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Picking through the pieces of their ruined home was as painful as it was exhausting.
Most of the side rooms were relatively intact; the kitchen was a mess but much of their pots and pans and silverware had survived, the contents of the garage were mostly untouched, and their bedrooms were spared for the most part. The main room’s collapse had caused a lot of structural damage, meaning half of Raphael’s room was buried in rubble and a busted pipe had started flooding part of Leo’s. The hole in the floor that had lead straight down into the Hidden City had been patched by the yokai, their mystic arts repairing the damage and hiding their existence once again.
Splinter’s collection of trophies and mystic items and what-have-yous had been scattered, either crushed or buried. He picked up what he could, mourned the rest, and moved on. The projector had somehow survived, the hardy thing hardly had a scratch on it, but Splinter’s favorite chair was reduced to, well, splinters. Their beanbags were in ribbons, their movie collection half gone, their skateboards broken along with the ramp. The arcade was a war zone, machines crumpled and sputtering sparks, only a few had made it through the assault and would have to be collected later. Walls that their enemies had torn through had collapsed much of their home, burying passageways they used to know by heart and making traversing some areas rather treacherous.
The first time they had returned to the remnants of their old lair to salvage what they could, it was the day after their final battle with Shredder.
Draxum had graciously allowed them into his tiny, cramped apartment, giving them some place to rest. He’d huffed and puffed about it the entire time, complaining about how much space they took up and how they never gave him a moment’s peace while he passed them all mugs of cheap hot coco and April ordered some takeout. Now that the fighting was over, everything that happened was starting to set in.
They were homeless.
Donatello stopped at the edge of the tunnel that led into what used to be the main room of the old lair. His legs locked up and his back stiffened and he found his breath stuttering in his chest.
The light coming down the tunnel was wrong. It was gray and watery and lifeless, not the warm yellow of the lights he’d painstakingly installed in the big room. It was wrong . His mind screeched to a halt, gears grinding, refusing to process what he already knew.
Their home was gone.
It was gone and they were just here to try and pick up the pieces.
He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and moved forward.
The lair didn’t look like home anymore.
It was a disaster zone, rubble and pipework everywhere, the chill of the sewers leaking into a home that used to be warm and safe.
Michelangelo was hopping from one slab of concrete to another, picking his way carefully up to his bedroom. The entrance to his room was half covered in broken pipes and chunks of rock that he began to shoulder out of the way without complaint. The grinding of stone on stone was loud in the echoing space.
Raphael was working on wedging open the shutter door to the garage. It was warped and bent out of shape and he grunted with excretion as he attempted first to bend it back into the correct position, then gave up and tried to bash the thing down. He hadn’t gone near his own room yet, hadn’t even looked at it. Perhaps he couldn’t bare to just yet.
Leonardo had sloshed into his old room with a small whine at how waterlogged it had become. But he hardly spoke a word of complaint as he began to extract what he could. Anything damaged by the water he carefully laid out to dry. He had never moved to slowly or so gently in his life.
Once again, Donatello found himself stopped, this time on the path to his lab.
His bedroom was relatively fine, everything he’d hoped would be there still was and with only a few dings and scratches. Some things were broken but nothing he could not repair.
But his lab…
The Shredder had torn directly into Donnie’s lab to get to Karai. And Donnie wasn’t eager to see what was left of his precious tech.
“Just rip the bandage off,” He muttered to himself, sucking in a deep breath and clenching his fists, “Just—just do it. Just go look. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.” He took a step forward, hesitated, and then forced himself to move. Putting it off would solve nothing. It couldn’t be as awful as what he was imagining.
It was worse.
All of his beautiful tech was in pieces on the floor, the walls were either gouged with deep cuts or dented and smashed beyond recognition or nothing but a pile of rubble. Loose wires swayed from the ceiling, there was broken glass and warped metal scattered everywhere, his work table was cracked in half, his computer a twisted pile of unrecognizable parts. Most of the stuff had ended up shoved against a wall in a graveyard of metal and wire, likely blown there from someone moving so quickly it had displaced the air in a torrent.
Donnie moved deeper into his lab, looking around in dismay as he carefully picked his way through the wreckage. He had expected damage, sure, but not total destruction, not complete annihilation, not an unsalvageable ruin of his entire life’s work. It made something in his stomach shrivel up and burn sour in the back of his throat.
