Chapter 1: Table of Contents
Chapter Text
Welcome back, if you're here from the first volume of this series. I have a fresh card and a fresh set of prompts to digest, so please feel free to send requests my way. As it may be apparent from reading the list of prompts, this volume will be significantly darker than the last iteration, so please read with caution. I will be tagging as we go along.
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And as always, I can't make promises about fulfilling every request I get and I may not be able to do them for various reasons, thank you for understanding.
This series may contain references to the Vol. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- >>>Table of Contents<<<
- GO THROUGH ME || RAPH
Raph’s protective streak comes out. - DEHUMANIZATION || HAMATO BROTHERS - PALE ROOM, PART I
Splinter has instilled a fear of humans in them since they were kids. The brothers find out why. - ATTEMPTED RAPE || DONNIE - BLUE RASPBERRY, PART III
“...I want you to live a long, long life with scars to remember me by.” - FORCIBLY STRIPPED || DONNIE & LEO - PALE ROOM, PART II
Leo didn’t think that there was enough room in his heart to hate anyone more than he hated Kendra. The EPF proved him wrong. - CRYING THEMSELVES TO SLEEP || MIKEY - PALE ROOM, PART III
One by one, they’re taken from the cell, and Mikey wonders if they’ll ever see each other again. - CATATONIA || DONNIE - PALE ROOM, PART IV
Donnie meets the right mutant, at the right time.
Chapter 2: Go Through Me || Raph
Summary:
Go Through Me || Raph
Raph’s protective streak comes out.
Chapter Text
Raph couldn’t remember which of them had gone down first.
It could’ve been Leo, because he was the most prone to getting hurt, because he leapt right the fray when things got dicey, because the invasion was over and he still felt like he had something to prove.
It could’ve been Donnie, because Donnie hyperfixated on one element of a battle instead of the whole thing, and when he did, he would lose sight of projectiles or attacks thrown in his direction, overconfident in his tech until the moment it failed.
It could’ve been Mikey, because, yes, he was hard to hit, but when he was, the results were always bad and he went down the fastest.
Or maybe it had been Raph. Maybe it was him, because there was a black spot where a memory should be, and he was sure he was missing some time, and when he woke up, things had gone to hell.
Raph was trying not to blame himself; he could do that later, lying in bed and staring at his bedroom ceiling while his brothers slept soundly in their own beds. Right now, it was about survival. With the Krang invasion had come a new onslaught of enemies with bigger, more mystical, more dangerous power sets. This one in particular could clone himself, and if he had a limit, Donnie hadn’t been able to determine it before his tech-gauntlet had shattered with a well-timed attack.
Raphn didn’t look back at their pursuers, barreling down confusing tunnels and corridors until they were at a sudden dead end, his three brothers held under his arms. They were in the guy’s underground hive which he populated with clones of himself—a narcissist’s dream, in another context. The tunnels were only just wide and tall enough to accommodate Raph when he hunched over a little, and they’d gotten lost fast. Raph had hoped to drop his brothers off in a more secure place before doubling back to deal with the clones, but a dead end squashed that plan in its path.
“Great, this is just great,” Raph said. He dropped his brothers in a pile. Leo was unconscious, and Donnie barely so, covered in cuts and bruises. Only Mikey was fully alert, his eyes bright and white in the dim.
“Raph?” Mikey said.
“Get Leo up, we need him to portal us out of here,” said Raph.
“Dude, what’re you doing? There’s too many of him to fight.”
“Don’t worry, Raph’s got this. Focus on getting Leo up.”
Leo certainly didn’t look anywhere near getting up, but Mikey was shaking him anyway when Raph turned and marched to the tunnel entrance.
The clone guy was an ant. There was irony somewhere in there about him forming his own colony, but puns were Leo’s thing. Raph scrambled into the tunnel’s entrance and wedged his body into it, blocking the way forward for the swarming insects crawling all over the walls, floors, and ceilings.
“One little turtle, two little turtles,” said one clone.
“Three little turtles,” said another.
“Four.” Another.
“Ready to play nice?”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” said Raph. “There’s only one of me, and…uh…let’s see…” He counted the surrounding clones. “About twenty-six…ish…of you! That’s not really a fair fight for you guys, is it?”
“Funny.”
“So funny,” said a clone.
“Tell you what, let us rough up those other three little turtles.”
“And I’ll let you go.”
“Nuh huh,” Raph sneered. “Not happening.”
“I know there’s no way out.”
“Give us the others. You can go free.”
“I’m not moving,” said Raph. “You’ll have to go through me if you want my brothers.”
He didn’t like the look the clones exchanged. It was hard to discern the expression in their inky black eyes, but the sneers were telling enough, and the jaws looked powerful.
Raph was short one sai, but he swiped the one he had at the first clone who got too close. Then they were all swarming and it was hell.
Raph sank his ankles deep into the sodden earth, jaws sinking deep into the fleshy mass of his arm, scratching against his plastron. He really should’ve just tried to wedge his shell in the tunnel entrance, but it was too late to move, and even he did, the clones would flood in and his brothers would pay for it. The tunnel was tight, and there was no way for the ant guy clones to squirm in around Raph’s solid body, so he used his full weight to press back, enduring the slashes and strikes from the bugs’ clawed hands.
“Raph!” Mikey yelled from behind him.
“I’m fine!” Raph shouted. “Get Leo up!”
“Leo, c’mon, wake up,” Mikey pled.
Raph didn’t see the attack come from his right side as one ant sunk its jaws right into his head and crushed. He cried out. Red swathed over his vision, his legs wanted to give out, the pained pressure was so intense that he thought his head had exploded all over the tunnel wall. The ant’s mandibles pinched hard. He and his clones were pressing harder and harder against Raph, shoving him in.
He would not move. He would do this, he would hold his ground, his brothers’ lives depended on it. He’d collapse this whole damn tunnel if he had to.
“You’re not getting in!” Raph screamed at the ant guy. He jabbed his sai into the forehead of the nearest clone. It bled green fluid and collapsed to the ground, but it was one of many, and they were all shoving against Raph’s indomitable strength.
He used his teeth when he couldn’t maneuver his sai any more. Once, Raph had eaten a bug on a dare when he was a kid, but the taste was significantly worse than he remembered. The clone’s carapace crunched under his teeth and it let out an inhuman screech.
Raph was breathless from exertion and losing blood. He felt light-headed and he couldn’t tell if it was from the ant trying to pinch through his head or the full force of the solid wall of ants shoving against him. At this rate, he’d crush his brothers. He couldn’t seem to hold his ground. Raph couldn’t believe that after all they’d been through, this was how it was going to end: in a damn insect hive against an enemy he should’ve been able to protect his brothers from.
The ground beneath his feet disappeared.
For a split second, he thought the tunnel floor had given away and they were collapsing into the earth below. He fell back with two ants on top of him, but the ground felt too solid to be earth; it was just New York pavement, grimy but solid, and they were no longer underground.
Raph couldn’t tell who was more surprised: him or the ants. He arched his head just enough to see a barely conscious Leo being held by Donnie, the last remnants of the portal above their heads vanishing in a swirl of blue light. Leo blinked slowly at Raph, then fell back.
Mikey made short work of the two ants that had gone through the portal with them. All in all, they were lucky it hadn’t been the whole damn hive, but Leo was precise with his portals, somehow only brought the two of top of Raph with them, and their insect brains splattered against the wall as Mikey slammed his nunchucks into them.
“Holy shit, Raph!” Mikey exclaimed.
“Watch your language,” Raph chastised him.
“Your brain looks like it’s leaking out,” Donnie said sharply. “I can think of more offensive vulgarities to use than ‘holy shit.’”
The world was twisting around him. Mikey was quickly at his side, wrapping up his head with a roll of bandages retrieved from Leo’s belt. They never went anywhere without bandages these days. Raph’s whole body ached, and when he stood a little too fast, he caught himself on the wall of the nearest building.
“Everyone else okay?” Raph asked.
“You look the worst off,” said Mikey. “We need to get you home. Can you walk?”
There was no way Donnie and Mikey were in any shape to carry him, not with Leo also down for the count. “I’ll manage. One foot in front of the other, right?”
Donnie scooped Leo up into his arms, and Mikey swooped underneath Raph’s massive arm to help him balance his weight.
“Take it slow,” said Mikey. “Are you—no, try it like—yeah, like that. Are you okay? Are you dizzy?”
“Mikey, it’s okay, I’m alright,” said Raph. “I’m sure it looks a lot worse than it is.”
Mikey didn’t look convinced. They started the slow march to the nearest sewer entrance with Donnie leading the way.
“Hey, kinda reminds me of that time you pulled me out from under that car,” said Raph, doing his best to keep his voice cordial. “You let me lean on you, remember? I thought I was gonna crush you.”
Mikey’s expression flickered a little. He smiled. “We really need to talk about this hero complex of yours.”
“Not a hero complex,” said Raph. “Just doing my job.”
“You could stand to learn to lean on us a little more, Raph.”
“Hey, I didn’t see you jamming yourself in a tunnel to stop those guys. Oh, wait—shucks, you’re small, it wouldn’t have worked.”
“I could’ve stopped them with my large personality if you’d given me a chance.”
“Right, I would’ve loved to see you try Dr Delicate Touch’s ‘Villain Reformation Program’ on a bunch of clones who wanted to eat us,” Donnie drawled.
“Hey, there’s no proof the program doesn’t work,” said Mikey.
“You can’t even find test subjects.”
“I haven’t found any yet. Maybe if you guys let me kidnap a villain—”
“We’re not kidnapping a villain, Mikey,” said Raph.
“Why not? They kidnap us all the time! Time for some payback—I mean, intervention. Y’know, I think the clone guy could be a great subject.”
“No way, I’m not going back in that hive ever again.”
“Bummer! Oh well, maybe I’ll send him—them?—a pamphlet instead.”
Mikey leaned a little into Raph as they hobbled over to the nearest sewer entrance and he gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze. Mikey flashed a relieved smile up at him. He didn’t think he was going to learn to lean into his brothers soon, not when his problems were far too heavy for them to carry.
Notes:
I'm back on my nonsense again and here we are!
As per tradition, I'll continue to accept requests and will do my best to fulfill them, although I may not always be able to due to various circumstances. If you're here from the last Volume, welcome back!
Chapter 3: Dehumanization || Hamato Brothers - Pale Room, Part I
Summary:
Dehumanization || Hamato Brothers - Pale Room, Part I
Splinter has instilled a fear of humans in them since they were kids. The brothers find out why.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They all reacted differently. Leo wanted to crawl inside his brothers’ minds, to pull apart their psychologies, to see how they were wrapping their heads around the current problem. It was the least he could do to understand them. To fix things. To ease tensions. Especially when he’d been the first to go down.
When he’d felt the tranquilizer dart pinch his neck, he knew they were in for a bad time. Raph took charge the moment Leo’s legs went wobbly, but he’d had a feeling even as his face hit rough concrete that it the control Raph exerted was a figurehead in an uncontrollable situation. Leo woke up later to a grimy ceiling and his brothers around him, no weapons, and four walls in a dank room no larger than a shipping container. The walls were smeared with grime and age, too small to accommodate all four of them, a heavy metal door separating them from the outside. Little lighting, no windows. A foul smell. The distant sounds of screams and struggling, too indistinct to place. Nothing except the tinny echo of their voices.
Leo settled his arm against the door, glaring at the metal and hoping that his silent rage would put off whatever monster-of-the-week had locked them in the cell. There really was no other term for it other than cell, but for now he avoided saying it out loud. Donnie didn’t have any of his gear, not even his Battle Shell, so that limited their options, however he kept busy probing the walls for weak points and hidden cameras. He found two in the first ten minutes.
For the rest of them, there was little they could do except pace around and hope Donnie came up with an escape plan. Brute force hadn’t worked. Raph had pounded on the door for close to an hour before he gave up, and it hadn’t even dented. Whoever was keeping them here had either built the room specifically to hold them, or it was designed to hold something much, much stronger than they were. Neither option bode well.
“How’s it going, Donnie?” Leo asked, glancing over his shoulder.
Donnie pried a small black object out from between two panels in the wall. “Camera number three.”
“Any idea who’s behind this?” Raph asked.
“It’s human technology,” said Donnie, rolling the camera between his fingers. It was only the size of his fingertip, and snapped when he applied enough force. “So I’m guessing humans.”
“Great, that’s great, really makes me feel better,” said Leo.
“Don’t be down, that means they have human weaknesses,” said Mikey. “Remember what Dad always says: a human’s greatest weakness is…”
“Their stupidity?” Donnie offered.
“Poor muscle mass!” said Raph.
“Daytime television?” said Leo.
“No, no, no.” Mikey shook his head. “A human’s greatest weakness is their stomach. We win them through food.”
“Oh, Mikey wants to play fetch with a human, brilliant plan,” Donnie drawled.
“It’s gonna work this time. Mikey came prepared!”
Mikey pulled out a bag of chips from his shell, a knock-off brand that tasted more potato than chip. The bag matched the expectations, crinkled like an old man’s flabby skin.
“I have a reward system all planned out,” said Mikey. “Once we make friends with them and teach them a few tricks, we make a break for it.”
“Mikey, that’s never going to work,” said Donnie.
“Didn’t you try that on April when we first met her?” Raph asked.
“Yeah, actually, that does ring a bell,” said Leo. “As I recall, April had you playing fetch and shaking hands within the hour, Mikey.”
