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It’s probably too cold to be sitting out on your fire escape like this, you think, even with the blanket around your shoulders and the hot chocolate in your hands. Tiny clouds haunt each exhale, mixing with the steam from your mug and swirling into pretty shapes that would, on a better night, catch your eye. Instead, your gaze turns to the stairwell next to you.
…Unoccupied, again.
It’s been days, you think, pressing your lips together when they quake. Turning your head, you press the back of one hand to your mouth. Your chest pings with a hollow ache that lingers even as you close your eyes and stand. It’s best, you think, if maybe you just… stop.
You stand, fingers clutching your blanket close as you turn and start towards your window to go back inside. The sun will be coming up soon; he won’t be coming. Or so you think, hand freezing on the lower frame of your window when you hear a thump behind you.
Donatello, true to his nature, loves proving you wrong.
Quickly, you turn your head. Before you, he stands, hovering at the edge of the fire escape like he isn’t sure he’s welcome anymore. Your heart flies to your throat, guilt clutching your stomach in equal force with joy, the mix of the two leaving you incapable of speech.
“…Hey,” he says, voice soft as the last black of night that hides him from everyone else but you.
“…Hey,” you respond. You swallow, turning back to face him and moving to slide the blanket off your shoulders before you hesitate. “Um… Were you planning on staying? Long?”
Hazel eyes follow your hands, and you notice in them a kind of longing ache that you don’t understand. “…I was hoping to, yeah,” he says, meeting your eyes once again. “If that’s okay.”
“Yeah. Of course,” you tell him. You finish the gesture you’d started, holding the blanket out for him to take. “Here. It’s cold. Put it on.”
“But—”
“Put it on, Donatello.”
Donnie reaches out, and a stake cuts into your heart when you see he’s careful not to brush your hand with his own. You press your palms into your mug, taking a sip of hot chocolate that burns your tongue and hoping it helps to abate a touch of the nausesa you suddenly feel rising on the back of your throat.
“…Thanks,” he says, tucking the blanket around his own shoulders. It’s warm from your body heat, you know, and you watch as he burrows into it up to his beak. His eyes close as he soaks up the warmth, making your throat click on a swallow. You turn your gaze away; this yearning is what brought you here. It wouldn’t do to linger on it more than you already had. He’s back, and that should be enough.
“…How’ve you been?” you ask, leaning back against the wall next to your window and rolling your thumb over the rim of your mug. It’s too hot and burns, but it feels better than the numbness the cold would otherwise bring.
Donnie huffs a laugh, looking at you with a raised eye ridge. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says, making your lip rise at one corner.
“Oh? Something even weirder than the fact that my best friend is a giant talking turtle?”
“It curled my hair, okay? For context on the level of crazy.”
“Hon, you don’t have any hair.”
“Exactly. That’s how crazy it was.”
…It feels good, bantering with him like this. Feels normal. You smile, even when you feel it start to fade and you have to fake it a little. “…Try me,” you murmur, watching as he flicks his eyes to yours, then sighs and tilts his head.
“My brothers and I got teleported to a parallel dimension where a pink squishy alien thing has been working to build a machine that will terraform the Earth into a terrarium for his dying alien brain race,” he says, droning, “and we fought a battle there with space elves and this super-scientist robot before teleporting back and accidentally cockblocking April and Casey.”
You blink once, then twice. “…Huh. Not what I was expecting,” you admit as you start to feel a small twinge of relief, smiling into your hot chocolate when he shoots you a look. “Cockblocking Casey and April again, though? Once is a mistake, twice is just mean.”
“Really? That’s your commentary?” he says a little sourly.
“Oh, sorry. Were you hoping I’d flip my shit about the parallel universe thing? I’m going to remind you that I am talking to a giant turtle whose dad is a ninja rat right now. Batshit weird is just kinda my thing at this point.”
He makes a sound of protest in the back of his throat, but you’re a little too lost in the solace that maybe he hasn’t been avoiding you on purpose.
…At least you are until you remember his caution in keeping away, his refusal to touch, and once more the tension returns.
The silence stretches between you two, excruciating and prolonged. Your teeth find your inner cheek, eyes studying the metal grates beneath your feet and the plunge to the ground below. Your hot chocolate has gone from hot to warm, the steam no longer thick and comforting.
“Donnie, I—” “Do you—”
Your jaw snaps shut, eyes looking at him in surprise as he mirrors the gesture. Quirking a smile, you bring your cocoa up to your lips. “…You go first.”
He swallows, looking at you before he turns his gaze away, fingers tight in your blanket and holding it to him like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to your fire escape. “…Do you… believe in the soul?”
“…Are you asking me as a philosophy major, or as a person?” you ask with a smile, tilting your head.
“Both, I guess. Probably about time you put that thing to use for something besides pretty wall art.”
“Har, har,” you snark, sighing and staring down at the ripples your cocoa makes when you shimmy the mug. “That’s a tough one. I suppose it’s one of those things that you can never really know for sure.”
“That’s really not an answer, though, is it?” Donnie asks, visibly frustrated. “How… how do you know if you’re really… you? If… If say, you were to—to have all your molecules copied, the originals deleted. Uh, hypothetically. How…” he trails off, face falling to distress as he flounders and burrows his beak into your blanket like it comforts him, even though your warmth must be long gone by now. “How do you know you’re… you?”
“…Do you know how to build a cuckoo clock?” you ask him, watching as he gives you a bewildered look that pulls him out of his funk.
