Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

kosmara: (ironic) the world or unreal state in which one lives.

* nightmare

***

Oh, hell.

Donnie winces as he feels his brain start to reboot, neuron by excruciating neuron. He hangs suspended in an uncertain murk, his body as if non-existent in the wake of shock - but he’s conscious, which means he isn’t dead, cogito ergo sum, which means he must still have a body.

Okay then. Let us tally the input.

Donnie’s ears are ringing - that’s the first thing that becomes apparent to him. The high pitched, hysterical whine that he’s unfortunately becoming more and more familiar with after every explosion he happens to get too close to - it kind of just never leaves at this point.

Because, yes, there was an explosion. In his lab. It–

Donnie frowns it away as corralling his thoughts in that direction turns out to be actually, physically painful. He’ll need to tally that too, evaluate the damage, map out strategies from there - but in just a moment.

Ah - he could feel his face frown just then, so that’s another sense returning to him. Nice.

The sense of smell reboots next, and with it its twin sense of taste which, yuck, he’d rather turn it right back off because his nose, his mouth, his throat are coated with - what, dust? chalk? - and the air his lungs keep insistently pulling in tastes like…tastes like…

Like sunlight, and asphalt, and the dense mush of fall leaves.

Donnie’s frown deepens. None of those are things he generally gets to smell down in the Lair - well, except for leaves when they get laundered into the sewers, but it’s summer right now, isn’t it? Fall is far away still.

So what gives?

Donnie’s vision is blurry when he manages to creak his eyes open. It blurs further into incomprehension as they well with tears at the bright stabs of light - whites and grays and sporadic smudges of blue which is, to reiterate, not at all the palette he’s come to associate with his lab.

He’s topside.

Huh?

Was the explosion that bad? Bad enough to - throw him out to the surface?

Oh shit - the others…

The sudden panic is sharp enough of a stab that it wrenches Donnie into a sitting position from where he’s been sprawled on his back, and he groans in surprised, bruised misery - and then coughs when the groan catches on the dusting of chalk, and groans again when the coughing rattles around inside his banged up shell, knocking painfully into his ribs.

His head hurts. His head hurts, so badly Donnie’s fighting the reflexive urge to vomit. Must be a concussion - he’s definitely blacked out there… But he doesn’t appear to be bleeding, at least. His hands are decidedly empty and he didn’t wear his shell - had yet to put it on, and even his gauntlet was charging - but in a moment he’ll convince his eyes to work and look for his bō and do a scan and go from there. Easy. 

Still, bō or not, it’s obvious he isn’t injured nearly enough for the strength of explosion that must have gone off. What–

“–can’t be, there’s no way–”

“It is though, look! It’s him! Come–”

The voices cut through the din between Donnie’s ears so suddenly that he nearly keels over, dizzy and ill, mind reeling as it tries to place the voices - gruff and strange and distorted, but scratching at his brain the way his hands itch when he reaches for a tool without looking and finds it missing. A break in the pattern that shouldn’t be there, a fracture in the bone healing all weird, a…

“Donnie? S’that really you?”

Two shadows tower over him, slicing up the sky. Donnie stares up, wide-eyed - squints immediately when his eyes whine with pain, irritated tears wetting his mask, cutting tracks in the dust he feels coating his cheeks.

Pizza supreme in the sky, his head… 

“Who–” he tries to demand in a hoarse voice, willing his hand to come up and shield his streaming eyes, willing his head to stop splitting at the seams, willing the dust and the topside and these bloody voices to make sense. 

But they don’t, nothing does, nothing listens or obeys, and even as Donnie is trying to concentrate enough to feel indignation, the world gives up on its balancing act and crashes sideways, pulling him along into the darkness.

***

“We gotta take a better look, what if he broke something?”

“We are not unsealing it! Look at all the bruises - I’ll bet you anything he’s got a cut on him somewhere, and even if he doesn’t - he was out in the open without a suit! That’s mental!”

“Oh, more mental than our brother coming back from the dead? Dude, think: if he got it, he would’ve shown it by now. It’s been hours. We can let him out!”

“No way. You remember what happened when…”

“I’m right here,” Donnie manages through clenched teeth. He’d keep eavesdropping with his eyes closed but god he hates it when people talk about him as if he isn’t even in the room.

His voice rasps like a file over his parched throat. The pounding in his head is slower now, lower in frequency, an ambient deep sea current that keeps rolling him along the bottom to the point where he forgets which way is up. 

Concussions suck. 

Donnie opens his eyes. Laboriously, he sits up on a - what appears to be a bare mattress, on bare floor, yikes - in a tiny pod-like room with a sealed exit not unlike the ones they have in the Lair for when Dad gets sick with something.

Ah - quarantine, then.

The sealed side connects to a bigger, proper room, with a low ceiling and dimmed lights that are low enough to plunge the edges of the room into unidentifiable shadows. Their reddish hue makes Donnie think of emergency lighting, but at least it’s not as harsh on his eyes.

He wills them to focus on the two shapes in front of him - now that he’s shown signs of life, they stopped bickering and are watching him.

“What– Leo? Mikey?” Donnie asks, looking between them. The break in the pattern gains a patch. “What’s up with you two? Where are we?”

‘Why am I in quarantine,’ he means to ask next, but his voice fizzles out, not nearly as authoritative as he wants it to be. He coughs, a hand coming up to grasp at his throat. The action is enough to tip him off balance and into the curved wall of the enclosure and Donnie sighs in brief relief, the bare concrete cool on his temple and the edge of his shell despite his thick hoodie.

To put it plainly, Donnie feels like crap. Which is, admittedly, a small price to pay for getting blasted all the way up to the surface. Although the idea of going back down and surveying the damage done to his tech alone is nauseating. He’s too afraid to think of the rest.

“There’s– by the bed,” he hears Mikey say, the sound muffled slightly by the clear plastic of the seal, and sure enough, there’s a small canteen on the floor next to him.

Donnie wrinkles his nose as he sniffs it (metallic, dry with chlorine, who drinks that?) and takes a sip, feeling it wash away the coating of dust in his throat.

‘What’s going on?’ he signs with one hand, the other still gripping the canteen. It’s sharp-cold against his skin, the sensation enough to force him a little bit more awake.

Donnie watches his brothers share a look of confusion that quickly morphs into something else, facets turning into each other so fast he’s got no hope of parsing any of it before they settle into - what? What is it?

“Sorry, Dee,” Mikey grimaces. “We’re kinda - out of practice with sign.”

…Is it shame?

Donnie peers at them, noticing that he’s leaning forward only when he has to catch himself on the mattress before he falls over again. Something is wrong. What?

His vision swims and doubles, his brothers’ silhouettes swimming with it, distorting until they almost appear bigger than he knows them to be - well, Leo at least, bulkier and taller than he has any right being, really, dwarfing the chair he’s straddling. Mikey is different too, swathed in robes, lanky and angular and–

Is that hair?

He appears to have hair. Black, tied in a top knot. Hair. 

Donnie must have really hit his head.

‘Hair?’ Donnie pinches the air by his forehead. Then, after a look at Leo, at the weirdly thin, lifeless shirt sleeve hanging by his right side, the cuff tucked in between the buttons - empty, it’s empty - ‘Arm??’ 

“We, um…” Mikey pauses and steeples his fingers where he is sitting cross-legged on a stool. His hands are wrapped in compression bandages. “We would really like to know how you ended up outside with no protection. Kinda out of character for you on all accounts.”

“What Mikey is really trying to ask is,” Leo rolls his eyes before Donnie can scowl at them - he’s obviously unable to talk and they don’t understand him - “where the hell have you been these past ten years?”

And, okay, apparently the shock of it finally compounds enough to break right through his silent spell because– “What?” Donnie croaks out. “Ten years?”

What kind of a joke is this?

“And why do you still look,” Leo gestures at him with his left hand - his only hand, “like this.”

Which, scoff, Donnie asked that first, and feels like he’s got much more of a right to that question. But it looks like he’ll get answers only if he provides answers first.

“I was in my lab,” Donnie grumbles, because acknowledging the law of equivalent exchange still doesn’t mean he has to like it. “Something went–” he cuts himself off, unwilling to admit the mistake. “There was an explosion, and I woke up when you weirdos came for me in your hazmat suits or whatever. That’s all.”

His brothers exchange a look, some sort of urgency passing between them.

“You think it might be the same explosion?” Mikey murmurs.

“You heard it too?” Donnie cuts in before Leo can respond. They don’t appear to have any fresh injuries, but - “Nobody got hurt, right?”

“Oh, we heard it alright,” Leo says, and there is a hardness to his voice that makes Donnie pause. “When your lab imploded on itself and you disappeared. Ten years ago.” 

“Donnie, we really just wanna know what happened.” Mikey places a hand on Leo’s shoulder, his tone soft. Leo grinds his teeth. His expression is unreadable. “And where you’ve been. We kind of…” His throat works for a moment before he continues. “We kind of thought you were gone.”

Donnie stares at them, lost, something unspeakable hanging between them and he - he doesn’t know what to do with it, he doesn’t.

“I don’t have any answers!” he tries, teeth gritting at the fresh wave of headache when his voice jumps out of formation. “I told you all I know, I– I was in my lab. I was going to work. You guys wanted to see who could hold their breath the longest and I already knew it would be me so I wasn’t interested. You,” he points at Mikey, “you gave me your board to fix, I remember it lying on one of my benches– oh. I guess it’s gone now too. Uh. Sorry.”

If he had his bō, if only he had his bō, he’d have answers. He’d have something he could offer them and finally wipe those expressions from their faces because for the love of Vygotsky he can’t make sense of them.

Where’s his phone?

“You sent a pic in the groupchat right as I was setting up my stuff. I don’t remember if I responded. Let me see.”

Donnie rummages in the pocket of his hoodie, but his fingers only encounter - a ziplock baggie.

Shit, he’s lost his phone. “Shit, I’ve lost my phone,” he glares at the baggie.

Useless.

“Is that– are those gummy worms?”

Donnie stares at Leo, puzzling out the look of elated surprise on his face. “Why?” he asks defensively. “I didn’t take them from your stash if that’s what you’re getting at. They’re sour. You don’t eat those.”

“Dontron, do you know when was the last time I saw a gummy worm, sour or not? Years, hermano.” There’s a predatory glint to Leo’s eyes that Donnie decidedly doesn’t like. 

He holds the baggie closer. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch - whatever it is you’re afraid of catching - if you eat them?”

“Zippy, dude. It’s safe. I’ve eaten worse.”

“But of course you have. Naturally. Silly me.”

“You really did just…end up here. From that day, all the way here,” Mikey says quietly, ignoring their banter. His eyes are unfocused - or focused on something else entirely, invisible to Donnie. “Way to skip ahead, I guess.”

Time travel. Time travel? “Are you implying time travel?” Donnie asks. “Are we seriously implying time travel?”

Oh, but it makes sense - if one is to look past the uncompromising weirdness of it all. It makes sense, and time paradoxes are already clamoring for his attention as they compile themselves into a list on the back burner of his mind, the how’s and why’s and… 

Well. The Universe hasn’t already collapsed, which means it probably won’t. That’s something. 

There’s an insistent itch on another back burner, the implications, the possibilities - oh, the multiverse is real, it must be - but trying to think about it gives Donnie such a violent stab of headache he gags. 

And most importantly - and most nauseatingly so - the question: how does he go back?

“You look…not very surprised by this hypothesis,” Donnie ventures once he manages to swallow the bile back down, which is a fair observation considering they’re talking fucking time travel. 

“We may have had a few hours to consider the options while you were passed out,” Mikey gives him an apologetic grimace. “It may have crossed our minds, and, well - finding you again, like this, after so many years - any explanation would be wack as hell. Considering - things - this one’s hardly the weirdest.”

The way he speaks catches Donnie’s attention, his brow furrowing, but he jumps to a more relevant question instead. “How did you find me?” 

“You kinda landed in a pile of debris - we heard the noise, saw the dust cloud. That area is dead, more or less, and we’ve scavenged it for supplies ages ago - which means there shouldn’t be anyone there. So we went to investigate.” Leo brushes it all away, as if physically setting the conversation aside, and leans in. “Now. I’ve got an important question for you. Are you bleeding anywhere?”

“I am not.” Concussion aside, his entire body is throbbing with the sweet-salty pulse of bruising - this ‘debris’ Leo mentioned must be the culprit - but none of it, as far as he can see or feel, crosses into the sharp, sour tang of connective tissue exposed to air.

“I remember how awful at lying you we– are, so this tracks,” Leo raises his brows. His mask is from much darker fabric than what Donnie remembers, the difference evident even in the unsteady light. “If you give us the gummy worms, we might be convinced to let you out early.” 

Donnie stares at him. “You’ll have to let me out anyway. This whole thing,” he gestures around his enclosure, “isn’t sustainable.”

He isn’t about to pee in a bucket, thank you very much - oh god, what if they all have to pee in buckets here? Does plumbing still exist? Sweet Aqua Claudia…

“Besides, there isn’t any ‘early’ - you said it’s been hours already. Which, great decision making, by the way, leaving me passed out with a concussion for that long,” he cuts his eyes in Mikey’s direction. 

“We did some healing,” Mikey wrings his hands, suddenly sheepish. “Is it...very bad still?”

Donnie looks at the bandages covering his hands and snaking halfway up his forearms, stares hard until he can tell there’s a dusting of white on his temples. 

Ten years, they said - they’re still in their twenties. This is still too early. 

“I’ve had worse,” Donnie says after a pause the way he might walk out onto untested ice. He waits for Mikey to react and raises his voice only after he catches him chew on the corner of his mouth. “ Anyway, you weirdos,” he shakes the baggie, not missing the way his brothers’ eyes track the movement, “let me out, I’m feeling magnanimous enough to share.”

The air in the room is cool and smooth, clearly ventilated, very unlike the stuffy pocket of the quarantine pod. Donnie moves slowly, careful not to trip or sway when his horizon refuses to stay level. Leo’s hand is gripping the back of his chair as he watches him sit down on Mikey’s vacated stool. Mikey is all twitchy, as if suppressing the urge to hover.

His little brother, hovering. 

It’s been ten years, Donnie reminds himself. They haven’t seen him in a decade.

He’s still unsure how to reconcile this with the fact that he ended up swiping the gummy worms because Leo stole his Goldfish Colors™ the night before. With the fact that his gauntlet’s battery was dead because in the morning Mikey asked him if they could use it to try and port Doom to every possible device in the Lair.

(They succeeded, of course. The waffle maker had never been more entertaining. Nor had Raph’s white noise machine.)

“Hm. Not as sour as I remember them being,” Leo remarks, his face screwed in poorly concealed misery.

Donnie snorts. “Yeah duh. I stole them from Raph. He’s a coward with these, although nowhere near the level of you two.”

He expects a retort - maybe something about Mikey’s sophisticated palate, or Leo’s complete lack thereof in his habitual chase for sugar high - but Leo’s expression shutters. Mikey stops chewing, and Donnie feels the ice creak and whine beneath his feet. Shadows move down below.

“Hm. Still hate these,” Leo decides. The line of his mouth is unhappy. Tense from more than the spasm of sourness.

He grabs another.

Something pokes at Donnie’s mind, a sharp little thing just beneath his skin.

“Guys…” Donnie reaches for it. “Where’s Raph?”

A thin wheeze of the vents sifting through air. Leo and Mikey share a look - again. Donnie is growing tired of these, tired of these impenetrable layers around him that they seem to dive through so easily, bound by shared - what? Secrets? Fears?

Tragedies?

“Guys!! Where are you– I left as soon as I got the bird–”

A voice reaches them from outside the room, from beyond– one of the doors, hell, Donnie didn’t even think to count them, and in the first moment he thinks he hears Raph because that would be incredible timing. But that is a ridiculous thought: the voice is higher, softer, nasal. It’s–

“Donnie!” 

The door whooshes open. April stands in the maw of it, the helmet of her worn mustard-yellow suit clutched under one arm, the hood pulled hastily down. She is taller now too, her hair darker and meticulously braided into cornrows. Her eyes are wide above the sharp slopes of her cheekbones.

“April,” Donnie murmurs, without even registering that he moves until he finds himself already standing, already taking a step towards her.

And it's weird and cringe as hell - he's literally just had a sleepover at her place, it's only been like the night before - but something small and terrible that had twisted in his chest only minutes ago at Leo’s hardened expression, at Mikey’s hovering, and then moments ago again, at the thought of Raph, twists tighter and crueler still. And so when April embraces him, her helmet clanging to the concrete floor, he finds himself clinging right back.

Chapter Text

litost: a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

***

“Careful here, the bridge is kinda dodgy.”

“You do remember I’m a ninja, right?” Donnie quirks an eyebrow, paying attention though as he treads right after April. His thick-soled boots squeak with every step.

A gust of wind grabs at them where they’re navigating a decrepit-looking road junction, and Donnie shivers, his hoodie and a borrowed suit (Mikey’s - too long for him, fabric too stiff, the inside smelling like stale sweat, ugh) doing nothing to combat the fall temperatures.

Bloody hell but he needs a shell. It’s weird to be outside without one.

But that’s why they’re going to April’s.

“You mentioned birds when you arrived,” Donnie remembers as he watches April tug at a length of rope tied to the traffic barrier before she tosses it overboard - ahead, the bridge bristles with exposed rebar. “Please tell me it was a code word for the new Twitter or whatever. I have my horrible suspicions that it isn’t but I shall keep clinging to hope.”

“Keep clinging then, my guy,” April grins at him as she prepares to descend. “One of my pigeons’ name is Twitter. You’ll meet him, he’s a baby.”

“Let the record state that I do not, under any circumstances, wish to be introduced to pigeons.”

“Sucks for you then, because it’s kinda the best we’ve got for comms right now.” April glances down. “The mold really got into the wires, and that was even before there was no one left to maintain the radio stations and satellites.”

Donnie takes a moment to think while he zips down after her. 

“Tell me more about this mold,” he asks as they continue down the road. Ahead, in the streets, a skyscraper’s spotted flank pokes out among the dense buildings, and April waves in its general direction. “My brothers have been vastly unhelpful so far, not that I’ve expected otherwise.”

(“At least you installed the ventilation,” Donnie points out as Mikey is fiddling with the various belts and buckles of the suit, adjusting it to Donnie’s proportions. “I am kind of genuinely impressed, he said, in a monotone voice.” 

“We’re not stupid, you know,” Leo is leaning against the door, a smirk stretching his lips. It's strange to see something so familiar on a face sharpened with maturity and hardships. His demeanor changed after April’s arrival. Something erased from his expression.

“Oh yeah? Coulda fooled me.” 

“Well, Professor, may you be delighted to hear that we know mold doesn’t just manifest in places. Mold powder has to travel and stuff, so - voilà! - ventilation. I’ll show you the gens later, I think the filters eat up like half of our diesel supply.”

“Did you just–” Donnie starts as Mikey claps the visor of his helmet down, its lower edge clicking into the lock. A quiet hum signals the built-in filters coming to life. “You know it doesn’t manifest - which, congratulations, you are smarter than Aristotle with his spontaneous generation doctrine - but you don’t even know it’s called ‘spores’ and not…’mold powder’?”

“Semantics,” Leo dismisses him with a flourish while Mikey mumbles something suspiciously like ‘The internet went down in the first two months’.

His hands smooth out the rubberized kapron and linger on Donnie’s shoulders, almost as if he is afraid to let go.)

“Well, uh– we don’t really know where it came from or how. My money’s on a government experiment gone wrong. The guys blame the aliens. Barry researched it, trying to determine the spread, build some sort of prediction model - but I really don’t know how far he got with that one. Not that it mattered.” With the scratched suit visors between them, Donnie can’t see April’s expression very well, but he hears the frown. “Shit went down real fast. It got into everything - water, grains, meat. It even chews on wires. You miss one spot cleaning your jacket when you come in, and soon your entire house is crawling with it.”

Donnie can’t help the shudder that runs up his spine at the thought. “I think I see where this is going. Humans are notoriously hopeless when it comes to basic sanitary measures.”

“You bet,” April lets out a humorless laugh. “And it was hard to organize too after the communication got shoddy. And once ya get infected, you’re a goner. It - erodes flesh. Gets very ugly very fast.”

Donnie feels sick - shit, he has been out in the open, Mikey and Leo were so right to be afraid - but he’s clean, he’s fine, it didn’t get him…

“How quickly does it manifest?” he blurts out.

April throws him a look. “You’re good, Dee. Lucky, yeah, don’t get me wrong, so lucky - so don’t even think ya can prance around like that again, hear me? But you’re good.”

“Is that what happened to Leo?”

A pause. Around them, the buildings close in, their windows gaping and dark.

April hums in the affirmative and hesitates before speaking again. “If you cut it off fast enough ya stand a chance.”

Donnie’s stomach churns. 

“It got chaotic from there,” April says after a pause. They walk up the wide steps to the skyscraper and push the main doors open. Donnie barely has time to look around the dark lobby before April starts for the stairwell. “Panic, curfews, riots, looting. Martial law. The whole shebang. But that eroded too. Everything did.”

Donnie stops at the bottom of the stairs for a second, his chest so cold that he forgets to feel misery at the prospect of trudging up however many floors it must be - it’s unlikely April would choose a skyscraper to dwell in if she didn’t care to take advantage of its height.

He’s honest enough to admit to himself that it scares him - the prospect of living through a time like that. Systems falling apart. Sophistications unraveling in favor of something baser, something more immediate. Planning horizon collapsing all the way down to the next step, next meal, next place to sleep. Next throat to slit when someone tries to take that from you.

He’ll take post-apocalypse over the actual apocalypse any day.

Maybe Donnie was lucky to ‘skip’ the scariest bits, as Mikey had put it. Maybe it was mercy.

They, meanwhile, had to live through the entire nightmare.

Donnie hasn't really gotten a good look at his brothers yet. He wonders how the years have logged themselves across their shells. 

April hasn’t mentioned her parents. Leo and Mikey haven’t mentioned Dad. Donnie isn’t ready to ask.

“Tell me, by the way,” Donnie huffs at around the twentieth floor. He isn’t out of shape or anything, but the suit sucks and everybody hates stairs, it’s just a universal truth. “Why couldn’t we just get Nardo to portal us up there? Why don’t you get him to do that for you every time?”