“She had gummy worms,” said Mikey. “I didn’t even know worms could be gummy, I thought they only came in slimy flavour.”
“Excuse me, this is a bit of a wild idea, but perhaps could we focus on escaping?!” Donnie shouted. “Being imprisoned lost its novelty a long time ago! There isn’t even a bathroom in here!”
“I went before we left,” Mikey said with pride.
“Okay, nobody think about waterfalls,” said Raph.
“Or water parks,” said Leo.
“Or hoses,” said Mikey.
“Or rainstorms,” said Raph.
“Fire hydrants.”
“Sewer water.”
“I want out!” Donnie yelled.
In the end, Leo would could able tell what got the door to open, unsure if it was them annoying the hell out of their captors or Donnie’s insistence that he wanted out or if it was just a regular, scheduled visit. Either way, the door swung open so fast that he leapt back to avoid getting flattened against the wall. Armed soldiers swarmed inside, dressed in black, their entire bodies obscured except for the lower halves of their faces.
“Oh, hey, finally!” said Leo. “Hey, we think we took a wrong turn somewhere, would one of you mind telling us where—wow, that is a big gun. Could you point it somewhere else?”
No answer. The soldiers were movie caricatures caricatures rather than living, breathing humans in front of him. Leo saw the disdain in their scowls. Circling the exit, Leo realized it wouldn’t be as simple as overpowering them, yet he searched for the opening anyway.
Once the soldiers felt secure, a woman with steely eyes stepped into the cell. She wore a lab coat, flanked by a young intern who openly gawked at the turtles.
“Okay, cool, you look like you’re an authority figure,” said Leo. “Could you let us out? We’re getting bored.”
The woman scribbled something on a clipboard. “We’ll start with blood and tissue samples. We can save everything else until after they’re finished processing A-12.”
“So cold. Hey, lady, I’m talking to you.”
The woman didn’t look at Leo, like he hadn’t spoken at all. Leo only knew that he was making words people could hear because the intern kept flinching with the rise and fall of his voice.
“Hey, fetch!” Mikey called out. He tossed a few chips at her.
That got the woman’s attention, gaze sliding over the chip fragments on the floor. With a nod to one soldier, the armed guard step forward and snatched the bag out of Mikey’s hand.
“Aw, no fair,” Mikey whined.
The woman scribbled on her clipboard, while the intern wheeled in medical equipment on a cart.
“Since you four possess language skills, you should know that this room is designed to flood with a paralyzing agent in the event of an escape attempt,” said the woman. “All personnel are armed and authorized to use lethal force. For your own safety and the safety of our staff, you will comply.”
“That’s pretty extreme,” said Leo. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
She sighed. “I’m Doctor Gabrielle Paccioretti. You’re currently in protective custody in a facility run by the Earth Protection Force.”
Behind him, Donnie let out a few low swears.
“‘Protective custody?’ We’re in a prison cell, and it smells weird in here. Where’s our lawyer? I plead the fifth!”
“The American government backs the EPF, but even if it didn’t…” She snapped on some rubber gloves. “The law doesn’t apply to nonhumans.”
Paccioretti nodded to the intern, who picked up the largest syringe Leo had ever seen. Maybe his internal panic was exaggerating the size.
The moment the intern took even a fraction of a step towards Mikey, Leo’s vision blurred with intense and overwhelming rage. He punched him in the face. Teeth and jawbone shattered under his fist.
Leo should have been relieved that he wasn’t shot dead right away. Movement and shouts and activity exploded all around him. He glimpsed his brothers rising to his defense, then swearing and the loud clicks of the safety coming off of guns. Strange hands seized his limbs. Leo fought the whole way down to the ground, clawing, biting, swearing, struggling. It felt like a long way to the floor. A whole ass group of soldiers pinned him, his jaw bouncing off of hard concrete.
“If any one of you makes another move, we shoot this one dead,” Paccioretti announced. Somehow, her voice rose above the loud outbreak of noise.
Raph, Mikey, and Donnie froze. Raph had a hand wrapped fully around the neck of a soldier, Mikey had another in a headlock, Donnie was wrestling another for his gun. No movement, all quiet. The cold metal of a gun barrel wedged against the back of Leo’s head and the fight in his brothers bled away.
“This is your only warning,” said Paccioretti. She nodded at the soldiers. “Continue.”
Raph released the soldier in his hand and raised his arms up in surrender, and Mikey’s hands were wrestled behind his back. Donnie bolted up and backed into the corner of the cell, closed in on three sides. From his position on the ground, Leo could only see Donnie’s feet skirting left and right. He saw the anxiety in every step, the heightening tension in his voice.
“Don’t you dare,” Donnie warned them.
Leo never heard what the threat was before the soldiers jumped and Donnie let out a piercing scream.
It sounded like he was being murdered. Full-body terror sliced its way through Leo, bisecting him in half. Donnie’s feet scraped against the concrete, Leo saw thin hairline cuts appear in the raw flesh, shouted his name although it was lost under the undercurrent of the full-body howl that went and went and went.
“Ignore it, it’s just trying to get attention,” Paccioretti told the soldiers. She knelt by Leo’s side, fully extended his arm, and sliced off the wrappings.
A second shriek accompanied Donnie’s. “FUCK, IT BIT ME!”
“Then break its jaw,” one soldier said.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Paccioeretti shouted. “I will not have the dental exam compromised by impulsive, stupid decisions. If you can’t handle one screaming mutant, find another job!”
Donnie’s scream was so physically painful that Leo wasn’t even aware of the ache in his arm until Paccioeretti withdrew and there was a fat, ugly mark where she’d taken a chunk of flesh out of his arm. The soldiers pulled back and Leo scrambled up, prepared to take a swing and damn the risks. The soldiers had him covered, held him at gunpoint as she gave Mikey the same treatment. Paccioeretti possessed the cold composure of a seasoned scientist, immune to flinches and gasps of pain as she first took a blood sample, then used an intimidating device to slice a coin-shaped chunk from Mikey’s arm. When she was done, Mikey hurried to Leo’s side, crushing his hand.
Leo knew the look of Raph keeping a close eye on each of his brothers, but he couldn’t keep the fear out when their gazes locked. The soldiers didn’t have to force Raph to extend his arm. He did it for them, accepting the treatment, more worried about the rest of them than he was about himself. The only moment Raph flinched was when Donnie’s scream reached a particularly high note Leo was sure he hadn’t heard him reach since they were kids.
Paccioeretti moved to Donnie last. It took four soldiers to hold him down while he struggled. Leo struggled to see around the wide expanse of their shoulders.
Donnie suddenly went quiet.
A moment ago, Leo had been praying for Donnie to stop shouting so he could hear his thoughts, and now he wanted it back. The only part of Leo that he could see past the mass of humans surrounding him was his rigid leg. It didn’t move again until Paccioeretti stepped back and stared down Leo as she left. He saw nothing to indicate humanity.
The soldiers waited until the last minute to let Donnie go, like a turtle paralyzed with fear was the biggest threat in the room. The intern wheeled out the cart, then the soldiers backed out of the cell one-by-one.
“Hey, there’s no washroom in here!” Leo called after them.
The reply came in the form of a metal bucket thrown inside. Leo ducked to avoid it, and it rung a hollow tune as it rolled around on the floor in a circle, and the last Leo saw of the outside was the disgusted glower of a soldier slamming the door shut and locking it with a thick clunk.
The adrenaline tasted salty in the air. They were all panting, holding the fresh wounds on their arms, staring into nothing. Donnie jumped up from the floor and stood with his back flat against the wall. The pressure Mikey put on Leo’s hand was intense.
“…Donnie?” Mikey said. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t,” Donnie barked. “Just don’t.”
Mikey left Leo’s side and reached for Donnie. “But are you okay?”
“I…I need to keep checking for cameras. I need to check for cameras, don’t distract me.”
Donnie shifted away when Mikey approached. Whatever Mikey was thinking, he seemed to think better of it and pulled back.
Raph sat back on the ground, his face in his hands, more confused and worried than hurt. Mikey curled up beside him, and Raph set an arm on his shoulder. His and Leo’s eyes caught. Since they were kids, Raph had always been the strong one between them, yet he could see the small vulnerable fractures in his irises, see Raph gather his strength with the rise of his shoulders.
“Wow, that was awful!” Raph finally said, like he was talking about a movie.
“Yeah, they were kind of cranky, weren’t they?” said Leo.
He picked up the bucket and held it in his hands. It smelt strange.
“Psh, they didn’t even provide reading material,” said Leo. “I can’t go unless I got the comics section.”
He looked around for a smile and found none. Tough crowd.
Leo set the bucket upside down and sat on it. “Hey, at least we got furniture now!…Until someone needs to use it. So, who wants to play a game to pass the time? And no, Donnie, ‘Find the Cameras’ doesn’t count.”
Donnie didn’t even look over his shoulder. He didn’t even appear to be inspecting the paneling anymore. He knelt with his back to them, rubbing his arm.
“How about Word Association?” Raph suggested.
“Oh, I’m gonna nail this one,” said Leo.
“You can’t make words up this time.”
“Fine, but I get to keep sitting on the bucket.”
“Deal. Mikey, want to go first?”
Mikey picked out dirt from under his fingernails, not quite rising his head.
Finally, he said, “Pillow.”
“Sleep,” Leo offered.
“Dream,” said Raph.
“Flying,” said Mikey.
“Birds.” Leo.
“Big Bird.” Raph.
“Sesame Street!” Mikey added with a fist pump and a more familiar smile.
It went on like that, a simple distraction. In the corner, Donnie tilted his head towards their voices, hands running steady over the wall. The distant screams and struggling Leo had heard before from beyond the cell had gone quiet.
Notes:
I feel like the Dehumanization in this chapter is very subtle, but I also really didn't want to do anything too overt and over the top for it, so I hope it still counts!
As always feel free to make requests on the bingo card, I'm now highlighting in blue the ones that have been requested or have plans associated with them!
Thanks so much to everyone who reads my work, it's really appreciated. It's such a nice outlit to be able to share my writing with people without fear of judgment.
Chapter 4: Attempted Rape || Donnie - Blue Raspberry, Part III
Summary:
Attempted Rape || Donnie - Blue Raspberry, Part III
“...I want you to live a long, long life with scars to remember me by.”
Notes:
Blue Raspberry, Part I
Blue Raspberry, Part II
CONTENT WARNINGS
- Attempted S/A. All characters involved are teenagers. The event is not glamorized and is discussed and described as something reprehensible. It doesn’t go beyond the attempt.- A character who is a teenager briefly reflects on their sexuality and sexual experiences. The descriptions are vague.
If any of this subject matter is upsetting to you, I urge you to please, please put yourself first and read responsibly.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Donnie lost track of his brothers hours ago, but their absence wasn't a concern this time. He was hacking the sound system to play his preferred playlists. The sight would have been unthinkable before the Krang invasion, but nowadays, the world was all kinds of weird. It was a blended yōkai-human teen party in the Hidden City, and technically, the Hamato brothers were crashing it, along with most of the party-goers crowding the mansion. He didn’t know who the host was, only that when he and his brothers had heard about the event through the grapevine, they couldn't refuse.
“C’mon, we’ve never gone to a party before!” Leo had begged Raph.
“Please, please, please, please, please, please, please?” Mikey grabbed Raph’s ankle and was dragged along the floor.
“I desire a night of debauchery!” Donnie shouted.
“We’ve had parties before,” said Raph.
“Yeah, with just family,” said Leo. “That’s boring. This is a teens-only event!”
“You know some moron is gonna bring alcohol, and we’re underage,” Raph said with satisfaction, as if that settled the matter.
“We won’t touch the stuff,” Mikey promised.
“I just want to show off my dance moves,” said Donnie. “I have no interest in intoxication. For the moment.”
“Raph, this is our chance to do something normal teenagers do,” said Leo. “We’re not gonna be the weirdest ones there, and there are already yōkai, so we don't have to use the costume excuse.”
“Please, please, please!” Mikey begged.
Raph rolled his eyes with a sigh and caved. He'd come along as their chaperone, but when Donnie last saw him, Raph was showing off his diving skills to the crowd and drinking apple juice straight from the carton.
The party was wild, even by teenage standards, and, in line with Raph’s expectations, someone had handed out alcohol at some point. Yōkai teens knew how to go crazy, which was attributable to the looser laws of the Hidden City. The humans who tagged along for the event poured in through a portal in the living room and would probably be too hungover in the morning to remember anything. No one seemed to know who the host was, only that the mansion could fit five lairs, and the music made ears bleed.
Donnie leaned over the balcony, watching Leo, who was surrounded by a crowd of both humans and yōkai. He was spinning a hilarious anecdote, and the audience was roaring with laughter. The sight was surreal, a peek into their lives if they went to a regular school. Leo was basking in the attention, and it stirred a satisfying warmth in Donnie's chest—something akin to pride. After everything they'd been through, Leo deserved some time off.
"Hey, there you are!" Mikey hopped up onto the balcony with a flip, perched on the rail, and swung his legs. "I've heard this song like, five times now, and I know it's one of your favourites."
"What a strange but welcome coincidence," Donnie drawled.
"So you're not hacking the sound system, forcing everyone to listen to your tunes?"
"Gasp! You dare accuse me of music-related crimes?!"
"If I were, would you consider committing a music-related crime in my name?"
"...Depends on what kind of reward I could expect."
"How about free hugs?"
"Psh, those cost nothing. Literally, that's why they're free. What else you got?"
