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It was sudden and all consuming when Donatello realized he had been ignoring what had now amounted to a migraine.
It was burrowed into his skull, nestled between his temporal bones and up behind his glabella, scraping its claws against the back of his eyes. He glared at the computer screen as he was brought abruptly out of his state of focus and into the reality of his physical needs; the first of which being immediate and complete darkness. His hand fumbled for the power switch and his hoarse voice called for assistance.
“Shelldon, lights off.”
The overhead lights flicked out, the purple glow of the rest of his electronics dimming to their lowest setting so that he could still see. His chair slid back as he got to his feet, and nausea immediately clawed his way up his throat. He gripped the edge of his desk with white knuckles, waiting for it to pass, and rocking on his heels to soothe the whine crawling up his plastron.
There was a noticeable disconnect between his mind and his body, Donatello had found. Immediate and sudden changes, such as injury or nausea, he could recognize, diagnose, and deal with immediately, but slower creeping effects like hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and the tendrils of a headache-turning-migraine constantly eluded him. He didn’t feel his hunger until he was practically sick with it or had a meal directly in front of him. Thirst didn’t register until he felt his focus slipping and craved a coffee, or his tongue dragged against the roof of his mouth like sandpaper. Drowsiness only made its appearance when he found his head dipping down to the desk, or after he had finished a project and took a moment to stretch.
The culmination of all three was just as difficult to detect, a migraine. When had he eaten? It was nearing midnight now, and it was surely closer to breakfast time when he had last emerged from his lab. The single coffee cup he knew sat upon its Atomic Lass coaster in front of him attested to the single cup of fluids he’d taken that day, and he knew he had noticed the bare edges of a headache approaching when Michael had popped into the lab to ask for help connecting his new drawing tablet to the computer. It had been something about outdated drivers, and though he had noticed it at the time, the headache had been swiftly swept away into a box in his mind palace labeled “not urgent”.
He had been preoccupied, but he felt stupid now for dismissing the early signs of what he had known would become this all consuming hurt blowing up his head like a balloon about to pop. Each time this happened he would find himself empathizing with early man and their primitive medical procedures. Get the drill, Raph, he’s going in to vent the pressure.
The nausea settled back into his stomach as a hot bubbling thing, less intent to crawl up his esophagus than it had been. Donatello cracked his eyes open and half-blindly stumbled his way out of the lab and to the bathroom to seek out the medicine cabinet.
One of his brothers was already stationed there, and said something snarky to him as he pushed them away from the sink to rifle through their stock of medications. It was- it took him a moment to process it- definitely Leo; the mass of green too small to be Raph and too easy to push to be Michael. Donatello squinted at the cursed yellow-green bottles with print too small to possibly read in any circumstances, let alone his.
“Which one of these is ibuprofen?”
Leo shot him a funny look - was that a face mask? - and Donnie nearly growled as he was bumped to the side so his brother could use his unimpaired eyesight to seek out the painkillers. The nausea lurched again in his gut and he dry heaved over the toilet, one hand gripping the seat and the other ceaselessly smacking against parietal bone. The immediate pain was heavenly relief, an external distraction from the internal ache.
“Yikes. You gonna’ want the Gravol too?”
Leo, unseen, waved the foil packet around in his hand, and Donnie nodded while he tried to keep his insides where they belonged. He heard the tap running, and then a glass entered his vision, followed by two pills in a green hand when he had taken the cup. He steeled himself, willing the hot acid to stay put, and them gulped them both down with as little water as possible. The cup was taken back, and Donnie bent over the toilet with both hands braced against the seat.
By the four humors did he hate vomiting. It wasn’t an uncommon event, his constitution seeming to be the weakest of his brothers. Pops told him stories about his proclivity for illness as a child, getting sick for weeks at a time when Raph, Leo, and Mikey recovered in days. Eventually, sickness had stopped clinging to him like Xanthium strumarium, but he still seemed to get sick the most often in their household, not least of all because of his bi-monthly migraines.
A cold hand on the back of his neck brought a hiss from Donatello, and were it not for the ministrations it brought with it he would have stretched out his neck and bitten it. As it were, the external pressure at the base of his skull made him curl his spine and press back into it.
“Oh, sweet Mendel, do not stop that.”
A snort - how dare he- “You got until my hand gets sore.”
Donatello grumbled, but accepted these conditions. The effect was instantaneous, and though his stomach remained hot and uncomfortable, the headache blissfully subsided for a few moments. At some point the hand switched, and he had half a mind to allow the rumble in his chest out, considering it heavily until it receded entirely and he let it out in the form of a displeased growl.
“Wooooowwww grumpytello, you can rub your own neck.”
“I’m going to hurl in your bedsheets.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your chunks to yourself, bro. You need anything else? You got a bucket in your nerd cave? Snackies before bed?”
Donatello rumbled again, but didn’t have the headspace required for a retort. The thought of eating made his stomach curl as the ache in his head returned, and he shook his head.
“No. Nnnngh, ice. Cup of ice.”
He could feel Leo look at him flatly, but moments after padding away he heard the ice machine on the freezer dropping cubes into a glass. Internally he cheered, until the volume of his thoughts made him squeeze his eyes shut and return to smacking his head to mitigate the pain. The feet padded back, and the bright light of the bathroom was thankfully switched off after there was a clink of the glass being set on the tile at Donatello's feet.
“Don’t hurt yourself. Goodniiiight!”
Leo’s voice sing-songed quietly, and he could hear a kiss being blown his way before slippered feet wandered back to their own room.
Donatello grumbled and turned around to sit on the toilet, rocking forwards and backwards with a self-soothing whine as he picked up the glass to suck the cubes down. One by one, he swallowed them whole to cool the boiling feeling in his stomach, slowly until the glass was half full of water and he sipped on it, occasionally pressing the cool glass reverently to his forehead.
The migraine was receding, slowly, but only in waves. He would think it was almost gone, stand up, and then it would return with a roll in his gut that was weaker than it was a half hour ago. He took to pacing, standing in front of a fan in the atrium as the hot-cold-shivering he had come down with was driving him mad. He might as well pick one extreme, he would warm up once the ache was gone in his comfy cozy bed, and maybe he could get some more things done on his phone before the dimenhydrinate kicked in.
Perhaps, he thought, as the waves of pain sunk to a low tide, and he sat on the edge of his bed.
Perhaps, he thought, as he plugged his phone in, headache only an itch at the back of his mind.
Perhaps, he thought, pulling the covers over himself, and he was asleep before his head hit the pillow.