“The mystic energy levels plummeted after The Horrors began,” April responds. She doesn’t sound out of breath at all as she climbs step after step ahead of him.

“Let me guess,” Donnie bites on the inside of his cheek, thinking. “The yōkai got spooked and sealed their dimension away from you to save themselves.” It’s not a difficult hypothesis to arrive at - in their place, he’d have done the same thing. “With their leave, the ambient levels decayed.”

“Yeah. You’re–” April pauses on the step to look at him. “You got it in one. How did you know?”

The answer will hurt, but she asked him a question. There is a blade sticking out of April’s chest, and Donnie touches the hilt. “Mayhem’s not with you.”

“Hm.” April turns away and resumes the arduous journey. “Fair.”

April has made her home in the attic of the skyscraper. The stairwell opens into a small hall, and she ushers Donnie into the makeshift cleaning chamber first and disappears onto the roof to check in on her birds.

The cleaning procedure entails getting a massive bucket of heated rainwater dumped over the suit and then manually brushing the dust and pollen out of the filters. Primitive and crude and honestly, with a system like this Donnie’s not the only lucky one. He’ll have to look into it.

Outside the chamber, two sloped walls of the open floor plan are lined with tall windows. Half of the space is separated with a plexiglass wall which transforms it into some sort of a greenhouse teeming with plants. The rest is divided arbitrarily into areas for living, cooking, eating. A double bed takes up one of the corners, bookcases shouldering the walls around it like sentinels. It’s humid and hot, and on instinct Donnie steps closer to the sealed windows as he tries to catch his breath.

The city stares back at him, drowsy in the evening mist. Fading sunlight rolls over the rooftops, spilling hues of orange and muted pink.

It almost looks normal, at first glance. If only it weren’t so still.

Donnie holds his breath for a moment, listening to the soft, dry clacking of his thoughts, observing their currents almost as if he were an outsider. He’s bound to have a breakdown about this whole thing sooner or later, stages of grief and all that, tedious and unnecessary as they sound.

But what choice does he have? Everything is gone, leaving him stranded. Everything is–

“Welcome to my sentry tower. I was our, like - spotter, back when we had more people. Comms hub, if you will.”

“What, like resistance?” Donnie turns away from the window to find April stepping out of the chamber in a cloud of steam. With an almost audible click he locks it all away.

“Mhm. S’why I have the birds. Though we weren’t resisting anything I could exactly swing a bat at, most of the time.” April flips her visor up and begins to unsuit. “It’s just - easier to survive, with more people. But now it’s just us. And - you, I guess.”

“Why won’t you move in with Leo and Mikey? Would save you the trips up and down.”

“And miss out on all this beauty?” she gestures at the windows. “Nahh. ‘Sides, a girl gotta have her own space instead of rooming in that bachelor den. The boys already had to crash here when their previous hideout got got, and lemme tell ya, never again. What’s the point of surviving in post-apoc if I still can’t choose where to live?”

Donnie can see her reasoning. At least the real estate market is no longer hell. Or, well. Existent.

The city holds its decade-long breath. Now that Donnie looks closer, he spots signs of destruction, decay. Wounds of violence or neglect. But it hasn’t been long enough yet for nature to come in reclaiming full-swing - or maybe it’s also been held back by the spread of the mold.

It just looks empty.

Donnie’s eyes keep snagging on familiar landmarks and swells of the skyline, almost tricking him into thinking that nothing has changed.

“Here,” he hears April say behind him. “Sorry I didn’t bring it with me - I kinda…wasn’t a hundred percent sure it wasn’t a dream or somethin’.”

She’s holding a shell, and only when the sight of it sends a jolt down Donnie’s spine does he truly realize how much he needed it, as much a comfort object as his phone or bō or goggles or gauntlet or any of his other most important devices, and now he doesn’t have any of them, just like he didn’t when the Shredder turned it all into dust in one fell swoop, leaving Donnie to grasp at the wrecks, untethered and lost. 

He rebuilt - and now it’s gone again.

He’ll rebuild again.

“Thank you.” Donnie takes the shell, delighting in the familiar weight, in the way his arm and core and leg muscles know exactly how much to tense and shift in order to accept it. 

April told him on the way over that it was the one possession of his they could pull from the wreckage - the one shell that he happened to leave in his bedroom rather than the lab or the storage. He thought it another small miracle that it’d survived this decade, but he rethinks that stance when he catches the way April’s eyes linger on it where her hands no longer can.

The shell fits Donnie perfectly, of course. It shows signs of age - not from usage but simple material decay, the metal dull, the cushioning filling stiff. It’s scratched a little in a few places, dented in a couple more, and its battery is dead, but all that can be fixed. It’s one of the multitool marks, too, with arms and everything. Useful. Utilitarian.

April treats it like an heirloom. A memento.

Donnie shrugs it on as casually as he can, the motion stiff with how hard he is trying to counterbalance her. The belt buckle whines as he fastens it.

April laughs. It sounds wet around the edges, and he can’t stand it. “What?” 

April opens her mouth - swallows back whatever she meant to say - opens it again. “Nothing, just - dude! You’re so tiny.” 

“Oh fuck’s sake!” he throws his hands up. “Will all of you stop!”

(Leo and Mikey haven’t said anything about it yet. But Donnie saw Mikey’s evaluating look as he adjusted the suit. Saw Leo’s far less subtle shit-eating grin from the doorway. And April is shorter than either of them yet still dares to have a good few inches on him, which, so rude.)

“Language, young man!”

Donnie gapes at her for a second in mute affront.

April bursts out laughing.

“Oh, Donnie,” she hiccups once she manages to stop, wiping her eyes. The sudden mirth is trickling out of her almost as quickly as it arrived. “I’m so happy to see you, but honestly? I’ve got half a mind to kick ya right back to where you came from. It’s not - a good place, here.”

‘You tell me’, ‘Yeah duh’, ‘Nor a good time, get it’ are some of the answers that jump out at Donnie. He settles for an eye roll.

“I can already see you guys are having a grand time here. At least you seem to have all your limbs accounted for.”

Donnie’s insides plunge half an inch as soon as the words leave his mouth - the familiar sensation of a missed step, knowing he’s said something too tactless a moment too late, the edge of his shield catching a bystander.

Whatever blow he’s dealt, he watches April weather it with grace, an old habit awakening after a decade of disuse. “Now that you mention Leo, not that you mention him or anythin’ - go easy on him, m'kay? Not even counting the rest of it, but he’s kinda - he was hard on himself for a long time after you disappeared. I won’t be surprised if it’s all been reopened now that you are here.”

“Hard on himself, why?” Donnie tips his head in genuine confusion. 

“Well, he…” April hesitates and frowns at something unseen. “They told me - when the explosion went off… You always had those reinforced walls in your lab, so the way it sounded to the guys didn’t really reflect how bad it actually was. So Leo kinda maybe - thought it was just ‘regular Donnie shit’.”

“Language,” Donnie says reflexively. He isn’t breathing.

A corner of April’s mouth twitches as she acknowledges the half-hearted joke.

“He was gonna beat the breath holding record, I think, so they didn’t really go to check in on ya as soon as he…probably now thinks they should’ve,” she concludes. “Now that we know you just ended up here, I guess it wouldn’t have mattered, but try telling him that.”

The straps of Donnie’s shell, coarse with age, cut into his shoulders. Its dead weight suddenly feels so much heavier.

Oh, Nardo.

“He…” Donnie tries, swallows, restarts. “He seemed okay to me.”

That’s not true. But by filling the gap where April obviously hesitates to speak he is hoping to catalyze her into saying something that would give away more.

But she stays silent.

***

There is so much work to do.

Donnie's been told that they've only been camping out at this new place for a short time still, and it shows. The life at the new - base, lair, home, whatever one chooses to call it - is precariously basic. Leo and Mikey go out to look for supplies and materials, come back and upgrade the place’s defenses with the tirelessness of ant workers. They are busy, always, in- and outside the base, patrolling and tinkering and nigh-constantly doing something, and they are capable - Donnie will admit it, they are capable - but there are some things they simply cannot do, passes in the dance left incomplete. 

And so Donnie steps in, a decade overdue. 

He spends hours at April’s place at a time, mapping out the locations with her from the high vantage point, and tasks his brothers with retrieving specific things for him to kit out the barebones of a new lab. Areas that were previously deemed swept clean turn up invaluable riches for Donnie - his brothers wouldn’t know what to do with any of that and so to them it appeared useless.

He commandeers one of the chugging diesel monstrosities and powers the tools in his shell enough to build a small solar panel for it. Once that charges, he’ll build more panels, hook up more stuff. Forego the generators altogether, hopefully - diesel is finite.

(He misses his home. He’s got a room here, a bed, a suit, a lab now - but it’s so little. So brittle.)

The filters for water and air come next, because he’s not thrilled about the metallic taste, and because who knows how clean it actually is, and also because while it’s been explained to him that they regularly clear out and burn wildlife corpses along their best-trodden routes, he’s already had the dubitable pleasure of spotting an unidentifiable by that point quadruped out in the wild. Needless to say that the sight of disease-pocked flesh sloughing off old bones was nearly enough to make him throw up right in the helmet. Which, no thanks.

It’s difficult, arduous work - frustrating, too, with the new limitations where he can’t just swipe whatever materials or tools he needs or hack into some billionaire’s crypto account to make an anonymous purchase, but bit by infuriating bit he moves along. The base grows more secure. It actually starts to feel like a safe space and not a temporary shelter.

All of it evidence how much they lacked him here. Negative spaces left by his absence, hands unlinked, connections unmade, opportunities lost.

And through all that, unbidden and sudden and viscous, another thought keeps ambushing Donnie when he leaves his flank unprotected.

Is this it? Is there no going back? 

He pushes the thought away. He simply has stuff to do here. Once he fixes it - once everything is okay - he will think about the rest.

The thought, in response, grows teeth, grins, swishes its nebulous tail, recognizing his bluff. Donnie ignores it. He works. And works. And works.

And from every split in the metal, every break in the seal, every spark in the wires, it stares at him, screams at him, taunts him:

You should have been here. 

How would they all be, now, had Donnie been with them the whole way? What would have changed had he not abandoned them?

Who would still be alive?

With filters done and cleaning chambers improved with steaming machines dispersing actual disinfectant instead of awkward countryside showers, Donnie turns to his next project. A crucially important one.

Objectively, at this point, it’s not urgent. At all. There are many other things it would make more sense to focus on. Donnie knows. He’s keeping spreadsheets in his head.

But spreadsheets don’t factor in guilt, don’t factor in its insidious pull or the way it curls up in his chest, filling him up plastron to carapace until he struggles to breathe. 

Donnie indulges in it like he’s poking a bruise, breathes in tact with the flow of pain under his fingers.

And finally, he plunges in.

***

“I’m gonna make you an arm.”

Donnie needs to be useful. Too little too late, but he needs to be useful. He needs to fix things. Close the negative spaces. Make up for lost time.

He’s lost so much time.

“What?” Leo says, completely oblivious to his inner monologue.

They’ve come up to the roof of the base - an old three story building that used to be some sort of storehouse for car parts, hangars and all - to hang up their laundry. Ironically, it’ll need to get steamed before they can bring it back inside anyway, but trying to dry it indoors from start to finish is a fool’s errand. These days, in the Hamato household, no type of mold will be tolerated.

(Which also means Donnie will have to think of something for when it starts raining too often for their current strategy to remain viable because he is not about to wear damp sweaters.)

“An arm, Leon,” Donnie repeats. “You need an arm.”

“I’ve got one right here,” Leo tosses a pair of pants over the rope and wiggles his fingers. 

He’s being insufferable. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but - I’ve been like this for a few years now. I’m used to it, I’m fine.” 

“But you shouldn't be!” Donnie exclaims, nearly dropping the tin bucket they’re using as a laundry bin. “Used or fine! You need an arm and I’ll make you an arm and I should’ve made it sooner before the amputation site has had time to seal off but I wasn’t there sooner so I guess now will just have to do!”

“Don– Donnie!” Leo interrupts him, looking almost as frantic as Donnie feels. Oh boy. “What’s on with you?” 

“Nothing is on with me! It’s you, all of you! It’s - it all went to hell, and it all went to hell because of me!”

Leo’s jaw actually drops. “Wait, hang on a sec. Donnie, are you… actually claiming responsibility for a whole ass apocalypse?”

“YES!” Donnie blurts out, and it sounds insane put like this but– “Not to be completely egotistical, but yes, I do believe that if I were there at the start of the outbreak I could have prevented it. I wasn’t, and whatever you did obviously wasn’t enough.”

Leo’s brows draw at the barb before rising again. 

“You can’t possibly know that. For all we know you’d just die first like–” 

“But we do know, Leo! We have the facts!” Agitated, Donnie sets the bucket down and begins to pace. He’s growing hot in the suit, the morning sun sparse but merciless all the same. “You didn’t have my tech, you didn’t have my sprawling network, you didn’t have an enemy you could slash and stab at. I could’ve hacked into government systems and make people comply with pandemic measures. I could've built us suits, pods, an entire station where we would all be safe, I could’ve figured out what to kill it with, or at least leak the information between different labs when they’d inevitably stop working together for the greater good - but I wasn’t there to help.”

“You’re just a kid.” Leo, on the contrary, sits down on the flat roof, laundry forgotten as well. His shoulders slope. “We all were.”

“Yeah, but you guys always rely– relied on me because I knew things and made things and fixed things–”

“That’s not true - I mean, it is, but we all contributed to the team–”

“Yes, but I’m your tech guy! I’m your ‘hack into the feed so we don’t get detected’ guy! I’m your ‘everything is FUBAR so I shall make an escape vehicle from two sticks of gum and a prayer’ guy! I'm your ‘know obscure biohazard facts so that nobody has to get their limbs amputated’ guy!”

His eyes are burning. Donnie turns away and lets out a wordless angry snarl, mashing his fists uselessly into the visor. 

Worthless. 

Leo is silent behind his back. 

“But I wasn’t there.” Donnie keeps saying it, the curse cutting itself deeper into his heart with every pass. “And now everything is different.” 

And now Leo is down an arm, and Mikey is going gray, and April has an empty double bed. And Raph–

“This is my fault,” Donnie murmurs, exhausted. “I - I messed it up, that day, in the lab. I messed it up and now I’m here and it's my fault.”

Confessing doesn’t feel like a weight lifting off his shoulders at all. If anything, it pushes him deeper into the ground. 

How different it felt then - that sense of weightlessness, of buoyed ecstasy. Only for a fleeting moment, but Donnie has the imprints of it on the inside of his ringing skull. 

He hears Leo shift behind him, but he stays seated. 

“What happened, Don?” 

Donnie barks a mirthless laugh. “I did a stupid thing. A stupid, stupid thing.” 

Tell him, tell him. 

He can’t. He wants to - but he can’t. His teeth press harder together so that not a word might escape. He lows through them in sullen misery. 

Guilt - and now shame. He’s always had trouble differentiating the two, but not this time, no. 

Tell him. 

No. He can’t. But–

But he doesn’t want Leo to keep chaining himself to it. 

“Leon, just– don’t blame yourself. For that day.” Donnie’s hands come up to grasp and rub at his arms, but the feeling barely registers through the suit. It’s not enough - but nothing is. “You couldn't have done anything.”

Leo's turn to laugh. “Y’know, I might as well keep doing that tho. What’s one more thing.” 

Is that where he asks? Is that where he can’t keep avoiding it anymore the way he has since the first and last time he was courageous enough to try? 

Donnie turns around and taps himself twice on the right side of his chest, making a cross sign. 

Leo averts his eyes, but he saw him see it. 

Very well. Then he shall ask with words. 

“What happened to Raph.” 

Leo shrugs. “I messed up.”

“Tell me,” Donnie pleads. If Leo refuses now, he may never manage to ask again. 

He watches Leo’s face spasm, as if it physically pains him to talk. He knows the feeling. 

“It was…just a couple years into the whole thing,” Leo finally says, speaking as if through a mouthful of gravel. “We were all beyond stressed, trying to organize communal action - hundreds of millions were dead by then. Half the population, worldwide. I mean, as far as we could possibly be aware.” 

He sighs. Maybe he wants to low too. But, unlike Donnie, he keeps talking. 

“Raph and I butted heads a lot. We tried to bring the NYC survivors together, but some were already…” His mouth twists as he looks for the word. “Were too used to just…banditry. They stole our supply of baby formula, to sell, and Don, we had kids at the base, newborns too, can you imagine–” 

He cuts himself off. Donnie can barely hear him over the sound of his own ragged breathing. The filters in the suit are struggling to adjust to the change in the pattern. 

“I don’t know. Something broke in me that day. Something twisted. I wasn’t the leader Raph wanted me to be. That was the last straw for him.”

Shapes beneath the ice. Donnie peers closer at them, afraid of the coming moment of recognition. “What did you do?” 

“That’s the thing. I did nothing. Again. And Raph - he…” Leo traces a buckle on his thigh, over and over. It keeps catching light, sending pinpricks of it into Donnie’s eyes. “He kind of– developed anger issues over time, I guess. The stress and everything. Like - like fits sometimes, even Mikey couldn’t reach him. So when I couldn’t punish them, couldn’t punish the way Raph demanded that I did - he left.”

No. No, that’s wrong, that’s–

But Leo is not done. It keeps coming out of him like pus or poison. “It was a screaming match to end all screaming matches. Hah. I seriously thought we were gonna throw hands,” Leo bares his teeth. Maybe he is trying to make light of it, for Donnie’s sake. “And then he suddenly looked just so - stunned. So astonished by how incompetent I was. Said he couldn’t be near me and left.”

“No,” Donnie breathes. He refuses. Refuses. “That’s - that can’t be possible. Not Raph.” 

He has to believe it so.

Oh? And how so? Do you think you’d be any different?  

Leo gives him a rueful smile. “You didn't see him, Don. You don’t know.” 

Donnie scowls at him, irked by the familiarity of it - you don’t get it, Tello, you just don’t get these things sometimes - “I know my brother.”

“Not what he became, though. Not what we all became.”

Out of them all, Raph was always the kindest, unswayed from the path the way Mikey or Leo could sometimes be enticed to by their whims, the way Donnie has always strayed away from it so casually. 

But the sense of justice always burned the brightest in him too. If a drive of such strength became corrupted in the new world… 

What have they all had to do - to get here?

Maybe Leo is right, then. Maybe he is right. 

“What happened when he left?” Donnie asks. 

The laundry bucket bakes in the sun, forgotten. He glares at it. 

In the corner of his eye, he sees Leo shrug. “What do you think happened? He caught the mold. It - yeah. It got him fast, out there. I…” He looks away. “I couldn’t reach him. Not in time.” 

Donnie catches him glance to his right, an aborted motion towards an arm that is no longer there. 

“And now he is gone.” 

How strange it is, to hear such echoes from another’s mouth. 

“You were just a kid, too,” Donnie replies. 

A huff of a laugh. “Throwing my words back at me, I see.” 

“They are decent words, for once,” Donnie brushes it off with a hand. “Besides, my fault, remember? If I didn’t prevent the apocalypse, then your bandits are on me too.” 

He jests, of course. 

Mostly. 

“You realize, right, how ridiculous you sound?” Leo’s voice lifts a fraction at the end, and, hell, Donnie will take it. 

“I am simply relying on empirical data,” he lifts his nose haughtily. In for a penny and all that. “All evidence suggests that you dum-dums are hopeless without me. My fault now. All my fault. Hands off my stuff, Nardo.” 

Leo laughs - one sharp, jagged exhalation - and Donnie immediately glowers at him with suspicion. 

“What!” 

“Nothing, nothing…” Leo leans back on his hand, tipping his head up at him - making sure Donnie sees his face, no doubt. “I just kinda…forgot what a little shit you are.” 

Oh, so that’s how he wants to play this. “Hey, maybe it's not me, maybe it’s you who’s a boring old loser now!” Donnie points an accusing finger at him. Leo laughs again. “You ever thought about that?”

Leo’s smile - a genuine one now - wavers, fades a fraction, tilts into something else. “Yeah…yeah, I have.”

Donnie halts too. Then, pulled by an impulse and giving in to it the way he usually might not, he walks over and sits down next to him. 

For a minute, they are quiet, matching the silence of the city. It almost feels like they could dissolve into it. 

To his right, Leo shifts, separating himself from it again. Grins. 

“…Told you you were the baby twin.” 

Oh, the fiend. Forgive him the incoming fratricide. “I will smack you,” Donnie promises. “I will actually smack you.” 

Leo chortles again. “I may only have one hand but I’ll totally smack you first!” he promises. 

And the thing is, Donnie– well, Leo obviously won’t smack him, but none of his own hands, flesh or metal, will lift against him now either. 

After a moment of staring at each other - or outright glaring, in Donnie’s case - they admit the impasse. 

But maybe there is a way forward from this. Maybe there is at least something Donnie can fix, even now. Even this late. 

“Let me make you an arm,” Donnie says to the city. 

The suit’s coarse fabric whispers as Leo nods. “Okay.” 

Chapter Text

toska: a sensation of great anguish; a longing with nothing to long for.

***

Donnie builds Leo an arm. It’s a maddeningly long and convoluted process. Not because he doesn’t know what he’s doing - who hasn’t fantasized about replacing useless meat with cybernetics, and unlike most people, Donnie had made actual blueprints to entertain his mind in moments of idleness and remembers enough to reconstruct them - but because of how hard it turns out to get everything he needs.

But, slowly but surely, he accumulates stuff, painstakingly collects and sorts through bits of steel, bundles of plastic fiber, sheets of silicone. He even recovers a polymer printing machine from a pharmaceutical tech company and manages to bullshit his way into reprogramming it to use recyclables instead of raw material.

He builds the arm, and it’s a beautiful thing of dark fiber and metallic gloss, responsive and smooth in motion. It has a screen, a heat scanner, and a grappling hook strong enough to carry thrice Leo’s weight - but, unfortunately, it lacks sensory receptors.

It’s not perfect.

