Chapter Text
His phone dings. Donatello ignores it.
His phone dings again, and he looks at it. It had become a new rule in the family when messaging him; multiple messages meant immediate response, but everything else could wait. This time, it’s back to back messages from April: u up? followed by found something - need you topside .
It’s late. It’s so late it’s early - which is to say, it’s about three in the afternoon. Of course he’s up. He doesn’t sleep unless he needs to. It’s only been a few weeks since the sky tore open and brought an apocalypse, extremely narrowly averted , along with it, and he’s been busy in the aftermath.
Leo’s vitals are hooked up to his phone; his brother has healed remarkably quickly, even for them, and Donnie knows he can’t convince him to stay in the medbay for much longer, but he’s going to keep his twin there for as long as he can. He needs as much data as possible to track his heart rate and breathing (which is to say, his panic attacks) and build some sort of sustainable data table from it, and he can’t do that once Leo is out and about. Curse his past self for pooh-poohing the fitbit craze of yesteryear - it would’ve been incredibly convenient to have in hand now, but there’s no way he’ll be able to convince Leo to let him set a similar function up without giving the game away. Much as he acts the fool, his brother is not an idiot, and the tracker Donnie installed traded advanced functionality for hardiness, limiting its transmissions to location only. It won’t be helpful in this instance; he’ll need to finish his alternate solution soon.
That said, the algorithm he’d built based on Raph’s tracker data is finished; that background process now sends alerts to his phone when Raph spends too long away from any of the family (eight hours of sleep notwithstanding). Raph may still be leery of hurting them, but staying out of arm’s length for the rest of his life is not a viable solution. Plus, it’s miserable. Everyone knows Raph gives the best hugs of the family, and those hugs are needed now more than ever, even if Donnie rarely ever asks for one. (He doesn’t need them, nor does he want them. Not usually, and not now, when Raph is displaying a new and heartbreaking hesitance to touch his brothers. Let Mikey, and Dr. Feelings, handle that; all Donnie needs to know is when to point Mikey in Raph’s direction.)
Mikey seems to be on the mend, at least, and the most likely to answer direct answers about his condition. The burns on his hands and arms, left over from opening that desperate portal to rescue Leo, have healed and scarred over, no longer tender to the touch. His hands still shake - a slight tremble is the baseline, worse with overuse or on particularly bad days - but even that is showing marked improvement, given that Mikey could barely hold a fork for the first week after the injury. He’s open and willing to work with Donnie, both in terms of treatment and data collection, and it is a relief to have something going well, or at least headed in the right direction.
(That Mikey might be humoring him in order to monitor him , and allowing him to collect data because it calms him down, is a possibility that has not gone unconsidered. Donnie will work with equivalent exchange, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of treating his brothers.)
He’s busy - he’s swamped - but someone had to pick up the slack in medical when their medic was the worst hurt; someone had to keep tabs on the situation; someone had to make sure the family’s recovery was on track or at least moving forward, in the lurching, stumbling way this family sometimes does; someone needed to monitor news feeds for any mention of further invasions or Krang-related issues that needed addressing; someone needed to assess the damages to and structural integrity of the lair and make sure it would hold up until repairs could be made; someone had to stay on top of everything, and of course that someone had to be him. No one else was available.
(Never mind that he hadn’t asked for other volunteers, or for help, and would have brooked no argument had it come up. He can handle this. He is currently in the process of handling this. Look how well it’s being handled.)
April is one of the few who knows the full extent of what he’s taken on - or at least, she’s the only one who’s seen his reams of data and half-written algorithms - so she knows exactly how much he has on his plate. She wouldn’t ask him to step away from it if what she’d found weren’t important.
So he texts her back - five minutes. - and stands. Nothing will explode if he steps away for an hour or so; the modified protocols for the currently jury-rigged security system should hold, or at least provide advance warning to his brothers if any intruders should try anything while he’s gone; and the coffee maker needs more filters. He’d gone through all of them. Again.
He swaps out his current battle shell for the jetpack model, grabs a hoodie in a token attempt at a disguise, and heads out.
“4:58, 4:59- wow, you weren’t kidding.” April stops counting as Donnie steps out of the midafternoon shadows - not as long as they were a month ago, but still more than enough for a skilled ninja to hide in.
“Of course not.” Normally Donnie would entertain the idea of banter, or even a joke, but these weeks have not been normal and he’s too busy to want to leave any of his projects alone for long. “What did you find?”
“I’ll show you, but it’s kind of across town. Bit of a haul.”
“I do have the jetpack,” Donnie informs her, only to get a distinctly unimpressed look in response.
“It’s three in the afternoon and people are twitchy . You wanna get spotted?”
He huffs. “Thank you, April, I am well aware of the passage of time. A more relevant question: is it across a populated section of town or one of the many, many evac zones?”
