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There’s a gentle rapping of knuckles at the lab door that gently pulls his focus away from his screen.
Retinas sore and burning from their overuse, he only has to half swivel his hair around to see his brother sheepishly let himself in without permission — the only brother who could do so without Donnie marching them back out again.
“Do you have a minute?”
He watches his fingers fluidly flit across his chest, eyes locked into the turtle that sits before him as he awaits his answer.
Donnie’s hand sweeps heavily across his face, muffling a tired sigh into his palm, unheard yet fully realised when his brother wordlessly steps forward to cross the room and places a hand on his knee, forcing him to look upwards.
“What’s wrong?”
In the grand scheme of things, there were a plethora of answers to that one tiny question, signed off by his brother's nervous hands that hover, almost like there was perhaps more to say.
Mikey’s mouth presses into a hard line. Donnie knows he’s growing increasingly frustrated the more he refuses to give.
He sighs again, louder and more pronounced with a heaving weight on his shoulders.
“Headache.” He signs and says out loud at the same time.
Mikey’s brow crumples. His eyes flicker over his shoulder, resting towards where the computer still buzzed and hummed behind him, waiting for him at its beck and call. There was so much work to get done. So much to achieve in so little time.
His molars find solace in the soft give of his cheek, chewing slowly there until the coppery burst of flavour hits his tongue, and he withdraws his jaw, letting it go slightly slack as he sighs once more.
“Rest?” A one-word notion of his brother's hand. Punchy and deliberate, like adding the question mark was merely an afterthought towards the last second.
Donnie smiles at him; a thin, barely there scrawl across his face that tells them both it was some fear to manage on its own.
“Later.” Is his short reply. He can’t afford to rest. He can’t allow himself the luxury to slip off to bed and let himself dream of things that weren't all the responsibility of keeping the lair running and keeping track of any possible threats cropping up around the city without more than a minute's notice.
His brother shakes his head, rather stubbornly so.
“Rest.” He says it again, more forceful this time. Nodding his head forward as it to clarify his point that he wasn’t messing around. “You look tired.”
Donnie hasn’t the energy to give him some witty rejoinder that he looked like this on most of his good days; the heavy bags and the gaunt look that bit at his cheeks was kind of his signature look.
But he knows Mikey can sniff out a deflection a mile off, so he just waves him off.
“I’m alright, Mike.” He says out loud to him, hands flopping like a deadweight in his lap. “Honest.”
He spins away, chaptering their conversation in means that if Mikey can’t see him face to face, there was nothing much he could really do than to drop it.
But there’s a hand curling around the back of his chair, forcing it backwards, and Donnie gasps, the sound lodged somewhere in the back of his throat as he fails to find his balance, almost toppling over until he steadies himself with flailing arms.
He scowls at his brother. “Asshole.”
“Rest!” Mikey is practically yelling at him right now, even with the lab in a still, settled silence, Donnie can feel his delivery rattle right through him. “Don’t tell me no.”
Mikey is supposed to be Donnie’s little brother; never the other way around, but oftentimes, more times than he’d care to admit that was, Donnie found himself shrinking under all of the confidence and bravado he didn’t have himself. More times in his life, Donnie was the one wishing he could be like him; stealing away some of his unbridled enthusiasm that made him loud, even without a voice to sound it off.
“You’ve been working all day. All night. You barely ate dinner.” Mikey’s face crumples, and oh, Donnie really can’t have him crying on him like this. That’s a rotten move even for him.
“I’m worried about you. You’re not yourself.” His hands tremble as he forces the words out through them.
“I miss you, Dee.”
His nickname, an amalgamation of the letter D and an explosion, something they’d coined when they were small, hit hard against his chest with passion, like Mikey ever needed to prove to him that he had even an ounce in him for anything at all.
Donnie stands. The bones in his knees groan and pop and his head feels fuzzy and light, like he might pass out.
But the vision of his brother standing before him sweeps it all away as he crosses the short distance towards him and stands before him, taller in stature but so small in every other way.
“Sorry.” He signs, letting the notion linger as he rests his knuckles against his plastron. Mikey stares at it, blinks and then looks back towards Donnie, right into his eyes.
“I guess I’m just… stressed,” he says slowly, smacking his hands together for legitimacy, trying to convey as clearly as he possibly could how much all of this really was weighing on him.
“Yeah.” Mikey mouths, lips over-exaggerating the word slightly. “I know. I’m sorry too.”
None of this was Mikey’s to be sorry for. Even with everything that had transpired in the past few months in the wake of their father’s death and the fall of the Shredder, this was the toxic fallout of that world shaking bomb having been detonated.
Donnie had expected their world to shape up again, but it’d come apart like a rubber band being pulled and pulled and pulled until it couldn’t no more, snapping and sending them soaring in different directions.
Leo had been the worst off to begin with: the hallucinations and the long, sleepless nights where he’d spend hours crouched in front of the shine until the candles burnt to the end of their wick. It’d been a very long time to undo all of that.
Things weren’t as bad as they initially were, but in the absence of their father, it was hard to make everything entirely perfect. Donnie often reminisced about the days before their fifteenth birthday, before their first topside outing. Before everything was soiled.
But they’re here now. They’re all here, bar one, and all Donnie can do is keep pushing forward to keep his family safe and secure.
He looks to his little brother. His best friend in every sense and meaning of the word. He’s losing that baby fat around the edges of his face, no longer soft all the way around. He’s growing into his shell and the stubby limbs he once held now grow with him, taller and stronger than before.
You won’t have this forever, a gentle and familiar voice reminds him from somewhere.
He feels a pinch in his cheeks. His brother missed him. And he missed him too.
“Turtle pile?” He only has to ask just once. The motion of his fingers as a collective string of L+R+D+M and love. Something else they made up when they were small still. Something that managed to stick around, no matter what.
Warmth spills over from Mikey’s beaming face into his chest.
“Yes!” Mikey chirps delightedly. He sprints off to no doubt go fetch their other siblings.
Donnie rubs tiredly at his head. He could throw a handful of meds at the ache and he could carry on working with it still looming over him like a dark crowd, or he could get up and go take himself to the other room where there would already be a nest of blankets awaiting him with an eager Mikey standing amongst them all, beckoning him over with the loudest most amazing laughter he’d ever heard.
He shuts off his computer, stilling his racing mind, and he goes.