"My unending gratitude and love."
Donnie rolled his eyes. "I suppose I could provide a free sample...okay, Miguel, name your request."
"I'm Blue."
"Absolutely not."
"Donnie, if you play I'm Blue, I guarantee that Leo will start dancing! It'll make him happy, it'll make me happy!"
"I'm thinking of rescinding music requests."
"Donnie, I'm begging you! I need to hear it!"
Mikey latched onto his arm and shook. Donnie groaned. Only for Mikey.
“You’re lucky you’re my favourite brother,” said Donnie.
“I am?!” Mikey asked. “Do you mean that, Dee?!”
“Nevertheless, I am going to make myself scarce to get away from it."
Donnie put on I’m Blue, and no sooner had the singer started singing about living in a blue world when he saw Leo bob his head. He said something else that made his audience laugh. Then the chorus started and he was dancing so horribly that Donnie averted his eyes. Mikey whooped and egged him on.
“I’m not related, I’m not related, I’ve never seen him before in my life, we’re not even the same species,” Donnie chanted under his breath.
He retreated inside the house, away from the raunchy party-goers and deafening music. While Leo entertained the guests, it was an excellent opportunity to do some light snooping. After all, it wasn't every day that he got to sneak around in a yōkai mansion. The house resembled a human home, albeit with more mystical objects and scientific marvels lying around. Donnie wondered if the host's parents knew about the party, about the teens egging the walls and the bison yōkai bench-lifting a couch while a small crowd egged him on.
His feet crunched on discarded snacks as he mapped out the house. His scans picked up an abundance of abnormal energy signatures, which he could analyze later as a perfect late-night activity. Donnie found himself in an empty office with large windows overlooking the party. The room was deserted and untouched by the party-goers. It was an impressive office, all things considered, with bookcases populated by rare books and an impressive portrait of a moth yōkai hung over a fireplace. A self-congratulatory self-portrait, perhaps. Donnie scanned the books and found most of them uninteresting. However, some appeared to be printed fan fiction, which he took photos of for blackmail material.
As he turned to leave, the beats of I'm Blue died down, and he took two steps before someone cranked his arm behind his back, and something sharp jabbed into his neck. Donnie struggled, half-expecting to hear one of his brothers burst out laughing, telling him he was too jumpy.
Instead, he caught a whiff of the scent of blue raspberry.
Donnie glimpsed the person holding him reflected in the portrait's glass. Kendra flashed him a wicked smile and said with casual flair, “Hey, Donnie.”
Donnie plunged into ice water. He fought and pulled; she wasn’t strong, he could still pull away—Then he looked in the reflection and saw that it was her bionic pinky finger jabbed at his throat, transformed into a sharp knife.
Kendra’s reflection grinned horribly and she shoved him into the waiting arms of Jeremy. Stupid, he was so stupid. He’d felt eyes on him during the party and assumed they were from the other attendees, should’ve known the eyes of the enemy when they were trained on him. Should’ve felt Kendra’s stare anywhere. It was a unique sensation, a cold prickle that played music up his spine, and he hadn’t recognized it.
In the year since he’d last seen Jeremy, he’d gotten taller, broader, stronger. Donnie was ready to fight, but Kendra had caught him off-guard and his senses hadn’t caught up yet, and Jeremy seized him in a hard arm lock from behind. Donnie’s feet lifted off the ground as he fought back, then couldn’t without threatening to snap his bones.
“Geez, I can’t believe you were right,” said Jeremy.
“Of course I was right,” said Kendra. “I knew the moment I saw your stupid ass brother that you couldn’t be far behind.”
"Which brother?" Donnie asked. "You'll have to be more specific, they're all stupid."
Donnie kicked Jeremy’s shin. No reaction. Jeremy pulled Donnie into a full-on hold, grabbing him from under the armpits and locking his hands behind Donnie’s head. His lower body flailed in the air, trying to land a good kick at Kendra as she gawked with wide, adrenaline-fuelled eyes.
“Kendra, can we just go?” It was Jase. He stood by the door, looking nervous and off-balance. A light insult in his direction would be enough to push him over.
“Ugh, why are you always such a fucking coward?” Kendra demanded. “Christ, I’m not letting it go this time.”
“Oh, how long are you gonna hold a grudge?” Donnie demanded. “Not to mention, you owe me!”
“Owe you?!”
“I saved your life! I could’ve left you to the Foot Clan.”
“That doesn’t count, Donnie. Besides, I could’ve done the same.”
“Kendra, I think we should really just go,” said Jase. “His brothers are literally right outside.”
“Yeah, and too busy being show-offs to care.”
“What are you doing here, Kendra?” Donnie demanded.
“What the hell does it look like? I was enjoying the party until you came along. I could practically see your forehead over the heads of the crowd.”
“I knew I should’ve killed you when I got the chance.”
“Well, you fucked that up. Hey, nice stick, by the way. Is it new? I liked the old one better.”
Kendra picked up his bō, twirling it with the haphazard care of someone who had never handled one before. Sweat formed on the back of his neck before Jeremy's hot breath dried it up. The familiar buzz of anxiety clouded his thoughts, and he watched Kendra examine the smooth wood of his bō with an unflinching stare. A few hundred pounds of dismay dropped into Donnie’s stomach.
He knew the look on her face, knew her well. He recognized the satisfied smirk of Kendra cooking up a new way to be unrepentantly evil, knew the smirk that grew into a toothy grin, creating a deep cleft in Donnie’s chest. His breathing increased, but his throat constricted, barely allowing oxygen to fill his anxiety-flooded lungs. He felt like he was about to drown on dry land.
“Oh, I got a horrible idea,” Kendra announced, and she laughed, darkness gathering in her eyes. “Damn, I might actually be evil after all. Jeremy, keep holding him.”
“Kendra?” Jase said.
“Shut up, Jase, and watch the door.”
“What are you—”
“I said watch the fucking door!”
Jase turned and did as instructed.
“Ever the good little follower, huh?” Donnie rasped out. He could taste the bitterness on his tongue.
Kendra tightened her grip on Donnie's throat, forcing both him and Jeremy to the ground. Donnie's panic reached a fever pitch, desperate to escape her grasp. In his frenzy, he would have gladly hurled himself through the nearby glass window. In the very peripheral of his vision, he saw Leo surrounded by his posse, ignorant of what was happening, and Donnie couldn’t fathom how Leo’s world was expanding when his was ending.
Donnie clawed at Jeremy before he locked up his arms, facing him towards Kendra. Her hand touched Donnie’s hip. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the room was pitching. Dread punched into his gut and released chilling adrenaline. Donnie screwed his eyes shut, hoping it would lock out the sensation of Kendra pressing against him, pressing against his knees, pressing them apart—
He realized what was coming, what she wanted. Humiliation. It wasn’t enough hurting him. Exposing him. She wanted everything. His identity. His dignity. Shutting his eyes amplified her presence, made her wretched touch burn on his skin like she was holding it against hellfire. No matter where he went, what he did, Kendra could insert her presence into it, blow her breath on his cheek. Donnie pressed his cheek against the shoulder of Jeremy’s windbreaker, digging his nails into his palms until hot blood ran down his wrists.
“Kendra—” Donnie stumbled, struggled over words, wound them up tight. He didn’t recognize his voice. He wrenched one leg away from her, pressed his calf up against her sternum. “Kendra, think about this—”
“Keep begging, Donnie, you know I like it,” said Kendra.
“Kendra, please—”
Liquid ice pumped through Donnie’s veins. He froze, despite every ounce of willpower screaming at him to fight. Kendra’s hands were a curse that nullified his strength, made him dizzy with fear. She pushed his calf aside and ran a cautious hand up the length of his long legs. Extending her bionic pinky finger, she transformed it into the small knife, not even big enough to cut vegetables. Only enough to cut him.
He thought for a horrifying moment that she was going to slice his shorts right off. Although she didn’t, what she did do was nevertheless awful. Kendra inserted the blade into the meat of inner thigh and carved.
Stars went supernova in the black of Donnie’s eyelids. He decided to keep them open, the lesser of two evils. At least with his eyes open he saw what was coming, see what Kendra was doing. He bit his tongue on the pain, then couldn’t hold back anymore and cried out, jerking his leg until Kendra held it steady with crushing force. Maybe he could still fight, kick her while she was distracted, bite Jeremy on the arm, but his body froze, couldn’t and didn’t move.
“Kendra,” Donnie said.
“Relax, I’m just marking my territory,” said Kendra.
“Just kill me.”
“I’m not gonna kill you, Donnie. On the contrary, I want you to live a long, long life with scars to remember me by. In fact, I hope you meet the love of your life, so they can see this and know that I got to you first.”
A sudden spike of pain made Donnie jolt. Kendra drove the blade in deep, slicing with the confidence of someone who wanted to make the scars last. Against his better judgment, Donnie looked down and saw the outlines of bleeding letters.
His chest was heaving, but he couldn’t intake oxygen, and he had little choice but to rest his head against Jeremy’s shoulder and stare at the ceiling. Raph’s awkward sex talks flooded back to him, and despite his confidence in the power of science, he couldn’t—he wanted to remember what Raph had said, what had Raph said about this? Just say no? No, he’d said to fight. Donnie’s body wouldn’t cooperate, he couldn’t even though it should be so, so simple to crush Kendra’s head between his knees and throw her off. Raph made it sound so easy.
He’d never thought about sex before, not seriously. It was a biological urge, a distraction to be dealt with behind closed doors. Donnie had never—well, not with someone else. He ran through the process in his mind, realized that technical knowledge didn’t make up for lack of experience. Shit, Kendra was turning him inside out.
Donnie made a strangled, awful sob when Kendra moved onto his other leg. He felt he might pass out. He needed to breathe yet his chest was cluttered with heaving cries. His face was wet. Donnie couldn’t tell if was sweat or tears. Both tasted salty. His gaze travelled and locked with Jase standing by the door and he was looking at him with open fear and Donnie had to pull his eyes away with shame.
“Hey, Jase, get a picture of this,” Kendra said.
“I…” Jase was holding onto the doorknob with white-knuckled strength.
“C’mon, don’t be an ass!”
“I gotta go.”
Jase bolted out the door.
“Fucking typical!” Kendra huffed. “Fine, I’ll do it myself. Take a good, long look, Donnie.”
Donnie stared at the ceiling panels. They were a deep onyx, almost reflective.
“I said LOOK!”
Kendra seized him by the back of his neck and forced his gaze down, at the words she’d written, one on each inner thigh. Donnie could barely read them through a watery film and he watched tears make a long journey from his eyes to the floor.
“So I said, ‘You really shouldn’t put too much faith in atoms.’ And so Donnie—that’s my stupid brother—he was like, 'Why not?' And I said, ‘Because atoms make up everything!’”
Leo’s audience, a collection of both human and yōkai teens, some drunk, some not, roared with canned laughter, although the joke was pretty terrible even by his standards. For the moment, Leo didn’t care. He was in his element, a true extrovert’s paradise, at the centre of a gaggle of people whose names he didn’t remember at a party at an address he couldn’t recall. It was the epitome of the teenage experience, a night of mindless debauchery and Splinter didn’t even know where they were.
It was liberating. Living in the sewers often felt like living in a prison. Sure, they had the Hidden City to retreat to, but Leo liked sunshine and crowded beaches, and not getting stared at, and it was hard to replicate the feeling of the sun on his face when the Hidden City was so deeply entrenched underground in more ways than one. He wanted to go to movies without wearing a disguise, and sometimes—though he would never admit it—he even wanted to go to school.
But tonight, the human and yōkai teens around him didn’t care about that. They didn’t care about appearances, or who lived on what surface. No one cared and the freedom tasted mesmerizing.
The crowd was still in the middle of laughing when Leo caught an unexpected movement out of the corner of his eye and his smile caught. A hand grabbed his arm.
“Wait, I know you,” Leo said, turning to the new face.
It wasn’t new, though. It was Jase.
“You need to help Donnie,” said Jase, before Leo could say anything.
“What?”
“You need to help Donnie.”
Ice crystals formed in his veins. The audience was still laughing over nothing. It didn’t matter anymore, the popularity, the stories, the stares of admiration. He thought about Donnie, about Jase. About the common thread that linked them together.
Where was Donnie?
It had been a while since he’d seen Donnie. He scanned the balcony where he’d last seen him and saw nothing.
“Where?” Leo asked.
“Office, second floor.” Jase pointed to the house. “It’s on the left—”
Leo was running before Jase could finish his sentence. He didn’t even take the stairs, just crawled up a pillar and over the railing of the balcony. There was only one way Jase would be here. Donnie hadn’t sent out an emergency distress beacon, but Leo hit the one on his belt, anything to get Mikey and Raph’s attention when he couldn’t spare the time to go looking for them in the crowd.
He shoved past some party-goers and ran.
Kendra's fingers seared hot on his throat as she gave his windpipe a tight squeeze. Donnie tried to decide if being unconscious would be better, but Kendra took that away from him too and loosened her grip for him to breathe. Perhaps that's what she wanted—for him to remember.
"Jeremy, do you want to go first, or should the stick go first?" Kendra asked conversationally.
"I'll go after the stick," said Jeremy.
"Just don't get pissed if you get a splinter."
Kendra reached for his bō, and Donnie desperately wanted to fold together like origami paper, to hide small, vulnerable fissures growing wider and wider in his flesh.
BANG.
Hope literally broke down the door.
