Work Text:
Donnie sighed and rubbed his face, groaning in frustration at the lines of code he had been staring at for hours. But he couldn’t stop now. He was so close.
There was a knock at the door of his lab, making him jump lightly and knock over the mug of coffee on his desk that had long been cold. “Shit!” he exclaimed as the mug shattered on the floor, spraying the cold liquid and shards of glass over his feet. Donnie froze.
“Dee? You okay in there?” It was Mikey. Well this was a predicament. Donnie summoned his spider battle shell to his back, using the metal attachments to lift him above the ground so he didn’t step on any glass, the movement shaking the tiny shards from his feet. The coffee on his ankles had begun to dry, the feeling sticky and uncomfortable. He flapped his hand in irritation.
“Donnie?” Oh. Right. He had forgotten about his brother for a second. “Breakfast is ready. I heard something break in there. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Mikey,” Donnie called. “I’ll be right there. Just… just give me a second.” The metal attachments brought him to the couch in the back corner of the lab and set him down. The couch didn’t get much use; it was only put in his lab in the first place because Leo insisted on having a place to sit when he wanted to come in and bother Donnie.
He looked down at his feet to assess the damage. It wasn’t anything bad. For the most part, the tiny pieces of glass had simply bounced off the skin. There were, however, a couple places where they had pierced, tiny rivulets of blood running sluggishly down. The sight made his stomach feel strange. In the back of his mind, he knew why. He pushed the thoughts down as he carefully picked out the pieces of glass, shining a light over the skin to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
He was far enough away from the spill to walk to the bathroom now and wash the stickiness away. None of the little cuts were deep or bad enough to require anything more than cleaning them. They didn’t even need bandaids. But still, he stared at them, unblinking. Watching the blood well up again, but no longer dripping. Just sitting in the grooves. Bright red standing out against the deep green of his skin.
He still had to clean up the mess in his lab. And he had to attend breakfast with his family. And he couldn’t think straight. Everything felt faintly fuzzy around the edges. Like he was dreaming. Like this wasn’t real. Was this real? No, of course it was real.
Yes, this was real. The itching of his wrists told Donnie it was. He ignored it. Ignored the itching. Ignored the fuzziness. Ignored the feeling in the pit of his stomach and the thoughts bubbling up in the back of his mind. The very unwanted thoughts that were very rudely invading his brain.
The sound of knocking on the bathroom door broke him from his daze. “Don? You taking a shit in there?” Leo. “Breakfast has been ready for like ten minutes, dude. Are you coming or not? Your food’s getting cold.” He sounded like he was trying to keep worry out of his voice. It came through regardless. When Donnie didn’t respond, he spoke again. “Hey, you good in there, Dee?”
Donnie opened the door. “I am just fine, Nardo.” His voice trembled minutely and he prayed Leo wouldn’t notice. His twin was leaning faux-casually against the doorframe with barely-disguised concern written on his face. “I just spilled some coffee in my lab and was cleaning it up.”
The concern on Leo’s face slipped into relief. “Oh, well, c’mon. Mikey’s been keeping your food in the microwave.” He turned to go down the hall, not looking back as Donnie trailed behind him.
The kitchen smelled sweet and his family was sitting at the table, a plate of nearly-finished french toast sitting in front of each of them. Leo’s was, of course, drowning in syrup and nearly invisible with all the blueberries piled on top of it. When Donnie sat down, Mikey wordlessly placed his plate in front of him, still steaming from the microwave. Donnie began eating, not bothering with any toppings. He didn’t taste the food; he could have been eating cardboard for all he knew.
He suddenly felt Leo’s hand on his wrist. He looked down. Oh. He was scratching at his arms. They looked raw, a pink tinge beginning to form under his skin. He looked up at his twin. Are you okay? Leo’s eyes seemed to say. Donnie’s face burned hot with shame. He nodded wordlessly and stared down at his half-eaten food. It was suddenly unappetizing. He felt his brothers’ eyes burning into his head. He didn’t look up.
Donnie stood up. “I am full,” he said to no one in particular. “Thank you for the food, Angelo.” He turned to leave but was interrupted by the sound of a chair scraping against the floor followed by Leo’s voice.
“Hey, Dee? You wanna watch something with me in my room?” His voice broke slightly and he cleared his throat. “We can watch Pluto Vacation IV.”
Donnie pondered. It was rare he would turn down an opportunity to have Leo willingly sit down and watch his favorite movie. But at the same time, he still had work to do, even if he doubted that he would actually be able to get anything done due to the fog still swimming around in his head.
Leo apparently took Donnie’s silence as confirmation that, yes, he would like that, and grabbed Donnie’s wrist again, abandoning his own plate on the table. Leo led Donnie to his room. Donnie followed. Neither of them said anything.
