Chapter Text
Donatello jammed the buzzer for Jenny and Sheena’s apartment, as the summer-hot concrete grew steadily more uncomfortable through the calluses on the soles of his feet. It was supposed to be a writing day. What a waste. He'd set the whole day aside to work on his slowly progressing novel, but life in Mutant Town just wasn’t cooperating. The electrical wiring at the dojo had suddenly become a safety hazard. The water reclamation rig on the Co-op & Food Bank building was flooding the upper floors again. The pressure in one of the basement boilers at Jennika's apartment had gone haywire. And nobody else was available to help... at least no one with the skills to fix it. Back and forth he went, all through the neighborhood, all morning long. It was mid-afternoon by the time he made it back home to exchange his tools for his writing folder, but even then the day wouldn’t get on board. He'd opened the desk drawer for his folder and his old laptop, and immediately saw that something was missing from its proper place. He shuffled through the drawer, the other drawers below it, even checked the top of the desk, flipping everything over to check underneath. Finally he saw what he was looking for… or what was left of it. Attached to the bottom of the large case of screwdrivers he'd just finished dragging all over town was a small square of exposed glue from a rubbed-off inventory sticker, and clinging to that was a torn scrap of blue pulp-fiber. The missing item must have caught on the glue this morning, and then fallen off in his bag. Fighting mild panic, he flipped his carrier bag inside out and felt along the liner and through the pockets. Nothing. If it wasn’t there, then it must have… Oh my God.
Oh my expletively figurative God.
“Yo, Donnie,” Jennika finally answered through the comm. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Jenny! Can you let me back in? I’ve, ah... lost a tool. I’m retracing my steps.”
The panic of the last hour had subsided into a glum, annoyed certainty. It had to be here. He’d checked everywhere else. What a stupid waste of a day.
The basement was dry and blessedly cool, although the smell of damp and rot from the recently cleared pipes still clung to the air. Don got down to the floor and shone a light under the boiler he’d been working on earlier this morning. The chill and the smell were stronger down here on the ground, and it reminded him pleasantly of home. Of home home, in the tunnels under the city. It’d been years since they lived there, but any time his senses sent him back (like now, or when he took to the sewers for a shortcut), it hurt, just a little. It was the last time life had seemed to make much sense.
Don's cleanup had been pretty thorough and he didn’t have to look hard to see that the space under the boiler was clear. No debris, hardly even any dust. He shuffled over to the second of the three boilers, and then to the last. Nothing. He got up to his knees and looked around, perplexed, scratching his head. He’d searched very, very carefully at his other stops, checking all the places he’d set his tools, and anywhere else that a small item might have been kicked, nudged, or picked up and left for its owner to find. It had to be here. He looked on top of the boilers next, then between the pipes and fixtures, and in every corner of the room, and under the dust-mat by the door… two, three times. By the time he gave it up as hopeless and trudged back up the stairs, he was feeling a little ill.
"Donnie!"
Sheena's head popped through the doorway to the street. She chased after him, her short pink legs racing down the sidewalk.
“Hey,” she huffed, a little out of breath.
Donatello tried not to sigh. He wasn't in the mood to chat, or - worse yet - add another task to his to-do list. "Hey. What's up?"
"Was it really a tool?” she asked. “The thing you lost.”
“Uh… why would... what do you..."
For half an instant he considered lying again. But what was the point? It was Sheena. “No," he admitted. "Not exactly."
Sheena was unusual, as far as his friends went. A resourceful, friendly, good hearted porcine mutant in the middle of a decaying mutant ghetto - for the most part she fit right in. But her seeming ordinariness was (at least in part) an illusion cast by the rare gift she had: an ability to hold complexity with grace. Unlike anyone else he’d met, she could know things without fretting about them, and could ask questions without any judgment or expectation. If she knew what he was looking for she wouldn’t feel any anxiety to know why , and more importantly, she wouldn’t mention it to Jennika - who was not at all like her in that regard.
