Work Text:
As the glitching image of young Donny faded out, his voice echoing into nothing, a wave of sadness hit April at the loss of the last of the mutant turtles she'd befriended all those decades ago. "Thank you…" she murmured into the destroyed throne room.
Just as she was about to turn away, an odd buzzing sound slowly rose in pitch. As she watched, in awe and concern, a rectangle of neon light grew into existence right where Donny had vanished. Swirling pink and blue and cyan pulsed across its surface as it spread into the size and shape of a doorway. A metal frame covered in tightly-bundled wires and blinking lights rose from the edges like an inflating balloon.
The swirling of the colors within the strange doorway became more agitated, until the streaks of cyan almost overtook the rest, coalescing into a large blob in the center. Before April could do more than take a single step back and raise an arm protectively, the doorway slowly spat out a dark, cloaked figure. As soon as it escaped the hold of the portal, it collapsed to its knees and the strange neon doorway fizzled out in a shower of golden sparks.
Any defining features were hidden by the hooded cloak, fabric pooling around it, but a surprisingly light laugh bubbled up from it. Then a familiar voice cried excitedly, "It worked! It finally worked!"
The voice was slightly deeper, a little rougher than the one she'd just heard calling her world a nightmare. But it was still undeniably…
"Donatello?"
The figure looked up and within the hood of the cloak a familiar green face beamed up at her. "April!"
He pushed himself to his feet, balance a little wobbly, and his hood fell back to his shoulders. "Is it really you?" he asked, voice hopeful and desperate.
"It's me, Donny," April answered hoarsely, stumbling forward to pull him into her arms. He was taller than his young counterpart. When she pulled away to get a good look at him, hands coming up to cup his cheeks, he had aged just the same as his brothers.
Donny grinned, tears gathering in his eyes, and pressed his hands over hers. "You're a sight for sore eyes," he choked out.
"Donny, where have you been all these years?" she asked. Unlike the other Donatello, she could clearly see he had been living somewhere for the past thirty years.
"Oh man, where do I even start?" he laughed, then trailed off as he finally looked around at where he had materialized. His face fell as he caught sight of a banner proudly displaying the Foot emblem, gently stepping away from her to turn around and fully take in his surroundings. "April, what the shell happened while I was gone?"
"A lot," she said quietly, hands falling limp at her sides. "Very little of it good."
"My br—" Donny started to ask, then cut off with a horrified gasp as he suddenly caught sigh of the bodies. "No!"
April weakly reached out to stop him, but he had already run for them with a swirl of his long cloak billowing out behind him. It wasn't until Donny was right beside them that he hesitated, head just barely shaking from side to side as he took in their injuries.
"What happened here?" he asked, staring down at his dead brothers with heartbreak stark on his features.
"The Shredder," April said grimly as she moved to join him. "He took over the planet. We just defeated him, but…at a price."
Donny recoiled in shock. "The Shredder?! But…he's dead! Master Splinter knocked him off a roof and dropped a water tower on him!" A horrified look crossed his face. "Did… Did I come out in the wrong dimension?"
"No!" April hurried to reassure him, belatedly remembering that the Shredder had returned just shortly after they lost Donny. "No, this is the right dimension! He wasn't human, the body was a robot. The alien piloting the body was in the torso, it must have shielded him."
Eyes widening, Donny murmured, "If I hadn't just spent thirty years trapped in a pocket dimension accidentally created by a comic book artist with a magic crystal, that might sound impossible."
"You what?"
Donny shook his head, digging through the pockets of his cloak. "Later," he promised. "I'll explain later." He gestured to Karai's battered corpse off to the side. "Friend or foe?"
Once again, April was struck by the sheer enormity of everything Donny had missed while he was missing. "That's Karai," she said venomously. "She murdered Leo and Raph."
Donny grimaced and turned back to his brothers, slowly kneeling beside Leo and Raph. "Got it." He finally pulled out a drawing pad and a pencil with a glowing pink crystal tied to the eraser end. "This is going to take me a while. Mind catching me up?"
"What…exactly are you doing?" April asked, watching him open the pad and flip to an empty page.
Glancing up at her, he gave her a pained smile and gestured theatrically with the hand holding the pencil. "Magic."
While Don knelt, sketching away, April filled him in on the past thirty years. It was, as she had said, a lot.
Though his reaction to learning about Karai almost made her laugh despite their grim surroundings.
("She was Shredder's daughter."
