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“Night bros!” Mikey closed his bedroom door and like a switch, his radiant smile and bright laughter disappeared. Despite his sub-par tactical skills, and scarce attention span, he never failed to uplift the quartet that was him and his brothers. Although, something was eating away at him from the inside.
He let out a groan and made his way to his bed doubled over in pain. He and his brothers had ordered pizza again. This wasn’t a problem for his brothers, although there was one thing troubling him — he couldn’t eat solid food. His stomach gurgled and cramped whilst he lay there in agony and anguish until it all became too much, and he began to sob as quietly as he could, although not quietly enough, as the door began to creak open, and Splinter peeped through.
“Michelangelo?” He said, his voice barely above a whisper. He could assume what happened, as it was a recurring cause for distress.
Mikey’s jerked to look at the rodent man who was making his way over to his bed, before the pain hit him and he scrunched up again, squeezed his eyes shut, and began to screech quietly. Splinter plopped down on the edge of Mikey’s bed and glanced over the rolled up reptile boy before him before he harshly began. “You ate pizza with your brothers, didn’t you?” Mikey opened his tear-blurred eyes to look up at Splinter, a look in which was reciprocated with a stern one. Any other time, Mikey would not take this very close to heart, but in such a desperate time, he didn’t have the strength to regulate anything, and the slight inconvenience of Splinter’s behavior triggered him to begin to bawl. Splinter sighed sympathetically and softened his look.
“You never learn, do you? This happens every single time.” Splinter said, attempting to soften his tone.
“But I’m so sick of this! Why do I need this stupid shit bag anyway?” Mikey snapped back.
“Language! And you know it’s better for you than letting everything build up inside.”
Mikey sighed and returned to grimacing and holding his stomach. “You have to keep up with your liquid diet, or else your food won’t assimilate properly.” Splinter explained, his tone exhausted from repetition of his hypothesis.
Mikey finally found the strength to sit up. With a groan, he rolled into an upright ball. “Why did I have to be the one sibling who didn’t develop right? The others don’t have to deal with any… stupid liquid diet, or stupid poop bag… or…” He paused as he began to choke up, deciding to end his sentence there rather than failing to continue. “Just.. why can’t I be built normal like the others..”
Splinter sighed. “None of you are normal. You’re mutants. You just happened to be caught in a sausage package when you mutated. If anything, you’re more normal to have a cloaca.”
The word alone drew tears. Mikey began to bawl once again before Splinter rose.
“Well, goodnight I suppose.”
The next morning, Mikey was awoken by the sound of his brothers laughing and joking. He hadn’t fallen asleep until late. He was tired, but the crippling pain had gone. He rose with a groan, and remembered he had to change his bag. With a sigh, he made his way over to the corner of his bedroom where he kept his supplies. The same corner in which he had an old, crappy mirror that he found next to a dumpster. Upon removing his pants, he was subjected to the dreaded sight of his skeletal legs. Fighting tears, he proceeded to change his bag, before zipping to his closet to put on the baggiest thing he could find. The one up side of his chronic thinness was making it like a hollow area to hide his bag on his leg. His normal clothes were nearly baggy enough to hide his bag now, so multiple layers of clothes that would swallow him even before he lost all the weight were sure to conceal it. He finished dressing and opened his bedroom door, nearly being blinded by the morning light.
“Mikey! About damn time you crawled out of bed!” Raphael shouted from the kitchen. This somehow brought Mikey back to his senses, and caused him to remember to mask.
“I had to finish a dream, dude! And where’s Donnie?” Mikey replied, walking into the kitchen and opening a cabinet to search for anything that he was able to eat. The last thing he wanted was to repeat last night’s dilemma.
“He’s in his room. Probably peepin’ at some micro-bacteria-organisms or something,” Raphael said, scooping a bit of nesquik powder into a cup of milk.
“He said he’s trying to make a thought display board thing.. Where it like, reads your brainwaves and determines your thoughts.” Leonardo added.