He b ō knocked against a piece of something, making it roll noisily across the scuffed and scratched floor. Donnie spared half a glance at it and then did a double take of horror.
It was an anti-gravity disc.
One of Shelldon’s anti-gravity discs.
No.
“Shelldon!?” Donnie called into the shadows of his lab, forgoing caution and picking up the pace to move deeper inside, “Shelldon, where are you!? Shelldon! Answer me! Please!”
Glass crunched under his feet and he felt bits of metal nick his skin in tiny, stinging cuts. But he didn’t stop moving. Donnie crossed the remains of his lab, gaze darting around, searching for a familiar outline, a glowing orange, a twitch of movement, anything . Pieces of shattered tech skidded away as he moved, his breathing growing shallow and tight in his chest as he searched.
A screw pinged off his toe and bounced across the floor, rolling away to vanish into the pile of stuff that had smashed against the wall.
Donnie’s heart dropped into his stomach.
“No…” The word scraped up his throat, choked and frightened and desperate, “No, no, no, no, no,” His staff slipped from his fingers, clattered to the floor as he dove towards the mangled heap of his broken dreams, “No, no, no, no! Shelldon! Shelldon, are you there!? Do you read me!? Please, please, please!”
The edges of jagged metal sliced his hands and arms but Donnie ignored it, could hardly feel the bite of them as he tore into the remains of his work. Blood was smearing over the shiny purple of the pieces he shoved aside but it didn’t register, none of it registered. The only thing on Donnie’s mind was finding his—
He shoved aside the remains of one of his Battle Shells and his fingertips skimmed a familiar curve.
Donnie made a choked noise and shoved both arms deep into the pile, wrapping his hands around the boxy structure he knew he would find and yanking it free. The point of something broken dragged down the back of his arm as he withdrew, scoring straight through the black wrappings so they unraveled to pool on the floor with the splatter of blood that followed.
Donnie didn’t even feel it.
All he could feel was the edges of the metal pressing against his palms and the aching hole that was slowly spreading in his chest, consuming him from the inside out.
He couldn’t breathe.
His mind was white out static and all he could see was Shelldon’s head, clasped in his shaking hands.
Shelldon’s eyes were mostly closed, barely a sliver of his optics visible through the slit between his thin metal lids. The glassy orange was dark and dull without any light. Something had sliced into the metal of Shelldon’s face, a scar that lanced over the indent of his mouth and up over the top of his head. It wasn’t terribly deep but it made Donnie’s chest do a funny thing, like the entirety of his being was retching and revolting at the very idea of Shelldon being—
That Shelldon—
That he—
The words stalled and stuttered and Donnie’s brilliant, wonderful, genius mind refused them.
Distantly, he heard the clatter of movement from the entrance to his ruined lab, registered it on some level. But he could not tear himself away from Shelldon’s remains, clasped tightly in his aching hands.
“Hey, Don, you got any extra boxes or something?” Leo’s voice and some distant part of Donnie urged him to get up, throw out a quip, to yell at his brother to leave, to do anything. But his limbs were too heavy and his lungs weren’t working right and if he moved then the rest of the world would drop out from underneath him and he’d fall into an endless void and—and—
“Donnie…?” Leo was closer, Donnie could feel his brother’s presence at his shoulder, “What’re you—oh. Don, man, I…”
Donnie swallowed, throat clicking, mouth dry, something inside him aching with more pain than he’d ever felt in his life. He tried to find his voice but it was lost somewhere in the black hole that had expanded inside him and all that he could do was let out a trembling breath.
“Donnie, I’m sorry,” Leo said softly, “I...I told him to protect Gram-Gram. I thought...I’m so sorry, I never—”
The hole in Donnie’s chest suddenly burned .
He rounded on Leo, making his brother flinch back in surprise, “You told him to fight Shredder!? You told him to—you made him stay!? You made him fight!? You did this!?”
Leo’s expression was utterly shattered, apologetic and worried and maybe a little frightened, “I—I know, I’m sorry, but I was trying—”
“He was only version one-point-fourteen-point-oh! What the hell is wrong with you!?” The words were tearing out of him, unstoppable, aching, and sharp. He threw them at Leo, poison barbs aimed to hurt, to make someone else take the pain that Donnie couldn’t bear to hold onto.
