Work Text:
His pinboard was full.
Donatello clicked his tongue in annoyance as the realisation sunk in, staring at the eight-foot standing board that took up one wall of his lab. It was covered completely, every inch of space taken up by overlapping layers of schematics and to-do lists and work-in-progress diagrams and sticky note reminders from his brothers to eat some actual food today and sleep or I will MAKE you! with fifteen exclamation points and five stickers. Those last ones kept appearing no matter what he did, and he’d given up on stopping them. The point was, there was just no room on the board for anything else… but as he looked down at the picture in his hand, he was reluctant to part with it.
It was a drawing. That wouldn't be a problem by itself, except that the board already had a grand total of five such drawings pinned carefully to the thick material, courtesy of their lair’s most artistic resident. Out of them this was the oldest one, newly replaced by a cartoony scribble of Shelldon 3.0 in his charging port the previous night, which in combination with the severe lack of space on the board meant that it was time for it to go. Still, he hesitated. Michelangelo had given it to him one day after getting back from physical therapy in the Hidden City, smiling tiredly as he sat down on Donatello’s desk and watched him pin it in place.
It was a stylised portrait of himself, masterfully crafted, an action shot of him twirling his tech bo around his body. Purple sparks of mystic energy trailed through the air behind the weapon, lighting up his features. He was grinning madly as he jumped to bring the weighted staff down. The dramatic, swooping lines of the image were clean, even with the slight wobble to Michelangelo’s hands nowadays, and every part of it was drawn with obvious dedication and care. No, more than that. It was, dare he say it – and lest he ruin his emotionless bad-boy image forever by doing so – drawn with love. Looking at the picture made an odd warmth settle in his chest, and he’d found his gaze drifting to it impulsively over and over again whenever he'd lost focus during the past two weeks.
Sigh. Oh well, into storage it goes for now.
Holding the picture carefully between two fingers, he dropped to a crouch beside a filing cabinet tucked away in the corner of his lab, hidden behind a curtain. One of many, though of course this one was special. He typed a long sequence of numbers into the keypad and paused before pulling the drawer open as the light turned purple, silently bopping along to the music playing against his tympanum. Let’s see, June 2011, Acrylics. October 2019, Oils. September 2016, the year of charcoal smudges and neon spray paint all over the walls. What a time.
There was a lot to sort through. Fortunately, his filing system was perfect as always, each folder organised in chronological order with coloured tabs marking the years. Unfortunately, the soothing nature of flipping through folders and the volume of the sweet jams in his headphones was exactly what prevented him from noticing the turtle behind him until they snatched the drawing out of his hand.
He spun around.
“Why did you take it down? I thought you liked this one?” Michelangelo was standing there. He clutched the drawing to his plastron protectively and took a half step back as Donnie reached for it, frowning. Then his gaze landed on the cabinet that he had been about to put it in, and his expression faltered. “Wait, what’s that?”
“Nothing! It’s nothing.” He jumped to his feet, bodily placing himself between his brother and the open drawer. Curse him and his failure to keep up the no-brothers-in-his-lab policy. Curse Leo for bribing the passwords from him with coffee. Curse his perfect organisational skills and stellar music taste for being so distracting!
“Dude…” Michelangelo’s eyes went wide, slowly pushing past him to stare into the cabinet. “You kept these?”
Donatello watched uncomfortably as the box turtle began to sift through pages and pages of carefully organised artworks. Each one carefully preserved in a plastic sleeve and marked with the date he received it along with the medium, along with occasional notes about the art itself. “Of course I did, dumb-dumb. You would have cried if I threw any of them out.” Never mind that he hadn’t told him the cabinet existed in the first place.
But Mikey wasn’t listening. “Don, some of these are from when I was like, three!” he exclaimed, holding up a crayon scribble of the four brothers all holding hands. At least, that’s what it was supposed to be. Raph was a big green blob and Leo’s markings were backwards, but when he told him that Mikey had pouted and thrown the balled-up paper in his face. That was the year Donatello learned that sometimes he had to ‘think about other people’s feelings’ (dramatic shudder) when giving criticism. He had picked the drawing up off the floor and carried it around in his pocket for a week. Years later, the wrinkles in the paper had been gently smoothed out to keep it from further damage, but despite his best efforts the edges were worn and soft from age. “Why did you keep them all? I thought you threw them out when you took them down, or- I dunno, ran them through a paper shredder, or something. Most of these are awful.”
“Scoff. You know I like data collection, and it only makes sense to catalogue the progression of your skills over the years. You’ll thank me when you can look back at your first gouache tests and laugh.” Yet the excuse rang hollow even to him. He had always been terrible at lying. He averted his gaze to the side, feeling the weight of his tongue in his mouth as he pieced together the right words. “And…of course I kept them. Why wouldn't I? You made them for me.”
There was silence. Too much silence. Had he messed up? After a few long moments he risked a glance and found that his brother was looking up at him from where he was knelt beside the cabinet, eyes starting to well up with- oh boy, Donatello knew that look. Attack incoming.
He braced himself just in time for Mikey to launch up from the floor and all but tackle him in a hug, burying his face in his neck. He instinctively cringed away from the feeling, awkwardly patting him on the back of the head. “Too much physical contact- too much, Angelo, please-”
Mikey reluctantly pulled away, still sniffling as he wiped at his face with one hand. The touch retreated to a comfortable level as his hands slid down to rest on his forearms. “I love you, Dee.”
Oh. He leaned down, nudging their foreheads together. “You too.”
That sparked a laugh from the other, and he couldn't help but smile at the incredulity in Mikey's voice as he gestured at the filing cabinet in response. “Apparently! You owe me big time for making me think you destroyed them all these years- ohmigosh, is that drawing of April riding a unicorn still there? I never took a picture of it before I gave it to you, and I wanted to show her so badly. Come on, you’re helping me look.” Before Donatello could protest, he was being dragged down to sit in front of the cabinet and sort through the past two decades of their lives.
His plans for the morning were certainly scrapped, and his pinboard was still full. Though seeing Mikey laugh as he waved an old drawing of a hippo-elephant-turkey hybrid in his face made the lack of productivity worth it.
And if afterwards he realised that he had never stored the portrait away after all... then nobody would question him covering up one of those schematics, or the sticky-note heart that was left beside it.