"It was a little blue notebook,” he said, holding his hands close together. “About yay big.”
“Okay. I’ll keep an eye out,” she said.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
She tilted her head in concern, her bob-length wig grazing the strawberry milk of her cheek. “Donnie, are you okay?”
“Hmm? Sure. Of course.” I mean, he’d certainly been worse.
“Okay. You just seem like you’ve had a lot on your mind, lately.”
“Yeah, well. End of days. Endless repairs. You know how it is.”
“I’m starting to," she smiled. "Take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will. You too. You and Jenny both.”
“Will do.” She smiled, with a hint of mischief. “So, what’s in the book?"
“Oh, y'know. Eldritch horrors. Future lottery numbers. The usual."
Donatello turned back along the sidewalk to hike the streets he'd already walked along twice today, hopefully with a keener eye this time. It hardly made sense that the book would’ve fallen out of his bag while he walked, but it clearly wasn’t at any of the stops along the way.
“You should be more careful with that,” she called after him.
He could hear the grin in her voice, and threw an answer back over his shoulder. “Yeah, probably should.”
* * *
It was poetry. The book had his poetry in it.
Not that he would have been so terribly embarrassed by that in itself. Donatello was too much of an outlier already to be bothered by more evidence of his own strangeness, and anyway, it had only started as an exercise to strengthen his narrative writing. That, and it made a convenient dumping ground for the stray images and ideas that didn't fit in his story; a good science fiction novel only had room for a few poignant soliloquies about the strange and beautiful workings of sapience and the universe. Everybody knew that. He had ultimately decided to try sonnets because they were technically demanding and relatively short, and seemed like a good way to build skill without getting sidetracked. Fourteen rhymed lines of iambic pentameter - duh-DUH duh-DUH - "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways .” His attempts were disappointing at first, overstrained and awkward, but he kept at it even though he wasn't used to willingly persevering at anything he was bad at. Excellence, or at least proficiency, came easily in so many other things that he could choose to do instead. He improved over time, of course, and whenever he arrived at something he felt happy with he copied it into his little three-by-four-inch blue notebook. It was satisfying in a completely new way. Writing fiction and journals had always been cathartic, but this was... different. With stories, he had to filter everything for an audience. With journals, he was only talking to himself. With poetry, he had to accommodate for the structure of it and follow where the idea wanted to go, but he didn’t have to filter a damn thing. He should have been more careful. He should have been a lot more careful.
It all came to a head a couple of weeks ago, after they received their Christmas scarves from Koya. She’d injured her leg in the early autumn, and during recovery she got it into her head to teach herself to knit and to make scarves as Christmas presents. She’d attacked the project with an energetic martial spirit and with all of her usual dogged persistence… accompanied by frequent fits of rage that destroyed her progress and sent her back to the beginning. Finally, months late and in the swampy heat of summer, she presented her gifts - but Don could see that she was irritated by how overdue and unseasonable they were. So he wrote a poem to thank her. It was the only one he’d ever shown to another soul, and Koya was enormously pleased at it, showing it to everyone who had received one of her scarves, as if the recognition that it contained justified her efforts.
The whole thing was unexpectedly touching. The idea of writing about actual people from his life had never occurred to him before, but now he began to cast out nets in his mind for some stray, suitable thought about another one of his family or friends. The very next poem that he wrote came from it. It was about the North Star. About having a longstanding and constant reference point. He had written the thing so fast, so fluidly and so fervently, that it raised some pretty alarming questions about the state of his heart, and Donatello, whether very brave or only very naïve, had never been one to turn his back on an unanswered question. So he sat down to investigate himself in another terribly imprudent fourteen lines of verse which took their place in the little book, alongside all the others. Whatever had possessed him, though, to give it that title, whether an overblown literary urge or a catastrophic failure of common sense, he really couldn’t say. It was so clearly a reference to something, and even the briefest web search would show that it was taken from a line in the lesser-known Shakespeare poem "The Phoenix And The Turtle." The Turtle. Good grief, Donatello! Draw a circle around it, why don’t you?