“It’s perfect,” Leo breathes when he finally convinces Donnie to show it to him. He sounds awed. “Dee, the fact that you could build it at all, let alone make it so sexy…”

“Of course I could, o thee of little faith,” Donnie scoffs, crossing his arms. “But it’s not - you won’t feel much. I can give you pressure and temperature changes, but for now that’s gonna have to be it.”

He frowns, unhappy. Even his resourcefulness has its limits, but it doesn’t mean he won’t be mad at himself for it.

“Dude, that’s more than enough!” Leo’s eyes are wide. Maybe he didn’t expect Donnie to actually succeed, maybe he couldn’t allow himself to hope for it. “I mean, what more could I need?”

You could tell apart textures. Know what softness feels like. Understand types of pain as sensations, not as notifications on the screen. Hold someone’s hand and be in it beyond just seeing yourself do it.’

Maybe it’s not important. Maybe Donnie himself wouldn’t care for it, or for most of it. But it feels important that Leo has it.

But for now, it will simply have to do.

“Well, if you are that opposed to having a flamethrower in it…”

“YOU CAN ADD A FLAMETHROWER??”

***

With the prosthetic itself out of the way, Donnie turns his attention to the actually tricky part: how to connect a dead thing to a living thing and convince the living thing to work together instead of rejecting it.

Biology - human and mutant physiology specifically - is not something Donnie counts among his strong suits. Oh, he knows enough to patch up his brothers after a bad scuffle, knows how to deal with shedding and with viral, fungal, or bacterial infections, and how their turtle heterothermy meshes with the trickling warmth brought on by human DNA. He knows a lot, don’t get him wrong, but most of it he knows out of necessity, not interest. Physiology is just too…squishy for his taste. 

His brain is brilliant and glorious, sponging up information and perfectly structuring it into an easily accessible and synthesizable database, but it doesn’t have everything. 

It doesn’t have what Donnie needs to help Leo. 

To put it bluntly, he fucking misses his phone. He misses the internet. Sweet Assange, he misses the Dark Web, now that was a treasure trove of information. 

“Whatchu got rotating in there?” Mikey taps his temple, having evidently noticed him chewing sores into his lips as he thinks. 

Leo and Mikey’s indoor greenhouse perished together with whichever base they used to hold before Donnie’s arrival, and turning a nearby square into covered gardens so far only exists as a sketch of a project on Donnie’s endless to-do list. But April’s own little greenhouse has given birth to a couple of pumpkins and more zucchinis than any rational person would know what to do with, and so they don’t have to live off of canned pasta anymore - and thank fuck for that. 

(His brothers’ long limbs and gaunt faces carry the memories of famine. Donnie does not do starving, doesn’t want to imagine what it was like. Another thing he’s privately happy to have skipped.) 

The bountiful harvest means that Mike is dancing around their cramped kitchen corner as he’s adding stuff to the stew and seasoning it - with what spices and where he keeps getting them from, Donnie doesn’t even want to know.

But it’s comforting to watch something normal happen, even though it brings forth an uncertain longing that he finds himself unable to dissect.

It must be because the kitchen opens into a massive, echoey cargo bay. Donnie has never been too fond of so much space. 

Unable to pause his distracted self-mutilation for long enough to reply, Donnie swipes two fingers under his eyes in a downward motion and taps his right shoulder.

“I mean, duh, Leo’s arm - I don’t think you’ve thought of anything else in the past weeks, but like - what in particular?”

Okay, yeah, that’s enough to make him stop, and he straightens up where he’s perching on a bar stool by the wall. “Scoff, I am perfectly capable of holding more than one thought in my head at any given moment. But I was– hm. I am considering the issue of immunosuppression post-implantation. I’ve collected some corticosteroids that do not appear to be too expired - I’ve run tests - don’t ask,” he warns when Mike opens his mouth, “but I’m not too keen on letting the idiot run around in post-apoc with his defenses down for any longer than what is absolutely necessary, so I do wonder if the process could be sped up and-or facilitated in other ways by Nardo’s ninpō…” 

“Bu-ut…?” Mikey prompts and Donnie realizes he’s trailed off.

“But I’d rather not have to find it out in vivo. I mean - after I get everything connected.”

And then it hits him.

“Michael– you did heal my concussion with ninpō. It didn’t work to its fullest, granted, but the effect was undeniable!”

“Uh huh…”

“And that’s definitely something new - well, new for me,” whatever hesitation Donnie registers in Mikey’s voice, he runs right over it as he picks up the trail, “which means that it can be developed, potentially from scratch. If you did that and if you are capable of performing it even in low mystic energy conditions, who’s to say Leonardo isn’t?”

He hasn’t really had the chance to grill Mikey about it all - past the sheepish explanation that yeah, he can just kinda do that now, and yeah, the hair just kinda started growing, but now he’s got him, now Mikey will tell him…

“I, uh…” Mikey scratches the back of his head, fluffing up his hair. “Dee, I’m really not the one to talk to about this. I barely understand it myself. Things just kinda went haywire around the start of the whole thing and then again when the yōkai locked themselves away. It was like…” He gestures helplessly. “This…turmoil. Like I was a tiny boat and the sea couldn’t decide whether it wanted to rage or lie completely flat.”

Donnie blinks at his profile in confusion. “Seafaring metaphors aside…what are you saying?”

Mike picks up a spoon from the edge of the sink and pokes at the contents of the saucepan. Steam leaves the lines of his face fuzzy. “Remember how I wasn’t…very surprised that you came from the past?”

What does that have to do with anything? “Yeah?”

“Well, it was because I kinda…” Mikey puts the spoon back down and rubs his hands. No bandages now, but he tends to wear long gloves these days. “Ikindamaybecanopentimeportals.” 

“What?” Donnie says, and then, when it all processes, “You what?” And then - but no, it can’t be, “You didn’t drag me here, did you?”

“No!” For a moment Mikey looks genuinely appalled. “No no, of course I didn’t, I–”

“Yes, yes, forget it, unrelated, my brain fired off too soon,” Donnie says quickly, eager to get him back on track. “Time portals. Explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain, Don,” Mikey sighs, now slightly less agitated. “I’ve only managed it - a couple of times, and it hurt my hands a lot.” He rubs them again. “And it only lasted a couple seconds - and went back in time a couple more. Leo was there when I did it the first time and I saw him through the portal - that’s how I know.”

What did he try to save?

Donnie’s head spins. His little brother can manipulate time. 

Could he send him back?

But no, no, impossible. No mystic energy - he’s said so himself.

And it’s not like Donnie hasn’t noticed the way his hands shake sometimes. If that was only after a couple tries…

No. Donnie firmly closes that door. 

He can’t hope for this. He has to make do with what he has now.

“Okay…okay.” He sighs. “So what you are saying is that you can’t help me figure out a solution for Leo.”

Donnie doesn’t mean to wound, he truly doesn’t. He’s just stating facts to keep at least something simple. 

“I can’t, Dee, sorry. I really don’t know how any of it works.” Mikey pauses, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the counter. “But I know who might?”

“Huh?”

“Well er–” he shrugs. “Barry’s library - it’s some ways away from here, but I go there sometimes to read his stuff. To try to - understand. Y’know? If anywhere has the information that could help you with Leo, it’s probably there.”

A chill touches Donnie’s spine at the name, the shrill alarm of being caught. He doesn’t really - want to go there.

But Mikey is right. It’s his best bet.

***

They don’t immediately get the chance to make the trek to Draxum’s place: Mikey is going feral canning April’s harvest (the only way Leo gets off the hook of helping him is pleading a missing arm, to which Mikey promises that the excuse will soon become obsolete), and Donnie busies himself with research on how to open up Leo’s stump and fit it with a bioport. Theoretical, for now, although he does set aside time to make the port itself. And then he gets distracted and builds a small dome for April’s birds so that she doesn’t need to suit up every time she has to go to them.

In his endless curiosity, Donnie also can’t help going down a billion rabbit holes as he travels all over the city to read up on stuff in public libraries and private companies and ends up bookmarking a few guides on launching a small weather satellite - he and Mikey have been discussing those covered gardens with roofs that could let UV and filtered rainwater through and agreed that having something that could help them plan for weather changes would be invaluable.

And yes, that’s quite literally rocket science. But Donnie didn’t get to where he is by thinking small. 

A tiny voice keeps asking Donnie about the implications of making such long term plans, but he can’t think about it. He can’t - not about the life he is now lost to, can’t think about his family, can’t do anything. And it’s weird, so weird because half of them are here and still sometimes look at him as if he is a ghost. And half aren’t and he doesn’t know which half it hurts to grieve more. Which half is weirder to grieve - the ones who are still there or the ones who have passed so long ago that, to everyone else, the grief has already gone dull and mossy.

He lies awake in the nights, his breaths shallow, his eyes dry, his jaws fused shut.

Rains come in and their outdoors building projects roll over into next year, and Donnie refuses to have any feelings on the matter either. He keeps his head down and works.

He misses them. But they are here. He wants to go home. But there is no home anymore.

The voice grows louder in his head, day by day, increment by increment. But hey, such is the world without Zoloft.

He will cope.

Because it’s not like Donnie can do anything. Mikey’s abilities are still budding - hey, maybe he’d arrived too early then, ironic laugh - and he was transported here only with the clothes on his back. The thing that brought him here is gone, the strange feeling it’d invoked in him gone as well. He is stuck.

***

“...but I told April not to throw them out next time, because you’d think they’re just weeds but in reality– Dee? Dude, you with us?”

“Hm? Yes, yes, weeds. Don’t eat the weeds.”

“Do eat the weeds, Donnie, that’s the whole point I’m making!” Mikey gets up from the floor where he’s been stretching and walks over, seemingly for the sole purpose of looking Donnie in the face. “Jeez, what’s up with you? You’ve been a bit zoney recently.”

Leo laughs from where he is doing a handstand. He’s been like this for about ten minutes now and has yet to show signs of exhaustion, the annoyance that he is. 

“’A bit’? Mans nearly performed a disappearing act on me when he tried to walk right into that manhole yesterday!” 

“Maybe I missed home and did it on purpose, how do you know!” Donnie glowers at Leo - nobody asked for his input. He’s upside down as well as he’s doing the drop back, taking advantage of his more flexible spine, and his arms are going to start quivering soon, not that anyone needs to know. “Ah, you know, just the good ol’ depresso. I’m fine, Michael.”

Mikey frowns and crouches in front of him. “You know it’s - fine not to be fine though, right?”

“Yes, thank you, Dr. Feelings.”

“No, dude, I’m serious - I know you’re not into this kinda stuff, but trust me - if something’s wrong, you wanna talk about it, yeah? You don’t survive the end of the world otherwise.”

He tried to be there for Raph, Donnie remembers. He failed - he fears failing again. Fears missing the signs. 

“I’m fine. Truly,” he repeats. Then, at Mikey’s unimpressed eye roll, at Leo’s scoff, he rolls out of the drop back and onto his haunches with perhaps more vigor than he feels. “It’s just difficult sometimes.” He flaps his hand vaguely. “Brain…unkind.”

Whispering thoughts that don’t even sound like his own, insidious and slimy in texture, persistent to the point where he wants to just - lie down and never move again. Let the mold claim him. Whatever.

“I get that,” Mikey nods. “I really, really do. It gets hard. But we keep going, yeah?”

“Exercise!” Leo, as always, feels the need to state the obvious as he gracefully exits the handstand and makes sure Donnie sees his self-satisfied look. Whatever, he wasn’t competing or anything. “When I was your age, I did it all the time.” 

“Yeah, right.” Donnie bumps Mikey’s offered fist and musters up a grin.

He feels like crying.

***

Baron Draxum was one of the last yōkai left on this plane after they cut all contact. 

He was also the first of the Hamato extended family to go down. 

He was still around for a good while, Donnie’s been told. But - professional hazards. Got too close to the source of danger trying to find out how to defeat it - and was in turn scorched by it to the bone. 

His last dwelling after the self-imposed exile from the Hidden City turned out to be the entirety of the NYU library. Donnie has snuck in there more than a few times and was always sent reeling by just how massive it was, and even now, scratched by the heavy hand of civilization as it fell and grappled at everything it could reach, it stands imposing and regal. 

Draxum’s domain sprawls, predictably, in the biology section, heavy desks piling with tomes and notebooks. Locked chests fill up the spaces underneath. Organized chaos, disarrayed precision - it’s hard to imagine a space more Draxum. 

“Do you come here often?” Donnie asks quietly as they walk down an aisle. His hand trails reverently along the dusty spines. Hoo boy is he gonna move right in, this is heaven on earth.

“Yeah and…nah?” Mikey says. Something about the place makes him lower his voice too. “Not as often as I’d like if I’m being real.” 

“Why not?” Seriously, seriously though: what’s stopping Donnie? New York seems to be entirely or almost entirely deserted so it’s not like Donnie is in danger on his own, and anyway, he can fortify this place too, it’s no biggie. Draxum’s vines run across walls and ceiling, supporting the stonework; form walls of their own too, cut by squatters or chewed through by wildlife in places, but sturdy still. Secure. Seal off an area and install filters so that he doesn’t have to sleep in the suit, and he’s good. 

“Well, I’d like to be here more often because this is like - our only real source of knowledge about mystic stuff now.” Mikey looks up, his gaze drawing an arc over the shelves. His hair, fuzzy with static electricity, clings to his visor on the inside. “It’s just kinda hard to train on my own without someone to guide me or even really tell me what I’m supposed to be doing, y’know?”

Donnie wonders if he wants to ask about Splinter - he’s been thinking about that a lot. 

Decides, once again, that he doesn’t. The stone knot in his chest shifts and tightens. 

“But?” he manages instead. 

“But it’s all - augh!” Mikey stomps his foot in frustration, and for a moment he’s just - Donnie’s little brother again, throwing a tantrum over something that dares not to go his way. “You’ll see what I have to deal with, but the dude had like twenty different codes to write in, and I know only, like, three. And a half. Really narrows down my options, research-wise.” 

Donnie hums. “Maybe I can help. I studied a few of those just to keep tabs on what he was up to.”

Mikey turns to squint at him, his lips stretched in a smirk. “With or without his knowledge?” 

“Don’t ask silly questions, Angelo.”

“Roger that.” Mikey throws him finger guns. He stops in front of a desk - the one with the least amount of dust on it. “Anyways - here’s where I’ve set up camp. But like I said, it’s been slow going. These,” he picks up a notebook, awkwardly because of the thick gloves, “were his last notes, for example - I know enough to figure out the dates, but the rest is total gibberish to me.”

Donnie attempts to glance over Mikey’s shoulder - leans to the side to glance around it instead. God, this is annoying. 

But the irritation at Mikey’s height evaporates the moment he sees the code. 

Donatello– 

The message is written on a separate page, tucked into the notebook at the front. The color of ink is different, too, and the rest of the notebook, from what Donnie can see poking out, uses another code, one Draxum knew at least some in the Hamato family would understand. 

The first page, however, is for Donnie’s eyes alone. 

“Give me this,” he blurts out, grabbing the notebook. 

Mikey, startled, lets go without objecting. “You can read it? What does it say?”

But Donnie doesn’t reply, eyes scanning the yellowed page, heart hammering in his throat. 

Donatello, you foolish boy. 

The Orb of Kosmos was not yours to steal, and its powers certainly were not yours to try to harness - although, perhaps, had you come to me honestly, we could have studied it together. Instead, you robbed us both of that opportunity, and your family of yourself, and for that I am cross with you. 

It was a mystery to everyone as to what exactly happened in your workshop that day. My best guess is that Kosmos destabilized in the unprotected environment and pulled the energy from the matter around it, hence the wreckage, and that the resulting outburst was enough to tear you out of the timestream and hopefully drop you back in at a different point. 

I did not tell your family of this. By the time I myself had deduced enough of Kosmos’s powers and what it must have done to you, they have already mourned you, and reopening this wound with hope that you might resurface somewhere in the timestream was a cruelty I could not justify.

If it spits you back out in the future rather than the past - if it spits you out at all - and if it is not too late…I am leaving you my notes. I will keep them as long as I live. I hope they may be of use to you.

Stop this plague, if you can.

Chapter Text

blunda: covering your eyes to avoid facing a hard truth.

***

Donnie and Mikey drag as many notebooks as they can carry back to the base, and Donnie immediately holes up with them in one of the sheds leaning against the storehouse. It’s uninsulated, which means Donnie can’t take his suit off, but he won’t risk the notebooks by trying to steam the spores off of them. Late autumn is cold and wet, but the shed, hastily equipped with a small heater, provides the bare minimal protection from the elements - and once Donnie gets stuck into it, he forgets it all anyway.

Three days pass in a blur, the fog of hyperfocus so thick that Donnie barely remembers to take breaks and go inside to pee or hydrate. His brothers look at him with poorly concealed exasperation and worry, and part of Donnie cringes with something almost nostalgic at the sight of it - these familiar expressions will not last once he tells them what he’d found. 

Mikey tried to pester him with questions on their way back but Donnie remained stubbornly silent. He’s always found sharing half-baked theories and unprocessed information terribly uncouth. He needs time to mull it over. He needs time to understand what he’s dealing with.

And so, every time, he waves Leo off, stuffs whatever Mikey has cooked into his mouth just to placate him, and scuttles quickly back out, hours passing both like blinks and like endless treacle as he pores over Draxum’s notes, laboriously decoding page after scrawl-filled page.

There are so many to go through. Draxum was evidently busy until his final day. Donnie wonders what he might find out at the end of the notes - was it the mold? An accident? Did Draxum see it coming or will it simply end on a chapter break, forever a work-in-progress?

Donnie will read the story as it unfolds before him. He will know soon enough.

Of course he knew that Donnie had cracked this code. The self-satisfied gall of this man, the arms race game the two of them always played, the I know that you know that I know - all of it culminating in his one last flipped bird, one last beratement - and then one last call for help. For there is, finally, something that neither of them knows, and that only Donnie can now find out.

Finally, Donnie is going to one-up him, so help him Fleming.

It takes Donnie three days to call a meeting. He is far from done with the notes - he’s barely begun, in all truth - but he knows enough to tell them. He needs to tell them.

They get together at April’s place. Sleet is hammering against the tall windows, rainwater melting riverbeds into the cityscape. Donnie leaves the notebooks behind, wrapped and locked away in a safe in the shed - he’d had to crack the code to the bloody thing and drag it all the way from the director’s office but it’s much better protection from the damp than the rotting wooden crates. And though he might be physically empty-handed, his brain is churning ceaselessly as it works, thoughts clacking around and drawing themselves into chains and patterns like marbles in a Rube Goldberg machine if that machine could end the pandemic.

Because that’s what Donnie is here to do. He thinks.

“Wait, hold on, lemme see if I got this right,” April says, and it’s really a testament to how much Donnie loves her that he agrees, with grit teeth, to tolerate repetition while almost literally vibrating right out of his shell with mental overstim. “You stole this… orb from him because, and I quote, ’he was gonna take too long setting everything up’, never mind that he was likely busy with the same precautions you prooobably should’ve taken yourself, and when it went wild it just - yote you here? And now you’re saying he knew that and left you his mold research?”

“Why didn’t he just tell us…” Mikey mutters with a lost expression, nestling deeper into his beanbag, but Donnie doesn’t even attempt to step in here - he isn’t about to fight Draxum’s battles when he’s got his own to deal with.

Like this one, for example: they are focusing on the wrong thing. But, with an uncomfortable set to his shoulders, Donnie indulges. 

“’Yote’ is one way to put it, if one must,” he grumbles. “Draxum speculated that the strength of the outburst opened a temporary wormhole - quite literally punching that wormhole through the fabric of this plane, puncturing the timestream and injecting me into it. The fact that I arrived in the now is simply the result of the wormhole having to have an exit point and not just an entry.”

“Okay. So he knew that,” April nods thoughtfully. “And he wanted you to continue his work?”

“But why wait for you?” Mikey is still inarticulately but inconsolably distraught. “He stacked everything on the chance that you’d just happen to come back - but he didn’t have to work alone…”

“Don’t you get it, Miguel? These ’mad scientist’ types always think everyone else is just too dumb to follow along, let alone take the lead.” Leo is leaning against one of the beams that support the spine of the roof, arm across his chest. He might be addressing Mikey but his eyes are fixed on Donnie, narrow with some kind of emotion that is sharp enough to make Donnie want to just look away from it.

“I can neither confirm nor deny whether that was his thought process on the matter,” Donnie pivots to look out - it’s growing dark, fog rising from the streets to meet the falling night halfway - and pivots again, “but my educated guess would be that you were too busy trying to save the world in more… traditional ways and not exactly jumping at the chance to be his lab assistants.”

“Donnie is…kinda right,” April shrugs. She leans forward to place a comforting hand on Mikey’s shoulder from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the couch. “I did kinda lean hard into the whole ‘Commander O’Neil’ thing.”

Donnie barely hears her divulge another piece of their tragic backstory, too busy grappling with what should have been his own. He would’ve been Draxum’s assistant - Draxum’s equal. He wasn’t there, and nobody could fill that space.

The thought oozes down Donnie’s spine, nestles in his ribs. He tries to breathe through it.

“Okay…” Mikey says - to April or to Donnie or to himself, Donnie isn’t sure. “So then - what’s the plan? What do we do now?”

“You do nothing until I’m done catching up on what I’ve missed.” Donnie starts pacing again - he’s been doing that a lot in the past half hour, his body made jittery by the sparkling circuitry of his mind. “Before we take action, I need to know everything there is to know so that I don’t have to waste time theorizing about something he’d already figured out.”

“And then?”

“And then…” And Donnie didn’t plan for theatrics, he truly didn’t (maybe), but poor sweet Michelangelo has just handed him the golden opportunity and he’d be a fool not to take it. “We stop the plague.”

A moment of silence. The rain is starting to let up, but the darkening sky is swallowing the city whole. It prowls outside in the shadows.

“Stop the plague, save the world. No biggie,” April muses. In front of her, Mikey seems to be lost in thought, but a tentative smile begins to stretch his lips. A smile of hope - for something more than survival and the gradual descent into oblivion.

Donnie gets him. Beneath the thick, unbearable sludge of depression, of every day will be like this until you die and achieve nothing, something kindles.