Leo looked like a saviour when he stepped over the threshold, a long-awaited hero here to slay the dragon and rescue him. Donnie gasped out his name, "Leo!" and watched in satisfaction as angered surprise appeared on Kendra, hardening her, tight with fury at the interruption.
Leo froze. He took in the sight in front of him: Jeremy holding Donnie from behind, Kendra between his legs, his bō in her hand. They all just stared for a long while as Donnie watched everyone calculate their next move.
Something horrible happened to Leo's face. Stormy rage gathered and exploded. He drew a katana in a single move.
He and Kendra were two gunslingers at high noon, and Kendra held up her bionic finger at the exact same time. A powerful blast ripped through the room, and Leo leapt to the side to avoid a white hot laser beam. Kendra must've taken his suggestion about the heat sink. The arms holding Donnie let go. Jeremy was gone. Donnie scrambled back, crying out, and then glass shattered. He glimpsed Kendra standing in front of the broken window, and their gazes caught in the moments before she leapt out. When she did, she smirked something awful and blew a kiss.
By the time Leo got to his feet, Kendra and Jeremy had both leapt out the window. Donnie saw Leo's intention to pursue them, to leave him.
"Leo?" Donnie said, unable to keep the hysterical note out of his voice. "Leo?!"
The call worked. Leo rushed back to Donnie.
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!" Leo exclaimed. "Donnie, are you alright? Holy shit!"
Donnie didn't get time to answer when Raph barrelled in through the door, followed shortly by Mikey.
"What the hell is going on?!" Raph asked.
"Raph, I need you to take Donnie home," said Leo. He sliced a portal through the wall. "Mikey, you're with me."
"What? What's going on?"
"Take. Donnie. Home!"
No argument, no leeway. Donnie's senses were alight with panic, and he saw Mikey and Raph's eyes flick to the blood pooling on the ground beneath him. He saw the argument die in Raph as he scooped him off the ground and they dove through the portal.
They lost the Purple Dragons so quickly it was almost comical. Leo spent what felt like an eternity leading Mikey around the area surrounding the mansion, searching for any sign of them, but came up empty-handed. Kendra had made a speedy escape, and when they returned to the party to find Jase, he had also vanished. He had enough of a conscience to call for help when Donnie needed it, but apparently felt guilty enough to make himself scarce when Leo started looking for him. It was as simple as that.
Leo couldn't stop trembling. He felt like a newborn child, bombarded with sights, sounds, and sensations, his senses screaming at him from all sides. He felt like he might be sick. He felt like a failure.
He had failed Donnie. He had made a silent promise to never let this happen to Donnie again, and yet it had occurred right under his nose.
"Leo?" Mikey said.
Leo looked up. He and Mikey were lingering outside the mansion's gates, where he paced, restless and eager for action. His katanas were out, but he couldn't seem to keep a firm grip on them.
"Leo, what happened?" Mikey asked.
He hadn't told Mikey what happened, hadn't told him what he saw, only that they were looking for the Purple Dragons. He didn't need to know the rest, didn't need to be subjected to what Leo had witnessed. Donnie wouldn't want that.
"Leo, what happened?" Mikey repeated.
"You don't need to know," said Leo.
"But something happened to Donnie, right? And the Purple Dragons were involved?"
"Yeah."
"So what happened?"
Leo didn't have an answer he desperately wanted to give Mikey. He paced back and forth on the street.
“Do you know where Kendra lives?” Leo asked suddenly.
“No?” said Mikey. “Donnie would know that. Should I call—”
“Don’t call him, for fuck’s sake!”
“Leo, you’re scaring me a little here. What’s going on?”
“It’s not important. What’s important is tracking down the Purple Dragons.”
“Leo, look around us. They got away.”
“They didn’t! We just need to look a bit longer—”
“We’re not gonna find them like this! We need Donnie’s help.”
“No, we’re not involving Donnie! Not in this, not with anything to do with those fucking psychopaths!”
Breathless, Leo leaned a hand against the wall and rubbed his eyes. Mikey set a hand on his shoulder and let out a long sigh, resigned.
“We can’t do anything here,” said Mikey. “Let’s go home and see what’s happening.”
Leo didn’t want to face what awaited them back at the lair. He didn’t tell Mikey that, but Mikey must’ve seen it in his eyes because he squeezed hard.
Leo cut the portal into the wall a little more ferociously than he intended, and the cool sensation of stepping through it wasn’t relieving like it usually was. He had to let Mikey push him a little to step all the way through, and when he did, it was to yelling.
The common room was always a mess, but it looked like a bloody hurricane had ripped through in their absence. The crimson trail ended at the open doors to the medbay, where Raph stood with his hands up, and Splinter was off to the side with long lines of stress cracking his face.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Donnie screamed from the medbay.
A drawer of medical equipment flew over Raph’s head, scattering across the floor with a metallic clutter. Splinter turned to Leo and Mikey.
“Blue, what is going on?” Splinter asked.
“Donnie, you need to let me check you for injuries—” Raph ducked as a scalpel flew out. “Geez, Donnie, I’m not trying to hurt you! It’s Raph!”
“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t CARE!” Donnie yelled, voice cracked and broken. “I don’t care, just stay away!”
“Donnie’s resisting treatment?” Leo asked. The question had a dual purpose: dodge his father’s question and try to lighten the mood. “He always was a bad patient.”
“Leonardo, what happened?” Splinter asked again.
“The Purple Dragons happened,” said Leo.
“What?”
Leo peered around the corner. He’d seen Donnie at his worse, seen him throw tantrums and lose his shit, but this was a whole other level. It was full on ugly-crying, eyes looking past and not at Leo, a wild animal kicked into survival mode. Crimson ran down his legs, but Leo scarcely had time to look before Donnie seized a chair and lifted it over his shoulder, ready to swing. A full body-tremble running through Donnie made the chair shake too, made him unsteady on his feet.
Injured animals were the most dangerous. Leo didn’t want to see where the blood ended, to let his mind go to the worst case scenario. He wanted to huddle in a corner and cry, but when he caught Raph’s look, he saw that he was near tears. Helpless. Raph had done all the tending, all the caring when they were growing up, when Splinter was too lost within himself. It was Leo’s turn.
“Donnie, stop throwing things before you take someone’s head off,” Leo said.
“Leave me alone!” Donnie screamed.
Leo leapt out of the way to avoid getting smacked by an airborne chair. Donnie then seized another.
“That’s the last chair in the room, Donnie,” said Leo. “If you throw that, you’re out of ammo.”
Crazed, Donnie swung the chair, prepared to strike, tears running down his face and dripping off his chin. Leo slid into the room.
“It’s just me,” said Leo. “We’re home now. I know it’s really tempting to throw furniture at this face, but please don’t.”
Donnie swung the chair, grazing Leo.
“Donnie, I’m gonna take the chair from you because you might hurt yourself.”
Another swing. Leo caught it that time, held the chair tight as Donnie fought.
“Don’t!” Donnie demanded. “Don’t!”
“Donnie, focus! It’s me, your stupid brother Leo! You’re at home!”
Donnie let out a loud sniff, stared at Leo’s chest. His body was shaking so badly that Leo felt it rattling through the chair, and he took the moment of indecision to touch Donnie's hand.
There was a long moment that pushed past the incoherent terror in Donnie’s eyes. He looked away, ashamed, stared at the blood on the floor, the chair, Leo's hand on his, the sweat, the silent hum of the overhead lights, Raph’s rapid breathing from behind Leo.
Donnie’s hand was clammy and cold to the touch, and Leo remembered the morning they’d brought him home after he’d first been kidnapped by the Purple Dragons, how he looked like another being, how much this Donnie looked like the strange being he’d watched sleep in a beanbag chair in the living room for five nights straight.
Donnie’s shoulders stooped low, and Leo would never be able to tell if it was his willpower giving away or simply the weakness taking over when he pulled the chair out of his hands and set it aside.
“I don’t want to—I can’t, I just can’t—don’t touch me!”
Donnie turned from him, holding his face in his hands like it was enough to hide him. Leo watched the full-body tremor start in his brother’s midsection and radiate outwards, down his legs, destabilizing him. Donnie didn’t seem to be breathing. Leo’s eyes lingered on the blood running freely down his legs.
“Donnie, I’m gonna help you over to the examination table,” said Leo.
Donnie smacked away Leo’s hand. It stung in more ways than one. Leo gave him a moment, and moved slow-steady to take Donnie by the arm. Donnie burst out in a crying fit, a horrible sob ripping out of his mouth to fill the deathly quiet of the medbay.
“Relax, hermano,” said Leo. “It’s just your brother, Leo. I’m helping you to the examination table.”
The twelve foot walk to the nearest examination table might as well have been a marathon. Donnie’s knees jolted and threatened to buckle. But he kept going. All that mattered was that he kept going, with gentle coaxing from Leo, until finally he was settled on the edge of the bed and pressing his palms hard on his ears.
Leo had forgotten that everyone else was watching nervously from the door. It was only when Donnie was seated that they stepped in.
Leo’s eyes passed over the source of the blood: some deep cuts sliced into his inner thighs. Donnie caught him looking and pressed his legs tight together.
“We need to stitch those up,” said Leo. “They’re pretty deep.”
Donnie smacked Leo’s hand away.
“Goddamn,” Leo said, a little more shortly than he intended. “I’m trying to help!”
“I…I can…” Donnie huffed out. He did something that looked like it took a lot of effort. “I can do it.”
“No, you fucking can’t. You can’t even hold your hands still, let alone hold a small, sharp object.”
“Leo?” Raph said.
“In a minute, Raph. Okay. Okay. We’re gonna stitch you up, Donnie, then you’re just gonna…you’re gonna rest while we figure this out.” Leo fumbled through a few drawers for the suture. His hands were no more steady than Donnie’s. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“Leo, I need to talk to you outside,” said Raph. “Now.”
Raph was staring at him with alarmed eyes. His phone was in his hands.
Mikey hopped up on the examination table next to Donnie, and, unlike Leo, Donnie didn’t resist when Mikey intertwined their fingers.
The common room felt ice cold when Leo and Raph stepped out. Splinter was sitting just outside the medbay, also starring at his phone with the most haunted, horrible look Leo had ever seen.
“Leo, what the hell is this?” Raph asked.
Raph held out his phone to Leo, showing a series of photos sent from an unknown number, though Leo didn’t have to have one to know who had sent them. It was a series of pictures of Donnie. Graphic ones. He wasn’t naked in any of them, but that didn’t make the sight any less disturbing. Kendra had taken photos from the most disturbing angles possible, and the words carved onto Donnie’s inner thighs were perfectly visible.
They read: KENDRA’S SLUT.
Leo fought to keep his stomach in his body. After a moment, Raph gently shook his shoulder.
“Is this what you saw?” Raph asked.
Leo nodded.
“Did you see how far—”
“I think I stopped it before it could.”
Raph scooped Leo into a hug and squeezed hard, lifting him off the ground. They held each other for a long while, silent, and he looked over the crook of Raph’s elbow to Splinter. He was staring, lost, at his own phone, and it didn’t take long for it to click together.
That bitch. She gained absolutely nothing from this, nothing except tearing Donnie down.
“How many people do you think she sent this to?” Raph asked.
“Too many,” said Leo.
Leo ducked back into the medbay. He didn’t hear what Mikey was saying to Donnie, but the intonations were soothing and hushed.
“Donnie, do you have your phone?” Leo asked. “Mikey, I need yours too.”
“Why?” Mikey asked.
Leo plucked Mikey’s phone out of his hands. Donnie was slower to respond, squinting at Leo, holding his phone protectively.
“Why do you want it?” Donnie asked.
“I just need to see it,” said Leo.
“But why?”
Leo snatched it away without an answer, and it was a good thing he had; Kendra had spammed Donnie with texts. With photos that made Leo want to puke, disturbing angles, close-ups of the words, then a series of very long and graphic texts describing what she would do the next time they met.
“She took pictures, didn’t she?” Donnie asked.
As much as he wanted to lie, Leo couldn’t. Donnie deserved the truth. “Yeah, she did.”
Donnie took two breaths, holding in oxygen between them, then he finally looked away.
“I want Dad,” said Donnie.
“We really need to stitch up those cuts,” said Leo.
“I want Dad.”
It hurt a little. It felt like a rejection though it wasn't. Leo still felt the hurt skewer his guts, at the way Donnie refused to look at him or Mikey.
Raph’s fist slammed into solid brick, cracking a gaping hole that radiated out, a cobweb of their collective trauma. Mikey shook all over, fists curled, arms rigid at his side, and Leo wanted to go up to him and pull apart his fingers to get him to relax, but didn’t want to break him more than he already had and everything felt broken already and he didn’t want to be the cause of more hurt.
Leo was a failure. After what had happened with the Purple Dragons the first time around, he’d sworn never to let it happen again, never to let the Purple Dragons interfere with their life, never let any villain mess with his brothers in the way they’d messed with Donnie. Although he knew intellectually that this was all unforeseen, that he shouldered no real blame, that didn’t make the horrible, crushing weight on his shoulders any less bone-breaking. He saw it reflected in Mikey and Raph, too. Saw white light glinting on Raph’s moist eyes.
“Why didn’t you catch her, Leo?” Raph asked.
“Because she’s too damn smart for her own good and because she had a head start,” said Leo. “Don’t you think I would’ve caught and beat the everliving shit out of her if I could?”
“How could you possibly lose her?!”
“I wasn’t gonna leave Donnie alone! What, you wanted me to leave him bleeding on the floor?”