“Donnie, I didn’t mean—”
“You killed him!” Donnie yelled and his voice cracked and his eyes were burning. He clutched the piece of Shelldon to his plastron, pressing the metal so tight to his his chest that it hurt, “You killed him! You killed him! He was barely one-point-fourteen! He was just—I only had him—just two years and you—”
It was too much.
Losing Karai, losing their home, and now losing Shelldon.
It was just too much.
Donnie broke.
Words failed him and all he could do was scream.
He doubled over, clutching the last piece of Shelldon to him, and wailed so long and so loud that he choked off in a breathless sob.
A hand tentatively touched his shoulder and Donnie lurched forward, slamming his head into his brother’s plastron, the pain not even registering beneath the searing ache that was tearing him to pieces. He leaned into Leo’s chest and sobbed, crying harder than he ever had, even as a child.
Leo could only put his arms around him and hold him, rocking him through it as the grief tore Donnie apart.
Donnie didn’t hear the rest of his family come to see what the noise was about. He didn’t see Leo shake his head and wave them off. He didn’t notice Leo coaxing him out of the lab and into the remains of their old med bay. He didn’t register Leo tending to the cuts and scrapes from the destruction Donnie had waded through. It wasn’t until Leo tried to tend to the gash on his arm that Donnie reacted.
Leo tried to tug Donnie’s arm away to get to the sluggishly bleeding injury and Donnie jerked back, ducking his head and tightening his arms around Shelldon.
“Dee, I know, but your arm—”
“J-just let it b-bleed!” Donnie gasped, his voice hoarse and shaking, tears still leaking down his face, “I don’t cuh—care anym-m-more!”
The silence was ice cold and stung and Donnie choked out another sob when he realized what he’d said.
“You don’t mean that…” Leo whispered and there was such fear in his voice that Donnie finally, finally, looked up at him.
There were wet stains on Leo’s mask, tracks through the dust on his cheeks. He looked exhausted, hurt, and frightened. He looked young. Donnie’s lip trembled and he gave a small hiccup.
“No...n-no, I don’t…” He took a shaky breath and uncurled his trembling arm, joints creaking like he’d been stiff for decades, “It juh—just...h-hurts. And I...I don’t kn-know how to f-f-fix it. H-how do I f-fix this, Lee?”
Leo’s jaw clenched and he blinked rapidly, trying to hold in his own tears as he cleaned up Donnie’s arm, “I...I don’t think it’s something you can easily fix.” He sounded raw, as hollowed out as Donnie himself, “I think you just kinda...heal? I...I dunno.” Leo forced a smile, a crooked and off-kilter one that didn’t reach his eyes and sat awkwardly beside the tears, but he was trying,
“But, um. M-maybe...when you’re ready? We can help you rebuild Shelldon.”
Donnie sniffed and hugged Shelldon’s remains closer, “I...I dunno if I...what if he’s not the same? What if...Leo, I don’t know if I can do this…!”
“Hey, where’s that emotionless passion, huh?” Leo was still on shaky ground but he was, tentatively, finding his stride and it got a sarcastic, gummed up snort from Donnie, “Look, Dee, buddy, I know things are shit—don’t tell Dad I said that—but if anyone can bring Shelldon back? It’s gonna be you.”
Donnie couldn’t look Leo in the eye. So he leaned forward and bonked his forehead against Leo’s plastron. Leo wordlessly wrapped his arms around him, holding him close. Shelldon was shadowed between them, pinched tight in Donnie’s trembling hands.
“We’ll get through this,” Leo murmured and Donnie hiccuped again, another hot wave of tears running down his face as he clutched Shelldon closer, “We’re a family and we’re ninjas and mutants and we’re gonna get through this. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Donnie pressed closer to his brother, the ridge of Leo’s plastron digging into him, taking the pain away from the hole in Donnie’s chest if only for a brief moment. Through watery eyes, Donnie looked down at the lifeless remains of the body in his arms.
“Nothing’s okay,” He whispered, “And it’s never going to be. Not ever again.”
Leo didn’t argue with him.
He couldn’t.
Because Donatello was never wrong.