Work Text:
Donnie felt like hitting his head on his desk, though he forced himself not to so that he didn’t break his technology.
He was slouched at his computer, one foot on the floor and the other on his chair, his knee at his chest as he typed on his computer. His stolen high-thread-count blanket had been taken from his bedroom so he could drape it over himself like a cloak.
He was trying to get SHELLDON’s memories back, after being destroyed by the Shredder. It was a project he’d been working on for years, fueled by sheer “I bet I can do it” energy for the first year. But he still didn’t know how to get them back. He’d tried recreating the memories, and various other things, but it still wouldn’t be the same SHELLDON.
There was a week or two where Leo had kept him in the med bay, and he wasn’t allowed to go to his lab and work on projects. When he was finally released, he’d sleep for a couple of hours before the itch to work on his technological son took over and he’d get a cup of coffee before holing himself up in his lab. Then someone would find him, make him sleep, and then he’d sleep for a couple more hours before he went to his lab to work on SHELLDON again. Then someone would find him again, and it would repeat. A vicious cycle.
He took a deep breath.
He needed a break, before he started breaking down into tears, breaking his technology, doing something incredibly illegal and frowned upon by his brothers, or all three.
He got up from his rolling gamer chair, trying to ignore the phantom feeling of slimy appendages burrowing beneath his skin. Only his shell was spared from the feeling, though that was because the airtight seal of his battleshell drowned it out.
He hadn’t taken his battleshell off in a long while.
Oops.
He could deal with the consequences later. He wound his blanket around his hands, and the feeling of the fabric made him feel a little better.
He walked out of his lab, his steps silent. His feet took him to the kitchen, where he decided to make a cup of instant coffee before continuing to beat his head against the figurative brick wall that was SHELLDON’s memories.
He heard a quiet string of curses in Spanish as he mixed his coffee.
From the med bay.
In a voice that he had heard since he could remember.
He pinched the bridge of his snout, pushing his glasses up so he could. He squeezed his eyes shut, before opening them and utilising his ninja training to quietly make his way towards the med bay with his full purple mug.
Sure enough, there was Leo. Patching himself up, sat on one of the stolen beds. He quietly spat Spanish curses as he rubbed a reddening wipe over the huge scrape on his knee, and Donnie could smell the rubbing alcohol from where he was standing.
Donnie took a quiet sip of his coffee—the warm drink soothing—as he watched his twin say one last swear before the slider took in a shaky breath, throwing the wipe into the garbage can with extreme prejudice.
He gave Leo a few moments to wrap it in a bandage.
Then he spoke.
“Hamato Leonardo,” Donnie said crossly.
Leo screamed. Very loudly and very shrilly, though he cut himself off quickly, probably remembering that other people were sleeping. The scream made Donnie wince, but he laughed a little as his twin clutched imaginative pearls.
“Donnie what the—Whyyyy would you do that to me?!”
“You’re hurt,” the softshell observed.
“Brilliant observation, genius,” Leo grumbled.
“Why thank you. What happened?”
“You’re not gonna get mad at me for getting hurt?”
Donnie took a long sip of his coffee. “I can do that when I’m more awake and can think of more complex words than ‘idiot’, ‘dumb-dumb’, and ‘stupid’. And you already know we know that you sneak out during nights you can’t sleep, and also your tracker shows you going literally everywhere in the city during the night. So it’s less a question of ‘when, why, where’, more ‘how’ so that we can make sure you don’t get some odd sickness or mystic disease.”
“You mean mystic curse?” Leo asked, with a grin that could only be described as a mischievous smirk.
Donnie took a deep breath. “Logically, ‘curses’ are a thing of myth. Myths are, incidentally, completely fictional and a figment of people’s imagination. Which is just another way to say ‘fake’, by the way. However, the thing that ‘mystic curses’ are closest to are diseases and—Leo I can tell what you’re doing you’re not getting out of explaining yourself. What. Happened.”