She’s silent for a few moments of consideration, then sighs, a signal of his victory. “Evac zone.”
He hands her the hoodie with zero preamble - she carries it, he carries her. “I do. Have. The jetpack.”
She sighs again, far more frustrated, and shoves the hoodie in her backpack. “Fine. Just stay low. People are still not happy about anything out of the ordinary. Someone nearly burned a building down over one of those mutant silverfish.”
Donnie starts the jetpack and picks April up, thinking of a much-maligned DVD rental return kiosk. “I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.”
It’s a few minutes of directions and light conversation, travel made much quicker by air, before April directs him to set down next to a pile of rubble. Very alien looking rubble. Chrome and desiccated tentacles, long since rotted in the New York sun, and-
She catches the sudden tension in his posture and reaches a hand out to steady him. “I’ve already checked this place over. It’s fine.” That imparted, she heads for a larger slab flat on the ground and hooks her fingers under it, then looks back at him. “Don’t freak out, okay? It’s already dead. It was dead when I got here, and then I made sure of it, so don’t freak out .” She’s watching him, looking at him like-
Like he’s Leo. Like a nasty shock could unmoor him from reality, send his mind hurtling into his own personal hell while his body struggles for air-
He hates that look.
He’s not Leo . He didn’t sacrifice himself to stop the apocalypse. He didn’t get stuck in a prison dimension to play Krang Prime’s punching bag. He didn’t come back home beaten half to death and screaming in his sleep. Leo needs the concern and the attention. Donnie is fine .
“I don’t ‘freak out’, April,” he informs her airily as she grabs the edge of the slab and starts to flip it back. “I am cold-blooded in every sense of the word. Physically, metaphorically, spiritually-”
The slab flops over backwards, April releasing it as gravity takes hold, and underneath it is a Krang-
there are tentacles in his arms in his legs under his skin under his shell there is power in the ship there is knowledge in the database and there is the understanding that he is not himself and if he cannot keep himself together in the mind of this ship then he will be lost gone subsumed but he is torn away from the knowledge the power the ship but the tentacles are still in his body in his mind in his memories they never left he never left they are STILL THERE-
His mind snaps back to reality to find his body has acted in his absence: put itself protectively between April and the Krang, activated his tech-bo and his ninpo ( he’d never devised a weapon that could hurt the Krang but that had not stopped him from trying, long overnight hours in medbay keeping vigil over Leo’s injured form trying to think of a way to handle them if they ever came back ) in the form of an oversized and jagged-edged glaive, and locked down defensively, awaiting motion from the invader intruder murderer Krang. April’s hands are clamped on his shoulders, and she’s nearly yelling, trying to get through- “I told you, I checked it, it’s DEAD -”
Which is when Donnie’s brain finally processes the data his eyes are providing beyond the initial panic instinct, and he realizes what he’s looking at is half a Krang. The left half, to be precise.
Oh .
He sags as adrenaline loosens its hold on his system, and April lets go. “You with me, Mister Cold-Blooded?”
“That was not a freakout,” he snaps defensively, doing the scientific thing and prodding the torn Krang with the end of his glaive as though it might bite (and the fact that it might is what’s keeping the adrenaline from releasing his system completely). “That was a perfectly measured and justifiable response to an external stimulus.”
She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, but says nothing.
He very much notices that look, but says nothing.
It’s a truce, as far as truces go.
She lets the silence settle for a few moments - long enough for him to collect himself (if he’d needed to, but he doesn’t because he is perfectly in control, thank you very much) - before opening her backpack, handing him his hoodie back so she has space to rummage. “That’s actually only part of what I wanted to show you.”
“ Really! What’s the other part? The right half?” He doesn’t like the hysterical note in his voice, but he can’t exactly hide it now.
“Pretty sure that half is in the prison dimension with the other half of the Technodrome,” April says calmly, leaving him to contemplate the ugly realities of being portal-chopped as she continues to dig through her backpack. “Aha! Got it.” She pulls a vial filled with blue liquid out of the bag, setting the bag down away from the Krang. “Watch this.” She crouches down near the Krang corpse and uncorks the vial, holding it out at arm’s length and slowly tilting it until the liquid starts dripping out onto the Krang. The corpse sizzles as the liquid touches it, eating away at flesh and tentacle and leaving nothing but vapor in its wake. A drop touches the pavement beneath the corpse and remains there, glistening in the midafternoon sun. It’s not acid - it’s not reacting to anything but the corpse - but then what-
Pulse pounding in his ears, he snaps his gaze to April, whom he cannot help but note looks extremely satisfied with her demonstration. He at least manages to whittle down his multitude of questions and shoots the top three most important at her, rapid-fire. “What is that, where did you get it, and how much more is there? Answers. In that order.”