Donnie looks to Leo next. “What? You let April beat you to the ‘saving the world’ quip? Losing your touch, old man.”

“Oh piss off,” Leo hisses suddenly, and it sounds like he’d meant to laugh instead but it tore through him anyway. “No - you know what? I’ll piss off. I can’t with you right now.”

And then, faster than Donnie can say anything or even really process, Leo pushes himself away from the beam and storms out of the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him.

“Well that was…unexpected,” Donnie quips in an attempt to recover his balance.

What was it? What did he say…

It’s annoying how much of his life Donnie spends wondering exactly that. 

Idiot. Useless. 

He turns to Mikey and April and opens his mouth to say something else when he sees them staring at him.

“What?” Donnie looks between them.

“‘What’?” Mikey repeats. “You mean– you really– you unload all this on us and now you say ‘what’?”

He doesn’t even sound mad or surprised, that’s the most confounding thing. Just - wondering, maybe. Perplexed.

“Well, I’m sorry I didn’t cut it into convenient bite sized pieces for you, I’ll take an extra few hours next time to whip up a handy PechaKucha on how to end the plague.”

“That’s not what he’s…” April cuts herself off and rubs her face. “Nah, nothing. I just kinda - forget that you’re still a kid, sometimes.”

Now that gets Donnie to actually bristle. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nope, not getting into it. You and Leo go hash it out, I’ll live vicariously through him. God knows I’m too old for this.” April clambers over the back of the couch and turns to Mikey, hands on her hips. “Wanna help me cook in the meantime?”

“Yup,” Mikey bounces up as well. “See ya later, Dee.”

And just like that, Donnie is dismissed. He splutters for a second from sheer indignation, but the conversation is effectively adjourned as April and Mikey retreat to the kitchen area, and so he’s got nothing else to do but go figure out what the dum-dum’s beef du jour with him is. 

He doesn’t want to, he really, really doesn’t. But he’s learned by now that holding grudges in confined spaces with no real possibility for physical distance because there’s a deadly plague raging outside is excruciatingly exhausting, and he’ll need the strength in the coming days.

Donnie doesn’t suit up - Leo didn’t, which means there’s only one place where he can be. He hears April and Mikey begin to whisper between themselves as the front door closes behind him.

The dome for April’s pigeons isn’t big at all - Donnie built it with enough space in mind to fit the rows of boxes and roosting poles, the small storage of feed and correspondence supplies, the small desk for said correspondence - not that it currently appears to be used as anything other than an extra surface - and for April to be able to move around freely without the risk of ramming her elbows into stuff at any given moment. The human-sized door opens into a small corridor that leads to the apartment, and the pigeon-sized door is fitted with a, well, pigeon-sized cleaning chamber.

(The birds weren’t too excited at the prospect of regular showers. But, to Donnie’s gleeful schadenfreude, the birds also weren’t asked for their opinions.)

Which means that there isn’t terribly much space for two mutant turtles to share, and Donnie involuntarily swallows and blocks the door with his battle shell - as much for his own resolve as it is to show Leo that he isn’t leaving when Leo shoots him a murderous look from where he stands between the boxes and the desk.

“I don’t wanna see you right now, Donald.”

Well, that makes two of them.

Leo turns back to the birds - they have obviously already bedded down in the unhappy weather, but now a few poke their heads out to check out their visitors. Twitter - a red pigeon with an unfortunate-looking tuft - gives Donnie a frazzled look before hiding again. Coward.

Donnie’s eyes travel over the lines of Leo’s shoulders, jagged with tension, over his firm, angry stance.

He looks thunderous.

Oh.

“You’re mad at me,” Donnie asserts.

Leo huffs. “Astute.”

Donnie didn’t even know Leo knew words like that. Once again, the chasm of difficult years divides them.

Ah well. Nowhere from here but through.

“If you are mad at me for not telling you about the research sooner–”

“You think I care about that?” Leo whirls on him, throwing his hand up. “I know you, Don, you’ll chew on stuff until it’s mush in your mouth before you finally spit any of it out. No, how about– did you think–” Oh god, he’s so angry he can barely talk. “How about I’m mad at you because you did a dumb fucking thing and didn’t even care– didn’t even think what it’d do to us? You–” he pauses for a second, his chest heaving as if preparing the next strike. “You stood right there and told me not to take the blame when - when you did it all to yourself! You knew it then! You knew what got you here!”

Donnie gapes, stunned by the tidal wave as it crashes and crashes and crashes. “I didn’t know it was gonna explode–” 

He didn’t - to the point where he didn’t even have all his devices and protocols in place when he went to take a look. To the point where he was going to work on something small and insignificant first, a chewing gum for his mind, as he considered the stolen orb floating in its glass case and marinated potential ways to explore it.

“Okay, maybe you didn’t, but you knew it was dangerous! Draxum’s shit always was! You knew it was a risk and you went for it anyway! We thought you were ground to dust, there was nothing left!”

Donnie feels a jab of spite at that, an answering anger of wounded pride. “Oh ho, you don’t get to lecture me on self-sacrifice, Leonardo!”

“Self-sacrifice in the name of family? Yeah, okay, maybe,” Leo actually concedes the point before revving up again. “Self-sacrifice to satisfy your fucking brain itchies? You’re alone in this one, hermano.” 

Leo tugs his mask off and wipes his face with it before sitting heavily down in the chair by the desk. It creaks under his weight, but if Leo notices he pays it no attention. 

There is just one lone light bulb hanging from the spiderweb-center of the ceiling, and its timid glow only serves to coax the shadows out of the lines wrinkling Leo’s face.

He looks so tired.

“It was always worth the risk to me,” Donnie mutters. His voice lacks the conviction he’s supposed to be feeling.

So Mikey and April - they are mad about it too, then? Would Raph be, if he were here to find out with them? Would Dad?

Leo lets out a disheartened snort. “Well, not to us.” He shakes his head. His eyes are fixed on the floor somewhere. “You don’t get it… We’d have given anything to get you back, Dee. Anything. Do you know - can you imagine what that feels like?”

Donnie wants to go home. He wants to go home. “What do you want me to say, Leo.”

What can he say, or do? It’s too late. It is always too late.

“I don’t know,” Leo shrugs. Whatever fight has gone out of Donnie, it has apparently left him as well. “Do you even know– did you even think?”

Donnie doesn’t know what he is asking. Doesn’t know what words he needs to save himself. The failure is too fresh in him, too recent still.

The air smells like sawdust and feathers. The rain has ceased. Nothing exists beyond the cold scutes of the dome. 

“It was shit, Don,” Leo says. His voice is flattened under the weight. “It was shit without you.”

A sour ache contorts Donnie’s face. He looks away.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

***

Leo was right to ask him - Donnie hasn’t thought about it. He wasn’t ignorant of it - after all, he knows that Leo blamed himself for his alleged death, and he’d have to be blind to miss the way the others look at him, through him sometimes. The way they treat him as if he were the youngest sibling - because now he is. 

But, beyond the ground-shattering reality of being transported into a world that ended, he forgot to think of the scorch mark that was left on those who remained. Of the immediate aftermath.

Forgot - or didn’t want to think, uncertain how to approach this behemoth.

But now, faced with it, Donnie cannot feign ignorance anymore. Can’t help watching his family in turn, cast in the half-light of things they’d lost.

Donnie looks at April helping him translate Draxum’s notes in focused silence, squinting far-sightedly at the pages in their little shed; looks at Mikey as he passes by the lab’s door in the night, wandering the base, checking the vents.

Looks at the mess of scars mangling Leo’s shoulder.

It wasn’t a clean cut. Whoever did it was inexperienced - or panicking, or both. Donnie would’ve mustered up more courage for his brother. He deserved better.

The guilt deepens, folds over itself thousandfold like layers of mokume-gane. The pressure is stifling.

Yet they do not mention the evening at April’s. They talk about the notes and the mold, of course - especially since Donnie has to employ them all to translate stuff for him to save time - but they talk of nothing around that.

(When they came back down to the apartment, Leo gave the other two a half-hearted shrug. Whatever he meant to say by it, April and Mikey have evidently read as the sign to put it behind them. Donnie sat at April’s round table with them, head low, shoulders aching with tension. He couldn’t bear to look anyone in the face, but whatever smiles he heard in their voices as they talked about nothing were strained - but present.

Donnie was mad, resentful, flabbergasted back when Leo was named the leader. He’s never believed in democracy, really - but it stung when it was his opinion that was pushed to the side. How would Leo - eccentric, flaky, ooh-look-a-butterfly Leo, his dum-dum twin, his warped mirror - ever mature enough to lead, to have people trust in his decisions implicitly?

Pushing his carrots around on the plate, Donnie was forced to conclude that whatever decisions Leo had had to make in the past decade have evidently tempered him into someone worth that trust.)

He busies himself, again, with Draxum’s writing, the world of words and formulas so much simpler that the messy tangles of feelings he doesn’t know how to parse. 

When he is finally convinced to take a break, he invites Leo to his lab and asks him to show him his shoulder again.

Both are silent and sullen as Donnie maps out the incision paths and connector points, first in his mind then on Leo’s mottled skin with a permanent marker. They can’t do the surgery yet - the healing problem has yet to be solved with the way Donnie’s attention got derailed - but now, in comparison to Draxum’s research, prosthetic implantation seems almost laughably straightforward. A simple matter for his mind to chew on as it reloads.

Donnie keeps his vision narrowed down to the felt tip so that he might avoid having to look Leo in the eye - until Leo shifts beneath him. Donnie lifts the marker in a sharp motion, ready to tsk at him, and realizes he’s been caught when their eyes meet.

“It’s chill, dude,” Leo says. His eyes are calm, his mouth is set. “Let’s just get this thing, yeah? The mold? That’s all that matters now.”

Donnie gives him a tight nod and returns to work, his brow furrowed. He doesn’t know if it’s disappointment he could read in Leo’s voice. He doesn’t understand the heights Leo’s looking down at him from, the trek upwards too long.

There is a darkness in him, slime hugging his lungs. It almost feels like drowning. 

***

‘...however, sample 14.7.B shows definitive resilience to it as well as the previously administered antibiotics, see Section 2 Addendum 13. Furthermore…’

Donnie loves reading Draxum’s notes. Loves following along the carefully charted thoughts, the neat order of them. The language Draxum uses, even through the warped mirror of code, is dry, meticulous, concise, the puzzle pieces of it fitting seamlessly along Donnie’s own. Even with Draxum gone, his mind remains, laid out before Donnie’s eyes, and it’s - pleasant. Nice. 

But something seeps through. 

Donnie doesn’t notice it at first, the slow creeping, the shadows of an intruder lurking in the corners. 

‘...was a decent attempt, but the speed at which the spores of 23.2.C have spread went significantly above my predictions, rendering the experiment pointless. Another failure.’

Once he starts paying attention, though, he can’t stop noticing. 

‘Too many variables to proceed with this one. I thought I had the system in stasis, but evidently I erred. Stupid oversight on my part.’

‘Where did I go wrong? What am I missing?’ 

‘How could I be so impotent?’ 

Heart in his throat, gripped by the terrible suspicion, Donnie leafs through the pages, watching the scrawl begin to break ranks and jump around, entire sections cramming themselves into spaces accidentally left blank. 

He knows what he’s going to find at the end. It’s not going to be an accident. 

There it is. 

‘I caught it. My throat It can’t be anything but. Why When could it have happened? I failed. I failed them all.’

Donnie leans back slowly, his skin, his insides crawling in disgust at the realization. He wants to scream, but it stays caught in the trappings of his spongy lungs, his webbed ribs, and he swallows the bile back down, forcing himself to breathe evenly through his nose. 

He needs to think. He needs to stop freaking out and think if he wants them all to live. 

And he will, of course he will. But for now, alone in the freezing shed, his limbs clumsy and winter-slow, he hunches over the evidence of their doom and gives in to the shudders. 

Stupid. Oh, how stupid, what a useless, tremendous idiot– 

Oh ho, no you don’t, Donnie thinks, spite warming him like the blade-thin flame of a burner. I’ve got you now.

Chapter Text

sisu: core, perseverance, strength of will; not momentary courage,

but the power to sustain that courage to see something through.

***

“Not to employ a cliché, but I’ve got good news and bad news for you, brethren. Good news: I understand what the mold does now. Bad news: Ophiocordyceps sinensis. Or, if you’d like, Dicrocoelium dendriticum. The former is a fungus too so it fits better taxonomically, but the latter would be more similar in terms of behavioral alteration of…”  

"Dee– please just start somewhere," Mikey says, his eyes already attempting to glaze over. 

No appreciation for the ironic elegance of it all. Fine. 

Donnie sighs anyway. “I shall start with the good news then. Although, now that I think of it, this is also the bad news. The good news and the bad news are the same. I lied.”

He is stalling, he realizes that. He doesn’t want to tell them, even though for all intents and purposes they absolutely have to know.

But this last moment of ignorance as they all stare at him expectantly - Donnie savors it in their stead.

“Imagine an ant,” he begins, walking back and forth in front of April’s windows covered in first snow, his hands clasped behind his back. This is totally tapping into his teaching-at-a-university-someday fantasy, obsolete though it may now be. He stops briefly to draw an ant on the window, frowning at the sad-looking thing. Drawing is not his forte. “It goes about its ant business and, during a lunch break, has a little snack. What the ant doesn’t know is that the snack contains a nasty surprise - a bunch of larvae of the Dicrocoelium flatworm.”

He watches a look of apprehension pass in a wave over April, then Mikey, then Leo. This is probably the most attentive, if still confused, they’ve ever been while listening to him talk.

Hah! But at what cost.

“Now, the thing is that the ant is not the larvae’s final host - they mature in sheep guts– uh– regular sheep, that is– but an ant is unlikely to say, hey, why don’t I take a stroll, and willingly march into a sheep’s mouth like that. So most of the larvae hide in the ant’s abdomen,” he dots its belly before stabbing a finger at its head, “while one of them - the leader, you could say - lodges itself in the ant’s brain.”

“Donnie, I seriously don’t like where you are going with this,” April warns him. Next to her, Mikey is nodding urgently, his face gray.

Donnie can relate. “Stay strong, I’m almost done. The key thing here is that the brain larva - it alters the way the ant behaves. Makes it abandon its usual routes and tasks, and eventually hustles the ant, in a zombie-like trance, up a plant or a blade of grass - where it will sooner or later be eaten by a sheep and deliver the larvae where they want to be the most. Now, the mold doesn’t want us to be eaten by sheep. But, inasmuch as the mold can want anything, it wants to spread - and it wants its hosts to stop fighting it.”

“Exactly why are you telling us all this.”

Leo’s question doesn’t even sound like one, but Donnie gets the need to speak - to section the moment into something, hopefully, easier to control.

Donnie stops. Breathes. Opens his mouth–

–delivers a different blow instead. Stalling once more. “I think that’s what happened to Raph.”

He watches the wounds reopen.

In the stunned silence, he speaks again. “I think he realized what was happening. In those last moments, he knew.”

That’s why he tried to get away. To save everyone else from the host of his body.

Donnie knows his brother.

“So his anger…” Leo trails off. Donnie sees his hand twitch when he chooses not to lift it to the amputation site. “Are you saying the mold made him…”

“I would hypothesize that the mold exacerbates the brain’s natural…predilections,” Donnie saves him the need to say it. “And considering the state of the world, it’s safe to assume that many people became more prone to anger or depression.”

“You got all that from Draxum’s notes?” Mikey asks, bewildered. He looks miserable.

“Yes.” Donnie laughs bitterly at the irony, at the memory of Draxum’s delirious descent into death. “But not the way you think. He didn’t know - didn’t know what to look out for - but I did, and to me it was fairly obvious."

“I don’t get it,” April gets up to pace as well but seems to change her mind halfway and sits back down. “Let’s um, let’s just think about it abstractly… How can you know that the mold is the reason the brainworms are so bad - which, thanks, Donnie, I hated that example - and it’s not just the unprecedented situation of living through the end times?” 

“How– hmm,” Donnie frowns - he knows the answer, he thinks, but needs to hear it confirmed all the same. “How high would you call the rates of suicide among survivors?”

In the brief pause, he watches the shadows unfurl. Leo and Mikey look at each other and immediately away; April glances at the bed and pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.

“High,” she says quietly. “But it doesn’t really - mean anything, right? Of course people would be depressed…”

“Think, I implore you.” Stop falling prey to the same rhetoric. “Those thoughts - I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’ve all had them, or keep having - do they even feel like yours? Or do they feel - foreign?”

Sludge and ooze versus the almost desiccated rattling of his thought, no matter if rational or emotional. Donnie knows what his mental processes feel like against the inside of his skull - and could honestly slap himself for not clocking it sooner.

Is that his purpose here? To figure out this puzzle as the one obsessive and weird enough to categorize his thoughts by textures? 

“Before the stage of flesh erosion, there appears to be a long conquesting stage, potentially preceded by a period of dormancy. During that stage - that’s when it alters the mental processes. That’s what…would make one’s mental state worse. And we were so ready to accept the apocalypse as the explanation for everything that it flew right under the radar.”

“Dee.” Leo sits very still, his body at full attention. “I…I think I’ve connected the dots. Please tell me I didn’t connect shit.”

Donnie nods in acknowledgment. “We are all infected.”

“What?” April whips around to look between them, her braids flying. “How can you know?”

“I know I am,” Donnie grimaces at the fuzzy, white-noise feeling in his throat. He’s got no clue if he’s imagining it. “And it’s safe to say that Raph was. And all of you fall in between.”

And even if they weren’t before Donnie’s suit-less crash landing here? With how much time has passed since, spent together in confined spaces…

Did he do it to them? 

“What? No. No, you can’t be for real,” Mikey shakes his head, looking like he’s about to whip out his Dr. Feelings credentials. “I’m pretty sure depression existed way longer than the mold. Whatever bad brain juice this is, it’s all home grown.”

“You are actually, factually proving my point as you speak,” Donnie spreads his arms. “What better way for the disease to stay undetected than to pretend to be something so well known it’s mundane? It’s doing it to you right now.” 

“Listen, guys,” April interjects as Mikey opens his mouth to argue. "God, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but nobody is invalidating how we all feel. Post-apoc woulda been shit on mental health even without the extra help. What Don is saying is that it can be both.”

“Yes, thank you, glad to hear we understand nuance in this house.”

Donnie is growing irritated, a simmer of it buzzing under his skin, but he pushes it down in a frankly impressive show of will. He’s had time to accept it already - they haven’t.

“Can we get back to the topic of we are all infected,” Leo clambers onto the back of the couch, restless. “Like, right now, if Don's right. We’ve got the spores in us.” He wiggles his right shoulder. “I don’t know about you guys but I’ve already lost a limb to this thing and I’m not exactly itching to have a repeat experience.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Mikey mumbles.

April shoots off the couch to start her decrepit-looking kettle, reaching for the jar with crushed mint while she waits for the water to boil with her back turned to the rest of them. Donnie notices her hands shake before he looks away to let her have some privacy.

Better yet - he turns around entirely and wipes the condensation (and the ant, put it out of its misery) off the window to look outside. His eyes travel over the city, its edges softened with timid snowfall. He focuses on that, tuning out the voices behind him. It’ll only get colder from here - he should get to upgrading the heating systems after all this is done. Maybe the plumbing at the base can still be salvaged… If Donnie has to go through winter without hot water at his disposal on top of everything else he might as well just call it quits.

(He skirts the image of the future that ends before winter can. His penchant for long term planning is another reason he’d hate living through the apocalypse itself.)

Donnie is halfway through mentally sketching something simple and effective for April - she’s already got rainwater reservoirs for her skyward dwelling but the pipes looked suspicious last time he checked the filters - when he hears his name being called.

He zones back in.

“Earth to Dontron. To Dontronello. Dontronito. Do–”

“Yes, Leo, tis I, present,” Donnie turns back around, rolling his eyes so hard he briefly catches sight of the Matrix. And there he was, being nice. Some things just don’t seem to change.

And they called him the childish one.

Mikey is perched on the armrest now, his folded limbs long and thin like a bird’s, gloved hands wrapped around an incongruently cheery red mug. April moves to sit down next to him - hesitates - shrugs and plops down anyway and combs distractedly through his tousled hair with her fingers. Leo has pulled a comforter off the back of the couch and sits cocooned on the floor, picking at loose threads.

Their faces look haggard. They’ve been made to feel too much in too short a time.

“We were just asking, like - if that’s how it is, what do we do?” Mikey glances down at the mug, back up at Donnie through the vapor. “Did Draxum get anywhere with– I don’t know, a cure, a vaccine, something?”

“Sort of. What he did realize - and this is important, everyone, so listen carefully - is that the mold negates mystic energy. That’s why the yōkai left - for once I fell into the folly of mistaking correlation for causation.”

“Negates how?” Leo asks. He appears to be deep in thought, his hand rubbing his chin.

“Unclear,” Donnie frowns. “It could be counteracting it on a physiological level, devouring it as sustenance, or simply seeking to destroy it in order to avoid contact. The latter could be our path to safety. Think,” he looks between Leo and Mikey, “back when you could still use mystic powers, did the mold react to them?” 

“I don’t remember,” Mikey glances at Leo and shrugs. “Maybe? I don’t know.”

Suboptimal. And if Donnie had caught the mold on any day other than the very first, there’s no telling if Mikey’s concussion healing had any impact either.

Anyway– “It’s worth a shot. We are racing against the clock as we don’t know when the flesh erosion stage will strike.” They’ve lost so much time. It’s been months for Donnie by now - and at least as long, if not longer, for others. It’s making his skin crawl. At any point in time he’s 0.2 seconds away from clawing his plastron apart just to get it out out out. “Draxum made brief notes on a cleansing device of sorts that would run on mystic energy - I think he arrived at the same conclusion, that the mold would only be combated with mystic. So that makes two geniuses individually coming to the same results, which inspires some hope… He didn’t have time to develop the idea though.”

Donnie doesn’t mention the sporadic bits, scribbled hastily in the margins, where Draxum debated with himself whether the yōkai might heed their call for help and agree to reopen the portals.

“But there’s no– you guys can’t even use your weapons, how can we build something strong enough to kill it?”