“I’m just sayin’ if you’d used your portals—”
“I was surprised! You’re not saying anything that I haven’t told myself a million times over.”
“You should’ve let me chase after them too. If the three of us worked together, we could’ve caught them.”
“You’re too slow on foot, Raph, you wouldn’t have been able to catch up.”
“Apparently you’re not that fast either.”
“Stop it!” Mikey stepped in, voice sharp. “This isn’t about pinning blame on who didn’t do what, and it’s not about your big fat egos! It’s about Donnie. Check yourselves.”
The argument closed down fast. Mikey was good at doing that.
Splinter emerged from the medbay, looking stressed but focused, and locked eyes with the three of them.
“Purple is fine,” said Splinter. “He has no injuries aside from those cuts.”
“Dad, how far did it go?” Leo asked. “Did he tell you?”
“You appeared before anything…Well, your appearance was timely.” Splinter squeezed Leo’s hand. “Could you boys look after your brother while I am gone?”
“Wait, you’re going after her?”
“Yes, and before you ask, no, you cannot come. I told that girl what the consequences would be if this happened a second time and I intend to deliver.”
“What’re you gonna do? Are you gonna kill her?”
Splinter was quiet a moment, thinking. “It…feels wrong to kill someone so young no matter how horrible she is. I will not hurt her…No, I am going to ruin her life, and I will start by speaking with her parents.”
“Ouch, she might wish you’d killed her after that,” said Mikey.
“Dad, let me come,” Leo begged.
“Your spirit is strong, my son, but your brother needs you here,” said Splinter. “Let me handle this.”
There was no room for argument, only a tight, claustrophobic corner where Leo tried to dredge one up and found none, and he realized that he didn’t want to leave Donnie’s side, that he would do anything in that moment to protect Donnie, and that going after his attacker wasn’t the only way to do that.
Mikey slid into the medbay. Leo glanced inside to find Donnie dressed in sweatpants and his preferred purple hoodie pulled far over his head, staring at his hands and flinching away when Mikey came too close. Donnie glanced up, and met Leo's eyes.
Leo blacked out for a moment, and when he came to, he was in his room, grabbing the doorframe for support. Raph was right behind him, his shadow swallowing him whole.
“It was my idea to go to that stupid party,” said Leo.
“Leo, I’m real sorry,” said Raph. “I’m sorry I yelled, I shouldn’t have—I…I didn’t mean…I didn’t mean any of it. It wasn’t your fault.”
“You think Donnie feels that way?”
“Of course he doesn’t. You stopped her before it got worse, and Donnie’s safe now.”
“I should’ve been there faster.”
“Leo, you got there fast enough. Don’t punish yourself like this.”
“…God, I’m doing just what Mikey said not to do: I’m making it all about myself. How do we fix this, Raph? How?”
Raph didn’t have the answers. Leo realized that none of them did, that it was pointless to go grasping at something that didn’t seem to have them.
Too often in the past, Leo had gone looking to Donnie for answers. How to solve a problem, how to fix something broken, how to win the unwinnable. Now Donnie didn’t have answers either and Leo was adrift in an uncertain sea, the harsh tide battering his broken body on jagged rocks. There was no answer, only the vague sense of a great injustice, and the knowledge that there was very little he could do to mend the cracks left behind.
Leo slept restlessly on the couch for a few hours, plagued with nightmares and the vague sense of being unsettled. He felt as though a monster was living under the couch, poking through the cushions with pins and needles, and he ached far too much when his brain convinced him to wake up fully.
Splinter still wasn’t back. Concerning, but not surprising. Leo knew he could take care of himself but he shot out a message to him anyway. It was early morning, and he knew that April would be getting up pretty soon, and suddenly he wondered if Kendra had sent any photos to her as well. Leo sent a text to April asking her to call him first chance she got and hoped to God she would see it before anything Kendra might’ve sent her.
Donnie wasn’t in the medbay, but Raph stood guard outside his open bedroom door, leaning on the frame and staring inside. Donnie was at his computer, hands clutched firmly around a controller, headphones on. It was typical Donnie-speak for ‘Don’t-even-think-about-interrupting-me,’ a warning sign to keep others away.
“How’s the brainiac doing?” Leo asked Raph, voice low. “Did you talk to him?”
“I tried,” said Raph. “I tried, Leo, I tried for an hour and he shut me out. Then Mikey tried, and Donnie yelled at him.”
“He yelled at Mikey. Mikey?” Leo massaged his forehead. “Alright, guess it’s Leon’s turn.”
“Don’t take it personally if he gets upset, just…just drop it if he doesn’t want to talk.”
“I can handle it.”
Donnie didn’t stir when Leo pulled up a stool beside him.
“Are you winning, son?” Leo asked.
No answer. Not even a snark or a side eye. Even though Donnie’s attention was on the game, there was no real sense of focus to it, only muscle memory. He was playing Terraria, building a tower that was far more asymmetrical than Donnie typically liked to build.
“Donnie?” said Leo.
“I’m busy,” Donnie said curtly. At least his voice was normal.
“Get un-busy.”
“I formally apologize for all the trouble that has been…I mean, I’m issuing a formal apology.”
“You didn’t cause the trouble, Dee.”
“I’m busy, can’t talk.”
“Donnie, we didn’t talk about what happened the last time the Purple Dragons were in the picture, and I can’t let you slide away again.”
“That was by design. I’m not discussing this.”
“I don’t care who you talk to, just that you talk to someone. What—What about April?”
“Why the hell do you think I’d go over this with April? With anyone?”
“So, what? You’re just gonna repress the shit out of everything and not deal with it?”
“And here I was worried that I would have to explain it in excruciating detail.”
“Donnie—”
“Discussion over.”
“Can we just—”
“Over.”
Leo looked, helpless, at Raph, hoping he could swoop in and fix the problem. Raph couldn’t though, this was beyond even Raph. He didn’t know how to break the wall Donnie rapidly built between them. What was he going to do? Bring a sledgehammer down on it? Rip the controller out of his hand, rob Donnie of the choice like Kendra had tried to do?
Donnie’s hands were shaking on the controller.
“Can I do anything?” Leo asked. He couldn’t be sure if he was asking for himself or for Donnie.
“…Moon Lord,” said Donnie.
“Huh?”
“Moon Lord. I need to fight the Moon Lord to get…I need more materials. Grab a controller.”
“Sounds like a four-turtle job.”
Donnie’s head dipped a little. His eyes were wide, unseeing.
“Feels like we could use two extra hands if we’re gonna go ham on the Moon Lord,” said Leo. “Teamwork makes dream work, am I right?”
Donnie nodded and didn’t stop. He set his controller down and squeezed Leo’s knee, rubbing a sleeve over his eyes. Raph gave Leo a thumbs up and left to grab Mikey, and when he was gone and when Donnie pulled back his arm, his eyes were perfectly dry, devoid of the miserable ache that had been there before. Wherever it had gone, Donnie had burned and buried it in a place that no one, not even Leo, could hope to touch.
Notes:
I'm sorry this took so long! I was extremely sick for a few weeks, and on top of it writing this was very, very difficult and emotionally taxing for me in a way I'm not sure I can properly articulate.
I didn't want to shy away from the reality of peer-on-peer sexual violence between teenagers, but at the same time I tried to write in a way that's respectful to the subject matter. I'm scared that I didn't accomplish that in the end but know that I had to do a lot of staring in the mirror. I remember seeing a lot of things when I was a teenager that deeply bothered me so I had to go digging deep into those repressed memories! Man I really did go to a rough high school.
Anyway a lot of people seemed interested in a continuation of this story arc so...here it is? Thank you for reading. Please be kind in the comments.
Chapter 5: Forcibly Stripped || Donnie & Leo - Pale Room, Part II
Summary:
Forcibly Stripped || Donnie & Leo - Pale Room, Part II
Leo didn’t think that there was enough room in his heart to hate anyone more than he hated Kendra. The EPF proved him wrong.
Notes:
CONTENT WARNINGS:
- This isn't Tcest, for the record.- The context for the prompt of this chapter is nonsexual, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing or uncomfortable. The descriptions are vague and not graphic. Please read responsibly.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Igloo.”
“Cold.”
“Snow.”
“Snowman.”
“Snow Jupiter Jim.”
“It can only be one word!”
“Snow Jupiter Jim is one word if I say it real fast,” said Mikey. “Snow-Jupiter-Jim-Snow-Jupiter-Jim-Snow-Jupiter-Jim!”
“Wait, we’ve used two words before,” Raph pointed out.
“Oh, I was going easy on you guys cuz you don’t know how Word Association works,” said Leo. “It’s why you have the fewest points, Mikey.”
“We’re keeping points?!” Mikey exclaimed. He folded his arms and slumped against Raph’s side, pouting. “I don’t wanna play anymore.”
“Aw, c’mon!” Leo exclaimed. “It was just getting good, mostly because I was winning.”
“I resign.”
“Boo.”
Donnie cut between Leo, Raph, and Mikey. He’d been pacing the length of the cell for the last however long it had been. Leo was scared to keep track of time because Donnie was doing it for them in his head, aware of every agonizing second that ticked by, counting the number of seconds it took to get from one end of the cell to the other, measuring the cell’s height, width, and depth, counting his heart rate per minute. Any more seconds and he’d be crawling up the wall.
Leo was doing his best to keep his cool, but the anxiety in the air was getting sharp, and the dim light, the foul smell, and the indistinct banging from whatever was next door didn’t help. Leo focused on his breathing, trying to remember Splinter’s techniques, and failing miserably.
There was an unspoken something between him in his brothers. They knew what was coming and they knew it was going to be bad and they knew that waiting was the worst part. Leo never imagined that he would ever hope that someone would walk through the door and torture them, but here he was, thinking about how much more torturous the waiting was.
Donnie passed in front of him again, footsteps silent. Mikey’s gigantic eyes watched him and Raph settled his arm around Mikey’s shoulder, maybe drawing him a little closer, though Leo might’ve imagined it.
Leo refolded his legs under his body. It would be a nightmare trying to get any sleep on the hard ground. It had to be close to nighttime by now, so whatever torture awaited them wouldn’t come until tomorrow. His gaze shifted up and caught Raph’s.
Leo and Raph exchanged a silent conversation. Raph tilted his head towards Donnie. Do you want me to handle that?
Leo shook his head. No. His responsibility.
He stood and held an arm in front of Donnie. Donnie pushed past it roughly.
“Stop,” said Leo, trying to get in his path. Donnie pushed him out of the way a second time. “Donnie, you’re gonna wear yourself out.”
Donnie hit the end of the cell. His body bristled, like he’d been expecting it to continue. He swung around on his heel and walked in the other direction.
“Could you at least sit down?” Leo asked.
“I’m fine like this,” said Donnie. He hit the wall again. Another bristle. Another swing.
“You’re stressing us out.”
“Sounds like a skill issue.”
The wall again. Donnie growled, swung around, and paced to the other end. “I do not care for small, enclosed spaces where I am being held prisoner.”
“Yeah, join the club. Sit down already.”
Donnie’s mouth half-opened around an insult when the door opened.
Donnie had ended up far too close to the door, too close for his liking apparently, as he retreated to the back of the cell. It was an intern, a different one than the first, accompanied by two armed guards. Leo memorized their appearances, the black uniforms and body armour, the strange emblems on their clothing that said ‘EPF.’
“Good evening,” said the intern. She wore a toothy smile as insincere as the brightness in her voice. “We have determined that your garments, since they come from outside the facility, may be contaminated. We ask that you surrender your current articles and change into these.”
The intern dumped the contents of the box onto the floor: four pairs of loose, very unattractive grey shorts with elastic waistbands. Prison uniforms. Leo stared at them in shock.
Silence tensed up between them and the humans. The soldiers had their assault rifles poised, while the intern stood with her legs together and hands folded in front of her body. She looked like a Barbie doll, if a Barbie doll’s newest profession was a researcher at a prison camp.
“Incredible,” said Leo. “I thought you guys were just evil shitheads, but now you’re just being gross. You know we’re kids, right?”
The intern didn’t even flinch.
“He’s sixteen years old, and he’s the oldest.” Leo pointed at Raph. “We’re kids. You’re holding kids prisoner in this shithole and asking us to change into your shit clothes.”
“Oh?” the intern said. “Well, if you were humans, I suppose that would matter, but you’re not, so it doesn’t.”
“Where’s the other lady? The one whose name sounds like an off-brand canned pasta? I want to talk to her so I can spit in her face.”
“Dr Paccioretti has many cases she needs to oversee. Are you refusing to comply?”
“What, you want it in writing? Yeah, we’re not complying. You’re the war criminals here, not us.”
“Well, if you don’t comply, it will be done by force. We can’t have outside contaminants.”
The tension prickled up his spine. He heard Donnie inhale sharp and gasp out something inaudible, and Leo turned to see him swivel toward the wall with his hands over his ears.
It clicked.
Shit. Leo wasn’t sure why he hadn’t been thinking of it before, why he hadn’t made the connection, and, God, he really was the worst brother in the world for not thinking of it sooner, for attributing Donnie’s reaction to his usual dramatic flair rather than the intimate connection it really was. It made him sick to his stomach. It made him hate humans.
Mikey stared off into the mid-distance, gulping for air. Leo’s attention wandered from him to Raph, and he searched for guidance despite being determined to carry all the weight on his own.
“I think we should do what they want,” Raph told him.