She gestures to it and smiles, like she’s about to sell it to the adoring public for three easy payments of $49.99. “ This is an herbicide my college is working on behind closed doors. Pretty sure it violates some sort of environmental law, but it also wrecks Krang. Gave one of ‘em a pretty ugly facelift, and I used the rest I had to bust up the subway monster and keep you and Mikey from getting crushed.” He shudders at the reminder of that particular brush with death - only one of many in that particular 24-hour stint, and all of them notable - as she continues on. “College is being used as a refugee shelter, so it’s a lot harder to get in and out without getting noticed, but I managed to swipe a few more last night and got some pictures of the notes with it. Figured you might be able to do something with it.” She corks the vial, fishes a second one out of her backpack, and offers them both to Donnie.
For a moment, he can’t move, body unwilling or unable to take them, breath shaking. She has a Krang killer. She has a bona fide, tested, Krang-killing compound , and she’s just. Handing it to him. For his use.
(If he’d known about it weeks ago- there never would’ve been enough time to go a borough over and retrieve more from her college, let alone replicate it or synthesize more, but if he’d known -)
(Well. He knows now.)
Another moment passes, and a mechanical arm unfolds from his battle shell, takes the vials into its perfectly calibrated grip, and tucks them away securely in the shell, folding itself back in after them. He struggles to breathe normally. It’s an automated process. It should be coming easily to him. Currently, it is not.
April looks at him, raises an eyebrow, and turns her attention back to the alien corpse at her feet. She fishes a third - and presumably final, if the compound is in limited supply - vial of herbicide from her bag, uncorks it, and upends it over the Krang, watching as the corpse’s flesh hisses and spits and disappears as the herbicide touches it. After a few seconds, there’s only empty ground where the Krang had lain, with no sign that half of a genocidal maniac had been there, ship debris excluded. A veritable bottle of Krang-Be-Gone.
Donnie’s control finally returns to him as the Krang disappears (no correlation or causation there. Of course not). “By Oppenheimer,” he breathes, “if they return, we’ll be ready for them .”
“Mm-hmm.” April hums in agreement, zips her bag, and gets back to her feet. “I’ll send you those notes.”
“Thank you, Apr-”
“Tomorrow night.”
“ April! ” Betrayal.
“After you get some sleep . Don’t think I can’t see those bags under your eyes, Dee. They’re big enough that your mask doesn’t cover ‘em, and that means they’re too big . I’ll send them to you if you get some rest.” She gets back to her feet and squares up with him. “And I. Will. Be. Checking.”
He meets her gaze, weighing his options. He could hack into the college’s database, narrow down which professors would be likeliest to have worked on the herbicide, dig into their individual file storage, sort through the data, and sift out whatever was relevant - it is all very much within his purview, and a night’s work.
Or, he could work on the Leonardo Panic Attack Frequency And Intensity table within the rapidly shrinking data collection window he has, make sure the Raphael Family Proximity Alarm algorithm is running as needed, put some effort into the Michelangelo Bad Hand Day Predictor algorithm, check in on Papa, see how Casey’s work into sourcing construction materials that could be easily liberated is coming along, get enough rest that Raph or Mikey would be willing to sign off on it, and get the information April has the easy way.
And then hack into the college database if it’s not enough. Donnie is nothing if not thorough.
He sighs heavily. Just because Donnie knows when he’s been bested doesn’t mean he has to enjoy the experience. “All right. I agree to those terms. I will get some rest, and receive those notes tomorrow evening at sundown.”
“You’ll get those notes when I can verify that you’ve gotten enough sleep to pass muster. No time limit on that.”
Even his attempt to set terms is rebuffed. He really cannot win this fight. “Sigh. Agreed. Begrudgingly .”
“Good enough.” She slings her bag over her shoulder. “Before I go - anything show up online?”
“Nothing outside the usual chatter. Talk about abductions, half-baked theories about what actually happened, the same eight blurry photos that get posted and reposted just as frequently as they’re taken down. Nobody has any relevant information; it sounds like nobody even knows they’re called the Krang. I’ve compiled a list of the most ridiculous descriptors based on inaccuracy and lack of creativity and polled my brothers - and Casey - for their opinions. The current favorites are ‘Bubblegum Bowling Balls’ and ‘Evil Easter Island Heads,’ though I do think that is because Raph favors alliteration and Mikey has been fascinated with Easter Island ever since he learned what it was.”
April smiles - “Put my vote down for the bubblegum brigade.” before getting back to business. “I haven’t seen much on social media either. Like you said, it’s the same couple of photos and a bunch of crackpot theories. Everything new or unique disappears as soon as it gets posted. Feels like an information crackdown.”
“It might well be.” He’d considered the possibility, but not put too much thought into it - he’s using too many resources elsewhere to afford it. Priorities. “I’ll adjust my parameters with that in mind and see what they turn up. Go deeper instead of wider.”