Leo sighed. “Fine. Hypno and his worm buddy—I’m like 90% sure they’re dating now, my gaydar is tingling—needed to pay rent again. I was chasing after them on the roofs, then—” He released a controlled breath. “Flashback. Felt like fighting Prime in the sky. Then I was in the air, falling, and when I landed, I landed in a roll, but my knee got scraped. It hurt like a son of a—Don’t worry, I can see the face you’re making, it’s not broken, not even cracked. I fell into a roll, absorbed the impact. I can walk, it’s just a flesh wound.”
Donnie raised an eyebrow. Too bad he didn’t have his mask, the expression would be a lot better if he had his gorgeous sharpie’d eyebrows.
“Seriously, Don-Tron. Just a scrape. Hurts to pick out all the gravel bits and disinfect, no lasting damage to my walking, except for the next few days where I might need to steal numbing cream.”
Donnie heaved a large sigh, and one of the arms in his spider battleshell rummaged around in its storage compartment until it pulled out an almost-empty tube of numbing cream. He tossed it to his twin, who caught it in one hand.
“You can keep it,” the softshell said after taking another sip of his coffee. “My injuries are healed enough that they don’t hurt much, and we need to go out for another shopping run soon anyways. I’ll just put it on the list. And one more thing—” He moved towards his twin, took one of his arms, and clasped a bright blue bracelet onto his wrist with one of his other spider battleshell arms.
“Wha—”
“You’re on near-house arrest.”
“WHA—” Donnie smacked a blanket-wrapped hand over his mouth, trying not to think about whether Leo's spit got on it or not.
“You’re going to wake up everyone else. You can be in the lair, Run of the Mill, and April’s. Each of the aforementioned locations have a distance of exactly fifteen metres from the edge of each. You can portal between each location, the bracelet doesn’t care about that. If you go outside the limits, the bracelet sends me a notification loud enough to wake me up. Then if that happens, I’m waking everyone else up and dragging you back. No more midnight vigilantism, especially if you’re not taking anyone else with you.”
“Aw, Tello, are you worried about me?” Leo asked, angry sweetness dripping from his voice.
“Yes,” Donnie responded bluntly. It made Leo’s face fall a little, before he put the mask back over it. “I’m sick of you getting hurt and pretending that it never happens, patching yourself up at—” he checked his wrist-tech for the time, “3:26 AM, and I wish you’d have told me instead of making me find out myself so I could at least watch your back out there!”
At that, Leo’s mask completely fell. Donnie flinched back, not realizing his voice had been rising the entire time.
“Oh.”
Leo looked away.
“I would like to clarify, Nardo,” he began, grabbing shoulder with his empty hand, glad to see Leo turn his attention back to the softshell, “I do not hate you for going out there. I love you, and I would rather not see you bleed to death in some alleyway if I had even a little chance to stop it. You might be breaking the Big Five, and you might be a dumb-dumb, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. You’re my dumb-dumb. You're my twin. If it meant rescuing you from a hostage situation, I would hand over all of my tech. I would build advanced nuclear weapons and destroy the world for you.”
Leo’s eyes got shiny. Donnie knew what was coming next.
“I’m okay with hugs right now. Just don’t spill my coffee.”
Leo immediately leaned forward and threw his arms around the softshell, under the blanket, squeezing. Donnie traced shapes into the slider’s shell while he drank more of his coffee, then began quietly rapping the lines to a song.
“Loom 16, take corridor B, down the stairs past the ibis tapestry.”
Leo began unconsciously beatboxing along. Badly, on account of the occasional sniffs.
“Sliding bookcase after bookcase shows the way to the hall, up the pole though a hole to a waterfall.”
Leo cut himself off with a wet laugh. “You’re such a dork.”
“It takes one to know one, little brother.”
Leo gasped dramatically—or as dramatically as he could through his tears—and drew away, though didn’t let go of Donnie.
“You know I was born first,” Leo said, though there was no bite to it. Maybe it was because he was simultaneously crying, but Donnie knew it was because he didn’t mean it. Neither of them did, whenever they fought about it.
Donnie took a long sip of his coffee.
“Sure. If time is non-linear, and the space-time continuum doesn’t exist.”
“Well, in the fourth dimension—”
Donnie shushed him. “I like staying in my denial that I know the most about this.”