“Huh, wonder how that’s workin out for him.” Mikey said, semi slamming the cabinet upon being unsuccessful in finding food
Mikey strolled back into his room, departing casually to perpetuate the idea that he was leaving out of boredom. He collapsed onto his bed, diary in hand. Mikey had been looking for ways to channel his emotions, and decided on poetry as his coping mechanism. He sloppily flipped a few pages, trying to find a blank page, before jotting down the date, and some lazy title, and got to writing.
“I wear a mask with a smile for hours at a time. Lay back and remember the emotional tide. No matter how hard I try to hide, there’s no shaking the thought of the cloaca in my backside.”
A short and sweet poem to summarize the diary passage was a recurring routine. Once Mikey finished the final bits of his poem, he migrated a few lines down the page.
“Dear diary, last night, it happened again. My brothers bought pizza and I couldn’t resist. O how I missed laughing with my brothers as we enjoyed the moist, cheesy delicacy. I had to lie and pretend I had grown out of my taste for pizza, when in reality, I cannot eat solid food. My stomach ached terribly. I’ve lost so much weight since I started my liquid diet. I hate it! It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just that I had a cloaca while my brothers all developed anuses when they mutated, but the fact that I only mutated partially. Instead of excreting through my cloaca, I partially developed a humanoid digestive system, meaning I now have a colon which was meant to be connected to a humanoid anus, but stopped development halfway through, so now I have a cloaca that ends before the colon, and a humanoid digestive system that ends at the anus, neither of which are not connected, so I have to wear a shit bag on my leg that connects to my colon, and I have to be on a special diet so that the waste is able to go through the tube. I basically have to constantly have diarrhea through a fucking tube. Fuck my life.”
Mikey let out a contented sigh as he closed his diary. Upon rolling onto his back, he opened his phone and began to mindlessly scroll various social medias before hearing his brother shout.
“MIKEY!” Raphael yelled. “COME OUT HERE!”
Mikey rose from his bed and opened his door to see what was going on. He was met with all three of his brothers standing in the living room.
“We’re gonna sneak out.” Donatello mumbled, trying not to let Splinter hear. “But we have to be very careful so that Splinter’s new cameras can’t see us.”
“He installed cameras?” Mikey laughed. “God he needs to chill!”
“Yeah, he’s super dramatic after last time.” Leonardo commented as the four slipped out of the door.
The quartet shuffled close to the wall that the camera was attached to, the camera looking out in front of the wall in such a way that the reptile siblings could not be spotted while sprawled against the wall like that. Once out of the radius of the camera, the bale made their way around town, laughing and joking along the way.
“Guys.. what if we just got pizza again?” Leonardo inquired upon the passing by of a pizza shop.
With much warranted resentment, Mikey took it upon himself to shut the idea down. “Nah, dude. That pizza place gives me gas!” Although partially true, (in a way,) Mikey continued as quickly as possible as to not have to elaborate on that lie. “Oh look! You guys wanna get smoothies?”
Much to Mikey’s demise, his brothers practically ignored his suggestion and paid attention to his initial remark. “Oh boo fucking hoo.I think you’ll be okay,” Raphael barked.
“Yeah, Raph is right, honestly. You’re being a baby. We all want pizza.” Leonardo added.
Mikey held back the urge to pout as he followed his brothers into the pizza shop. He, Leo, and Raph sat in a chair as Donnie went to order a pepperoni pizza, paying no mind to the fact that they were mutant anthropomorphic turtles, plus the rancid smell of Michelangelo’s excretion receptacle hidden under his layers and layers of fabric. Donatello returned to the group and they began to wait for their pizza. Michelangelo was uncharacteristically quiet as his brothers joked and talked in the meantime.