Yeah. It was the sound decision, just not the one Leo wanted to make. He glared at the intern with all the venom he had.
“You want us to wear your prison uniforms, then get out,” said Leo. “We’re not changing in front of you.”
“If that is your preference,” said the intern. “Please put all of your present attire into this box.” She set the box on the floor. “And put everything you’re wearing into it, including those masks. Thank you for your cooperation. You have fifteen minutes to comply.”
The door locked with a loud click behind them.
Leo’s fist shook at his side. No one could say anything, no one was capable, not Donnie standing with his back to the room, not Mikey whose complexion had developed a grey undertone. Raph looked nauseous.
“Do we really gotta, Leo?” Mikey asked.
“Don’t think they’re giving us the option,” said Leo. “Look at it this way! We want to match with the other prisoners in the prison yard, right? We gotta fit in with the cool kids.”
Well, he had to lead by example. Leo changed first, and he did it quick so he didn’t have time to think about hidden cameras. The shorts were itchy, and he unwound the wrappings from his limbs and dropped them into the box. He almost forgot his mask. The masks were as much part of their identities as their shells were, but Leo measured out only a teaspoon of emotion to show when Mikey and Raph were watching.
“I look good in anything,” said Leo. He flapped the baggy shorts around. “I think if I flap hard enough, I can fly around this cell and really give those guys something to gawk at. Whaddya think, Mikey?”
Mikey snorted out a half-laugh. It got him and Raph going though, and they changed fast, dropping their masks and what remained of their belongings into the box. At least they had shorts that could fit Raph’s bulky frame, but Mikey looked far too small in hia.
Leo knew that there was going to be a fight when he saw Donnie standing still in the corner, facing the wall like a reenactment of The Blair Witch Project.
“Oh, Donnie, we’ve changed the Turtle Club’s uniform,” Leo sang. “Aren’t you turtley enough to join the Turtle Club?”
Nothing. No response. Not even a shiver, a side-eye, a glare. An icy chill tap-danced down Leo’s spine.
“C’mon, Dad can’t even tell us apart without the masks. This is probably the best chance for a prank we’ve had in a while! He’ll come storming in here in rescue mode, take one look inside, and won’t even be able to tell which of us is which!”
“I can’t do this.”
Each syllable skewered through Leo. It hurt to breathe.
“I can’t do this.” Donnie looked at him with open terror, pupils constricted into small, black dots. “Leo, I can’t do this.”
“Dee, the nice humans aren’t giving us a choice,” said Leo, fighting to keep his tone steady while conveying the urgency.
“I can’t!”
“Donnie, c’mon, you’ll pass out if you don’t breathe.”
“No, I can’t! You don’t understand—” Donnie broke eye contact, stared at his feet. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
He didn’t. Leo made no assumptions about that, but he didn’t need to know what it was like to not see the profound effect on Donnie’s whole body language. It made him want to gut every human, and he wondered, for the first time, if Splinter had been right to encourage them to stay in the sewers rather than go on moonlit adventures.
Against his will, Leo glanced down. Ever since the whole thing with Kendra had happened, Donnie had tied the wraps on his legs almost high enough to cover his entire legs, and he never spoke about it. No one did. Leo kicked himself for letting them fall back into old habits, to do what they had done last time.
It was just so easy to not talk about it. They could almost pretend it hadn’t happened, then sometimes things would happen that would crack it all open, bring out a reminder. The way Donnie shied away from hugs, evil grins that disappeared the moment Leo looked away, projects that used to take him just hours to finish now took him days, tossing and turning at night, and all the while don’t talk about it, never talk about it, it never happened, no one bring it up, no one upset Donnie. But Donnie was upset anyway, and it was just buried, just small fissures in the earth, invisible to the naked eye until there was an earthquake.
Leo hated himself for not addressing it sooner, although he’d never known how. Just that it was too late and Donnie was being traumatized all over again.
Raph watched from the side, prepared to step in, a silent yet steady pillar in their lives, the rock that held them altogether. Leo wanted to fall back and let him take control and it was so, so tempting to lash out at Donnie and demonstrate that he couldn’t do this either, but hell, he wouldn’t place the burden on Raph. Leo imagined what would happen if he let Raph do it, of Raph lying awake in bed years from now, haunted by the moment that he hurt Donnie. It would kill him, slow and torturous.
It had to be Leo. Leo would do it. Leo would shoulder the burden, though he wasn’t nearly strong enough to carry it.
Raph opened his mouth, about to intervene, and Leo’s reflexes kicked in. He spoke first.
“Raph, can you stand in front of us?” Leo asked.
For a moment, he thought Raph might fight him on it, before he blocked him and Donnie in with his sheer mass. Not much of a privacy curtain, but it would give the humans something unsatisfying to stare at.
“Mikey?” Leo said. “…Mikey!”
Mikey looked up.
“I need you to hold Donnie’s hand.”
Leo expected Donnie to bite out an insult, to insist to stop treating him like a child, but the shake in his brother’s knees was uncontrollable. Donnie reached for Mikey’s hand first, crushing his fingers.
Leo redressed Donnie as fast as he could. Mask first. Arms. Belt and gear. Shorts. He saved the leg wrappings for last. Donnie's deep, legible scars were visible even when dressed.
“Donnie, what games do you wanna play when we get out of here?” Mikey asked.
Donnie’s head jerked up.
“We haven’t played Mario Party in ages, and I know how much you stan Waluigi,” said Mikey. “I’m thinking we need a game ASAP.”
Donnie made a shuddering noise as to answer, but no words came out, just a stiff jerk that could’ve been an affirmation, could’ve been a release of nervous energy. Leo continued unwrapping until finally, finally, they were off and it was quiet and Leo had nothing that could make it better.
Leo didn’t think that there was enough room in his heart to hate anyone more than he hated Kendra. The EPF proved him wrong.
He dropped everything into the box and kicked it to the door, and scowled as the intern poked her head back in to retrieve it.
“I hope something in this goddamn place eats you alive,” said Leo.
“Oh,” said the intern. “Alright.”
When they were gone, when they were alone, Leo didn’t know what to say to Donnie. His entire expression glazed over with the telltale marks of a shutdown, the kind of full-body, full-mind switch that crippled everything that made Donnie into Donnie. When they were kids, Donnie would have moments where he ‘powered off’, as Raph had put it, when things were too loud, or too much, or too little, or too overwhelming. Leo hadn’t seen it in years. The humans had made Leo hit the hard reset button and now the button was stuck and the loud, opinionated, too-smart-for-his-own-good Donnie was gone.
Leo was about to apologize and beg for forgiveness, and Donnie grabbed to him in the heated silence instead. It wasn’t a hug, not the way his arms locked tight around his neck. It was a cling. Donnie held onto him with his eyes wide open, joints rigid. Although it was the most bodily contact Donnie had allowed in weeks, Leo was hesitant to call it a win.
Donnie held on all the way to the ground as Leo settled himself against the wall, resting Donnie’s legs over his lap so that they were in a slightly awkward sideways embrace. He resisted the urge to bury his face into Donnie’s collarbone; he still needed to keep an eye out, and Raph and Mikey were watching so carefully that he felt like a performer at the pinnacle of a difficult routine, and any misstep would earn a pained, sympathetic gasp from the audience, and he needed to play it cool, keep it together, to perform perfectly. To do everything that he needed to do to make sure that they all didn’t break down together. Someone had to keep a cool head. Someone had to keep an eye out for the opening that would help them escape. It had to be him. It had to be him. It had to be him.
“Donnie, I promise nothing is going to happen to you,” said Leo. It felt awful to lie, but he didn’t know what else to do. The worst part was that Donnie was smart enough to catch the lie, but too tangled up in his head at the moment to notice or care.
He didn’t have a plan. Not even a half-cocked one. Donnie clung onto him, and Leo held back, hands running over the subtle ridges running on his brother’s shell.
Notes:
I'll be honest, I'm really not sure what to say at this point, except this chapter and storyline is emotionally exhausting and I can't wait for it to be over so I can get back to writing normal grade angst. That's kind of why this prompt was next on my list because I really, really wanted to get it over with as soon as possible lol.
Anyway, as always thank you to everyone who reads, leaves comments, kudos, etc. on my work, it feels great to have a group of supportive readers! Thank you again.
Chapter 6: Crying Themselves to Sleep || Mikey - Pale Room, Part III
Summary:
Crying Themselves to Sleep || Mikey, Pale Room, Part III
One by one, they’re taken from the cell, and Mikey wonders if they’ll ever see each other again.
Notes:
Crying Themselves to Sleep || Mikey - Pale Room, Part III
One by one, they’re taken from the cell, and Mikey wonders if they’ll ever see each other again.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
\Their cell was quiet when Mikey woke up. What he wouldn’t give for a window. At least in their lair, he had the sense of whether it was daytime or nighttime, or even a clock just to tell the time, but he woke up in the near-total darkness and no sense of how long he’d been asleep.
Raph had taken up Donnie’s pacing. However, while Donnie paced a long line, Raph did it in a tight circle at one end of the cell, large hands rubbing the back of his neck, his arms, his sides. Leo was holding onto Donnie. Leo’s face was so tight, so old, and so unlike him that Mikey almost thought he was looking at a stranger, and when he sensed Mikey watching, he forced a reassuring smile.
“Man, they sure like keeping us waiting,” said Leo. “Anyone else getting hungry? Thirsty? Both?”
“Ugh, please don’t talk about food right now,” said Raph. “Raph is getting hangry.”
Leo’s laugh was stilted. “You sleep alright, Mikey?”
“No,” said Mikey, stretching out his sore limbs. The floor felt harder than concrete and just as inviting. “Did you?”
“Ah, y’know, hard to sleep with this guy on me. Didn’t realize Donnie was this heavy. His head must really be dense if he’s got this much weight on him.”
“You think all his weight in his head?”
“No, really, if he has, like, more brain cells than us and they’re all packed together, that makes him heavy. I bet Raph isn’t as heavy as him. Hey, Raph, come over here and test it out for me.”
Raph grunted something noncommittal. The feverish silence created a horrible, heavy heat in the cell, making it difficult to breathe.
“Hey, Mikey, hold on to him for a sec, would you?” said Leo.
Mikey scooted across and Leo passed Donnie to him, prying his hands away. When Leo gently passed Donnie to Mikey, Donnie didn't even seem cognizant of it. He let out something between a gasp and a grunt, and clung to Mikey when he was passed into his arms.
Leo convened with Raph in the corner of the cell. Despite Mikey being able to hear everything, they spoke quietly to create the illusion of a private conversation.
“Tell me you got a plan,” Leo whispered.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Raph hissed. “We could rush them. Might get into the hall before they release that gas or whatever it was.”
“Yeah, and get shot by a bunch’a pea shooters. We don’t even have our weapons and there’s a whole lot of them and four of us. Donnie was probably our best bet for coming up with a way out of here and he’s not all there right now.”
Raph looked around, searching the ceiling, and Mikey knew he was looking for cameras. He pulled Leo closer in and started signing instead of speaking, at just an awkward enough angle that it might be difficult for a camera to get a view of their hands.
“Donnie may’ve left us a way out,” Raph signed.
“Like what?” Leo replied.
“The emergency beacons in our belts. Everything happened too fast for us to hit them, but if we can activate them, Dad could pinpoint our location and come get us. He knows we’re missing by now.”
“They confiscated those the moment we were out, along with the rest of our gear.”
“The belts don’t look like a threat a first glance. I don’t know if they’d lock them up with our weapons.”
“We’d need to get out of here.”
“They aren’t gonna leave us in here forever.”
“Dunno. I think they may just let us starve to death.”
“No. They didn’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s an interrogation tactic. They’re depriving us of food and water to make us more agreeable.”
Leo looked scared. “You seem pretty sure of that.”
“I feel pretty sure.” Raph rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, no matter what happens, focus on trying to get to those belts. Be sneaky about it if you have to.” He locked eyes with Mikey. “If that fails, we all have to keep an eye out for an opening to escape, even if it means only one of us gets away. If one of us escapes, they can go get help.”
Leo opened his mouth, as if to protest or agree or something, but he didn’t have time to when the lock on the door clanked and opened.
Mikey squinted against the blistering florescent light that came into the room in a long rectangle. Leo put himself at the front, right into a barrel of an assault rifle the guards at the door pointed inside. The intern was back.
“Alright, room service!” Leo joked.
The intern surveyed his clipboard, flipping through a few pages, then pointed at Raph. “Him first.”
“Woah, hey, let’s not get hasty. I think it’s only reasonable that I go first. I am the leader of this quirky band of misfits, so it’s only fair—look, that’s a nice gun, but hot tip: if you point it at the shell, it’s not gonna do much.”
“Don’t answer it,” said the intern.
Leo stepped into Raph’s path as he stepped forward. “Wait, hold up, you need to feed us first! It’s in the Geneva Convention. Yeah, I’ll take an omelette, if that’s on the menu, and maybe some—”
“Step aside!”
“You’re not helping, Leo,” Raph hissed.
“No, we need to eat before—before any serious, uh, before we, uh, are taken to the prison yard, or whatever,” said Leo, talking faster and faster. “Matter of fact, we haven’t gotten that phone call yet, in fact since there’s four of us, we’re each owed a call, so that makes four calls total—”
Mikey squeezed his eyes shut as one of the guards butted Leo on the head with the rifle. He heard, though. He heard the sound of Leo’s body hitting the ground with a loud thump and his surprised, pained cry. Donnie’s arms tightened around Mikey’s neck.