Donnie wasn’t able to pay attention to the movie. He stared at the screen of Leo’s laptop but didn’t register anything happening on it. He could feel Leo’s eyes on him, watching diligently. He ignored him. Leo touched his shoulder. Donnie jumped minutely. Leo was looking down at Donnie’s arms. Donnie saw he was scratching again. He stopped, folding his hands in his lap and turned back to the movie neither of them were watching.
Donnie remembered a similar situation from years ago, back when they were tots. He remembered he had worked himself up into a sobbing mess, crying into Leo’s arms because he had gotten a papercut. The sight of his own blood had made him squeamish. It was funny, looking back at how scared he was. He didn’t know when he had gone from being terrified at the sight of blood to watching with morbid fascination at how it beaded up from his skin.
Donnie didn’t want to die. Not really. But at the same time, he couldn’t really remember the last time he wanted to be alive. The idea of dying, the idea of not knowing what happens after life, it was… scary. But so was being alive. He had cornered himself; damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
He was usually able to distract himself from these thoughts. Immersing himself in his work was the best way of doing this; if he was focused on not blowing anything up, he wouldn’t be able to focus on the horrible itching feeling underneath his skin. He wouldn’t be able to focus on the fogginess of his mind.
Donnie was pulled back to reality by the sound of the laptop shutting. He looked up at his twin, who was standing up and stretching. Oh. The movie must have ended. Donnie stood up.
“Hey, Dontron?” Leo asked, feigning nonchalance as he settled on his bed. Donnie turned to him. “I was gonna head to Hueso’s and hang out there for a little bit. Do you wanna come with?” He picked at one of the loose threads on his sheets, eyes pleading, though Donnie didn’t know what for.
He nodded numbly, not entirely processing what Leo had said or why he seemed so desperate for Donnie to come along.
Leo stared at him for a second too long, expression carefully blank. “Alright,” he said, finally. “Get ready and then I can portal us there.”
Donnie nodded again.
Run of the Mill was loud, as expected, and Donnie was flooded with relief that he had brought his headphones because the atmosphere was immediately overwhelming. Donnie slid into a booth while Leo wandered off to go bother Señor Hueso, subtly shooting Donnie concerned looks every so often. They went unnoticed. Donnie was preoccupied with staring at the wood grain of the table, scratching his arms through his hoodie.
He pulled out his phone to do… something, but ended up staring at his homescreen. It was a photo of him and Leo, the latter’s arm slung around Donnie while his own arms were crossed. Leo was cheesing for the camera and Donnie looked mildly annoyed, but there was a faint smile playing on his lips. It was one of Donnie’s favorite pictures of the two of them (though he would never tell Leo that).
Would Leo care if he disappeared? Logically, he would. They were brothers — twins — after all. But at the same time, Donnie remembered all the times he had begun infodumping only to be shut down by Leo with a roll of his eyes and a proclamation that Donnie had gone into “speech mode.” He remembered Leo’s comments of needing to fix Donnie’s fixes. He remembered the times Leo had called his tech junk. But that’s just how the twins were, right? They threw jabs and barbs at each other.
But was Leo really joking when he would say all that stuff? Would he secretly be relieved if Donnie disappeared?
Leo suddenly materialized at Donnie’s side, making him jump. Leo said something, but the noise-cancelling on Donnie’s headphones was turned up to the max. All he saw was his twin’s lips moving without any sound. Leo seemed to understand that Donnie couldn’t hear him and gestured to Donnie’s arms. Donnie looked down and saw that at some point he had slipped his hands underneath the sleeves of his hoodie.
And that’s when the pain registered. It was a dull throb, almost numb-feeling in a way that didn’t make sense. Then again, nothing really made sense right now. And Donnie felt something warm and wet coating his fingers, already drying underneath his fingernails. He pulled his hands out from his sleeves and, yeah, that was blood. His pupils dilated and he just stared.
A hand gently grabbed his wrist (though he didn’t feel the pain that should have come from it) and he looked up, met with Leo’s face, just inches from his own, thinly-veiled panic evident in his features. Hueso was there too, apparently, eyes wide in their sockets. Leo was still trying to talk to him, but even if Donnie could hear him, he didn’t think he would be able to process anything his twin was saying.
The world felt fuzzy and distant, like Donnie was floating in a dream. The world was made up of blobs of color. The grip on his wrist tightened and a whine was pulled from his throat without his permission. The grip lessened. And then he was being picked up. He didn’t fight it. The world was silent. And dark. When did his eyes close? He couldn’t find the will to reopen them.
His headphones had been removed. That was the first thing Donnie noticed. He could hear a speaker playing… something. His brain still wasn’t working well enough for him to identify what it was. He was laying on something soft. It was a bed, but it wasn’t his bed. It was a bare mattress with one sheet covering him. Donnie liked to have as many blankets as possible on his bed. And there was something covering his arms. It smelled like citrus. It smelled like Leo’s room.