“A cuckoo—? Of course not. I deal with machines, not—”
“But you know what it is,” you interrupt. “You and I can talk about a cuckoo clock. We might picture it a little differently, but it’s the same thing in our heads. Enough so that we can have a conversation about it, and it makes sense to both of us.”
“…This sounds like a philosophy thing,” he says, eyes narrowing.
You laugh. “It is,” you admit. “Pragmatism. It’s a school of thought that says that minutia don’t really matter if their absence doesn’t inhibit communication.” You shrug one shoulder. “So if you were to ask me if I had a soul, I’d tell you it doesn’t really matter. Because I’m here, and you’re here, and we’re here together with or without one, right?”
Donnie stares at you for a long silence, long enough that you look away when it starts to feel a little heavy. Longer still, until you look back, running your tongue over your lips nervously.
“…Donnie?”
“…Yeah. I’m here,” he says, echoing your words like they’re worth their weight in gold. “…I’m here.”
…You wonder, suddenly, what happened with the strange alien thing he mentioned; there’s certainly more to the story that he isn’t telling you, whether to protect you or because he hasn’t deemed it worth his mention. Either way, a weight slides off his shell, and his shoulders go a little straighter beneath the blanket.
Then, looking to you, his face softens. “What were you going to say? Earlier?” he specifies when you tilt your head, causing your stomach to twist.
“Oh,” you dumbly answer, teeth clenching in your mouth. You’d worked up the courage in the moment, but now it feels like an impossible task to manage. Still, you close your eyes, thinking about this, how good this feels to have him here, how you’ve spent the last few nights clinging to your fire escape like maybe if you just waited hard enough he’d know and come back. “…I’m sorry.”
“Sorry… for what?” he asks, perplexed.
You tilt your head back as your throat tightens; of course he’s going to make you say it, because this isn’t already the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do. “I… I’m sorry I made it awkward. Between us.” You clutch your mug, now cool instead of warm in your grasp. “I-I shouldn’t have done—that. Without asking. I should have asked and not just—I’m sorry.”
The silence nearly crushes you for the few seconds before you hear him choke out a response. “You—What?” he starts, causing you to snap your gaze over to him. He looks flustered as hell, steam all but coming out of where his ears would be if he had them. It ties your insides into knots, seeing him pretend it never happened, unable to bear the thought that he’s going to let your mistake necrotize the best relationship you’ve ever had.
“Donnie, fuck’s sake—you can’t even touch me anymore,” you all but wail, hating how you sound but unable to stop. “I—I thought you were avoiding me because—because I—”
“No!” he barks, leaping to his feet like a cat and taking the few steps it takes for him to come close, close enough for you to smell your perfume on the blanket, to feel his rush of breath when he speaks at rapid speed. “It’s—It had nothing to do with that. I seriously did get sucked into a parallel universe and fight giant brain aliens. I—” He flounders, looking agonized. “I wouldn’t do that, you—you have to know that.”
You want to look away, but his proximity makes it impossible. “…I thought I did,” you whisper. “But you didn’t come, and I… I thought I’d really messed up.”
Slowly, he exhales, lowering his gaze to stare at your mouth before he parts the blanket and looks at his palm like it’s a foreign thing to him. “…That question I asked.”
“… About your soul?”
“Yeah. It… wasn’t exactly hypothetical,” he says, flexing his fingers. “That teleportation thing. Honeycutt—the Professor—alien dude—said it works by scanning your component elements, destroying them, and reconstituting them in a new location.”
“…Like a… copy, paste?” you ask, flustering a little when he shoots you a brief grin that’s a ghost of its normal self, but still enough to wind you.
“Smart and pretty,” he compliments, clearing his throat before he continues. “But the, uh, ‘essence of the individual’ is never copied,” he says, looking back down to his hand again.
“…The soul,” you guess, watching him nod. “So you… were worried that you weren’t… you?”
His jaw works, fingers curling into a fist. “You… kissed a Donatello that doesn’t really exist, anymore,” he whispers, brow ridge furrowing. “I… I’ve been having trouble convincing myself I’m… allowed to pick up where I left off. That I’m allowed to have you.”
Your heart splits and bleeds. You place your mug on the windowsill by your hip, then slowly reach up and cup Donnie’s cheeks with your palms. They’re a little warm, still, from the last vestiges of your hot cocoa, but still he shivers at your touch.
“…You can,” you murmur, pulling him closer until his forehead presses against yours. “You always can, Donatello.”
A wounded sound emerges from his chest, his eyes squeezing shut as his hands rise to cover your own, pressing you close with fingers tight enough that it almost hurts. Your blanket slides off his shoulders but he ignores it, stepping close and instead folding into you, his plastron meeting your chest and legs tangling with your own.
“…I want this,” he chokes out, eyes opening and staring so deeply into your own, you’re half convinced that if you do have a soul, he’ll see it. “More than anything. I want this.”
“…Me too,” you admit, letting your thumbs trace beneath his mask.
“Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask,” he says, one hand lowering to grip one wrist so he can turn his head and press a kiss to your palm. “Just take. It’s all yours, anyway.”
Quivering, you wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him into a hug. He burrows his face into your neck, hands falling to your waist and gripping your shirt like it’s the only thing holding him in place. You want to say his name, to tell him how much you love him, how you’re not sure how your heart is still inside your ribs for how full you feel; instead you just nod, turning your head to press kisses to the side of his head, to each inch of skin you can reach without pulling away, holding him close until the sun begins to rise and finally, your hot cocoa is cold.