“Move!” the guard shouted.
Raph’s hands were halfway to picking Leo off the floor. An instinct that never went away. It seemed to take a lot of effort for him to step over Leo instead and into the light. The last thing he did was turn back towards Mikey, flash an I-got-this smile, and he was gone.
It happened so fast that Mikey didn’t even have time to feel truly afraid, just stunned and lost and he couldn’t even get up to check on Leo because Donnie made himself ten times heavier than he already was and Mikey was small already. Fortunately, Leo stirred and sat up with a fresh gash on his head running blood down his face.
“Let me see,” said Mikey.
Leo looked around, dazed, and found Mikey. He scooted over and let Mikey prod at it.
“Are you dizzy?” Mikey asked.
Leo didn’t answer, looking into something past him. The fear caught back up to Mikey’s body and a terrible twisting sensation pulled his intestines every which way.
“Leo…Leo, c’mon, please answer me, don’t leave me alone here. Please.”
It took a minute or two for the focus to come back to Leo’s eyes. He breathed deep. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Are you dizzy?” Mikey repeated.
“No. No, it’s—ow.”
“Sorry. Put pressure on it, I don’t have—fuck, I wish I had a cloth or something—”
“It’s okay, it’s fine.” Leo pumped confidence into his tone. “Everything’s fine. This is all part of the plan.”
“Well…Well, it’s not for forever. They’re gonna bring him back.”
“Yeah, of course they are. They probably just took him to…to get more blood samples, or something. It’s like going to the doctor.”
“We’ve never been to the doctor.”
“Yeah, we’re way overdue for a check up, aren’t we? Raph’s gonna be fine.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
Leo scooted up shoulder-to-shoulder with Mikey. He looked at them with an unnatural wistfulness, and Mikey looked for far longer than he should’ve, trying to dissect the emotion. Their gazes didn’t break from one another. The silence filled up all their words for them, drowning all feelings that came with it.
Finally, Leo put an arm over his shoulder and tugged him close, and the nagging fear chewing at his stomach lining eased a little.
-
They spent time reminiscing on what they were going to do when they got out, all the pizzas they were going to eat, the petty crimes they’d commit, the criminals they’d beat up. They complained about Raph’s body odour a lot; he’d been stinking up the bathroom lately, and no amount scrubbing got it out of the tiles. Leo suggested stealing a bathroom from Big Mama, insisting that they could cut a whole room out of her hotel and cart it off to the lair without anyone noticing. Wistful, daring, confident, sensational, preposterous little pranks that would get them on magazine covers, boost their egos, give them bragging rights all throughout New York City’s underground scene. Then they’d take a vacation to Todd’s, go camping for a while despite Donnie’s griping, drag the Caseys with them, maybe take a trip to Australia, go to places where humans would never see them again.
And that was the crux of it, the fear behind it all, because Draxum was wild and crazy and his experiments were out there even too far for the yōkai but he wasn’t a human, and he had some sense of what it was like to be persecuted and feared. Humans weren’t all that kind to each other a lot of the time, but God, they were so much worse to anything that wasn’t even tangentially them. The fraction of human DNA that made them walk upright and talk and think and feel just wasn’t enough. And Mikey was thinking, maybe it was a little too much for the situation it was in. He wished he had less of it. That he was more animal-like, because an animal would know how to survive. He felt close to breaking down and soon his throat got too dry from dehydration and fear to continue, so Leo spoke for all three of them because he was the only one who had enough words to make up for it.
Even Leo’s voice faded after a while, and the only thing that made him stop was when the lock clanked again. Leo scrambled up.
The same quartet of guards entered. At least, Mikey thought they might be the same. It was hard to tell behind the helmets.
“Where’s Raph?” Leo demanded. No jokes, not even a quip.
The guards pointed their weapons at him. One said, “Come with us. Do not resist.”
“Yeah, I want to know where my brother is first.”
“Come with us. I won’t warn you again.”
Leo’s gaze flitted in all directions, searching.
“Leo, you’re not gonna go, are you?” Mikey asked.
“…Relax, I’m…I’m just gonna go find out what they did with Raph,” said Leo. “I’ll come back for you guys.”
“Leo!”
“Stay with Donnie. I’ll come back, promise.”
Leo threw up his hands in mock surrender and a roll of his eyes and an upward quirk of his lips. He winked at him and walked out with his escort.
“Leo!” Mikey called out.
The shutting of the door was definitive. Mikey listened to his rapid breathing in the dark.
He held tight on to Donnie and tried not to think about all the things that could happen to Leo and Raph. Donnie was here, Donnie was with him, Donnie was safe, and no, don’t think about Leo and Raph because they knew what they were doing: Leo was confident and smart, and Raph was strong and willful. That would be enough. It would be enough to keep them alive, long enough for Splinter to find them.
Still, Mikey wondered. He thought about the Krang invasion, about Casey’s bad future, and wondered if it was fate that he and his brothers died, if his brothers being taken from him was the space-time continuum trying to right itself and force them to face the fates they’d dodged when the invasion was stopped.
It was so dark in the cell. Mikey felt like it was getting darker. The only thing that felt tangible was Donnie in his arms, and he was far too quiet.
“Donnie, c’mon, get out of your head,” said Mikey. “Don’t leave me alone in this!”
It had been a long shot to begin with. Donnie was a terrible listener even when he wasn’t powered off. Mikey wished he could find the switch to turn him back on.
Mikey stared at where he thought the cell door might be. He wasn’t imagining it; the lights were definitely getting dimmer. The darker it got, the more afraid he became, the more he revisited his childhood fear of the dark. Donnie had made him a nightlight for his room to chase away the perpetual dark of the sewers. Back then, the monsters had been imaginary.
Now he sat in the dark again, terrified of it, trying to hold the panic inside his body by holding his breath.
Donnie shifted a little, adjusting his grip around Mikey’s shoulders. It was probably just an instinctual reaction, but Mikey latched onto it, hoping that it was a deliberate sign of life.
“You there, Donnie?” Mikey asked. “Don’t worry, Leo and Raph will get back here soon.”
He didn’t know what else to say.
The third clank from the door sent his heart back to his throat. The light streaming in from the hall almost blinded him.
Paccioretti stepped inside, followed by her intern and the usual entourage of guards.
“You see?” said the intern. “Just as I told you.”
“I have eyes,” said Paccioretti.
“Where’s Raph and Leo?” Mikey demanded.
“What do you want to do?” the intern asked. “Should we turn it over to Bishop?”
“Bishop already has his hands full with the other two,” said Pacioretti. “An unresponsive subject is useless to everyone.”
“Where are Raph and Leo?” Mikey repeated.
Pacioretti gave Mikey a careful, prolonged stare. She whipped out her clipboard and scanned down it, biting the insides of her cheeks.
“What has D61’s diet been like lately?” Pacioretti asked.
“Uh, mostly table scraps from the cafeteria one or twice a week,” said the intern.
“Hm. It’s been a while since it had a fresh meal and we have three subjects who are better candidates. Take it to sub-level 2 and dump it in.”
The intrinsic fear launched into Mikey’s throat. Meal. Table scraps.
He twisted away from the advancing guards, pinning Donnie against the ground. He wouldn’t let this happen, he couldn’t let it happen, Leo had told them to stay together, he needed to stay with Donnie, he needed to.
“NO!” Mikey shouted. “No! You can’t do this!”
“Don’t be theatrical,” said Pacioretti. “The only thing you’re doing by throwing a fit is wasting my time.”
“You can’t do this! I won’t let you!”
“This is not a situation where you have a choice. Comply.”
“You’re not feeding my brother to some fucking monster!”
Pacioretti rolled her eyes, and with a wave of her arm, she left to let the guards do their jobs.
They were an execution squad. They even had the black hoods in the form of their helmets. Mikey let out a scream and clawed at the nearest one, all his training forgotten in the throes of his uncoordinated panic.
There was a moment, a small one, that almost passed by unnoticed. Donnie made an indistinct noise and his eyes were wide, alert, and alive, but he didn’t seem to be capable of speaking. They met his. Mikey felt like thousands of thoughts passed between them, but they were blurred with heightened emotion, and the rift never felt so wide while being so small.
Donnie was yanked out from underneath him.
“DONNIE!” Mikey screamed. “DONNIE! NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS!”
“Get that thing under control!”
Several bodies slammed into him and shoved him back into the dark, while dragging Donnie towards the light. The last he saw of him was a flash of his wide eyes, then the humans were gone and the cell door slammed shut.
Mikey charged to where he thought the door was and pounded on it, screaming Donnie’s name and clawing into the metal. His mind raced with a mantra: Donnie’s-gonna-die, Donnie’s-gonna-die, Donnie’s-gonna-die. His nails dug into metal. He thought he could rip it away to expose the light. There was still time, he could just get to him, and he could remember his training instead of panicking, he could make it better. Mikey could make it better.
It lasted for forever. The desperate, howling sound of his own voice as he slammed his hands against the metal until something hot and liquid poured down his arm, and the feeling in his hands numbed into a burning, buzzing sensation. Mikey was sure he slammed his head against it once or twice. He kicked and screamed. He could get to Donnie. He could get to him before they fed him to a monster, and no, don’t picture it, don’t picture Donnie’s body getting cleaved in two by a monster, don’t picture explaining it to Leo and Raph and his own dad, he was going to fix this. Mikey could make it better.
Mikey slammed his shoulder against the door, pressing all his weight against it, but it didn’t budge. It was an immovable force, and his body was too small. Mikey was still working on the mystic mojo, but when he tried to focus on breaking down the door with psychic power, the only thing that came was a headache and tears that would’ve blinded him if the cell wasn’t already pitch black. He couldn’t move his arms. He pounded his body against the door, pressing his shell against it. Mikey could make it better.
Mikey thought this must be what purgatory was like: a black, horrible, inhospitable place where he lived with the fear that he would never see his brothers again. He attacked the door until he became exhausted and collapsed to his knees, tears flowing uncontrollably as he pressed his forehead against the metal.
It had been a long time.
Long enough for them to take Donnie to another cell.
Long enough for them to push him in.
Long enough for something to end his life.
And if it was plausible that something had killed Donnie in that time, it was plausible that something had killed Leo and Raph long before that. There had been more than enough time for the humans to do horrible things to them.
It was the universe realigning itself. Setting things right. They would die young like they were always meant to.
Mikey couldn’t see anything, only feel all the pains in his body and the perpetual ache in his soul he thought might be permanent. He curled into a fetal position, shell propped open against the door. He cried and cried and cried, until his body gave him no choice but to fall asleep.
Notes:
Sorry it's been so long! My muse needed a very long vacation before they felt like writing again.
Sorry also if this story is super self-indulgent and needlessly flowery, I know this is not everyone's cup of tea. At this point in my life I just need something super edgy to write.Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read, comment, and so on and so forth, your support means a lot to me!
Chapter 7: Catatonia || Donnie - Pale Room, Part IV
Summary:
Catatonia || Donnie - Pale Room, Part IV
Donnie meets the right mutant, at the right time.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The ground disappeared beneath Donatello and he had a momentary sense of falling down, down, down, straight to the centre of the Earth where molten rock would consume him. Memories flashed around him. Swarms of humans and hands. Being held by his brothers in the dark of a cell. A heat that didn’t give away. He thought about the possibility that he hadn’t left the cell, but his heart thrummed loudly in his chest, and he knew he didn’t have the luxury of death no matter how much he preferred it to torture.
He hit the ground in a heap. It wasn’t hard like he expected, nor was he instantly liquefied. No, it was sodden and muddy. His mouth filled with dirt and muck, and Donnie rolled onto his back up towards a circle of light far above, with a few human faces looking down on it.
“This seems like a waste of resources,” said a human.
“We don’t get paid enough to think,” said another. “Hey, want to get lunch later? I’ve been dying for Subway all week.”
“You really need to quit eating that garbage.”
The circle of light closed, and darkness swarmed over him.
Donnie’s survival instincts kept him alert, but fear paralyzed him. He wrung his hands into the muddy earth and scanned his surroundings, lit by sparse overhead lights that didn’t reach every corner. The smell was terrible: swampy and humid. He sat on a raised island in the centre of the room, surrounded by a doughnut-shaped ring of murky water, and steep, uneven land on the other side. It was about the same size as a school gymnasium, with a tall roof and a steady drip-drip-drip of water that filled the silence. If the ground hadn’t been so soft, the fall from above could’ve easily killed him.
Where was Leo? Mikey? Raph?
Donnie felt like he was going crazy. He couldn’t even be sure if they existed anymore, if he was just some experiment concocted by the humans who’d imagined a family to cope with the trauma.
He felt as though he might die there, kneeling in the mud.
If it hadn’t been for the water moving.
Donnie whipped around towards the noise. He saw the ripples in the water long before he saw the thing that was making them. The water was so cloudy that it looked almost solid. The ripples gave it away. Donnie’s heart lunged into his throat.
The thing rose out of the depths like something from a campy horror movie. And it was huge. Large shoulders. Gnashing teeth. Covered in swamp debris and mud and who-knows-what-else. It climbed the slight slope of the island on all fours.
The thing opened its mouth and said, “Hello, I am—”
Donnie grabbed some mud and hurled it.
The mud wad landed squarely in the thing’s beady yellow eyes.
Donnie only knew he was screaming because deafening echoes bounced off of the chamber walls, horrible and cracked. It was impossible to run. Even if he had anywhere to run to, the earth was too soft to get a proper foothold, and he sank ankle-deep into it.
