Work Text:
Collections/Challenges: Whumpay, Day 17
Prompt(s): Financial Trouble
Characters: Donatello, mentioned: Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, April, Casey, Splinter
Rating: Teen
Summary: During the aftermath of the invasion, Donnie realizes their lack of an income has had more drastic effects than anyone realized. As he looks over Leo’s battered body in the back of Casey’s van, Donnie vows to make sure something like this will never happened again. No matter the cost.
————————————————————
The turtles never needed money. They had algae, worms, they robbed junk yards and found discarded tools, toasters, furniture. They would take each item home and Donatello would fix it up, good as new.
They never needed money.
They never needed money.. until they went to the surface for the first time and tried pizza. Obviously, they couldn’t steal it. Or rather—they didn’t want to. They had to start scavenging, picking up spare bills and coins. Sometimes they got lucky. Sometimes they didn’t.
If they didn’t have money it wasn’t the end of the world. April would lend a hand, Casey would pitch in a few bucks. Enough to satiate their pizza cravings. That’s all they needed the money for—food.
That’s what they thought anyways.
Oh.. how wrong they were.
The injuries started piling up first. Gashes that needed stitches, a fracture that required a proper cast and crutch, poison that needed a store bought antidote. When it wasn’t a wound, it was a rare chemical Donnie didn’t currently have in his possession. Something that could only be ordered online. A key ingredient for the retro mutagen, an alkali metal he was steadily running out of, acids and bases that couldn’t be found in a scrap yard.
Donnie was the first to recognize their financial trouble. When they returned from dimension x with the invasion ready to go at any minute, he realized that they didn’t have enough money. Donnie was missing key parts for his mech—it could work without them, obviously, but they were necessary for 100% guaranteed functionality. The machinery was rare, the kind of stuff that cost thousands—and they didn’t have any money.
That was the first time Donnie realized how reliant he was on these parts and chemicals. He tried to brush past it, convincing himself that it would be fine. He didn’t really need those specific parts—it would work fine without them, right?
In hindsight, he definitely did. (Not that it matted anyway.)
As he sat in the van with Raph and Mikey, staring down at Leo’s comatose body, he was a wreck. His brain was going a million miles a minute, running through everything that had gone wrong. Every decision. All the mistakes. The argument. The mech. Shredder. Splinter. The domino pieces seemed to fall perfectly into place, sending them hurtling into failure. But why? Why did this happen?
Deep down, Donnie knew the root of it all was the money.
He didn’t have enough money to properly build the mech, therefore they couldn’t stop the invasion, leading Leo to where he is now. Injured, unconscious, a cracked shell that Donnie couldn’t fix because he didn’t have the necessary equipment, because he didn’t have the money.
Donnie took a good look at his brothers body, scanning over the broken and battered flesh. Leo’s face was scratched up and red from the glass, his nose was covered in dried up blood and he was sporting a nasty black eye. His neck was painted with colourful bruises, small pinpricks of blood dried in various places across the green skin. He had about a dozen cuts and gashes on each arm, some of them were still bleeding, sluggishly, a small puddle forming below the wounds. Donnie had wrapped the bad ones; three shirts had been dismembered in the process. Leo’s plastron was scratched to all hell but thankfully there weren’t any chips. The one mercy it seemed he had been granted.
Leo’s legs were mostly unscathed—a mural of their own scratches and bruises. Donnie wished that was all, really he did, but he couldn’t ignore the broken leg glaring at him, stabilized with a pink T-shirt and his broken Bo staff. It frustrated him that a t-shirt was all they had, yet another glaring example of why they needed money. He tried to move past it but he could still hear the sickening crunch of bones forcing themselves back into place. He could feel them shifting under his hands as he wrapped the joint. Mikey and April had to cover their ears, closing their eyes while they huddled up together. Leo had let out a weak groan soaked with pain, even Raph had to turn away, staring off into the distance with blank eyes. The injury would take a long time to heal. Months, maybe even years. A part of him hoped Leo would stay out for the worst of it—another part of him hoped Leo would wake up once they put a cast on.
Donnie couldn’t look at Leo’s shell from his position on the floor but he remembered it clear as day. He was already cringing at the mental imagery, his hands clenching into fists. His shell had been.. bad. Very bad. It was scuffed and black, scratched and scraped in every direction. There was a point directly in the centre where a spiderweb of cracks fanned out like some fucked up art piece. Donnie was thankful that it wasn’t completely shattered but that didn’t negate how awful it was. He hoped—prayed that they’d heal, but he wasn’t sure. For once, he didn’t know.
He hated it.
Donnie put his head into his hands, trying to fight back the choir of voices telling him it was all his fault. Over to the side he could hear Raph and Mikey comforting each other, or rather, Raph comforting Mikey. He secretly wished they’d shut up. He wished that they knew how awful their situation was, how it could’ve been—no, how it could be so much better, if only Donnie had access to the proper equipment. The necessary equipment.
Donnie had always built what they needed, that was what they could count on. The centrifuge had been a rare piece of tech he couldn’t recreate and they had been lucky enough to find it in the rubble of TCRI. They were always lucky enough to find things like that—things you couldn’t find in the city junkyard. But they couldn’t rely on luck. They needed stability.
Their father was dead. Leo was in a coma. New York has been taken over by the kraang. The population had been turned into all sorts of mutants, soon to be enslaved—or worse, slaughtered. Donnie had failed them.
He failed his father.
He failed his brother.
He failed his family.
He failed everyone.
He blinked back the tears, sniffing and wiping his eyes. Hopefully it looked like grief over Leo’s condition, which it partly was, but really it was the debilitating guilt eating him from the inside out.
This was all his fault. He should’ve prevented this—somehow. They needed money and he should’ve been able to provide it (logically he knew he couldn’t. He couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t steal from a bank. He couldn’t drain April or Casey of their own savings. He couldn’t do anything.)
(He still felt guilty.)
As the weight started to settle in, he became numb. Leo was the older brother, the “responsible” one, but Donnie was the one who kept everything running. He needed to figure out a plan, had to learn how to navigate this lifestyle with the lack of an income. He needed to improve his engineering skills, brush up on his first aid. He needed to learn how to make the most top notch, complex machinery from scraps and rubble. He needed to be better.
They didn’t have money, but they had him. And he was going to fix this. Whatever it takes.