“Hey! Watch it, Splinter Clan!”
“Sorry. Sorry about that.”
For all his ninjutsu training, Donatello had still never gotten the hang of being perfectly aware of his surroundings on a crowded street. Too much of his life had been spent in hiding, and he was often too absorbed in his own thoughts to make learning it a priority now. He took a breath and reoriented himself, imagining the sidewalk as a narrow, dark-silted river, and himself as a broken reed passing between clumps of still-standing grass. As he went, he tried to reason with himself about the lost book. It was probably fine. Without that ridiculous self-accusing title, the final poem would probably look like nothing more than a self-important poet trying his hand at a sappy love sonnet, for kicks. And it was written obliquely enough that even with the title (assuming whoever found the booklet actually bothered to read it all the way through, then noticed the allusion, and cared to look it up)... even then it was hardly more dangerous. It might very well seem like just another weird poem about science or the cosmos, like most of the others. Except… if she found it… He flinched for the hundredth time that afternoon. She was one of the smartest people he knew. She was perfectly well aware of how much he valued her input, and had been his beta reader numerous times for the novel, so she could have no compunction about reading the booklet. She was literary and had a keen eye for layers and clues. And she knew him. If she did read it, there was at least half a chance that she'd see the full meaning of it - his whole, raw, unfiltered and unburdened heart, laid open on paper and misplaced for anyone to find. How could he have let this happen at all, let alone written it down? God, he was such an idiot!
You know, Venus, if you weren’t so busy with everything else, I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this mess, he thought, loudly. I would have realized what was going on sooner and done something about it. What good are psychic friends if they can't call you on your crap?
Don’t make that my job, butthead, came the reply. I’m not your therapist.
What do you mean? I don’t treat you like a therapist.
Oh, sure. Like an extra RAM card, then. Boundaries!
Another quarter-hour of stomping along the sidewalk and scanning for a half-hidden slice of blue found him relenting a little. No… not an idiot. Not really. It wasn't wrong-headed to have unbidden or inconvenient feelings, or even to accidentally show them sometimes. Other people did it and lived with the consequences. Just… not him. He’d always been (and still mostly was, especially when things were going badly), an observer. A compiler. A fixer . With his family, and with those other few close and chosen friends, he hardly ever shared his feelings without screening them very thoroughly first. They were processed feelings… packaged and made rational. Intellectualized and safe emotions, with a very stable shelf life. Even after everything that had happened a year or two ago around the time of the Armageddon Game, he was still only starting to come to terms with the fact that maybe the real impetus behind all of his careful restraint -
Restraint?
I’m sorry, okay? he expostulated. Boundaries! Geez…
That maybe the real impetus behind all of his careful restraint wasn't as generous or as evolved as he always used to think it was. Maybe he was just… scared. Scared of having feelings that other people could touch. Feelings that didn’t fit inside of tidy boxes that he could keep out of everyone’s way. It was a painful, humbling realization. But at least if he knew what he was really afraid of he could confront it. He could chart a new course. A course that led away from the desolate, bitter, tower-dwelling self from a terrible future that he’d seen up close. Away from the even worse things that he might become. Venus was right. He had to stop avoiding the hard and frightening stuff. He had to get out of his own head.
Great! Fantastic. Only now he was so far outside of his comfort zone that he wished he could climb out of his skin and turn into some kind of tree or constellation, like an Ancient Greek fable of mortification. Of course “mortify” came from the Latin, not the Greek. "Mortificāre:” to kill, or make dead. The Greek word for mortify was "nekroó" and didn't bear any etymological relationship to embarrassment or humiliation (also from the Latin: "humilis,” meaning "low," derived from "humus" = "earth, soil, dirt"). The Classical-Era Greeks, characteristically, viewed shame as an ethical achievement rather than a fear of exposure, and they were rather proud of it. It was funny. As much as the stories and figures of Ancient Greece had always fired Don’s imagination, when the chips were down his own affinity seemed closer to the more severe, self-flagellating Roman sensibilities. Well, it certainly fit with his upbringing. “Okay, Donnie,” he muttered to himself. “Enough with the socio-linguistics lesson. Stay on task.”
