Chapter Text
There’s something wrong with me.
Or, he’s pretty sure there is.
He’s different from everyone. From the rest of his family.
Which is an odd thing to say when your family consists of four teenage turtle ninjas and their once-human-turned-rat father/sensei.
They’re all different. Donnie’s so smart and makes things out of nothing, Raph’s so strong and can defend against everything, and Leo’s so cool when he’s leading.
Mikey’s so different.
And wrong.
There is something wrong with me, he thinks. He’s not sure what it is, though, but it’s true. It’s there.
Every morning, they eat breakfast. Donnie has taken to drinking coffee, but beyond that change, it’s always the same. Leo and Raph eat toast, and Donnie springs for oatmeal, while Splinter calmly drinks tea and eats whatever they have on hand, normally rice for the morning with bits of egg included if they have it.
Mikey is different.
He likes eggs, but only scrambled, and he likes toast but not burned. He doesn’t like coffee, but he’s okay with the smell. The one time Splinter makes hard-boiled eggs, the others devour them while Mikey shrieks and sobs about how it’s DIFFERENT, it’s not EGG at ALL, he HATES IT.
When Mikey gets older, he takes up the mantle of chef, just so he can ensure things are Properly Cooked. They have to be made how he likes, the things he eats, after all.
Breakfast falls into morning meditation.
He is different.
Leo is the best, his legs crossed correctly, his eyes closed, his mind quiet. Donnie is up next, his form a little slouched, his legs a little loose, but his eyes are shut and his face calm. Raph is next, his form looking bored, his head bowed a bit with his eyes pinched, but he never complains until the time is up, and then he gives a few grumbles.
Mikey has never been able to do what they do.
There are stories from Splinter, small playful ones of him being the only turtle who would climb up his father’s back, giggling as he rolled down into his lap, burbling spit bubbles at him before toddling away.
He is older now. He is expected to act different.
He cannot.
The quiet of the room seeps into his brain, and it hurts. It wails in agony, rolling on the ground and kicking its feet, and eventually-not even five minutes-his eyes flutter open, and he puffs up his cheeks, flicking his tongue and tapping his fingers against his knees. He starts to hum and to rock, ‘dun dun dun’ popping out of his throat as his eyes flick over the dojo. Was the tree leaves turning brown? Wasn’t it early? That normally only happened every November 15th when the sun is its highest, earlier and it would be a very cold winter, any later and it would extend into spring. Was that rot? Was the tree dying? Was-
“Michelangelo.”
He freezes in his rocking, his legs spread out as his toes dig into the floor, his eyes blinking rapidly as he looks over. He slumps, eyes flicking over his father’s stern gaze and down again, a red alert blaring in his head at trying to meet his eyesight. “Sorry. Sorry.”
He sees his father nod.
Mikey’s fingers dig into the wraps around his knees, counts to ten, and starts to rock.
Raph’s elbow knocks into him, enough to send him tilting over again. “Cut it out, bozo,” he mutters.
Mikey stills again.
…three minutes.
A record.
“I’m bored, bored, bored, bored-“
“Michelangelo.”
His brain feels bubbly again. He wants to get up, screech and do handstands, wants to splash paint in waves upon waves on his notebooks and sing from the radio.
He does not want to sit here and think.
“If you cannot sit patiently like your brothers, go and do something productive. Clean your room, perhaps-“
“Okaysenseithankyou!”
He runs out with a whoop and a screech, but can hear the tuts of his father, the sighs of his older brothers, the grumbles as they reassert themselves for what remains of the hour.
He doesn’t want to clean, though. When he makes it to his room, it feels like someone’s chained him by a wrist, dragging him away, and he lets it, giggling up a storm as his eyes dance around the lair with the ideas of all the things he could do.
He could catch up on his comics, he could doodle the sunset he saw on the TV, he could run around in circles until his legs shake with exertion and his lungs burn in pleasure, hecouldcookforIckorhecouldexploreorhecould-
His hands shake.
He clutches at his head, breathing in deeply as he sinks onto the couch, his body jerking as his brain spins in a frenzy, unable to decide what to do without bringing itself to tears at what ELSE it could be doing.
There is something wrong with him.
Perhaps he was born wrong, a whole other turtle than the three that try their best to be good ninjas. Perhaps he hit his head growing up, or something made him unbalanced, and now all he can do is sway between unending energy and curling up on his side, watching the days pass around him and frozen at the idea of having to choose.
“What the shell are you doing?” Raph asks him eventually, arms crossed, watching him lay on the couch, mouth half ajar as he watches a rerun of some anime they’d seen last week.
I think there’s something wrong with me, he wants to say, the words crawling up his throat and clawing at him, leaving ribbons of blood in their wake. Sometimes I want to roll around and sometimes I think too much and sometimes I have too much to do and I want someone to tell me what to do and how to fix what’s wrong with me. I want to be like everyone else in the world who can do the things I can’t seem to do. It’s unfair. It’s unfair. It’s unfair.
“I dunno,” he mumbles, shrugging.
Raph kicks his legs over, and he moves, and they sit there, watching the show, his legs over Raph’s lap and probably making Leo huffy that they’re not training.
Suddenly, he wants to learn how to animate, make a show just like the one they’re watching.
He is overridden by guilt, suddenly, at all the things he wants to learn or has tried and gave up on.
He goes through five emotions at once in the time it takes an ad to play and end, a total of four and a half minutes. He counts and measures the time in their day, and loses himself in the counting.
There is something wrong with him.
He’s just not sure what.