"…Is she an alien in a robot too? Should we burn the body?"
"Oh boy… No, she's adopted. And human.")
After the fifth time she told him about an ally they had lost to Shredder's forces, he paused in his unexplained "magic" drawings to look up at her and grimace. "Maybe for now, could you skip telling me about all the great people my brothers met who I'll never get the chance to?" he asked quietly.
"Oh." She bit her lip and considered it. "I'll try. It's just…we've lost a lot of people over the years."
Donny was silent for a moment, then looked back down at his drawing. "Nevermind," he murmured. "Just keep going. Leatherhead sounds nice. I'm sure we would've gotten along."
"Maybe I could take a break and you fill me in on what you've been up to all this time?" April suggested gently, resting a hand on his shell.
"Oh! Yeah, sure. Uh…where do I start…?"
"What happened when you went down to check on the water heater?" April prompted.
"A monster attacked me and then disappeared," Donny said simply, then chuckled at her bewildered expression. "I know, I felt about like that when it happened! While I was down there, I met Kirby. Long story short, he found this magic crystal that brought everything he drew to life." He waggled the pencil with the pink crystal in the air before going back to his sketching. "And he drew a lot. What he didn't realize at the time is that everything he was drawing was disappearing into a pocket universe he created…"
As she listened in disbelief, he told her about him and Kirby going through a portal much like the one he had returned through. How they had encountered an army of monsters Kirby had created, and the heroes (also created by Kirby) fighting to protect their city (another Kirby creation).
"I wasn't kidding about him drawing a lot," Donny said dryly. "Anyway, we helped them fight off the monsters and Kirby was hailed as a mighty sorcerer thanks to his magical assistance."
After that, Donny grew quiet. His hand paused its movement over the paper and he stared down at the glowing crystal. April left her hand on his shell in silent support as she waited for him to regain his composure.
Finally he bowed his head and whispered that when they got back to the portal they'd entered the magical realm through, it was shrinking. He and Kirby had run for it, but were too late.
"We were trapped," he said, voice desolate with a pain that had clearly dulled but never fully died even after decades. "We tried everything. Kirby added more detail to the original drawing, he redrew the portal. He even tried drawing me standing next to his drawing desk, when I wasn't looking. He told me he'd hoped he could at least get me out, back to my family. Nothing worked."
Eventually, they had accepted that they would be stuck there for the foreseeable future.
So they had adapted, integrated with the fantasy society living there. They already knew Kirby as a powerful sorcerer and Donny as a skilled warrior, so the people there were happy to welcome them into their city.
After a while, Kirby had insisted he teach Donny how to draw. And Donny soon became known as his magic apprentice.
Donny paused at that and gestured to his voluminous cloak. "That's why…this." He shrugged helplessly. "Gotta look the part."
For thirty years, he had lived in a land of swords and sorcery. He had learned to create improvised technology with the materials available. He had learned drawing and magic from Kirby. And together with Kirby, they had experimented with both the limits of the magic crystal and in methods for returning home.
Donny had never given up hope. Even after losing Kirby.
"Nothing unexpected," he told her morosely. "It's been thirty years and he wasn't a young man to begin with. He died years ago of old age. I was both afraid and hopeful that his death would cause the pocket dimension to collapse, either taking me with it or spitting me back out in my home dimension. It outlasted him, though. And I took over as the local sorcerer."
Over the years, Donny had developed a knack for technical drawings and schematics that the crystal seemed to respond well to. They were nothing like Kirby's fantastical images, but they did the trick.
"So then…?" April gestured to the drawing pad Donny had been diligently sketching in for a while now.
With a practiced flourish, he held it up and said, "Ta-da!"
On the once-empty sheet were careful, meticulously detailed medical diagrams with labels and notes. Intricate anatomical blueprints for…Leonardo, according to the title on the page.
He flipped to the next sheet to show her where he had already started another page for Raphael. Then another for Michelangelo.
"What…are these?" she asked, not daring to hope.
Donny looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, "Local sorcerers are who you call if someone's too far gone for the local doctor to help. I didn't spend thirty years learning magic and trying to get back just to not get the reunion with my brothers I've been dreaming of all this time."
As April watched, he drew a final line on Leonardo's page. Nothing happened. No flash of light, no sparkles, no tinkling bells. For a moment she was disappointed, feeling foolish for getting her hopes up.
Then Leo drew in a sharp breath.