He stopped suddenly, with a frown. What task? He’d looked everywhere. He’d retraced every place he'd been, and a few places he hadn’t. The book was gone. Either someone had picked it up, in which case it was too late, or he'd dropped it on the street and it had been kicked into some hidden corner, or down a grate, where rain or vermin would put an end to it. He might as well just go home and decide whether it was worthwhile to transcribe the less incriminating poems from memory… if he could remember exactly how they went. He almost reached out to Venus again for commiseration, but he thought better of it. She had a point. The profound twin-like connection they shared sometimes led him to treat her like an adjunct part of his own brain, and it wasn’t helping him learn to be more vulnerable with other people, or to manage his own problems. It was like cheating… avoiding having to do either of those two things, while pretending to do both. He sighed and turned back toward home. Along with the exhaustion of a wasted and stressful day, he felt a perverse twinge, almost like a pang of loss. He really liked those last two sonnets. They were pretty good, he thought.
Anyway. Maybe if the book resurfaced, they would all just think he was in love with Koya. The idea of such a rumor getting back to Koya herself, of how aghast and how angry she would be, made him break into a hysterical giggle that he tried to pass off as a cough.
He climbed the stairs to his crowded third-floor apartment for the second time that day. There was something to be said for apartment living… for opening a door in a narrow, airless hallway designed to deaden noise and hide dirt, and having home hit you all at once with a friendly ( usually friendly) assault on the senses. Clattering pans and chattering voices spilled out, along with plumes of steamed rice, and scorched onions, and some sort of bleak, generic protein simmering in soy sauce, corn syrup and oil. April's voice dipped suddenly to a sarcastic note, and Raphael roared with laughter. Raph was positioned at the stove, stirring furiously, while Alopex sat on the counter beside him, stabbing loose bits of escaped food with her forefinger and eating them. April had just thrown on her jacket, and she scooped a hand behind her neck to free her ponytail, unleashing a spray of fiery, gold-red hair.
“Hey, Don! How’d the writing go?” she asked.
“It didn’t," Don shrugged. "Things came up.”
“Told you,” Raph said. “Stuff always comes up.”
Alopex, growing bolder, snatched a scrap straight from the frying pan. Raphael whacked her hand with a wooden spoon. “You should turn off your phone when you’re writing,” she said. “Help you concentrate.”
Don and April exchanged the quick, knowing look of two veteran Atlases. When you were used to having the world on your shoulders, used to being the only one who could help in very specific sorts of dire situations, going incommunicado was easier said than done.
“Hey April, you wanna take some of this with you?” Raphael gestured at the very serviceable, very plentiful, deeply uninteresting food. “It’s pretty much done.”
One would have to know April pretty well to see the tiny ripple of dismay that rose and almost broke the surface of her expression before a much larger wave of good-humor and gratitude caught up to it. She hugged Raph around his shoulders. "No, I've got way too many leftovers at home already." She threw her bag over her shoulder. "See ya!”
“Speaking of food…” Alopex grabbed the large cloth bag beside her and shoved off from the counter. “The weasels need vegetables.” She leapt to the window.
“Put the tomatoes in plastic!” Raph called after her. “And don’t forget to can them tomorrow, or they’ll go bad.”
Alopex scaled the fire escape toward the rooftop garden, and Don went to his room to fetch something to read. Leo’s classes ran late today, so the others wouldn't be home for hours - and he wasn't in the mood to write anymore. He opened the drawer of his desk, and stopped cold. There, exactly where it ought to be, sat the little blue book with a very small scrap of paper folded on top of it. His heart tightened in his chest. Dammit. Crap. Dammit . He flipped the paper open and a familiar, messy, block-letter scrawl liquified the ice shards of terror in his veins, sending a thrill of relief through his body. Raphael. Raph had found it. His eyes shut tight for a moment, and he breathed out slowly, counting down as his heartbeat returned to normal. He opened his eyes again, and read the few taunting, improvised lines Raphael had left:
"There once was a guy from New York
whose book of poems fell in the forks.