Donnie grins at April. It feels like a knife blade. “Draxum did some decent conceptualizing, even as his thoughts began to lose their coherency, but he lacked my technical know-how. Luckily, I am happy to lend my brilliance. Leave that part to me.”

***

Now that he knows what he is looking for, Donnie stops wasting time decoding every word and instead seeks out and follows the winding, uncertain path of Draxum’s thought as he outlined the machine. He doesn’t even need to translate anymore, per se - by now he is so fluent in the code that it seems to enter his bloodstream and alight his neurons directly from the pages. 

Draxum trails off eventually, too sick or too confused by that point, but Donnie hits the ground running as he accepts the torch. He’s got a clear problem and a clear solution - and figuring out the in between has always been, hands down, his most favorite thing in the world. 

Donnie dives into work with the ferocity of a hound on a hot trail, chasing the fleeting shapes and connections between them that his mind conjures, grabs them by the feathers and slams them down into the material world.

It’s intricate, complicated, nigh-impossible work, but Donnie has always thrived on science’s frontier. Has always danced his best on its cutting edge.

Draxum’s notes guide Donnie to his lab’s vault beneath the library where Donnie, after an hour of unbridled excitement, calms down and puts together an alpha version of a device that would pull mystic energy from the surrounding space. He nearly faints when he first turns it on and it tugs on every cell of his body at once, turns it hastily off, thinks - and repurposes four cloaking brooches as blocking devices. Because that’s what they already are, that’s how the concealing already functions - he simply expands upon it.

The device is promising to be bulky and not very stable and honestly, Donnie can’t be bothered to lug it all the way up and to the base, and so instead they mold-proof the vault so that he doesn’t have to wear the suit as he works.

(Not that it matters if they’re all already infected - but nobody is in a hurry to dunk themselves in the plague soup and get, well, more infected.)

The energy coagulator is but one part of the machine. Another is an almost alchemical device, the vague idea for which Donnie had hunted down in Draxum’s notes, designed to transform mystic energy into something thinner, sharper, with a clear outward vector in contrast to its amorphous directionlessness. A steel weapon where mystic energy is a vein of metal in the rock. Donnie only has a rudimentary understanding of exactly how it works - and ew, alchemy - but he has to trust Draxum's directions on this. 

From the transformator’s chamber, the new energy will be fed into the disperser and, well, dispersed into the surrounding space, cleaning air, water, flesh. It will go through solid rock. It will leave no stone unturned. It will be the cure. 

Slowly but surely, the machine begins to take shape around the energy coagulator. It acquires filters for distilling it, vats for storing it, pipes for feeding it into the transformator and then the dispenser. The three of them nestle together in the web of wires and pipes. Separate pipes link the coagulator to the machine’s engine - Donnie’s plan is to kickstart it with a generator and switch to mystic energy once there’s enough. No amount of generators would be able to compete with distilled mystic energy - and it already needs to be collected for the cure anyway.

Donnie builds an amplifying frame around it to screen more space at once, the entire library or maybe even the full block if it reaches that far. If– when this works, they’ll need to move it around anyway, at least until Donnie figures out how to give it a wider range - but by then he’ll already know how to rebuild it quickly.

Donnie knows that he is right, that this will work - but he gets the confirmation when it starts attracting the mold. Whether it seeks to destroy or devour the particles that escape during Donnie’s lightning-fast tests or simply fills up the vacated space when the mystic energy gets slowly sucked out of it like receding tide, Donnie does not know.

But it doesn’t matter. It works - it’s gonna work. The mold congealing on the outer walls of the protected area, dripping from the library’s ceiling, trickling into the cracks - that only means that he’s on the right track.

***

Donnie was going to set the arm project aside until after they’d deal with the mold, because putting Leo on immunosuppressants while he is undoubtedly infected is an idiotic idea, and he stands by that. It makes sense to wait - besides, after the mold is gone, the mystic energy levels will go up again and he will be aided by his ninpō. It’s the logical, reasonable thing to do.

Leo will not hear of it.

“For our big final standoff? I want the fancy arm. You wanted me so badly to have it, and now I do too, so stop beating around the bush and slice me up.”

Donnie chews slowly, savoring the crunch. Mikey has managed to find a stash of tortilla mixes, their plastic packaging untouched by mold, and Donnie isn’t about to rush his first taco experience in months if it kills him. He’s always had trouble with mushy textures when it came to food, but now it reminds him too much of the sludge coating his lungs, and - no thanks. 

Besides, it gives him a moment to think in peace which has never been a given when it came to Leo.

(Besides-besides, nothing infuriates Leo as effectively as having to wait, and Donnie relishes the power.)

Leo acts like their argument never happened. Like he isn’t mad at Donnie anymore. Donnie doesn’t know what to make of it.

He sets it aside in a familiar exercise of his mind. Maybe, later, it will make sense.

He swallows. “Leon - for the umpteenth time, we can’t just let you run around with a heavy ass prosthetic with or without immunosuppression. Your body will burn it right off of you. We need to wait. And anyway, I’m busy with Draxum’s stuff right now.”

Never mind that the tacos Leo’s brought weren’t the only reason Donnie immediately scuttled out of the lab and into a sealed staff room upon his arrival - he also may have gotten stuck on a tricky bit of getting the engine to accept two different types of fuel, and the feeling of mentally banging his head against a wall was driving him insane.

“C’mon, don’t try to pretend you aren’t running a dozen side projects anyway,” across from him, Leo leans on the kitchen island, a particular glint in his eye telling Donnie he won’t back down so easily. Figures. “I know that big forehead of yours and what lurks behind it: you need to work on several things at once. So work on this.”

“I am not, in fact, running any side projects, nothing major in any case,” Donnie smirks at him. “You are wrong, though I know that’s nothing new for you.”

He isn’t wholly wrong, though, Donnie will give him that. The cure machine demands his full undivided attention in the hours that he works on it, and after such long periods of concentration his mind begs for simpler work as a way to reset. During the briefest of breaks he may have gone over April’s hot water pipes, fixed their coffee maker - if only they had coffee itself, but, y’know - and sketched out a project for a small transmitting station to bring their comms back up. He hates being idle.

The arm would be so tempting.

Still, that’s not the point - why won’t Leo understand? “It’s dangerous,” Donnie snaps, glaring at the half-eaten taco in his hands. So much for savoring. “I will not have you risk yourself just to have a shiny toy sooner than what is safe.”

He realizes he’s walked right into the trap as Leo grins, wolfish. “Oh, ‘dangerous’? Well, brother dearest, I think you owe me a free pass on that.” Here it is, Donnie thinks with a thrill. Leo might not be after another argument - but he has not forgotten it. “I think it’s my turn to make reckless decisions about shiny toys, and I wish to cash in. Besides,” his grin grows wider, “in the name of family, remember? My whole shtick? I want to be there to help when the time comes. I’ll be more help if I have two arms.”

This is reckless. Pointless. “Or, on the contrary,” Donnie fishes a cilantro stem out of the taco and points at him with it, “you might become distracted if something goes wrong with the prosthetic.”

“Your stuff? Going wrong?” Leo waves him off, nearly catching his mug of tea. “Puh-lease. We know nothing will go wrong on your side, and how about you let me worry about mine.”

Donnie gives him a pointed look: flattery will not work. “I am worried about exactly that, and my point still stands. The weight alone might tear the port straight out. The site will get inflamed. It might bleed. There might be an infection.”

“Well, good thing we’re all already infected, so it doesn’t matter? Listen - what if we just pump me full of, I dunno, antibiotics and anti-inflams? Wrap me up in gauze like a mummy, dunk me in disinfectant like I’m in a bacta tank? As a temp solution, for just enough time to get us to the other side? After that you’ll put me on the immuno stuff, and Mikey will be able to help too. I’ll be the bestest of patients, promise.”

This is the closest to begging Donnie’s seen him in a while. It kind of reminds him of the old times.

He leans back in his chair. “Hah, as if.”

“Cross my heart, hope to die,” Leo salutes him with the mug. 

Donnie snorts again, but his gears, already always turning, switch configurations. 

It’s a stupid plan. Stupid, foolish, nonsensical plan. There are so many things that could go wrong.

But…?

But if something does go wrong, would Leo not be safer this way?

Behind the well-worn mask, his brother is afraid.

“Your liver…” Donnie muses, still unsure.

Leo, of course, sees his chance. “We’re still super soldiers, remember? And it’s not like I drink or anything. I think it can take one for the team just this once. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

Donnie chews on his lip as he considers Leo’s point, his eyes narrowed. A slow grin spreads on Leo’s face again - he’s always been unfairly quick to realize when he’s won.

The next day, Leo is fitted with the port and put on a nuclear cocktail of meds. The surgery is an impressive success. Donnie passes out immediately after it and wakes up with a clear solution for his engine problem.

***

“Behold: the Mystic Purifier™!” 

“So it’s…done?” Mikey breathes. He sounds almost too awed to speak.

“A beauty, hm?” Donnie preens. He walks over to the machine and pets the glossy arch of the amplifier. “I am confident that we can launch it tomorrow.”

“Donald…it’s gorgeous,” Leo strolls around the machine that’s taking up a good chunk of space in the middle of Draxum’s lab. A harness is strapped across his shell and over the bandages, keeping the weight of the port off his shoulder. “I’m not even sarcastic - you’ve outdone yourself, honest.”

“Well…” Donnie isn’t about to be coy with it. Compared to this magnum opus, everything he’s ever made before has been child’s play - literally. Even the drill. “Mindful of the black swan fallacy, I will not claim to know definitively that I am the very last person on Earth who could figure out how the mold works or how it might be defeated, tempting though it may seem.” He stops here and faces his brothers, his shoulders straight, the amplifiers arching behind him like wings. “I am, however, fairly confidently, the only person who can build this.” 

Nobody could have created it other than him - that’s why he was irreplaceable, that’s why he had to be here, why he was meant to be here, convoluted though his path may have been.

And he wasn’t, not from the beginning, but he is here now. He can fix this.

He will.

The build is not perfect - off the top of his head, Donnie can think of twenty-seven ways to improve it, make it more stable, less clunky, more efficient, et cetera et cetera - but he doesn’t have the time to marinate the design and doesn’t have the materials to make his true vision come to life.

He preens, yes - it’s still l fucking incredible that he’d pulled it off, thank you very much - but he wishes…he wishes.

“Yeah yeah, okay, token theater kid,” Mikey chuckles. “Very cool, very neat. But - you said tomorrow? Is it not done yet?”

“Oh - it is, almost, I just, um,” Donnie flounders, suddenly flustered. “We need to clear out the space, and check the seals because the mold’s been worse than what I remember about our common bathroom. And then I need to run a few more tests - it’s very hard to coagulate the mystic energy because its levels are so low so I can’t do any real beta testing if we want to have enough in storage for the real thing, but I was– I was still going to check something, okay? And I need– I needed to get something from the Lair.”

“What, like from the base?” Leo cocks his head.

“No - Lair, capital L,” Donnie explains. He looks down, suddenly very interested in his hands. He got many a blister working on this thing.

“But there’s nothing? It’s - after Shredder, well, shredded it, we moved, remember? We hadn’t tried going back there since.”

Donnie shrugs. There’s no point keeping up this facade. He doesn’t know why he tried. “I just need to go there, okay? Get off my case. I’ll be back before curfew, Mom.” 

He hears Leo inhale as he opens his mouth to say something else but Mikey steps in faster. “Hey, no, I get that,” he says, and when Donnie chances a glance at him his smile is disgustingly knowing. “That’s cool. You can go do that, and we’ll get started on the clear-out.”

Despite his tone, Donnie’s hackles still lower a fraction. “Cool,” he echoes.

Donnie can’t even explain it to himself - and he’d tried. He only knows that, on the eve of their final battle (because it is a battle, there is no point in calling it anything else), driven by an uncertain yet undeniably present feeling, he finds himself being called home for one last time.

Winter dusk is falling as Donnie walks through the city. The cold tries to grab at his clothes, worm its way inside, but Donnie has upgraded the suits with their own heating systems ages ago, a thin smear of soap on the inside of the visors keeping them from fogging up too much.

He walks soundlessly, untouched by the city. Almost like a wraith. He picks his way through the foreign-and-familiar-again landscape, through the quiet, gentle apocalypse that they are about to uproot.

The Lair - what’s left of it - is an insight into the abyss, the tangled, broken pipes and construction beams and slabs of concrete interrupting its cylindric descent. Down below, under the powdering of snow and among the trash and debris, Donnie can barely make out the opalescent, oily sheen of the closed portal to the Hidden City. 

Carefully, Donnie sits on the edge of the hole, letting his feet dangle over the drop. Their family recovered all they could post-Shredder, and if anyone’s ever wanted to try to loot the miserable remains, they’ve had ample time to do it by now. He’s not here to retrieve anything, just to - to linger, for a moment, near the last true dwelling of his amputated childhood before everything changes again.

Maybe that’s okay. Maybe he’ll come back here once it’s all over and plant a garden or something. Unleash his botanical genius upon the caved-in rotunda without having to turn it into a ship in a bottle with all the current precautions. Maybe then he’ll find the courage he keeps lacking and finally ask about Dad.

They will keep going. As always. They will feel alive again.

That’s all that matters now.

Chapter Text

ya’aburnee: ‘you bury me’; an expression of affection;

the hope that a loved one will outlive you.

***

The next morning, the four of them descend into Draxum’s lab vault and close the doors. They remain suited up even behind the seals and the filters of its walls; Donnie is wearing his battle shell directly over the fabric.

He flexes his fingers and runs his last checks on the machine before he can launch it. Mostly visuals and physical wear, metal arms coming out to try the pipe joints and the millipede-like lines of solder. That’s the best he can do without proper testing.

“All good?” Leo asks from behind him. The lightness of his tone is a thin film.

“Mhm.” Donnie’s eyes dart over the machine, tracing and tracing, waiting for something to snag on his gaze, a break in the pattern for him to attack - but nothing emerges. “Ready as it’ll ever be, I suppose.”

Ideally, he’d delay the launch. Ideally, he’d take an extra week or ten to proof every square inch of the machine and troubleshoot every individual step, start to finish, twice. He’s, frankly, done with hotheaded ( bone headed) decisions for at least until the end of the month, which is definitely a new record for him.

But they don’t have the luxury of waiting. The bombs are ticking in their lungs, and the vague awareness of how long it’s been makes them reluctant to waste another second.

“Let’s get in position, then.”

At Leo’s command, Mikey and April take their spots to Donnie’s left and right, putting the amplifiers behind their backs, eyes scanning the walls. Leo completes the vaguely diamond formation, taking the spot behind the machine’s heavy bulk.

Donnie breathes, waits for the brief condensation to clear from his visor. This is their last moment of calm. From here on out, there’s no stopping until they’re done.

Well, then. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Donnie launches the machine’s generator and watches it arise from slumber. It comes alive with a binaural whirr as its various parts wake up and join in, lights connecting, framework settling into itself under the vibrations. Aurora borealis-like wisps dance on the walls and vines of the almost cavern-like lab, its sparse lights dimmed.

It almost looks like a waiting room of Hades. Abandon hope and all that.

Donnie watches the machine with some caution as he takes half a step back, away from the controls, to give it breathing space. 

With a low sigh-like groan it begins to chug the mystic energy out of the air. Particles blink and glimmer like bioluminescent algae as the tide carries them, disturbed, towards the funnels and into the pipes. The machine tugs at Donnie with inquisitive, hungry fingers but washes over him after the brief inspection; in his periphery, he sees Mikey and April tense and check their brooches, but nobody sounds the alarm. The machine huffs and shudders as the first droplets coalesce inside.

The air grows colder. The machine begins to glow.

“So when can you start transforming it?” Leo calls from around it.

Donnie is staring hard at the indicators even though he knows it’s no use this early. “We need to wait for the vats to fill more.” Otherwise it’ll just sputter out before it can get going. Lose precious momentum.

He considers the vats. “By my estimations it must take no less than–”

“Uh, guys– don’t mean to alarm you, but the mold’s here!”

Donnie closes his mouth with a click and spares a second to look where Mikey is pointing, the crack under the lab’s doors marred with a seeping, crawling mass the dull color of rotten viscera.

Fuck, it’s way too soon.

Okay. Okay okay.

“Sooo how about now?”

Donnie grits his teeth. “–no less than an hour, maybe three quarters if I can speed it up. So, Leon, my answer remains unchanged. We need to wait.” He pauses, his mind working. “I expected it to happen, it’s fine. We gotta buy it time.”

“Stay with it, then. The rest: fire extinguishers at will,” Leo commands, his voice easily filling the space over the hum of the machine. He barks a laugh. “Tello, you regretting or super regretting not hooking me up with that flamethrower now, eh?”

As if they need to burn any more oxygen in the mostly-sealed underground lab. As if the generator, even with its fumes filtered, isn’t already more than enough. “Pest. Go away,” he waves Leo off. To either side of him, Mikey and April heft their fire extinguishers.

“That’s what I said,” Leo crows and lets out a whooshing jet of carbon dioxide, immediately engulfed in the small cloud.

The thing is, his past self from just a few months ago would not only give Leo a flamethrower - he’d be brandishing one himself right now. Cackling, probably. But hey, guess he’s starting to learn - largely against his will, mind - what it means to have to mature. These three are an awful influence on him.

Donnie’s eyes scan the indicators as he chews unceremoniously on his lip, half-listening to the others unleash smoke bomb-like hell around the edges of the lab. He’s projecting about 500% more calm than he is feeling. He did expect the mold, but he didn’t expect it to besiege them so soon.

It’s fine, though. They just need to stall the mold enough for the coagulator to do its thing. They came prepared for it. It’s fine.

His suit’s filters kick up a notch, mincing the airborne particles of foam. This will choke out the mold, hopefully, or at least create enough of a physical barrier to stall it. 

Donnie cranks up the machine, watching the meters jump closer to overdrive. The faster he forces it to work the faster the mold will react, but there’s no slowing down now, no matching it, even - they need to outrun it.

For a tense minute, everything works. A layer of foam covers the mold where it’s crawling through the cracks. The meters of mystic energy keep ticking up.

And then with a sharp snap one of the vats breaks in two.

“Shit.” Donnie hauls himself up towards it with his metal arms, tools at the ready to check the damage, and gets a blast of mystic energy in the face for his trouble. Something small and terrified in him recoils when he breathes in the neon blue vapors - something else leans in.

“What’s going on?” Leo’s voice, pitched to carry.

“I’ll fix it!” Donnie shouts back. “Hold the mold back, I’ll fix it.”

“You heard him, let’s kick this spring cleaning up a notch!”

Donnie covers up the crack and squints at the damage, trying to see past the spilling energy. It dances and coils under his gloved hands like a living being in a busted cage, fighting to get out. Blue droplets hang in the air like dew, and Donnie might be going insane in the fog, but for a moment he thinks he can see Draxum’s vines on the walls begin to writhe.

He hears April yelp, the sound of surprise preceding the disgustingly wet shlap of something heavy and meaty hitting the ground - one of the vines got pushed out of formation in the wall and a cloud of mold spills inside, swallowing up a patch of floor.

Donnie coughs, the air humid and sticky in his lungs, scraping against his throat like sandpaper.

No matter. He just needs to fix the crack. That’s what he was afraid of - one of the million things he was afraid of, one of the million things he tried to account for, but it wasn’t enough.

But he will fix it. He has to. He will.

…He can’t. 

The mystic energy pours over his fingers in a sludge, vaporizes into particles making camp on his visor, and without cleaning and drying the vat he can’t make the edges stick, and without that he can’t patch up the crack.

Such a stupid mistake. Such a stupid, stupid mistake.

The machine whines and groans as it has to reach farther and farther out to extract new particles, and pinpricks of them alight on the walls as they travel through matter, the spreading cover of mold undulating and swirling where they pass. The cloud grows around the machine, drowning Donnie in it.

The suctioning feeling makes Donnie’s skin crawl as its waves curl over him like a giant squid’s tentacles, but the machine keeps bleeding it too, a great ouroboros gasping for breath. The noise heightens and spreads, whooshing and chugging and filling Donnie’s skull ear to ear until he struggles to think through it. 

What can he do? Quick - what can he do?

The machine will cannibalize itself and break if he keeps pushing it like this to try and outrun the energy loss. And if it breaks, they’ll be left alone with the mold, in the dark, underground.

A cold shiver slithers up Donnie’s spine, touches the back of his head, a sharp realization: he got them here. He’s led them all to their doom.

It all went wrong so fast.

No, this can’t be it. This won’t be it. He will fix it.

“I’m gonna reroute it,” Donnie screams over the noise as he jumps back down to the control panel, hands flying over keys, metal arms already poised for a more direct approach. He can’t allow it to slow down - so he needs to be faster. “I’m gonna–” he tries again, but it’s too loud, there’s no way they can hear him - he can barely hear himself. The only sounds that reach him through the agonized wheezing of the machine are Mikey’s panicked breathing, and Leo’s determined grunts - and his own stuttering heartbeat.

Hold on a second.

“Hah! I forgot the feeling,” Leo laughs, and there is no sound, nothing that can travel over the din - but Donnie hears him. “Shit, I knew we shoulda brought the weapons. Welcome back to the mystic Zoom call with the fam, fam!”

But of course - they’re basically swimming in the mystic soup now - no surprise that they would enter the Mind Meld. Donnie pauses in brief wonder at the not-sensations that brush his temples, the back of his mind, familiar and clear: Mikey’s energy, laughter and centrifugal force; Leo’s, lightning and fractals; an empty fourth space, its large negative imprint glowing a faint green - a roar to Mikey’s laughter, a roll of thunder to Leo’s lightning. The law of gravity to Donnie’s own light refraction. 

The laughter stutters into a yell. “Leo, watch out, the wall!” 

A crackle of wild electricity, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this– fuck!” 

Donnie reels for a moment from a biting jolt of pain not his own, his hands clenching on the controls. His shoulder burns. 