Leo smiled. Genuine, not a teasing grin or a smug smirk.
Just Leo.
“Thanks, Don-Tron.”
“For the cream, for existing, or for telling you that I’d nuke the world for you?”
“Yes.”
“That was not a yes or no question.”
The slider laughed. Donnie was pretty sure that was the first time he’d genuinely laughed since they fought the Krang.
“Wha—”
“I like it when you’re you, Donnie,” Leo said, after his laughs died down.
“You are incredibly sleep deprived,” Donnie observed. “Have you been running on adrenaline this entire time?”
“I am. And yep,” Leo agreed, blinking up at him with a sleepy smile. “Can I sleep in your room tonight?”
SHELLDON still needed more work. More hitting his head against the figurative wall until it broke.
But also, he did need a break.
He was still sort of leaning towards doing something illegal. Which was not very good.
And he had some botany rabbit-holes he wanted to fall into.
“Sure.” There was a quick moment where he wished he was strong enough to lift his twin like Raph or Mikey. Then he extended the arms of his battleshell, took the blanket off of himself, wrapped it around Leo, and picked him up. Donnie had to adapt to the sudden added weight, but much better than holding the slider himself.
He walked to his room, passing his lab and locking the door.
When they finally got to his room, he carefully set the now-asleep package on his bed, beneath the built-in heat lamp. Then he got his phone from his desk and laid down beside Leo, opening up his personal search engine that looked through the search engines of both human and Mystic origin.
“You gonna take your battleshell off, Tello?” the slider mumbled, half-asleep.
Donnie thought about it for a moment.
“Yes.”
He took off his battleshell and set it carefully on the floor below his bed, his shell to Leo. There was a quick moment where it felt like things were burrowing into it, but they were silenced by a warm hand being placed on his shell.
A finger traced letters onto it.
I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U
Then a big heart surrounding the letters.
Donnie smiled to himself.
“I love you too, Nardo. Now sleep, you have a lot to catch up on.”
Arms wrapped around his torso, the fingers interlocking at his plastron as he searched up his first query: ‘how to take care of mandrakes’. He filtered the searches so it showed only Mystic results.
He heard his twin’s breathing slowing. At some point, Leo mooshed his face into his shell.
Donnie could feel the caffeine wearing off, but he still had more to research.
He was sure he could stay awake until morning, and finish going through all his rabbit-holes.
* * * * *
Raph unwrapped his hands, coming from a quick workout in the dojo. He looked around the dining area once he arrived, and saw that the twins were missing.
“Where’re Donnie and Leo?” he asked Mikey, who was at the stolen wafflemaker.
“Don’t know. Sleeping? Hopefully? It’s not very likely though, they’re probably working on whatever they do instead of sleeping.”
“Huh. Raph’ll go look.”
He went through the lair, looked in the lab, looked in the med bay, and saw a new alcohol wipe in the garbage. But neither twin. He made his ways to the rooms next, thinking that maybe they were actually sleeping. Donnie’s room came up first. He poked his head in, and what he saw made him smile.
Because Donnie had finally taken his battleshell off, something that Raph hadn’t seen off his shell since he was released from the med bay and was allowed to wear it again. He was asleep, his phone in one hand. There was a Mysticpedia page open on it. Raph had a feeling he was researching botany until he eventually fell asleep.
Leo was mostly wrapped in Donnie’s blanket, though it looked like he’d draped some of it over his twin. His arms were wrapped tightly around the softshell’s torso, his face mooshed into the leathery shell. He was also completely out, his mask still on.
He snapped a picture of the sleeping twins, before stepping away and texting Mikey.
YOU: guess what?
YOU: [image]
LITTLE MAN: JSFDJKFSJGSSDFJSKJSDK REALLY?? 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Mikey practically appeared beside the snapper, beaming. He quickly and quietly entered the room, utilising their ninja training, snapping a bunch of photos from various angles of the twins.
“Finally!” he chirped with a big smile, once he left the room. “Those two need sleep. I’m, like, 90% sure they haven’t slept for longer than three hours a day since we turtle piled.”
“Nope. Are you sending those to April?”
“Heck yeah,” the box turtle responded with a grin.