Once the pizza was delivered to the table, a hush went over the boys. “Oh yeah, let’s dig in, fellas!” Donatello remarked once the waiter had gone. Mikey masked his feelings and laughed along as his brothers cracked jokes and took pieces onto their plates, although there seemed to be no way out of eating pizza again.
Noticing how hesitant Mikey was, Raphael took that opportunity to make fun of him. “What? You scared to shit or somethin’?” A sudden uproar was warranted by this comments, and the boys began to laugh uncontrollably. Mikey laughed along to hide the tears he was holding back as he scooped some pizza onto his plate.
It did not take long for Mikey’s stomach to begin to gurgle. His body was so used to his nutrition shakes that it could hardly handle anything heavier. Soon his stomach began to ache, and his bag was unable to relieve it. Soon after the quartet sucked down a whole pizza, they were prompted to keep going on their way, although Mikey had an idea to get out of the cramp-warranting activity that was running around the city.
“Woah, you guys, has it been an hour and a half already? Splinter is gonna get mad at us if he finds out.” Mikey commented, which although uncharacteristic of him, led his brothers to aimlessly babble their “oh yeah”s and “oh shit”s.
The reptilian assembly that was the teenage mutant ninja turtles made their way back home, the added activity only making Mikey’s cramping worse. He began to fall behind a bit, which caused him to not hear the plotting among the three others. The four got to the point where they had to avoid the camera, but Mikey, distracted by his increasingly severe stomach ache, didn’t notice and went right into the view of the ring doorbell camera, triggering the sparkling sound that occurs once motion is detected.
The three others groaned “MIKEY! YOU FUCKING DUMBASS! YOU GOT US IN TROUBLE!” Raphael screamed in blind rage, likely causing more trouble than Mikey’s mistake ever could have. Raphael stormed inside like a monster destroying everything in his path and made his way to Mikey’s bedroom, Mikey naturally running after him.
Upon sliding into the doorway of his bedroom, Mikey saw Raphael throwing shit onto the ground, and taking hold of his diary. “RAPH- WAIT!-”
“WHAT’S THIS?” Raphael began to look through the pages before Mikey could get to him. “CLOACA?! WH-” Raph looked like his eyes were going to pop out of his head as he read through the pages. Even by the time Mikey got to him and snatched it away, Raphael had already read it. His face looked shocked for a moment, before bursting out in laughter. “YOU HAVE TO WEAR A SHIT BAG ON YOUR LEG?! AND THATS WHY YOU CAN’T EAT PIZZA?!”
“STOP IT, I CANT HELP IT, RAPH!” Mikey screeched insecurely, before Donnie and Leo arrived at the door and shot each other a look before stepping in.
“Y-Yeah! Raph! Cut it out, he can’t help it!” Leonardo shouted, still taken aback as he watched Mikey begin to double over in pain from the pizza.
“HE GOT US IN FUCKING TROUBLE BECAUSE HE WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION TO THE CAMERA!” Raph screamed with violent intent. “WHY SHOULD I FORGIVE HIM?!”
“First of all,” Donnie cut in, “we never even got in trouble, and he’s our brpther! We should support him no matter what.” He made his way over to Mikey, who was now collapsing onto his bed, scrunched up with pain. “I’m so sorry we made you eat pizza, Mikey. I’m gonna be a better brother to you from now on.”
“Yeah, me too. I’m sorry Mikey, I had no idea, but we shouldn’t have made you eat it if you didn’t want to either way.” Leonardo added. “And I think you owe him an apology, Raph.”
Raphael groaned with absolute rage. “Fine! I’m sorry! God!.” Donnie let out a sigh as Raph stormed out of Mikey’s room.
“I’m sorry Raph spilled your secrets, Mikey, but we support you, no matter if you have a cloaca, or need a bag for your excretion, you’re still the Mikey we know in love.” Donnie explained.
“Yeah, Donnie’s right.” Leo continued. “And I know Raph will come around with time. You’re our brother, no matter what. We love the brightness you bring to our family, we love you.”