“Your arm–” 

“All peachy, the harness holds! Remind me not to try and catch concrete walls with barely-not-open wounds again,” Leo grunts, and it’s tinged red around the edges. Metal pulls on flesh, blood-hot, straining against the sweat-sticky leather, and it hurts hurts hurts– 

Donnie clenches his teeth, grinds not-his pain between them. He can’t do anything about it, can’t even spare an ‘I told you so’ that he doesn’t even feel. “I’m going to–” he tries to explain, a sense of urgency gripping his limbs, but he doesn’t know how to explain it quickly and succinctly enough - his thoughts race faster than his mouth can ever hope to translate.

In Mind Meld, though, he doesn’t need to. His intention strikes out like a whip, and his brothers catch the momentum. 

“Go for it! We’ll keep covering, do what you need!”

Donnie vaguely hears Leo call out to April to relay the information, but he pays it no mind. He’s got more important things to do. 

His tools out, he clambers back onto the machine, inside the curving cocoon of amplifiers, and pushes his hands in, past the steel skeleton of the framework. 

He blocks the flow of the mystic energy into the vats and unscrews the nuts that hold them against the openings in the broken vat. He fishes out another pipe from a box beneath the control panel and attaches it at the end of the first one, twisting it until it turns enough to align with the transformator. Its walls have a few plugged ports - Donnie did try to account for such eventualities, he’s not a complete moron, thank you - and so he unplugs one of them and screws the pipe to it, bypassing the broken vat.

After half a moment of consideration, he gets to rerouting the other pipes too, connecting them directly to the transformator and the engine section. The coagulator vats are there for a reason, serving to store the energy and feed it on at a steady pace. But Donnie didn’t exactly expect the first vat to blow - and since one did, others might too, and Donnie isn’t about to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, not in this. Best to skip the vats altogether now, which isn’t an ideal solution, but it isn’t an ideal situation either, so at least they match.

While fairly straightforward, the work isn’t the easiest, and made harder still by the puffy exhalations of mystic energy in Donnie’s face, by its uneven, unreliable light, but Donnie grimaces and continues his almost vivisectional work, whipped on by the sharp feeling of standing on the cliff’s edge. 

Bar some scrapes and the mercifully few times he’d had to tag in for Leo and sew one of his brothers up after a bad fight, this is the closest he’s ever come to operating on a living thing. He hates it.

But it works. With another pained huff, the machine reorients itself as the flow of energy resumes. Donnie coaxes it into a faster pace with a silent apology, his jaws so tense he can feel each individual tooth. 

It works - but it isn’t enough. They’ve lost too much to the bleed, and there’s no making up for it now, not if the machine needs to use up mystic energy as fuel.

The simple fact is that the mystic energy is a much better source than the generator could ever hope to be, and, if Donnie is entirely honest, it’s only for stubborn, sentimental reasons that he would favor nuclear fission over it as a global energy resource in terms of effectiveness, not that anyone needs to hear him say that.

That’s why his plan was to split the collecting mystic energy between the transformator and the engine after the initial generator kickstart. But with how much they’ve lost, the mystic energy is not coagulating quickly enough to both power the machine and have enough for the cure.

And it’s only a matter of time before the mold gets them, pulled towards the machine as if by a magnet. That - or before the machine breaks under the strain. It already stutters and struggles with the unregulated feed, but Donnie needs to keep pushing it before it burns out - needs to get results out of it while it can still be useful, while it can still make a difference because otherwise what was the point of it?

Not that it’s relatable or anything.

Think, think - but with every second he wastes thinking, the machine keeps bleeding, their salvation slipping further out of reach. Such a tiny, insignificant thing - a crack in a vat - has sent them careening off the course.

Now that they’re dumplings in mystic broth, could Donnie fix the machine with his ninpō somehow? Since the Shredder thing he’s been - or he was, rather - training to use it here and there but with a decent level of wariness and distrust for something that felt so addictively exhilarating. But if there’s a time to try again, it’s now.

Donnie sinks into himself, searching for its hum, for the point where it can puncture and flow into patterns of hard light. And it’s there - it seems to be - but with his hands closing around nothing, with no bō to guide and shape it the ocean-deep bulk of it smooths back out, barely disturbed.

Fuck. But if Leo and Mikey, with more natural affinity and more than a decade’s worth of a headstart on him can’t do anything without his weapons, what could he?

Donnie could try again. He could - he knows it’s there.

But with every try, he loses precious minutes.

Back to the drawing board of tech then, to the ground so familiar it feels more like an extension of his body and mind than the mystic powers ever did.

Donnie ignores the bitter taste of disappointment.

The pace of the machine keeps jumping, the noise levels rising and falling with it, and in the brief not-really-lulls Donnie battles the overstimulation enough to press it down and try to pay attention. The others are holding down the perimeter, close to the walls even as their topography shifts and spasms. April has wheeled out a massive bottle of industrial disinfectant and is tearing a length of fabric into pieces. Donnie can’t immediately see Leo and Mikey, but he can hear again - and in the Mind Meld his intention reaches out effortlessly in shafts of hard light and maps out the room, bounces off chains and mingles with strands of lightning. They are doing okay, for now.

'For now' being key because they are counting on Donnie and Donnie still doesn’t have a solution.

“Dontron, what’s with the existential despair?”

Donnie shakes his head before he can catch himself, trying to get rid of the inquisitive static electricity as if it were a fly. “It’s not despair, it’s called thinking.” 

The static clings to him anyway. “Legit couldn’t tell the difference. What’s up.”

“The amount of mystic energy we’ve amassed is falling drastically under my projections,” Donnie frowns: it’s annoying to say this, it’s annoying to solidify his mistakes into being. “If we keep routing it to the engine, we won’t have anything to process in the transformator. And vice versa.”

“Damn, man, I hate these either-or situations,” April says as she unscrews the bottle and dumps it into a bucket full of rags. Her hands do not stop working even as her forehead creases in concern.

Stupid, should’ve stacked the gennies wall to wall, should’ve done this or this or that - but they were in too much of a hurry, he was in too much of a hurry, and everything he’s done has led them directly to this outcome.

“Hah,” Mikey takes one of the rags from April and scales a wall, easily finding footholds among the vines. He stuffs it into an opening, shaking his hand off and sending droplets flying. His energy feels the same way: bright sparks, radial blur. “Really, you’d think Barry would have a secret stash of uranium here somewhere or whatever, but we’ve lugged all his stuff out and I didn’t see anything.” 

Would Draxum have anything useful? In his chests and drawers and boxes full of unidentifiable chemicals and materials and tools - would he have anything? Donnie’s looked - he’s too nosy not to and doesn’t care to deny it - but so much of it was complete novelty to him, there to gawk and and regretfully set aside until further notice. So much, in the end, turned out to be a waste of space.

And then - the lines connect, and a wave of light changes vectors as it splits.

“Mikey…I use the term loosely as we are in an unprecedented situation but you are a genius!” 

“What? I mean, thanks, and yeah duh, but what? What’d I say?”

But Donnie disregards him. He’s got what he needed. “Keep doing what you’re doing, I’ve got this. For real this time.”

With a grin that feels sharpened, Donnie gets back to work.

The solution is beautiful, as all simple things are. The machine is taking in mystic energy because Donnie has taught it to do so, has taught it to tell the difference between it and physical matter and, at the crossroads, go after the former. Two clear paths are laid out before it, and a switch blocks one of them.

But Donnie stands at the switch. And, so very easily, he can flip it.

The recognition patterns work, he only needs to change the way the machine reads the results.

Now, here are the facts:

1. The machine can use physical matter as fuel - the generator is an example of that.
2. In order to match the levels of mystic energy with physical, the machine needs to take it in over a very long time.
3. They don’t have the time.
4. The other variable in the formula is the speed of the intake.
5. With a little bit of fiddling, Donnie can increase the speed of the intake.
6. …Drastically.

If Donnie manages to do it quickly enough, if the machine manages to take the gulp, it might be enough to catalyze the collected mystic energy, push it through the system all at once.

It…It’s insane. But it would work.

And here are the problems:

1. This might hurt.

(It most likely will. The brooches are only good to actively block the mystic energy: they’re not nearly sophisticated enough to have their function reversed on the fly. And the machine will not care.)

2. The machine might blow from the pressure before it can take in a big enough mouthful.

(Which will most definitely hurt if it comes to that.)

Ergo… 

“I need you guys to leave,” Donnie calls out.

Leo actually pauses where he is barricading a hole in the wall with its own pieces. “Say what?”

“I’m going to redirect the consumption routes so that it takes in physical matter, at high speed and in large quantities,” Donnie explains quickly. This time, he doesn’t have the opportunity to let them process it all. “In layman’s terms, imagine the contents of a blender. If the machine is a thirsty gym rat, this room will soon become the blender for its protein shake. So I need you to leave before that happens.”

“To be honest I kind of legit don’t know how we’re gonna get to the surface right now, but sure, let’s dip.”

“No - I need to stay and make sure it works. If it does, the wave of the cure should reach you anyway. You’ll be fine.”

And if the machine overloads and explodes, he will be the only one caught in it. And he’s left his notes in the safe, simple enough that even Nardo will be able to follow the steps. He’s stashed multiple copies around. They’ll be okay.

A moment of confusion, of urgent thought, pathways connecting. “Donnie, that’s insane.” Leo again, his energy zapping the back of Donnie’s neck. “Following your own metaphor - which, by the way, can you stop with those because honestly they only make it weirder - but following your own metaphor, you’ll get blended too.”

Graciously, Donnie ignores the jab. “That’s the idea, and congratulations on getting a good grade in cause and effect.”

“Well that’s a stupid idea.”

Donnie’s eyes sting and he scowls, watching his hands work the controls. “Then pardon me for not having a perfect solution under the circumstances! This is the best deal I can get us right now.”

“Alright then.” A pause that is too charged not to contain a silent conversation Donnie isn’t privy to. “Then we stay as well.”

That gets him to whirl around and glare at the others. “What?”

“Well, you gotta look after the machine, right?” Mikey shrugs, as if it’s obvious. As if he’s being sensible. “So we’re gonna look after you.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” Donnie hisses, feeling like a clown even as he says it when the conversation locks into a loop.

Leo grins at him, evidently catching his misery.

“We’re in this together, okay?” he says. “We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing - buying you time.”

Oh how Donnie hates the idiot.

“Stop with the sacrifice, for fuck’s sake,” he groans. “I’ll be fine on my own, I can do it.”

As if on cue - probably on cue, because the Universe despises Donnie personally and finds delight in his suffering - one of the supporting beams buckles and gives out, making the machine list heavily to the side. Donnie is too busy with the controls to react in time, but April jumps in, jamming her shoulder under the steel frame and holding the beam in place.

“You were sayin’?” she pants, and oh, he hates her too, actually, even as he rushes over to push the beam back to where it should be. He hates everyone.

There’s something on her cheek, rising from under the collar of her sweater, barely visible through the visor. There’s something in the corners of her mouth, darkening her grin.

Donnie’s lungs turn to stone. In a stark contrast to its stillness - a feeling of something creeping in, gnawing, burrowing, answered by something else that rises from within in familial recognition, awakening, spreading.

Donnie already knows what it is. He already knew before he figured out the solution, before they even started the whole thing.

The cold shock of understanding douses his brain, his spine, spreads out over the Mind Meld, echoed by the others. Donnie flexes his fingers and they are itchy and stiff and vile, and he doesn’t even need to rip his gloves off to know what he’s gonna see. He shivers and gags with disgust. He’s keeping the gloves on, he doesn’t want to see it. 

“You idiots,” Donnie squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, grieving - but a moment is all he can allow himself because he needs to get back to the control panel and keep working. “It might blow.”

There’s no point in saying it. It doesn't matter now. They’ve already lost - they are already lost - it doesn’t matter at all. They ran out of time.

“I mean…it’s kinda what you're good at?” Leo muses. 

Donnie rolls his eyes. “Ah, the insults truly never cease.” 

“No no, listen, I’m not dissing you– what if we do make it blow? Like, on purpose?” 

Donnie stares at him over his shoulder. “Has the mold gone to–” He catches himself. His throat closes for a second. “Has anyone checked if Leon’s hit his head recently. What in Galileo’s name are you blathering on about.”

Leo is obviously losing his mind and can’t mean it but even so, a part of Donnie rallies against the idea of destroying the machine. Failing or not, struggling or not, imperfect or not - it’s still his creation. He still put his soul into it. It still hurts to discard it.

“No, hold on, I think I’m picking up what Leo’s putting down,” Mikey snaps his fingers. The chains rattle in unison, faint on the edge of Donnie’s ringing hearing. “Can it act like - can it explode the cure too? So it can cover a larger area? Would kinda hate it if it just fizzled out in the library or something.”

“By my calculations, the amplifiers should allow it to clear the block already,” Donnie corrects him automatically, but his mind is revving up to adjust to the change in pace. This could work if… “Potentially…if I were to do this, to use the explosion not only as a catalyst but as a physical spreader, make it propel the cure’s particles… I would have to connect additional collecting pipes to the dispenser as well.” He runs his fingers over the controls, blocking the intake in one of them - the speed falls, but if he does it one by one and only to a few - and quickly, very quickly - it might keep. A port is unplugged in the dispenser, the pipe connects to it, the flow resumes. 

“That will give us more space to store the matter and so, have a bigger explosion - it won’t go through the transformator but that’s okay, if enough fuel hits it from there it will trigger by association– it’s called critical nucleus, look it up,” Donnie is rambling, he is very aware of that, but his hands work faster, adding pipe after pipe after pipe until the intake levels match in both the transformator and the dispenser - and then he retrieves more tubing and gets to connecting it too. “And it will also, as you’ve so helpfully if perhaps accidentally pointed out, send the cure outwards like a slingshot. So if I were to make it, it would look something…like…this.”

He jumps down and steps back. The machine looks like a porcupine of metal - or a beast held up and staked by a tangled mess of its life support, sighing under the strain of its own body weight.

It looks like a mess with the hasty upgrades Donnie’s had to give it, his bruteforcing work an ugly contrast to the defined elegance with which he usually approaches his projects. 

But it should be enough. And that, under the circumstances, is gonna have to be enough too. 

The good news is - the one piece of truly good news, barely any strings attached, oh joy - is that the amplifiers do their work abiding by an exponential function. Even a small increase in the volume would mean a significantly bigger coverage, which was something Donnie was going to expand upon in the future versions of the machine.

With how much they’re going to feed to the machine now - well, Donnie doesn’t exactly have a spare minute to sit down and do the calculations, but it could be the whole state. It could be more than that. 

It could catch enough stray survivors out there that, among them, one would be curious enough to trace it back to the city - and, with Donnie’s post mortem guidance, step in where he now has to stop. And the city will be a safe haven for a time too, give the last vestiges of humanity someplace to catch a breath.

It could be worse. It could be so much more hopeless.

“Aw hell yeah, you mad lad, you’ve done it again!” Leo jogs over to Donnie to punch him in the shoulder. “It looks like three levels more menacing now, which, love. I’ve always wanted to go out with a bang, y’know. Like someone I know.”

He sounds like he savors the idea, and it grates at Donnie, this nonchalance and ease while they are locked in a claustrophobic space staring death in the maw. He is so quick to grin right back at the abyss, to accept the outcome he’s been dragged into against his will or knowledge. His reckless, foolhardy twin.

Is he quick though? Or was it simply a long time coming for him?

For all of them?

The three of them look at each other, a decade-heavy weight in the space between them.

“We’ve had a decent run, y’all,” Mikey says. “All things considered.”

“Coulda been better,” April rolls her eyes. The line of her mouth seems weighed down too but she pushes it into a smile anyway.

Donnie finds no shock in their stances, no surprise, only calm acceptance as they look at each other and at the machine and see beyond.

They are all ready to die here. They came ready. Had they no faith in him? 

But Donnie shouldn’t feel stung: he’s proving them right, after all.

Very well. Time to break his creation, then. That’s what it was good for, in the end. 

With a few wires hastily resoldered under the panel and a few more buttons pressed, Donnie commands the machine to use new recognition patterns. Then, he opens the valves one by one and pushes the lever that controls the speed up another notch. 

The machine tugs at Donnie, and it feels like a curved piece of metal hooked through his plastron and around his spine, a full body jolt that makes his cytoplasm slosh in each individual cell. He gasps when his heart skips a beat and tries to reorient itself, and the others echo him.

Oh, but this is going to hurt. This is not going to get so much worse before it can end.

The mold, unchallenged now, slithers on the floor among them, on the walls around them, tugged closer by the machine, and the machine doesn’t care who to dig into in its endless seeking hunger. They are not pushing back the siege of the mold anymore - it’s no use - but Leo glances at the ceiling and after a few gestured directions Mikey and April get to helping him reinforce the ceiling, pushing the spare piping under the shifting masonry and decaying vines. Their movements falter in off moments, limbs halting as if hitting invisible walls, but they keep going.

The ground shakes, and the ceiling coughs dust down at them, the stonework unsettled by the currents.

Donnie glares at it. Leave it to Leo to be right about something at the worst time imaginable. 

The machine grasps at the matter around him, at the fabric of his suit, at his flesh, making little distinction - and Donnie can’t blame it because he was the one who’d taught it so. Donnie has gotten abrasions before from fighting in the urban hellscape, nasty ones too, and the feeling reminds him of that kind of pain a little, the sweet-sour tang of blisters and burns - only make it full body, and not only surface level, and make it keep going.

With a grunt, he tips forwards and braces himself against the control panel. There are cracks in his skin, and he knows they are there because there is light pouring out of the cracks, visible through the scuffed fabric. It hurts beyond comprehension.

But it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay. Best case scenario, they’ll sanitize a good chunk of land and give whoever comes a path to follow.

Worst case scenario, they all die for nothing. Donnie doesn’t want to think about that one. If he gets one dying wish, then he wants not to have to imagine the worst outcome, for once.

One thing is certain: they will end here. They will end here - but whoever is still out there will get a fighting chance. The plague ends with them, one way or another. They are all of this place and they will die with it.

Donnie didn’t mean for it to end like that. For any of them.

Fuck, he didn’t mean to.

The machine churns and whines in overdrive like an impaled animal and Donnie, guided by an impulse, reaches up to pet its shivering flank. It seizes under the pressure, pushing against his fingers, and the transformator sneezes and expels a small puff of pale steam.

Alarmed, Donnie reaches up with a metal arm to clamp the small split forcefully shut, pinching the edges together. But the escaped steam still travels, its wisps curling and dancing, and Donnie can only watch, caught in the pleochroic shifting on its colors, as it presses up against his visor - and goes clean through.

It hurts. 

It hurts as it spreads, up into his brain and down into his stomach and on and on, every neuron ablaze, every atom of his body trembling as its own atoms pass among them. It hurts like fire and razors and needles put together, and it hurts so much worse than that. Donnie writhes and chokes, and someone keeps screaming, and only after the agony burns him through and he sags, boneless, against the humming flank of the transformator and the screaming finally stops does he realize it was him.

From beyond that barrier, other voices finally fade in, a rushing wave of confusion and worry and alarm. April - closest to him - can’t even reach out where she is kneeling on the ground, arms wrapped around her belly, but the look on her face, hell, he never wants to see it again.

“I’m fine,” Donnie rasps and staggers back a step to take his agonized weight off the machine, and his metal arms spider out to brace against the floor, “S’methin’ must’ve– slipped in and cat–” he coughs, “catalyzed. If that’s the cure half-stuff it fucking hurts.”

Is it, though? In his notes, Draxum theorized the finished substance to be closer to crystals and snowflakes and ossification points in the softness of cartilage, something pointed yet lacking barbs. Merciful. This was nothing like that - or maybe the yōkai are more robust than Donnie had assumed.

Leo moves as if to gag, and he hastily tears his helmet off and wipes his mouth. He has to lean against a wall when the simple motion pushes him off balance. “At least we know it would’ve worked, huh?”

The conditional mood doesn’t escape Donnie, but what is left to say here? At least it would’ve worked. Not that he actually knows. It did something for sure - ideally not just turning his entire soul inside out, but at this point, for them, it doesn’t matter either way. 

Something rattles inside the transformator, and Donnie reaches for the hull, holding it together between metal arms, grasping at the framework to keep himself and the machine steady. The upward motion almost keeps carrying him on like a buoy rising from underwater, tries to tug him off the ground and into the air - no, not off the ground. The ground is ceasing to exist.

It feels like reality itself is destabilizing as its physical matter is pulled apart like simmered meat. Hair thin cracks run along it, and Donnie shivers against them.

He isn’t even afraid anymore. His one regret right now - aside from having to die and watch his family die - is that he won’t be able to record any of this. 

But the plague ends with them - at least here, at least now. He did what he came here to do. It’s okay.

It’s okay.

There are no secrets in the Mind Meld - and in its spinning kaleidoscope there is no breath to even remember why Donnie would have need for them at all.

I’m sorry I left you, Donnie thinks, and it is ripped away from him in the currents. Sparks and ringing and the endless expanse of being. I’m sorry I missed out on the years with you. I’m sorry I hurt you.

It was stupid. I’m sorry.

His body hurts, the razor-feeling whining between his fibers as they are probed for weak points. Soon it will be pulled apart as well and fed into the machine. He, too, will power it.

The lab begins to fade around them as it unravels and melts into nothing - even the light is devoured, sucked into the endless maw of the machine. The deafening noise heightens in pitch. The air froths, tinged with mold, sliced into strips, singing with the thrum of mystic energy as the machine chugs its way towards the crescendo. It will blow soon. 

Donnie’s head hurts. The barbed fog keeps coursing through him, judging his every cell and finding it lacking.

If he were religious, he would compare it to being enclosed in the fist of God.

Donnie wheezes too now, just like the machine - it’s getting harder to breathe, harder to stand, harder to think, but he commands his shell’s arms to cling to the framework, commands his knees to stay locked even as he is starting to lose sense of which way is up. Stress pumps his body into overdrive. He sees too much even with his eyes squeezed shut, hears too much even through the cacophony, feels - fractals and chains - breaking, twisting, splitting. His body is jittery and almost weightless, almost as if he could step right off the ground and float and float and float. Like anything could be possible. 

The Orb - that is just how it felt, too, right before the Orb blew. 

His two greatest losses, heralded by the same epigraphs. How infinitely funny.

He wants to go home.