Something at the other end of the bed shifted, making the mattress dip lightly. Donnie finally opened his eyes and was greeted with the sight of his twin, seemingly immersed in the movie he was watching, lips moving along with the audio. Donnie turned his attention to the lap and rolled his eyes. Of course this dumb-dumb was watching Jupiter Jim Sails the Seven Galaxies. He absently reached down to scratch at his arms and was interrupted by the feeling of fabric covering them. He looked down. White, dotted with small blots of red. Had he done that?
He looked back up and saw Leo staring at him. The two of them were silent for a moment, just looking at each other. Leo’s face was blank, his eyes betraying nothing about how he was feeling. Finally, Donnie spoke up, voice crackling strangely.
“Scoff. I don’t understand how you can watch this.”
Apparently, that was not the right thing to say in the situation. Leo’s expression darkened. “Really?” he breathed out in disbelief, running a hand down his face. “That’s all you’re gonna say? We’re not gonna talk about what happened?”
Donnie didn’t say anything for a second, staring down at his bandages again. “I do not know what there is to say,” he said carefully, not looking up at his twin.
Leo barked out a cold laugh that was devoid of any humor. “Okay, I’ll start then. You’ve been weird all day, you tore your arms to shreds, you were dissociating for three hours before you fell asleep. What’s going on?”
Donnie still didn’t look at him. He scratched at his wrists and then stopped when the motion rubbed the bandages over the fresh cuts, the gauze pulling at the torn skin and creating a horrible sensation that sent chills down his spine.
“Dee, please. Talk to me.” Leo’s voice sounded too raw, too emotional. It was something Donnie rarely ever heard from him.
The silence that followed was deafening. Donnie didn’t want to say anything. But he had to say something. “I think…” he trailed off before starting again. “I think today was a bad day.” He whispered the words like it was a confession, a terrible secret.
His twin’s response came immediately. “Alright. Do you know why?”
He nodded. “I, fuck, I knocked over one of my mugs this morning and — I still haven’t cleaned that up, actually — and it broke and cut me a little and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the blood. And it reminded me of–” he cut himself off with a whine. He still had trouble talking about it.
“Of cutting?” Leo finished for him.
Donnie nodded brokenly. Leo had been the first one to find out about his… habit. It hadn’t been intentional, of course. If Donnie had his way, no one would have ever found out. But Donnie had gotten sloppy one day and forgot to lock the bathroom door when he slipped inside to run the blade over his skin a few times. He would just get so… he didn’t know. And he needed a way to get that out of his system. He would find other ways to hurt himself if he didn’t have a blade on hand. Scratching was the main one. He knew it wasn’t healthy. But there was something about watching the blood bubble up and run over his skin that felt so cathartic. It became his outlet.
And then Leo had found out. Of course he found out. He would always find out about anything going on in the family. When he had barged into the bathroom, apparently not realizing it was occupied, Donnie had jumped and tried to hide both the blade and his arms behind his back. But it was too late.
The bandages running up and down Donnie’s arms now reminded him of that horribly tense moment in time where Leo had dragged him to the med bay and wouldn't let him leave until he let Leo clean and bandage the cuts (both old and new) and he explained what had happened.
“Oh,” Leo said, voice shaking almost unnoticably. Donnie noticed. “Alright. I… That’s– that’s alright.”
“I’m sorry,” Donnie whispered, burning with shame. It was really starting to sink in now. Months of progress down the drain in less than a day. He had really messed up.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
The two of them sat there like that for a long while, the movie still playing in the background because neither of them really had the will to turn it off. They didn’t look at each other. They just sat in silence. It was sickening. Donnie felt like he was going to choke on it.
After what felt like hours, Leo’s voice came. “So, it’s blood?”
Donnie finally lifted his head to look at the slider in confusion. He was staring at the TV, though it didn’t look like he was really watching it. “What?” he asked, not understanding.
“It triggers you,” Leo clarified. His eyes remained on the TV and his face remained unreadable.
Donnie thought about it for a moment. “I’m… not entirely sure,” he admitted. “Because I get hurt and bleed in fights all the time. And I’m not really ever triggered by that.”
Leo hummed, brow furrowed. They lapsed back into silence.
Later, Leo approached Donnie as he was cleaning up the mess in his lab. He had already carefully swept away the pieces of broken glass and disposed of them in his bin that was specifically meant for broken glass, not wanting to throw it away in his normal trash bin lest someone went to empty it and accidentally cut themself. He was now working on scrubbing aggressively at the sticky residue on the floor, wearing gloves that went nearly all the way up to his elbows.
Leo flopped down on the couch and watched him work for a few minutes. He was so silent that Donnie forgot he was there, jumping when the slider finally spoke up.
