Chapter Text
Sometimes, even a genius able to bend nature laws to his will can fuck up.
Of course, he may find excuses.
Oh, I’m not used to dabble with ooze. Yes, I know this is dangerous, in theory, but don’t worry, I’m taking precautions
Well, maybe this genius takes precautions, but this time, it’s not enough. An unavoidable rule in the lab is you don’t do lab operations alone. Donatello does not have a lab buddy, almost never. Usually, this is a minor break of the rule, as his brothers are never far. Because usually, he’s in his lab, in the Lair.
Maybe this is why it all goes downhill. Because he’s not in the Lair. Because he put his experiment setup in an abandoned basement somewhere. He has a reason, yes. He does not want contamination. Of the Lair, of the experiment, one may never know.
He wants to keep this a secret, until he’s sure about what he’s doing. Because maybe he feels shame when he researches this subject, not that he would admit that to himself. He’s very vague with April, who, truly, knows something is up, but let him easy anyway. The truth will come out eventually, and probably with a grandiose presentation.
Still, she squeezes out the location of this experiment of his, just for safety measures. She promises she won’t bother him, that she won’t peek until it’s ready. This measure, at least, is why the family will know - or at least will think they know - what had happened to him. This will be why they won’t bear any hope of Donatello being alive somewhere.
Dear readers, they are wrong of course. Or there wouldn’t be a story.
Coming back to Donatello, it goes wrong, very wrong, very quickly. The explosion knocks him out. He feels he can’t breathe in empyrean vapors. He passes out.
When he wakes up, not much time has passed, but he doesn’t know that. He watches his hands. His five-fingered hands. This feels wrong, somehow, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know where he is. He sits up, and in the back of his mind comes a fact that frightens him. He doesn’t know WHO he is.
He frantically searches in his mind, and in the room, but there is nothing but debris. Slowly, he feels more in tune with his environment and realizes there is something slimy bloody on his back. He jerks up, shouts as he throws the thing off his back. He doesn’t know what the green thing is. That freaks him out even more. He flees the basement, goes in the street with only a short, keeping to the shadows, and promptly forget the location of the basement.
When Donnie doesn’t come back to the Lair this evening, his brothers go look for him. April gives them his last location, where they find a remnant of his shell, a too small green thing without a Donnie inside.
Months are not enough to heal. The grieving still hurts, but life moves on. The most difficult thing, for Donatello’s family, is the almost quiet way their brother was gone (explosion aside). They weren’t there to save him, but apart from a shell, would there have been anything to save? (yes, there would have)
This is not the story of the turtles accepting the loss, of grieving and pain.
This is not the story of the memoryless human who came from this basement, who took the name Damian - which felt not quite right, but he can’t find anything better. This is not the story of his struggle to integrate human society.
No, this is the story of what came three years after that accident.