The belated, quietly withdrawn surprise of understanding reverberates in Donnie’s skull and spreads out almost like an actual echo before he listens closely and tells apart the subtle fluctuations in pitch, the changed steps in choreography - Leo’s and Mikey’s signatures as they catch his recognition and share it second-hand. Elation and understanding and doom, mirrored twice.

There’s something else in the mix, a quick chain link curled into a spiral that Donnie, left out, doesn’t have the time to follow, but when he turns around and squints his failing eyes, takes in the remaining space shot through with cracks and threaded with cords of unraveling matter, he sees–

–he sees Mikey shove his hands into those cracks and pull. 

He screams as he does so but doesn’t let up, straining and yanking until something in the fabric gives with a crack, and the wound before him churns and bubbles and bleeds gold down his quivering arms. 

A portal - with his bare hands, Mikey is opening a portal. He snaps his mouth shut and squeezes his eyes - his tears run golden too. Heavy chains shift and rumble in the dark, regal even in their disturbance. 

Awed, for a moment Donnie stands frozen in place, able only to stare, to watch, to witness. 

And then a sudden and powerful force jerks him towards the golden beacon, a whiplash of movement, but it isn’t gravity losing its mind as the plane unravels - Leo’s grapple closes around the shoulder clamp of his battle shell and its momentum is enough to uproot him from where its metal arms still cling to the shaking machine.

Leo throws him across the lab and towards the portal but something staggers in the motion. Leo cries out and curses, and the trajectory of Donnie’s flight changes, dropping him next to the portal, close enough that he can feel the icy fire lacing the air around it. His battle shell digs into the small of his back, the clamps bent out of position and the entire weight hanging on the belt. Mikey’s arms run with cracks; Donnie can’t even see his hands. He doesn’t understand how he is doing it. He tastes iron.

With a stuttered cry, Mikey heaves the portal wider, hair flying wild around his strained face. His eyes are starting to glow too.

“Get in there!” someone yells - Donnie doesn’t even know who. His hearing must be going as well. 

What?

“No– wait–”

What are they doing?

Donnie looks around, gulping through the panic, his eyes snagging on the crumpled shape on the floor. It’s Leo, and he’s struggling to sit up, and the sleeve of his suit is torn and drenched in blood. The grapple’s cord coils on the floor like a dead snake. 

“Leo–”

“You go first, little bro!” Leo calls out to him around a bloody grin. His face is blotchy with mold. “Right behind ya.”

Idiot, how does he think he’s gonna do it with his arm like that, how is he gonna–

Donnie wills his body to move. He unfastens the belt, letting the battle shell clang to the floor, and jumps up and starts towards Leo, but April appears between them, running towards him with her face determined and wild.

“April, wait!!!” 

She didn’t Mind Meld with them, of course, but April - dear, brilliant April - has always been a Hamato in spirit if not in blood, in any way that truly matters, and with a spark of laughter - amusement, even - amidst the chaos she takes a running leap and kicks him square in the chest.

Already reeling and tattered, Donnie stumbles back and falls. The star-bright edge of the portal rises over him like the sickle of the sun, and above it stands Mikey with his ruined arms spread out as far as they would go. Donnie locks eyes with his flaring ones for a moment, and Mikey has the audacity to fucking wink at him before he falls further and the horizon swallows him up.

Donnie flails and tries to reach for him - tries to reach for anyone, god, please, anyone - but his hands stay empty.

He falls into the light.

For a moment, there is nothing. In the liminal pocket of the portal, swathed in Mikey’s energy holding the edges open, there is nothing.

The machine explodes, taking everything with it. The portal closes. The world ends.

***

Oh, hell. 

Donnie comes to with a gasp and exhales a whimper when his chest alights in searing pain. It hurts too much to move. It hurts too much to breathe.

Frozen, he stares at the ceiling. His limbs feel faraway. His head is threatening to tear right off his neck.

It’s done. It’s over. It worked? It’s–

The machine worked. It did what it was meant to do. They won.

Micron by micron, Donnie tries inhaling again, wincing every time his ribs knock into the white-hot barrier of pain. He feels lightheaded. The ceiling swims above him.

The ceiling is wrong.

There are no vines, only what appears to have been a ceiling fan. It isn’t domed and faraway. It’s - rectangular. Low.

It’s wrong how right it feels, even with scorched jet-trails criss-crossing it in random patterns. Even with entire areas of it seemingly sanded right off.

He’s in his lab. This is his lab. The machine blew, which means Draxum’s vault no longer exists, and now Donnie is in his lab.

Which begs the obvious question…is the afterlife real?

Not unless he’s supposed to be in this much pain. His head is pounding. He can easily tell the borders of his body by where the pain ends.

He must be alive, then. He must be–

He’s in his lab.

Not the one at the base - his lab… 

Alarmed, Donnie tries to sit up and wheezes helplessly instead. He looks around urgently, eyes darting between cracked lopsided screens and broken furniture and smatterings of soot. Something is still smoking. His tools are strewn across the floor, bent and beaten out of shape. His desks don’t have a single horizontal surface among them. There’s glass - bits of it are embedded in the charred walls.

The casing of the Orb - that’s what it is.

He’s back.

The portal - when the machine consumed everything for its final act he had nowhere else to fall but back here.

Oh god - the others - they aren’t with him–

They didn’t make it. But…

But they weren’t planning to, were they?

The sound that leaves Donnie is quiet and strained. Pitiful as it clambers up his constricting throat, pitiful as it breaks out, pitiful as it dissolves, too soft to carry. 

He doesn’t have the words for it. Doesn’t have the strength. His eyes slide shut and he floats on its boundless plane, in the bottomless deep, held in the undertow. 

His chest feels brittle, splintering. It must be April’s one hell of a kick. It has to be.

He is here now. He’s here, and they aren’t–

Except they are. They are all here.

Donnie’s eyes fly open. The unnameable thing seeps into the cracks, grabs at his ribs, but the sudden need in him burns just bright enough to call him up from the deep.

He needs to see his brothers. He needs to see Mikey– god, he needs to see Raph. Needs to see Leo, and do it as soon as possible before the dum-dum piles the guilt of it onto his back. He needs to see April, too, even though she isn’t here right now. Needs to see Dad.

A cry struggles up Donnie’s aching throat, but he can’t call out - can’t talk. He can barely move. He looks around, hoping for something, anything, his brain still so slow and so stupid, and spots it - spots his phone. It lies on the floor, not too far away, smeared with soot but seemingly whole.

It’s been here all this time while he was–

But it’s only been moments, huh. Donnie only skipped the explosion - on both sides.

Inching his hand towards the phone feels like trying to crawl through hell. His vision keeps doubling and fading out, and with a shiver of fear (fuck, it hurts his spine to shiver) he thinks, for a moment, that the phone might be out of reach after all. That after all this effort (after all their sacrifice) he is still simply going to die here. 

His fingers connect with it. But he’s still wearing gloves. He’s still got the suit on. He can’t unlock it like that.

The despair that hits him is powerful enough that Donnie has to close his eyes for a moment. He's running out. 

So slowly, every muscle screaming in protest, he tugs his hand back to his chest and pulls the glove off. Only when the sight of his discolored and bruised but healthy skin greets him does he realize he was expecting to see mold.

But it’s gone - he was cured. It worked.

If he was cured, why does he still feel so horrible? Why does his chest feel so tight?

Oh - is it dangerous for him to break the seal of the suit like this? Is it dangerous to unlock the lab? If there are spores caught in the fabric, something that didn’t get hunted down by the fog…

It’s getting harder to think. Donnie must be close to passing out - must be the whole matter of nearly getting unraveled down to the atoms, and won’t that be fun to investigate. But right now, he needs help - and if something happens, he’ll rebuild the machine with the, oh god, practically infinite supply of mystic energy once he gets the brainpower back. He knows how to, now. He’ll get better supplies, he’ll avoid his mistakes. He’s made plenty of them in the trial run.

Reaching for his phone again feels like an insurmountable task, but, after an eternity, Donnie succeeds. There’s no way he can bring it up for a face ID though, so he flips it over to unlock it with a fingertip, and then over again. Too weak to lift his phone, Donnie tilts it just enough to see the screen.

The light from it stabs his eyeballs. Donnie still has the group chat open: the last message in it is a picture from Leo. He’s holding up a peace sign with Mikey in a power stance in the background. His eyes are bulging from how hard he’s trying to hold his breath. Raph’s arm is in the shot - it’s all that fits in the frame. They look so terribly young. 

Donnie never did respond.

The screen is too bright. Donnie blinks away the tears and slowly, so slowly moves his thumb until he manages to send a single message.

‘help.’ 

Chapter Text

over hedges we’d headlong

and on ledges we’d land

and every time i’d fall i’d call, i’d

reach out for your hand

you sing, “if i have to be who i was, 

(you’re not!)

do i have to be who i am?”

***

He’s got this he’s got this he’s got this.

Fifteen and twenty… Fifteen and twenty-five… Fifteen and a half…

Leo’s pulse is a slow roll of thunder in his ears, muted and vague beyond the horizon. His body has adapted for oxygen deprivation almost immediately after the cutoff, and he floats in a state that is close to meditative.

Fifteen and forty… Fifteen and forty-five… Fifteen and fifty…

…Or as close to meditative as it can possibly be when in some puny three minutes Leo’s gonna beat Donnie’s high score and be crowned the absolute champion of everything, and he can’t hecking wait to rub it in his besnooted face. His heart, sluggish and heavy, tries to speed up in excitement but he forces it back down even as he is already starting to hear the victory chant, Le-o! Le-o! Le-o! Le– 

BOOM!!! 

Leo cracks an eye open as his body shifts into an open stance, the movement easy and natural. Mikey is scrambling up from where he’s fallen off the back of the couch, and Raph pauses flicking peanuts in his mouth, one still balanced on his thumbnail. 

They all look in the direction of the sound. Then Mikey’s eyes flick to Leo’s and, after a moment, Raph follows suit.

Leo rolls his eyes and gives an exaggerated shrug. What was the timer at again? Sixteen and five…

“Wonder what Donnie’s cookin’ this time,” Mikey laughs. “Leo, you good? That would’ve knocked me out of it for sure.”

Leo pointedly rubs a hand over the length of tape covering his mouth. A clothespin is taking care of his nose, and he lifts his head as proudly as if it were an Olympic torch. Mikey can whine all he wants about Leo cheating - he’ll prove them all wrong. Easy peasy.

Sixteen and ten…

“You think we should go check on him?” Raph muses. He keeps looking over his shoulder at the dark hallway leading away towards the lab. “That sounded like it was a chonker.”

Leo gives him the biggest stinkface he can muster under the circumstances (tape, clothespin, and also his facial muscles have fallen asleep seven and a half minutes ago) but Raph isn’t even looking in his direction. Where’s Mind Meld when you need it? 

“Eh, you think? He threw a chair at me last time I tried,” Mikey rubs his chin. “The guy’s sensitive.”

Leo snorts and it backfires horribly when the snort gets trapped in his nose and threatens to turn into a sneeze. His eyes begin to water.

Leave it to Donnie to screw him over while not even being here, seriously.

He can do it!!! He can!!! Sixteen and twenty-five!!!

Oh god he’s gonna sneeze oh fuck–

“Yeah, nah, I’ll go check.” Raph heaves himself out of his bean bag. “Raph’s big bro senses are tingling.”

Leo rips off the tape; the clothespin goes flying. “I don’t even see why we should because obviously it’s just the usual Donnie shit but if you are that afraid of losing to me Raph you should’ve just said I wouldn’t even gloat okay I would but not too much okay I would a lot ACHOO!!!” 

Raph stares at him for a moment. “Did you just forfeit your go because you had to sneeze?”

“Bless you,” Mikey helpfully supplies.

“Nonsense,” Leo waves his hand but the tape is still clinging to his fingers which ruins the effect a bit. He claws it off and on the third attempt manages to throw it on the ground. “I just wanted to point out that if we dropped everything every time Donnie made something go boom we’d never get anything done.”

Raph’s chasm shifts into an intrigued configuration. “You never do anything anyway?”

“Oooo,” Mikey grins between them, the little shit.

“Hermanos, it’s Donnie. You know? The guy that makes things go boom? He’s fine! Mikey’s right, he’ll probably only get pissed at us, and I don’t know about you but I’m tired of my options being either to pry his jaws open with a crowbar or to chew my leg off like a trapped fox to be free of him. Capiche?” 

“I guess,” Raph drawls. He doesn’t sound very convinced but at least he isn’t actively running off.

“Anyway, this rudely interrupted attempt puts me aaaaat,” Leo gestures at Mikey’s phone, propped up on the table (he didn’t even trust Leo not to cheat the timer somehow, as if he’s the likeliest turtle to tamper with tech and not a certain other someone), and waits for him to pick is up.

“Sixteen minutes and thirty-two seconds,” Mikey says, deflating a bit.

“Ah ha! Which is still way better than what either of you bozos can do, and Donnie’s whole demon possession thing means he only breathes to entertain us mere mortals, which means I am officially the coolest, thank you, thank you, and thank you.”

“Oh,” Mikey says, his tone oddly quiet and flat, as if it hasn’t yet settled on an emotion to convey. He’s looking at his phone still.

“‘Oh’ what?” Leo saunters over and sits down next to him, slinging an arm over his shoulders. “Amazed by my magnificence? Rendered completely speechless? I know.”

“No, it’s– look,” Mikey thrusts his phone at him; the back of the couch dips as Raph leans in behind them as well. 

He’s got the group chat open; the last message is from Donnie.

Leo reads it.

“Huh. He’s not– you think…?”

They all look at each other. In the next moment, they tear off towards the lab.

The first thing Donnie did after they moved into the train station was to call dibs on its largest storage room, which means that his lab is one of the few rooms which are, well, proper rooms.

The second thing he did was install reinforced doors.

Leo, Mikey, and Raph stand before it, naturally hesitant to proceed. They’ve had enough negative reinforcement over the years to kind of dread barging into Donnie’s lab (though not nearly enough according to him).

“Donnie!” Raph calls out. Then, louder, “Hey, Donnie! You all good in there?”

Silence.

Something shifts in the back of Leo’s mind, and he looks at the bottom of the door. Donnie was really intent on sound proofing it, which means that its entire outline comes flush with the doorway when it closes.

There’s a thin smattering of dust on the ground, right along the edge of the door. It’s no longer sealed.

“Raph, smash it,” Leo commands.

“Huh?”

“Hurry!”

Donnie is so gonna bitch at them for taking the door down, but really, it’s his own fault for portal-blocking the lab because his helpful brother keeps teleporting to it to helpfully get him food and helpfully steal him for family movie nights and so on and so forth, oh boo hoo. 

Leo and Mikey stand aside, and Raph backs up, pushes himself away from the opposite wall, and crashes into the door.

Before the dust even gets the chance to settle, they rush in through the vaguely Raph-shaped hole.

The lab is a mess. It looks like a tornado has swept across it, or maybe thirty to fifty feral hogs. Nothing has remained in its place, Donnie’s controlled chaos devolved into, well, the garden variety chaos.

Donnie himself lies in the middle of the ruins, supine on the floor.

“Shit– Donnie!”

Leo rushes over and kneels beside him, vaguely aware of Mikey joining him. Donnie’s wearing some sort of protective suit, and ew, where did he even get this ugly old thing? His phone lies next to his outstretched hand, its screen turned towards the ceiling. His face is hidden behind the dusty visor of the helmet.

Leo stares hard at his chest. Only when he notices it rising and falling does he let out a breath of his own.

Okay. He lives. Now think. 

There was an explosion. Donnie was caught in it. He’s alive for now, but how badly is he hurt? Can he be moved?

Now that Leo thinks of it - how is he still in one piece? The lab looks wrecked. 

“Donnie,” he taps lightly on the visor, leaving fingerprints in the dust. “Earth to Dontron. Can you hear me?”

No response.

His lungs cold, Leo feels around for a release mechanism and the visor flips open, revealing Donnie’s face. He looks gray. He isn’t wearing his mask or goggles. His skin is a patchwork of burst blood vessels, thin, papery, angry.

He looks like shit.

“Donnie,” he tries again. Fuck, please, please. 

Donnie's eyelids twitch - and lift a fraction. Bloodshot eyes stare back at Leo, his entire scleras swallowed in red. It would be a sight straight out of a horror movie if Leo weren’t so used to Mikey’s eyeballs already.

“There you are,” Leo laughs in brief relief. “Scared me there for a sec - how bad is it? What hurts?”

It might be everything - or, if he got his spine got, it might be all the way down to nothing. Please, please don’t let it be that.

Donnie’s lips part, but no sound comes out. Fuck, he must be stunned. Concussed, most likely. 

Leo grabs his hand. His skin feels rough and cold against his fingers. “Squeeze if you can hear me.”

After a private eternity, Donnie squeezes. The touch is barely there.

Okay. Okay. 

“Can you feel your legs?”

Another squeeze. Donnie’s already near-blank expression falters.

“Hey, no, no you don’t, you stay awake, yeah?” Leo places both of Donnie’s hands on his chest and jumps up. “Raph, let’s get him to the medbay.”

Raph, bless him, doesn’t ask questions, which is good because Leo doesn’t have any answers. He kneels down by Donnie’s still form and picks him up. Donnie lets out a small mewl, but that remains his only protest at being manhandled. He hangs in Raph’s arms like a rag doll, limp and quiet, and Leo’s heart thuds painfully in his chest.

In the medbay, they cut the suit away (Leo's got half a mind to burn it) and discover that Donnie is wearing a sweater and a hoodie underneath it, already sweating profusely. Both things look threadbare and old (where did he even find something so ratty and who held him at gunpoint to make him wear it?), and after a moment of hesitation Leo tells Mikey to cut them away as well, not willing to risk jostling Donnie too much.

From there on, it’s straightforward. Intravenous fluids, pain medication, heart monitor. Raph disappears back to the war zone of Donnie’s lab, but Mikey gets some warm water and starts wiping the grime off his skin, and Leo fishes his phone out of its pouch and turns the flashlight on, lifting Donnie’s eyelids with his fingers to check his eyes.

Both pupils contract with ease. With a small noise of discomfort, Donnie tries to squirm away.

He…isn’t concussed? But how?

What’s wrong with him then?

…Well, a billion things which Leo is very happy to list at any given opportunity but like, what’s wrong with him right now. 

“Leo, look.”

The sponge in Mikey’s hand is covered in something gray and weird, and with a jolt Leo realizes that it’s not grime - or not only grime - but clumps of sloughed off skin. 

Did Donnie go into a molt or something? Curioser and curioser. Maybe Leo should take a more active interest in his work because this beats video essays on Kickstarter scams.

It’s not funny though. There’s something wrong with Donnie, and Leo doesn’t even mean him looking like one big bruise. There’s something else, but what?

“What happened…” Mikey echoes him. “And what’s with the suit and all?”

“No clue… We should take another look at the lab after this, see if anything can give us a hint.”

“There ain’t a thing.” Raph is standing in the doorway, scratching the back of his head, staring at the floor. “I went to see if I’d find stuff, it’s not like I can be much help here, but it’s just - decimated. Whatever he was working on was a doozy.”

There is a wobbly quality to Raph, a minute tremor of locked muscles. Leo narrows his eyes at him.

“What’s up, big guy?”

“Ah, no, it’s just…” Raph turns both hands palms up, as if cradling something. “He was just…so light. Barely weighed a thing.”

Leo places it now, the feeling of wrongness. The way Donnie’s eyes sink into the sockets. The way his skin looks just a touch too loose on him. His features have always been a bit sharp, but now he’s fit to cut.

“If uh…if Donnie has discovered a new rapid weight loss thing, someone needs to step in and tell him that this stuff never works,” Leo attempts, but the joke is dead on arrival.

Mikey makes a complicated face in his direction, and Raph appears not to have heard him at all as he carefully steps up to the cot and lays a gentle hand on Donnie’s forehead.

Donnie’s eyes flutter open and he looks around aimlessly for a few seconds before focusing on Raph. The skin around his eyes creases, and he closes them again with a pained expression.

Raph takes his hand off and steps back. He won’t look at anyone.

“You’re okay,” Leo tells him, because Raph needs to hear it, and also because if Raph is feeling weird and guilty then Leo stands no chance.

He thinks about Donnie’s phone next to his lifeless hand.

He didn’t even want to go check up on him. What if Donnie hadn’t sent the message - what if Leo managed to convince the others not to go…

How close did they come to losing him? For good?

Leo feels sick.

***

“Okay, out with it. What happened.”

Donnie stares at Leo for a long moment before his eyes slide away again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yes, I got that part, now tell me more,” Leo says as he’s patting some aloe on Donnie’s cheeks. 

After a solid twelve hours of sleep Donnie woke up lucid and cranky, and Leo, silly him, naively thought he’d get answers out of the guy. Because, you know, if something of that caliber went off in their home, maybe Leo deserves to be informed. He’d even brought Donnie a bowl of soup Mikey’s had on simmer the entire time Donnie was out, anxious to keep his hands and mind busy, so it’s not like Leo isn’t trying to be nice here. 

But Donnie only shakes his head and leans away from his touch. His posture is subdued, lacking the usual rod he tends to replace his spine with. It’s weird. 

At least he’d stopped molting after the first time Mikey gave him a sponge bath. His new skin looks horrendous though anyway, covered in ghastly purple blotches which is on brand, sure, but it also seems fucking painful, enough for Donnie to tolerate the aloe goop. Still, Leo tries to leave the layers thin and have them dry quickly, but the way Donnie zones out staring at his hands is making him uneasy.

“Why should I,” Donnie mumbles to them. He's blinking slowly, slouching against the pillows. “You won’t believe me.”

Oh, this is promising to be zesty. “How would you know? Try me.”

“I didn't.” 

What’s that supposed to mean? “Well, not all of us are stubborn clowns.”

Donnie is silent for a second.

“Sigh. Whatever. I went to the future.”

“You what??”

“See,” Donnie scowls. “Thanks for proving me right. Stubborn clown.”

“Now hold on, don’t write me off so soon, give the guy a moment– you went to the future? How?”

Donnie makes to pull his knees up to his chest but grimaces and abandons the idea. “It doesn’t matter.”