Donnie skidded down to the water’s edge and dove in. He couldn’t see anything in front of him, but neither could the creature, and that evened the playing field.
He didn’t know how deep he swam, but he reached the bottom and felt around blindly for something to give him more cover. He clawed at nothing except mud and more water, and panic came in a hard wave that made him thrash around as if he were at risk of drowning.
Donnie’s head slammed into something solid. Something metal, solid, and curved. A pipe of some sort. Donnie couldn’t feel an opening, but the earth was soft enough underneath that he could claw out something to push himself into.
It was a tight squeeze, pressed between the pipe and earth, but that thing was blind in the water too, and it would have to do a lot of digging to pull him out. Finally secure, Donnie tried to calm his terror.
He stayed there at the bottom of the water, in total darkness, for a long time. He didn’t move. Without light, he didn’t have a sense of how long it was. Donnie listened to the movement of the water, listening for any sounds of the thing swimming past, but all of it had stopped the moment he dove into it. His senses felt heightened with fear.
The nothingness continued. Donnie listened to the water swarming in his ears. It was so long that he felt as though reality was getting further and further away from him. Softshell turtles in the wild spent almost their whole lives loitering at the bottom of muddy waters, but Donnie had just enough human in him that he couldn't stand the extended isolation. Periodically, he slipped into a flat nothingness that left him frozen. He couldn’t even feel afraid anymore, just nothing.
His brothers weren’t here, and he didn’t know where they were or what had happened to them, or what had led to this moment. The black space between his racing thoughts grew larger and larger. It left him feeling like he’d buried himself under the pipe to make it easier for the people who were going to dig his grave.
The darkness at the bottom of the pond was maddening. He had to know what was out there.
In one of the small, fleeting moments of awareness, Donnie pulled himself out from under the pipe, desperate for just a gulp of air, and to get a sense of where the monster was. Even a fleeting bit of pain would be better than experiencing nothing for all eternity.
Donnie rose to the surface slowly, careful not to ripple the water as he poked his head out. The thing sat atop the island as if it were in a waiting room. Although Donnie had been careful not to make any noise, it swung its head around as though he had blasted an air horn.
The island had enough light cast on it that Donnie could get a clear look at what it was. It was a massive crocodile—no; it was an alligator. Bipedal, tall enough to dwarf Raph, and glowing yellow eyes that had a sense of intelligence that most alligators lacked.
“I do not eat things with sentience,” said the alligator. “Not unless I am very, very angry at least.”
Donatello ducked back under the surface and swam back to the safety of the pipe. He’d lost track of it during his ascent, and it took a while to find it again. When he did, he squashed himself back into the pit he’d made underneath.
His awareness faded away in a flash. It took him a while again to refocus, trying to remember long-forgotten coping techniques to steady himself. Donnie couldn’t take deep breaths underwater, but he counted backwards from a hundred and tried to think straight.
Many, many mutants and yōkai had tried to kill him and his brothers. Some had pretended to be friends, others had been hostile outright, and he didn’t know if this one was friend or foe.
He couldn’t stay under here forever.
It was a calculated risk, one that Donnie had to psych himself up to. He ascended a second time and found that the alligator hadn’t moved. He was picking something out of his teeth.
“I hope you know I use that body of water as my lavatory,” said the alligator. “You are swimming in my diluted waste products.”
Now that was true terror. Donnie scrambled out on the other side of the pond’s bank, shaking as much of the water off as he could. He retreated until his shell pressed back against the far wall, which was moist with humid and covered with plant life and moss.
The alligator didn’t pursue him. Adrenaline ebbed off, and Donnie realized he had no strength in his legs. They folded beneath him. The two of them stared at each other, neither speaking.
Being above water was better than being beneath it. Out here, he could feel the air and breathe and see. He could dig his nails into his flesh, and the humid air stung it. His vision was only dark around the edges instead of being consumed by it.
“I am Leatherhead,” said the alligator.
Donnie raised his head.
“It is similar to ‘Leatherback,’ but I am not a turtle.”
The alligator said it with complete sincerity, as if Donnie wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an alligator and a turtle. Leatherhead had a rigid, stilted way of speaking, like he had to think carefully about what he was saying before he said it.
Leatherhead moved slow. Donnie had the instinct to run, even to dive back into the contaminated water, but he couldn’t move. His body wasn’t cooperating, and he was helpless to do anything but watch as Leatherhead advanced towards him.
Leatherhead stopped at the bottom of the embankment. He held out a crinkled bag of potato chips.
“Do you like the chips?” Leatherhead asked. “They are made of a root vegetable referred to as ‘solanum tuberosum.’”
There was a loud clank. Donnie realized Leatherhead was wearing a large collar attached to a heavy chain that dragged behind him. Attached to the wall somewhere in the dark on the other side of the room, it was only just long enough to get to the place where Leatherhead stood.
Effectively, Donnie was safe, so long as he stood where the rope didn’t reach.
Leatherhead placed the chips on the embankment, well out of the water, and went back to sit on the island a safe distance away. Donnie didn’t feel hungry at all, though he knew it had been a long time since he’d eaten.
They both stayed quiet. Leatherhead seemed to wait for Donnie to do something aside from sit there. Donnie waited for himself to do that too. People—well, yōkai and mutants—were often afraid of Raph because of his size and fearsome appearance, not realizing just how gentle he truly was. Donnie wasn’t the best at getting a read on others, but Leatherhead displayed no outward signs of aggression. No gnashing teeth. No flailing. Even his movements were lumbering and predictable.
But Donnie’s body froze over, and he didn’t want to thaw out for spring.
-
Nothing. There was nothing. He was nothing.
He was a nothing thing trapped in a nothing body in a nothing world. Donnie became a statue, become nothing. He was a being of stone, never having a will of his own.
The nothing retreated and his eyes were wide open, but his body cramped all over like he’d run a marathon. The body that didn’t feel like his gasped out some breaths, and there was a slight, surprised noise from the other side of the room. He blinked open his eyes to see the alligator—Leatherhead—opposite the chamber from him, on an outcrop of land. He was reading a goddamn book like he was in a library.
Donnie forced himself to stay in the present and focus. His legs wobbled dangerously underneath him when he scrambled to his feet as the fight-or-flight instinct kicked back in.
“Interesting response to the solanum tuberosum potatoes,” said Leatherhead. “Are you allergic?”
Donnie squinted, feeling dazed. “…What?”
“Oh, you can speak? I was not sure.”
“Of course I can fucking—” Deep breaths, Donnie. “I…I need to…”
“There is no escape. I understand my appearance is…off-putting. I hope that eventually you will grow accustomed to it.”
Eventually. insinuating that this was going to be a forever situation. Just the thought made Donnie off-balance. He almost burst into tears right then and there, but he sucked in all the liquid in his body and instead wiped the thin layer of sweat over his brow.
“If you dislike the chips of potato, perhaps you would consume something else?” Leatherhead said.
Donnie grunted something noncommittal. His body hurt so much. There was a powerful pain in his abdomen that could’ve been hunger, could’ve been anxiety.
“The humans provide leftovers from a food distribution centre,” said Leatherhead. “Come and make a selection.”
Donnie wasn’t sure if he was in his right mind as his feet moved underneath him and into reach of Leatherhead’s chain. His balance was off, and he slipped across the muddy embankment, unable to keep his path straight. He couldn’t believe he was walking straight towards the massive ting. Maybe he was just too desensitized to things of Raph’s size.
But, hell, up close Leatherhead was bigger than Raph.
He didn’t have the strength to climb up the last embankment. Leatherhead reached down. His hand had thick, pink scars and track marks that were visible across his large scales. Donnie’s entire hand was only the size of his finger.
He felt Leatherhead’s powerful strength as he grabbed his hand and Leatherhead hauled him up the rest of the way, but he was remarkably gentle.
The strip of land appeared to be used as some kind of…living space, if it could be called that. Woven hay layered the ground to keep out the moisture, and makeshift bookshelves were built against the walls, filled with rows and rows of massive textbooks. Donnie scanned the titles. It was mostly scientific literature mixed with old encyclopedias.
When was the last time anyone sensible had read an encyclopedia?
Driftwood and logs were used to construct makeshift furniture. There was a table with some random bits and bobs of old laboratory equipment, and another set of shelves with food. Some of it looked like it had come from a vending machine, while the rest comprised table scraps, old coffee cups, and half-eaten sandwiches, fruits, and fast food.
Donnie felt overwhelmingly dizzy. He felt weak and weepy. His world was ending. His knees buckled, and Leatherhead steadied his fall to the ground.
“You appear weak,” said Leatherhead. “You need to eat and drink.”
“I don’t know if I can,” said Donnie.
“You will. Or else I will eat you.”
There was the joke. It was funny. Donnie almost laughed.
His world went black again, although he had no actual sense of being unconscious. He could still hear and smell, and had vague flashes of Leatherhead’s massive shadow intersecting the light.
Donnie came to lying on his side in a bed of clean hay. It was large enough to encompass Leatherhead, so he felt small and exposed in it. There was a pain in his arm, and when he shifted to look, he saw that a long line of tubing was sticking out of it.
“Where am I—” he started.
“Do not pull that out,” Leatherhead warned him sternly. He sounded close. “Those are fluids. I am trying to increase your hydration.”
Donnie tried to follow the IV line to see where it ended, but his vision was wobbly.
“I don’t know where I am,” Donnie said.
“You are in my cell, in a research facility,” said Leatherhead. “What is your name?”
Donnie didn’t know how to respond.
“Do you have one?”
“Yes,” he said. “Donatello.”
“Donatello,” Leatherhead repeated. “Do you sculpt?”
“No.” Donnie thought about his inventions, about his Battle Shell and his old tech-bō and the Turtle Tank and all the inventions in between. “Sort of.”
“Do you have any allergies?”
“No, I…I don’t think so…I don’t know…”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“I may need to give you medication later.”
“Medication—how do you have this stuff?”
“I have been down here for very, very, very long. I have acquired certain items during that time.”
“Are you a mutant? Were you human?”
“No. I was an alligator. Specifically, the species ‘alligator mississippiensis.’”
He was like the turtles. A regular animal turned into something else through the intervention of humans.
“Try to rest. We can exchange information when you are more coherent.”
Awake, but not all the way.
Cold, but warm.
Dead, but with a pulse.
Donnie lay half on his side, picking at dried hay. A threadbare blanket wrapped around his body, and his arm ached from the makeshift IV lodged in his veins. He rolled a strand of hay between his fingers until the fibre crackled and broke, leaving only thin threads.
Heavy weights were crushing him, keeping him impossibly still. He let out faint, panicked cries that were quickly hushed, and he clung to the source of comfort in the absence of his brothers.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be vulnerable. But he was.
“Please don’t touch me,” Donnie murmured, half-begging.
“I will not proceed with physical contact unless strictly necessary.”
“Please don’t touch me. Please. I don’t want to…”
“I will not touch you unless your current condition necessitates it.”
Donnie let out a miserable cry trying to force his body to move. He couldn’t even open his eyes.
“Who is Kendra?”
Donnie’s chest spasmed. It was Leatherhead at his bedside. Leatherhead, who could’ve eaten him, but didn’t, who had saved his life instead of ending it.
“A monster,” Donnie said.
“I am familiar with the concept of monsters,” said Leatherhead. “This facility is full of those who see our existence as strictly beneficial to them, violating our bodily autonomy for their own gain. In a metaphorical sense, I am a monster myself.”
“…No, you’re not. You’re not a monster.”
Leatherhead let out a low, rumbling hum that went straight to Donnie’s core. “That is a sentiment with positive connotations. But I have killed before, and I will kill again.”
“You haven’t killed me.”
“For now, I am in control of myself. I hope I will stay that way.”
“You’re not a monster to me.”
“…Thank you, Donatello. May I initiate physical contact? My understanding is that the holding of hands is a comforting gesture, and I would like to do so.”
It helped that Leatherhead was so explicit about it.
“Yes,” said Donnie.
Leatherhead’s massive hand was so gentle when it squeezed his.
“I want my brothers,” Donnie said.
“Family connections are highly valued, so that is understandable,” said Leatherhead. “Shall I humour you, or would you like me to provide an accurate assessment of the current situation?”
“…An accurate assessment.”
“My calculations predict an exceptionally low chance of seeing them again.”
Donnie’s ribcage tightened like corset laces. He let out a strangled, faint cry.
“What are the odds?” Donnie asked.
“Approximately 4.82%.”
“…I believe in them…”
They had beaten the odds before.
They could do it again.
And this was all he had left.
“I believe in them,” Donnie reiterated. “I believe in them…”
“The odds are never zero, Donatello,” said Leatherhead. “Simply unlikely.”
“Thank you, Leatherhead…I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“You needn’t,” said Leatherhead. “But the sentiment is appreciated.”
They were here, and they were alone together.
And, hopefully, a rescue would come for them soon.
Notes:
I
Am SO SORRY
I've been absent from writing in general for like, the last year?
This has been a HORRIBLE YEAR for me. I would like the trauma to stop, please! I have! Issues!!
ANYWAY writing makes me feel better. I really want to get back into the groove of writing again.
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b (Guest) on Chapter 2 Mon 06 Feb 2023 03:18PM UTC
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LittleMissFox on Chapter 2 Mon 06 Feb 2023 10:41PM UTC
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ImSorryForTheArson on Chapter 2 Thu 09 Feb 2023 02:17AM UTC
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