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The first time, it’s a simple patch job.
Mikey’s been scraped from shoulder to elbow, from hip to knee, a layer of skin peeled away to leave the flesh raw and bleeding. Gravel and grit from the road has to be flushed from the wounds. The scrapes bead blood slowly, unhurried.
He’s had worse injuries.
Donnie still tuts and scolds him, puttering around to clean the scrapes and wrap them in bandages.
“You need to be more careful,” Donnie grumbles. It’s not in anger, but in concern, Mikey knows that well enough, “I can’t—Angelo, I don’t want to lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Dee!” He smiles, bright and cheery. Donnie sighs and pats Mikey’s head with a twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, “I promise, I’ll be right be your side!”
And he means it.
Donatello hates the color red.
He hates it most of all on his little brother.
“Dee—”
Hates the way Mikey chokes on his name, breath snagged on a hiccuping sob.
“Hold on, just a little bit longer, I’m almost finished. Just hold on…” It’s a plea more than a reassurance. Donnie is bent double over Mikey’s arms, pinned down to the table with heavy straps.
Green skin is peeled away, muscles flayed open with delicate precision, blood vessels carefully nudged aside. Suction can only do so much with the body held wide open like this; there’s sticky crimson pooled on the table and the floor. It clings and stains but Donnie’s learned to ignore it. There are more important things to worry about.
He weaves the delicate, gossamer threads of mystic cables through and around, stitching them to nerves and joints with deft movements. Mikey’s breathing is shaky and shallow. There are tears on his face.
“Almost done,” Donnie murmurs, focused entirely on finishing his work, “Almost done, Mike, almost…there. All set. Let me just stitch you back up and you’ll be all set!” There’s a mumble from Mikey but not much else, “Now, those filaments will help protect you from your own mystic powers and make it easier to channel. But they do burn out and too much mystic power will overload them, which could fry your arms from the inside out. So, dear brother, do try not to open any portals to other dimensions, hm?” He smooth s the pad of his thumb over the muscles as he presses them back into place, humming as he sews them back together.
Mikey’s head lists to one side, eyelids fluttering.
The blood transfusion is running low.
Donnie finishes stitching up his patient before he does anything about it.
“I’m not a baby, Donnie!”
“I’m just trying to protect you!”
“I don’t need you to protect me! I’m a mystic warrior! I can take care of myself!”
“Why won’t you let me help you!?”
It goes wrong, once.
A mistake, a push too far. A tip over that invisible line.
There’s blood on his hands.
“I can fix this,” Donnie breathes panic, eyes wild, “I can fix this, I can fix this! I can fix anything!”
So he does.
The straps are normal, almost a comfort sometimes. Old friends that wrap tightly around arms and legs and waist. They’re grounding.
But even their touch is lost when the ocean of pain swells into an overwhelming tsunami.
Donnie’s humming a discordant tune behind his face mask, the flare from the precision laser dancing in the lens of his goggles. Its a mesmerizing display, lights reflecting and splintering over metal and glass. A pleasant distraction from the searing pain as the laser does its work.
The noise dies down. The light show ends. Donnie sets the laser aside, still humming to himself, and wedges his gloved fingers into the cut left behind. It doesn’t take much strength to pull t he two pieces open.
There’s a series of sickening cracks and wet pops as the plastron comes loose from the rest of the body. Blood spurts from the fresh wound in a brief fountain, leaving a streak up Donnie’s front, up his mask, and along the edge of his goggles. He doesn’t seem to notice.
Steam rises from the open chest in the cold air of the operating theater. The chill settles into the cavity, seeping into organs that were never meant to be exposed this way. The facsimile of ribs, twisted by mutation, stretch with each expansion of lungs, the heart pulsing perhaps a bit faster than resting. It all glistens in the bright overhead lights, wet and heavy and thick with iron stench.
Donnie picks up his scalpel and pauses, turning his attention away from his work for a brief moment. The weight of his gaze is a heady balm.
“You know I don’t mean to hurt you, right?” Donnie asks calmly, soft around the edges, “I don’t want to hurt you. But this...this is good. This will keep you safe. You understand that, right?”
A slight vibration of the throat, something that might be an acknowledgment. The brain is addled and the body is wracked in pain. It’s difficult to discern what’s happening.
But Donnie is there. Donnie protects. Donnie provides. Donnie fixes. Donnie is safe.
So even though it hurts hurts hurts when Donnie pries the heart from Mikey’s chest and begins to replace it with a glowing, golden fire of metal and wire, Mikey knows it will be okay.
Donnie’s fixing things.
Donnie always fixes things.
Of course, it’s not enough.
Maybe that’s his fault though.
It hurts, of course, these things always do. But it’s a mild pain compared to being under Donnie’s knife.
Maybe he should have listened when Donnie said to stay away from Leo.
He wishes he had listened.
He hopes Donnie finds him soon.
It’s getting so very, very cold.
Donnie treats each of his projects with the careful delicacy and precision of a master. But this one he handles as if each piece were spun sugar and threads of glass.
He unspools miles of nerves and carefully separates the veins and arteries. He peels up every scute, measures and catalogs it, and sets it aside in a precise pattern, labeled and preserved to keep it healthy and alive. He drills into each vertebra with a tiny, diamond-tipped bit, each hole measured and calculated and analyzed for optimal placement.
Skin and muscle are stretched and pinned in a careful array. There’s a blueprint hologram hovering beside him, one he refers to often, checking and rechecking everything he does. This has to be perfect. It has to be perfect because it’s his Tech, his ultimate design, an unstoppable force.
You will be perfect.
A violet glow sears against the bright operating lights. Donnie cups his Ninp ō in his hands, lets it pool in his palms. The air fizzles, tastes like ozone and steel.
Then he tips the light down to trickle into the funnel. He watches it trace down the lines that feed into his Tech’s freshly installed spine. The glow burns bright, brighter, brightest. It floods the vertebra and the ridged scutes attached to it. The entire structure flexes, rippling against the clamps holding it in place. A sacred geometry, alive and breathing, pulsing purple and gold. The colors of royalty.
Donnie lets out a breathless laugh. He smooths his palm over the new construction, the filaments of nerves still trembling and exposed, blood vessels twitching as the golden heart beats steadily. His Adonis, his David, Heisenberg moment. His Frankenstein monster, more beautiful than the Fibonacci sequence, more exquisite than the Golden Ratio, alive and breathing.
“You’re magnificent ,” He says as he tightens the bolt to the final piece of equipment—a discharge siphon that can also act as a weapon and an object for balance. A tail, really.
It’s a laborious process to put everything back together again. Deconstruction is so much easier than rebuilding, but Donnie’s eager to see his Tech come to life again. It’s motivation enough to keep him going, even though his feet are tired and his legs are sore and his hands are starting to cramp and there’s a headache threatening the back of his head.
“Come on, come on, wake up,” He coos, crouching down to be eye level with his creation. Delight bursts fireworks in his chest as eyelids flutter and then a sliver of glowing yellow appears, “Thaaaaat’s it, come on, you can do it! Open you eyes...that’s it…”
“Dee…?” A hoarse croak of recognition, the flicker of glowing eyes.
Donnie beams and raises his hand to cup the round, childish face in his palm. That draws a soft, weak churr from the Tech on the table.
“You’re all right, Pet. Nothing and no one will ever hurt you again. You’ll be safe now. I promise.”
And he means it.