“How far did you go? Did you meet future us? Were we cool? Well, I mean, I know I was, that’s a given, I’m just including my future self to be polite. How tall was I?”

Leo physically can’t shut up, questions punching their way out of him like miniature torpedoes, but can you blame him? Time travel? If anyone could do it it would be Donnie, sure, but c’mon, time travel?? 

Donnie starts picking at the blanket covering his lap and stops with a wince. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Also, importantly - how did you come back? Did Future Donnie send you back? Should we expect a visit from them?”

Donnie doesn’t respond, but his eyes widen. Leo tilts his head as he watches him, and opens his mouth to give another prod when Donnie suddenly bolts off the cot - and promptly face plants on the tiled floor.

“And ow,” he says out of frame. “Ow.”

“Shit, Dee, you absolute creature,” Leo gets out of his chair and jogs around the cot to help him up. “Has our luck run out? Are you gonna remember your dormant octopus DNA and start on your escape artist war path now?”

“As if you’re any better when you’re sick,” Donnie grumbles. His face is pinched in pain as Leo gets him to sit back down. He resists, but Leo overpowers him so easily.

(Too easily.) 

“Semantics. Now tell me what possessed you there for a sec.”

“I was–” Donnie pauses, his forehead creasing, as if he forgot. Then, “I need a laptop.” 

Shit. “Dee, they’re all wrecked. Your lab–” 

“I know,” Donnie interrupts him in a tone that’s way too even, and Leo gets a sneaking suspicion and follows it. Wisdom save, success.

“…You were gonna steal my laptop.” 

Donnie is a shit liar, so he, smartly, stays silent.

“Donald,” Leo warns him. 

“Give me your laptop.”

Aaand here’s his opening. “I will if you tell me why you need it.”

“I want to play Apex Legends.” 

Leo makes a buzzer sound. “Nope. Try again.”

“I want to program it to play whale noises every time you open your mouth. That would be a better use of air time.”

“I thought you wanted me on your side?” Leo quirks a brow.

Donnie audibly grits his teeth. “...Unfortunately, I do.”

“So fess up.”

“If I tell you why I need it, do you promise not to freak out,” Donnie mutters. He won't look at Leo. 

“An intriguing start, considering you’ve just claimed to have time traveled. Which is still bonkers, by the way, don’t think I’m not gonna hound you on this.”

“Leonard.”

“Donjamin.”

Donnie lets out a dramatic, world-weary sigh, and alright, Leo is not a monster. Generally speaking. 

“Okay, I promise to try.”

Donnie’s mouth is pressed into an unhappy, tense line. “There is a non-zero chance I brought a dangerous strain of fungus with me,” he says. “I need to make sure I didn’t.”

Say what now? “Wh– fungus– as in–”

“Mold, Leo, do keep up.” Donnie’s face is tight with frustration. His red eyes are half-lidded, tired. “In the future, there is– details don’t matter. I have a piece of software on the cloud that I can modify and use to perform a scan, but all my tech is gone, so I need a device. Now chop-chop."

“Hold on, rewind,” Leo makes a timeout sign - is that what the suit was about? - because, “you brought some freaky mold here and you’re only telling me now? Tello–” 

“I know what to do with it, but first I need to know if it’s here yet,” Donnie interrupts him again. He closes his eyes, his shoulders hunched. He’s swaying a little where he sits. “Please.” 

It catches Leo off guard, the stumble in the dance, the naked plea. “Wow, sheesh, okay,” he cringes before he can help himself. “Just - get back under the covers, aight? I’ll bring it to you, just stop trying to shamble around like a half-baked zombie, you weirdo.” 

Donnie doesn’t respond but he leans back against the pillows, visibly exhausted, and okay, Leo will take his victories where he can get them right now. 

His totally professional opinion? Donnie shouldn’t even be upright, let alone pushing that big wrinkly brain of his. He’s barely able to sit - and they were both there when he tried to stand. 

But, well, Leo knows his brother. It’s a miracle Donnie is willing to stay in bed at all (and a testament to how wretched he must be feeling). If this is how they can compromise - let’s just say, Leo is happy that Donnie is compromising at all. 

It’s when Leo is already prancing away to grab his laptop and find the charger - maybe he’ll even untangle it so that Donnie doesn’t throw a fit, look what an excellent brother he’s being - that Donnie’s words resurface in his mind and he rolls them around in his mouth, trying to crack the uncomfortable secret within.

‘Yet’?

***

Donnie slowly gets a bit better over the next few days, and at first Leo rejoices, but then he’s quickly reminded of what an ass Donnie can be when on bedrest.

To be completely fair, none of them are perfect patients. Even Raph, who tries so hard to be good and to show an example, gets antsy and anxious when he isn’t allowed to shuffle around and hover in the doorways. Mikey can be placated if you bring him his sketchbooks but may fly off the rails if his brain gets the zoomies and demands a project escalation. As for Leo himself - he’s fine, really. He gets his fair share of being yelled at but that’s because his brothers don’t know what’s what. If the resident medic says he’s fine then he’s fine. 

Donnie, however, is a whole ‘nother can of pizza worms. He sneaks out of the medbay, and overworks himself as per uzh, barricading the doors and ordering laser guns to fire at will at intruders, and when his pain levels get too high they seem to block out his sense of hunger so getting him to eat becomes an exercise in futility. He grows shifty and slinks around the shadows, guarding his pains like a wounded animal, hissing at anyone who tries to come closer. Literally. 

This time is… This time it’s no different at all, except for all the ways it is. Donnie still refuses to make it easy to help and still sucks at eating proper meals (although they do catch him sneaking food from the kitchen, at least). Moreover, he still makes the unilateral decision to move back to his room the moment he can walk, by which Leo means that he stumbles all the way there and earns himself bruises on top of his bruises but ya know, dragging him back would only lock them into a repeat performance. 

Besides, after they got him hydrated and lathered in aloe and pumped a bag of donor blood into him, his vitals turned out to be…largely okay. Below his norm and fuzzy around the edges, but nothing actively worrisome. Leo isn’t an idiot no matter what others like to claim - he’s put two and two together. Donnie managed to skip the explosion somehow, which is why he didn’t get blown to pieces. Whatever damage he carries has been brought from over there. Poor nutrition is a given, but Leo draws a blank on the rest of it. It can’t be this mysterious mold because then Donnie wouldn’t be so hell bent on turning his laptop into a mold-Geiger counter. He’d already know he’s infected.

Despite their questions, Donnie still doesn’t talk about it, still claims to be okay, but there’s no need. They see it.

It's hard not to notice anything when Leo comes to the kitchen at 4 am in his aimless sleepless tours of the lair and finds Donnie staring at an avocado or a bagel or a bottle of Dr. Pepper like he’s never seen one before, or scrupulously putting leftovers into Tupperware and stacking them in the fridge, or storing the fucking bread in the fridge while he’s at it because apparently that’s the kinda guy he is now. Everything goes in the fridge, everything else goes in the freezer. 

Leo sees the way Donnie squints at the vents sometimes, gingerly scaling the walls to check them when something does not appear to be up to his undisclosed standards. Leo was there when Donnie went on a cleaning spree of their common bathroom and had to be physically hauled away by Raph while yelling muffled curses through his gas mask. 

Leo sees how Donnie looks at them when he thinks nobody is noticing, a tense set to his jaw. It’s - confusion. Wariness. An uncertain kind of scrutiny. 

In hopes to bring him closer back to normal, they present Donnie with his battle shell - the only thing, bar his phone, that managed to survive by virtue of not having been in the lab where it blew. Donnie doesn’t look surprised at all, only nods and takes it from them. 

Leo expects him to start tinkering immediately, assuming he would be happy to keep his hands busy assembling something or rebuilding his lab. It’s ill advised, of course - in an ideal world, Leo would prefer Donnie to keep resting, but with the way he stares, the way he prowls around like a wraith, the way he barely seems tethered to the ground as if he could just take off and leave at any moment? Leo will take the overworking asshat over that. 

But instead Donnie keeps the battle shell off his bruised shoulders and busies himself with Leo’s laptop, tapping away and humming in thought as he squints near-sightedly at the screen. He's laser-focused on the task and will not tolerate any distractions, growling with frustration when his headaches get the best of him.

In a way, Leo is glad of that because, well, the whole mold thing does kinda sound a bit scary, and having Donnie on top of the issue has historically worked out in their favor, albeit in roundabout ways sometimes. But it’s still weird to see Donnie like this. There’s none of his manic energy of hyperfocus, only a methodical, single minded stubbornness. On paper it should be basically the same but instead it ties Leo’s stomach into knots, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he is afraid of the nebulous future Donnie seems so intent on avoiding or because he simply wants his brother back. 

What happened? And what should they expect? 

But Donnie refuses to let anyone in on his secrets, and so Leo bides his time.

***

Leo didn’t really mean to sneak up on Donnie. It genuinely wasn’t his goal when he left his own room to go wandering. It’s just that he’s a ninja and an insomniac which means that he’s adept enough in the art of skulking around unnoticed.

And that’s how he ends up in Donnie’s doorway, watching in mute wonder as Donnie, cross-legged on his bed and with Leo’s laptop balanced on one knee, presses a button, and a blue light, startlingly bright in the darkness of the room, erupts from the webcam (he thought it didn’t work?), morphs into a flat beam and pours over Donnie, starting at the top of his head. He holds the laptop out on outstretched hands and tilts it so that the beam can travel all the way down to his folded legs.

Once that’s done and the laptop gives a whirr, Donnie taps a key, narrows his eyes as he scrolls through something, taps again, and puts the laptop on the blanket. Head in hands, he hunches over and lets out a short, ragged sigh.

“You’ll waste your eyes like this.”

Donnie doesn’t appear to have noticed him, but to his credit, he doesn’t get startled either. He straightens up with a bored look on his face. “Get off my back, Mom,” Donnie rubs his eyes. He looks so tired. He always does now. “What do you want.”

“Oh, nothing, just wanted to grab my laptop to go get shot at by smurfs and hate myself before inevitably switching to Stardew, but I see it’s still ocupado.” Donnie hasn’t immediately chased Leo out, so he braves a step closer. “So what’s the verdict?”

Donnie cuts his eyes to the screen. Taps a few buttons. “All clear.”

“Okay.” Leo lowers himself on the edge of Donnie’s bed, careful not to spook him. “So…does that mean we’re all good? Uh, for now?”

It sucks that Leo kinda pushes Donnie anyway in the end, but he needs to know how to help. And also, well, it’s his future too, and something horrible looms ahead. 

Donnie is checking something on the screen. His features are sharp and eerie in its bluish glow. “From what I’ve been told, we’re at about T-minus one year, but that means I’ve got plenty of time to either prepare for it or prevent it altogether.”

A year. According to Donnie, in a year the world is going to go to hell - unless he stops it. He’d tried to fix it once already - did it work?

Leo gets an unrelated impulse and considers it for exactly half a moment before giving in to it.

“Draxum’s asked after you.”

Donnie doesn’t respond but he just kinda pulls himself together as if to retreat into his shell. Ah, so much for not spooking him. 

He isn’t acting surprised though. Interesting.

“You’re not gonna ask what he wanted? Shall we tell him you’re accepting visitors?”

“No.” The word is a steel lock on the door clicking shut.

Leo suppresses a sigh. Shouldn’t have asked that. In his defense, he’s been sleeping like shit lately, and that makes it harder to think. Besides, Leo himself only found out that Draxum’s been paying attention because Mikey told him so, and if Mikey knows any context he hasn’t divulged any of it so far.

But something’s gotta give.

“Look, hermano, you’ve got options,” Leo leans back on his hands, careful not to touch Donnie by accident. “You can talk to Dr. Feelings, who’s been raring to go, by the way, or you can talk to this guy,” he jabs himself in the chest with a thumb, “and this guy won’t make you watch TEDx talks, pinky swear.”

What would make Donnie talk? Ah–

“If shit goes down in the future, it’s best we know, right? I know you are itching to get to work like the doomsday prepper you are.”

“‘Doomsday prep’ implies overreaction,” Donnie mutters, and hey, at least he’s talking. “That is not the case.”

“Oh?”

“Leo–” Donnie exhales through his teeth. For a few seconds, there is silence, ruffled only by the vents of the laptop as it slowly cooks on the blanket by Donnie’s feet. 

“I can’t,” he says and rubs his face. “I lost you all. I don’t know what to do.”

There it is. There it is, what Leo wanted, the first spill of steam from the pressure cooker that is Donnie’s brain, and Leo should rejoice at getting something out of him but his words fall hollow and still, and their meaning is a shadow in a darkened doorway.

“What do you mean?” he tries, because there’s no way Donnie is gonna clam up again, not when he’s finally trying to talk. “They - we - stayed there?”

Leo already knows that’s not it. There is a frozen kind of sadness to Donnie, and confusion, and a lack of balance.

Grief with nowhere to go.

What happened there? What happened to all of them? 

Donnie lowers his head. “Things went wrong because I wasn’t there, and then I was - but I lost them anyway. I did everything wrong, again.”

Leo opens his mouth to say - something - he isn’t even sure what, an impulse to react to the unseen enemy of - of loss, and guilt, and shame poisoning Donnie’s words, but Donnie speaks again, and his words come out jagged and desperate, fitting poorly together.

“I tried. I did– Leo– don’t make me talk about it.”

Leo backpedals, alarmed. Donnie’s honesty always alarms him, the last refuge of a cornered animal. “Okay, hey, it’s okay. We don’t gotta.” Donnie is curling up and away from him, miserable and small, and Leo can’t leave him like this, can’t let him go. “You wanna hug?”

Donnie shakes his head. Pauses. Nods.

“Okay.” Leo moves quickly, turning so he can lean back against the headboard. He opens his arms. “C’mere.”

Donnie turns over without another word and ends up half on top of Leo, hiding his face in the crook of his neck. Leo places his arms around Donnie’s shoulders, careful not to squeeze. There is a tension to Donnie, the kind of held breath that turns ribs into stone pillars, and Leo taps the edge of his carapace and says, “You’re okay, buddy.”

Donnie shakes his head again, and, yeah, Leo gets it. Of course the dude isn’t okay.

Donnie isn’t hugging him back, keeping his hands close to his chest, trapped between them. His breaths come harsh and heavy even as he audibly tries to press them down into something that wouldn’t give him away. Leo feels his jaw work against his collarbone, the muscles jumping as Donnie grits his teeth.

Leo takes his chances and gently smoothes a hand down the rigid line of Donnie’s spine.

With a sob, Donnie breaks.

He cries quietly, shaking from the effort of keeping it together, failing all the same. Leo feels him swallow the sobs, feels them break their way out anyway, and Donnie curls up tighter in increments at every failure, desperate to preserve his composure even as it bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.

There’s nothing to preserve, and Leo doesn’t know what to do but hold him. 

Raph often looks like that - like he carries the world on his shoulders, and Leo aches with it too, aches that he is saddled with it, but on some level - shamefully, privately - he’s simply used to it. Raph is the oldest, and that’s that. Raph’s always been there holding up the sky for them. It’s how it is. 

But to see his twin - his younger twin, too - bending under the same kind of weight leaves Leo helpless.

But he can hold him. He can do that.

Donnie cries in endless tremors that seem to cool down for a minute or two before the hurt reawakens and digs into him again. His mouth keeps opening as if he means to say something, but no words ever come out. Donnie cries like none of it can ever be fixed. Like nothing will ever be right again.

Leo holds him closer, and Donnie pushes his forehead into Leo’s shoulder with a low sound, but Leo can’t read his mind. Whatever is dragging Donnie underwater is concealed from him.

Eventually, Donnie’s tears run out and he sags against Leo in silent exhaustion. He isn’t relieved of his tension - it’s simply become too heavy for his frayed frame to carry.

Still, it’s a reprieve. At least a surrogate form of it, at least for a time.

For a few minutes, the only sounds breaking the silence are Donnie’s fruitless attempts to breathe through his nose. He hates having a stuffy nose - which means he’ll move soon. Leo waits patiently, tapping soft nonsensical patterns on his carapace.

Donnie mumbles something unintelligible. 

“Come again?”

“I made you an arm.” Donnie pauses. Sniffles. His voice is rough with tears. “You - lost one. So I made a replacement.”

“Oh shit, really?” Leo leans away to look at him for a second. “Course you did. I bet you put all kinds of cool stuff in it, too.”

Donnie shrugs, shoulders moving under Leo’s arms. They’re a weird mustard-y color now as the bruises heal. “Had a grappling hook.”

“What on earth for? I can just portal places. More importantly, where is the fleshy one gonna go?” Eugh boy, abort, abort! “No, don’t tell me, I want to find out for myself.” Nailed it.

But Donnie, already alarmed, pushes away until he can sit up, and Leo nearly scoots back into the headboard from the intensity of his red-eyed stare.

“It will not. Happen,” Donnie promises.

“Well, how do you know? Maybe I’ll get into an arm wrestling match with a kaiju and totally win, by the way, you thought about that?”

Donnie blinks slowly. “No. I did not account for kaiju arm wrestling.”

“See,” Leo grins and puts his arms behind his head, stretching. “My limbs, my rules.”

“Leo, I’m serious,” Donnie says. “It won’t happen,” he repeats with a nod, hammering it into a certainty. “I’m here now. I’ll fix it.”

There it is. He isn’t supposed to be like this, he isn’t–

“Donnie…” Leo starts. He considers reaching out for his hands, balled into fists on his knees, but doesn’t risk it. “You don’t have to do this alone. You’ve got us. And yeah you know all this scary stuff now, and yeah you probably are the only one with the key info on what to do with it, but we’re here to help, yeah? Just point me in the right direction. I’ve got your back.”

Donnie snorts quietly through the snot. Which is, okay, not the reaction Leo was expecting.

“What?”

“No, you’re just…” Donnie reaches up to wipe his snout, hiding his mouth briefly behind his hand. “You’re the same as him.”

…Oh.

“Duh,” Leo puffs out his chest before he can think about it too hard. “I know what I’m about.”

“Hm.” Donnie falls silent for a few seconds, his brows pinched. “Don’t make me tell the others.”

Leo waves a hand. “Nah, man. Twin privilege.”

“I’m older than you now, by the way.”

Leo glances at Donnie to see if he’s joking - he doesn’t appear to be. How long has it been for him? His eyes look so weary. 

Leo won’t stand for it.

“Nahhhh,” he drawls. “Once a baby twin, always a baby twin. Deal with it.”

It’s his job to look after Donnie. And he’s nearly messed it up so, so badly, and he won’t make the same mistake again.

Donnie rolls his eyes, but a corner of his mouth twitches upwards, and hell, Leo will take it.

He looks at Donnie, studying his haggard face, made to look even older in the dim lights. 

There’s now a secret that’s just for him, the secret that the future they have buried in their own graves. Leo might never know. He might never understand. But also - he gets it. They’re all islands with their own dark shit lurking below the waters. They’re all alone, and maybe, now, Donnie is more alone than the rest of them. 

‘You’re the same as him.’ At least, Donnie sounded comforted when he said that, a half-smile curving his lips. At least his future self managed to do something right, and, if what Donnie says is true, then Leo is doing something right in this timeline as well.

Maybe they’ll be okay.

***

“...and that’s because there was a scheduling conflict so I imagine he could only come in to voice Jupiter Jim’s AI version for one day or so and they got someone to sub for him for retakes. It’s really subtle especially with the robot voice filters so I’m not surprised you didn’t catch it, but if you listen to the way he says ‘detonate those rascals’ you can totally hear it!”

“Big man, I love you, but you can’t convince Raph that they switch voice actors mid-line. That makes no sense!”

“Detonate, dude! De-to-nate!”

“Stop poking me!”

Leo snickers where he lies with his eyes closed, listening to his brothers rib each other. They’re having a movie night, sprawled out on the floor with all their pillows and blankets, bowls of snacks hiding somewhere in their midst, Jupiter Jim performing heroic feats on the projector screen in front of them. Leo is only half-paying attention, drowsy and warm. If only Mikey would stop trying to elbow him in the head now and then his life would be perfect. Well, perfect for the moment.

“...I swear, man, we gotta put on Jupiter Jim and the Amazing Devil next, you’ll see what I mean by– oh hey, Dee!”

Leo cracks an eye open, and there he is, in-Dee-d, standing awkwardly in their collective line of sight. He’s wearing a baggy hoodie with his hands stuffed in the front pocket and its hood pulled low over his face.

“Hey buddy,” Raph pushes himself up on an elbow, trying so hard to appear casual. “How’s it hangin’?”

Even after their impromptu late night pity party Donnie remained subdued and withdrawn, and part of Leo aches to take offense in a wistful kind of way. But hey, if only one well-placed conversation could undo all the damage, huh? It’d just be Mikey’s world with them all living in it.

Donnie shrugs and shifts his weight, visibly uncomfortable, staring at something on the ground.

But, despite all his unease, he isn’t leaving.

“Wanna join us?” Leo asks. “We’re watching the AI one and Mikey just got his Voice Actors Trap Card activated.”

Donnie throws a look over his shoulder, as if he’s only just now noticed the movie playing behind him. And then, still without making eye contact with anyone, he crouches and crawls over the pillows to join them.

The three of them are lying close together in a controlled tangle, but everyone quickly shifts and makes space for Donnie in the middle, and after some shuffling around he ends up between Mikey’s legs, curling around one of them and into Raph’s chest, a sliver of his eye aimed groggily at the screen.

His back is to Leo, and after just a moment of hesitation Leo shrugs and drapes himself over Donnie’s shell. He feels Donnie tense up and waits, holding his breath, but slowly, Donnie relaxes, melting into the spaces between all of them, and sighs in poorly concealed contentment. Raph’s arm reaches around and settles on Leo’s own shell, bringing them all closer together.

With the two of them piled on top of Mikey like this, there’s no way Mikey can even see the screen anymore, but when Leo throws him a glance he finds him lying back with his eyes closed, a soft smile stretching his lips.

They settle back in after that, paying various degrees of attention to the movie as Mikey resumes his chattering and Raph grunts in response sometimes, and after a few minutes Leo feels Donnie reach up and tap him lightly on the arm. With a grin, Leo taps back.

Yeah, maybe they’ll be okay.