His brother then found them
and just about drowned him
for being an asinine dork."
Don stared at the limerick, then snorted in quiet laughter. Show off. He slipped the book in his pocket to deal with later, and returned to the kitchen, where he saw Raphael piling a mountain of hot rice into a large Tupperware container.
“Raph! What are you doing?"
"Putting the food in the fridge. What's it look like?"
"You’re gonna give us all bacillus cereus poisoning," Don huffed, pulling out half a dozen small, shallow containers. He took a serving spoon and started to fill them up. Raph shrugged, then joined him. When they were nearly done, he gave Don a strange, appraising look.
"Ah, hey. So you might wanna keep a tighter lid on that, buddy."
Don looked down at the securely fastened packages of rice, then up at Raph, perplexed. "Which one?"
Raphael threw a loaded glance at the door April had walked through a few minutes ago, then back at him. Comprehension took a moment, as Don floundered from literal meaning to figurative implication, and when he got there he flushed unhappily; his strongest instinct being to seize up and get snappy. He opened his mouth to assure Raph that he knew all of that perfectly well, thank you very much, that the whole thing - writing, feelings, all of it - was some kind of ridiculous mistake, and that not only had he not intended for any of it to happen, his only current plan was to make it unhappen and to forget it as quickly as possible, starting with burning a few pages from that stupid book. After all, he wasn’t… he wasn’t some… some kind of...
Don stopped himself before he started. What right did he have to talk like that? Thinking of Raphael and Alopex… of all the heartache and uncertainty, and the slow, uneven repair they had done in full view of everybody, whether they had wanted privacy or not. Raphael never had the luxury of shutting everybody out of the mess, and Don wasn't helping his brother, or anyone else, by trying to hold himself above it all. He sighed and shook his head, his anxious frown lightening into a wry, quiet smile. "How do you do that?"
“When are you gonna realize that I’m smarter than you, man?”
Don smiled outright. “I'm inclined to believe you, at the moment."
“Well, you should. You’re a genius, which is nice I guess, but your common sense is about zero. You can say nine-hundred ninety-nine things that nobody else understands, and still tell on yourself with the thousandth one. And you got absolutely no idea that you did it. The Northern Star? Come on, man. We all know who that is. At least for you, anyway. And then you gotta follow it up with whatever the hell that was. Absolute, total dumbass.”
Don pulled a face as he placed the containers in the fridge. “Duly noted." He closed the refrigerator door. "Look,” he said, flicking his finger between the two of them. “I appreciate the advice… and the fact that you probably saved my ass today. But this never happened, okay?”
"Yeah, no duh.” Raph cast a suspicious glance at the ceiling. “Ally’s been up there too long… gotta make sure she doesn’t take all the damn carrots this time. You're on dinner duty tomorrow. Don't forget."
“I won’t.”
At the window ledge, Raphael turned back. "Y’know, the flow’s not terrible in a couple of 'em."
Don tilted his head at him, setting an edge to his voice that was halfway between affectionate and angry. "Never. Happened ."
Raph raised his hands in mock surrender, and disappeared up the fire escape. The apartment now safely empty, Don reached into his pocket and pulled out the book. Relighting the gas burner with a match, he flipped through the book’s pages until he landed on the last two with writing on them. He hesitated, the smooth paper between his fingers. Then he closed the book and turned the burner off. Making his way back to his desk, he pulled a small lock-box from the bottom drawer… but before he locked the troublesome book away, he carefully penned a title on its front cover, and wrote Raphael’s name on the scrap-paper limerick, and slipped it in between the pages.