“And I’ll keep an eye out up here. See if Casey wants to do a little daytime recon.”
“You know,” Donnie starts, hoping to shift the blame, “Casey keeps the same schedule as us, but also helps you topside. I’ve yet to observe him sleep.”
“Hm-mm.” She shakes her head, shutting him down immediately. “He naps all the time when there’s downtime. Pretty sure it’s a post-apocalyptic thing.” A beat. “But you don’t nap at all , so we’re going with check-in before you get anything else from me.”
Donnie makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. He’s well aware that this is Good Older Sister Behavior, but she knows him far too well for his convenience. “ Fine .” He turns to leave, then stops, softening. They are still in an evac zone, some distance away from her parents’ apartment. It is still distressingly unstable out here. People, as she has so helpfully reminded him, are twitchy. “Do you need me to take you home?”
“Nah, I got it from here.” Easy, as though she hadn’t just dissolved a Krang corpse with an illegal substance like it had been a sales demonstration. Quintessential April. She turns to leave, waving over her shoulder. “Text you when I get back. Twice, so you’ll look at it.” She’d never used to check in before - only after particularly rough nights, when everyone was injured or otherwise on edge. Now, there’s a specific group chat with constant notifications of safe departures and arrivals. It is also, he thinks, a post-apocalyptic thing, even though their apocalypse had been mercifully abbreviated.
He also raises a hand in farewell. “Until tomorrow, when you send me my notes!” A beat. “Or possibly sooner, if something comes up.”
“Yep, I got you. Later, Donnie.”
He waits until she rounds a corner before melting into the shadows. He doesn’t follow her directly - she had turned down a ride, after all, and she has proven herself more than capable - but he does take a winding, parallel path, traveling from shadow to shadow and running brief scans in between blocks. Her way is clear; he watches her enter her building, but he doesn’t depart until he gets two texts, one right after the other: home safe , followed by SLEEP TONITE . He sends a brief reply - if you say so - and slinks back into the shadows, waiting until the safety of the evac zone to fire up his jetpack and head home at speed.
It’s not until he makes it back to the lair, specifically to the kitchen, that he remembers: coffee filters . He makes another frustrated noise in his throat, opening the cupboard in the vain hope that he, even with his impeccable observation skills, had missed one.
What he finds instead is an entirely new package of them.
He blinks, pulling the plastic sleeve off the shelf to inspect it, then turns when someone else enters the kitchen, only to be greeted with the smiling face of Casey Jones. “Hey, you’re back!” It always sounds a little surprised, as though he’s still unaccustomed to seeing Donnie around. Or alive.
Well, it’s only been a few weeks. He probably is.
“You were out of those, and Master Splinter told me the machine wouldn’t work without them, so when I found some nearby I brought them back!” Casey explains, the smile never leaving his face. Eventually, when the repairs on the city are closer to completed and the evacuation orders lifted, they’re going to need to explain the concept of an economy that runs on currency rather than barter to him; evidently that, along with a steady supply of coffee, had been one of the first things to go in the apocalypse.
For now, Donnie sets the machine to brew with the darkest roast they have. “Casey Jones, you are currently my second favorite human,” he announces. It’s hard to beat April after this afternoon’s scientific demonstration and take-home gift. The smile on Casey’s face doesn’t falter, however, and once again Donnie is struck with the odd, axis-tilting feeling that Casey understands him better than he knows. He should be grateful - for Casey helping them avert the apocalypse, and also for the coffee filters - and he is , but the experience is tainted by that unsettling realization. He does not know Casey well enough to know whether that smile is genuine or a mask, or what Casey expects of him - current him, not a long-dead future him that he will hopefully never have to become - and that gap in his knowledge bothers him, like a missing tooth.
Not enough for him to make an effort to fill it, however. He has far higher priorities. Like the well-being of his brothers, for example, or the impending weaponization of an illegal herbicide.
He doesn’t wait for the machine to brew - even if it’s cold or oversteeped sludge by the time he gets to it, it’ll still be coffee, and that’s what matters. “I’ll be in my lab if anyone needs me,” he says, heading in the direction of his lab before pausing in the doorway. “Try not to need me.”
“Okay.” It’s slow, like Casey is turning over something in his head, and- “I can help you, if you want.” Yep, there it is. Casey had maintained that he’d helped out in his future ‘Uncle Tello’s’ lab, but that doesn’t hold water here, and while the offers aren’t consistent or insistent, Donnie is still extremely tired of fending them off.
“You can help dear Angelo make breakfast when he gets up. He’ll need the extra pair of hands.” The predictor algorithm is only partially done, but it had still pointed towards today being a bad day. Instructions imparted, and without waiting for a response, he heads for his lab at speed, mind already running down the list of storage possibilities for the herbicide and selecting the most secure option. Tonight, routine is key, along with a begrudging extended nap; tomorrow, the real work begins.