“Can we make a deal?” he asked suddenly. He was staring up at the ceiling.
Donnie paused. “That depends on what the deal is,” he responded dubiously, looking at Leo from the corner of his eye.
Leo turned to look straight at him, sitting up. “Next time you feel triggered, can you tell someone?” His voice trembled slightly and he swallowed. “It doesn’t have to be me; I just want you to tell someone.”
Donnie looked at his twin for a long moment. “I… suppose I can do that,” he muttered, turning back to stare at the floor. He was still.
“Thanks,” Leo whispered, almost inaudible. The sound of his lab door closing followed a few seconds later.
Donnie stared down at the bandages lining his arms. There were only a few faint speckles of blood that had soaked through the fabric. It really wasn’t that bad, he kept telling himself. And still, he stared, not wanting to peel back the strips of white and see the damage that laid underneath. But he knew that bandages should be changed every day. And he didn’t want to ask for help. He didn’t need to ask for help.
Whatever. He could do this. He could do this. He could totally do this. He carefully unwound the bandage, feeling the cotton tug at the places where the blood had dried to it. He winced at the sensation but kept going.
It really wasn’t that bad. Or at least, it wasn’t as bad as he was expecting. The scratches were pretty deep. It was kind of impressive considering how short he typically kept his nails. And there were a lot of them.
Ok, yeah, it was pretty bad.
Long, deep scratches littered his arms. A lot of them were angry and pink but not bleeding, though there were quite a few that were bleeding. The pink ones were sluggishly oozing serous fluid, making them appear shiny.
Leo said that these kinds of scratches should be kept moist via vaseline and bandaged to minimize the scarring. He could do that. He just had to work himself up to actually putting the vaseline on it. He opened the cabinet above the sink. He dipped his fingers into the horrible substance and shivered. It was disgustingly greasy.
No. He could do this. Donnie flapped the hand that didn’t have the vaseline on it in frustration at the sensation and began to apply it, working through the urge to gag at the feeling.
He couldn’t really feel the pain of rubbing the raw, exposed scratches through the awful feeling of oily gel against his skin. He had to stop several times to breathe through his nose to try and calm down, but eventually, he finished applying the gel. He rebandaged his arms and washed his hands four times to get any last remainder of the vaseline off his skin.
Donnie was tired. He didn’t want to have to think about repeating that process over the course of the next week or so (or maybe even longer). He wanted to lay down and go to sleep. He wanted to wake up and for this to all be over. He wanted everything to all be over. He wanted—
He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes and tried to steady his racing mind. I don’t want to die, he told himself. I don’t want to die. And he didn’t. Not really, at least. He just wanted everything to stop. He wanted to be able to slow down and catch his breath; to not deal with being alive for just a little while.
But that’s not how life works. There are no breaks. No pauses. The world keeps moving on, with or without you. And he had to do the same fucking thing for every day of his life.
How on earth was Donnie going to do this?
He had been standing at the sink for too long. He needed to get out of the bathroom. He needed to get back to work.
He needed Leo.
He made his way to his twin’s car. It was silent inside but the light was on, which meant Leo was probably reading one of his comics. Donnie slid the door open and lo and behold, his guess was correct. There was Leo, sitting on the beanbag chair and holding a Jupiter Jim comic. The sight brought a faint smile to his face, the familiarity comforting.
Leo’s eyes flickered up to see who was standing in the entrance to his car. He set the comic down when he saw Donnie, eyebrows raised in a silent question of are you alright?
Donnie didn’t say anything and instead flopped down on Leo’s bed, which he supposed was enough of an answer. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of citrus, because Leo loved using candles to cover up the scent of dirty laundry and old pizza. He heard the sound of Leo getting up from the beanbag and felt the bed dip a moment later. His eyes remained shut even when he felt the hesitant hand begin to stroke his shell. Donnie churred in contentment at the feeling. Leo churred back in response.
Donnie lost track of how long the two of them stayed like that, Leo gently rubbing Donnie’s carapace while Donnie basked in the affection. He almost fell asleep when he realized that Leo’s hand had stopped moving, resting just below where the spines on his shell ended. He grumbled in the back of his throat and wiggled his lower half to try and get the slider to resume. Leo let out a small exhale-laugh from his nose and continued stroking. Donnie fell asleep.
Later, Mikey called the two of them for dinner. April, Cass, and CJ came over as well. All of them sat at the table together and ate leftover pizza from Run of the Mill. They laughed and talked about their days. No one asked Donnie about the bandages on his arms, even though he saw the concern in all of their eyes. And he knew they would be having a conversation later. Unfortunately.
But that didn’t matter right now. No, what mattered was being here, in the room with everyone. Eating pizza and enjoying their presence.
Donnie had to do this every day for the rest of his life.
But he thinks that maybe he’ll be okay with that.