#projecting my bloody noses onto leo

[koolaidashley]

May I please have some Disaster Twins Fluff? 🥹

Oh sweet child of course you may

[peachpearsnook]

Living In Ruin (Dead Donatello AU)

Chapter One

Warnings: This AU contains character death, terminal illness, grief and mourning, and horrible coping mechanisms

After his possession of the technodrome, Donatello swore that he would never let another thing infect him like that. But the invasion attempt was months ago, and he wasn’t able to hold onto that oath to himself.

It was during a routine check-in, when Donnie discovered something off with himself. He was checking the different parts of his blood, such as platelet count, etc, and found one reading, regarding his white blood cell count, to be odd. So, he did some digging and tried a few more tests on the down low. He had an excess amount of abnormal white blood cells. 

The information was startling to say the least and he didn’t want to alarm Leo with it by asking him what it meant. That was part of the reason he did these tests himself anyway. So, he looked it up himself and confirmed it with more tests. He had cancer. An aggressive form of leukemia, to be more exact.

He sat back in his chair and took in the information. An aggressive form of blood cancer was ravaging through his body. That’s where the dizzy spells and the nosebleeds were coming from. The symptoms he waved off as nothing more than his body telling him to take a break from working was actually cancer. 

Against his better judgment, he kept the news to himself. 

He did the math after getting his results from the test, his survival rate was 23.4%. He waited long enough for it to spread because he was stupid enough to ignore symptoms like fainting and excessive bloody noses, and now he had a month and a half left to live. In more exact terms, he was given forty-five days to get everything in order since diagnosis. 

Donnie knew his siblings would panic the second they got the news, and yet there was nothing anyone could do for him. He couldn’t go to a regular hospital for radiation therapy or anything of the sort, not to mention it was already too late with how he had let it go for so long.

Despite the diagnosis, he could still work and prepare for the worst to come. 

As the days ticked without a word being said to his brothers or April, he found himself bruising easily and every cut seemed to bleed to no end. He would wake up covered in blood and sweat from a random nose bleed and excessive sweating. He lost weight and looked like he was shrinking compared to his twin. Everything ached, everything hurt. Some days he had fevers, others painful headaches.

Still, Donnie managed to get his affairs in order. He began working on gifts for his siblings, cleaned and organized his laboratory, and tried to be around his family as much as possible. Some days, he found himself dozing off in Mikey’s room as he drew or humming to himself in Raph’s room as he trained. He gave April a box of forever unfinished projects and still never told her.

Then his battle shell stopped fitting and eventually his purple hoodie was too large to be considered oversized, even to his tastes. He started leaning on his tech bō whenever he stood because his legs and head would always scream in protest of it.

Donnie had just finished the second of his gifts to his siblings. It was for Mikey, his creative, adoring, little brother. He made him a custom street art kit in the form of a high tech duffel bag. It would sort new paint cans and dispense needed colors. It also had spots to hang painters masks and other needed equipment. Donnie added his tag to the corner of the bag for his ‘genius built tech’ and embroidered an added message for his little brother. He put the bag in a box labeled “for my family,” next to the gift he had already made for April. 

Glancing at the calendar, it seemed he had a month left before the inevitable. It seemed too soon. As they say, “those who burn the brightest, often burn the fastest.” He hoped that saying was right, and that he was able to make something of the short sixteen years he was given. By now he was far too exhausted to even cry at the grim reality he was facing. 

He got up, leaving the box hidden in the corner of the lab to be found after his demise. He had thirty-one days to finish Leo and Raph’s gifts. He kept his space clean and removed the locking mechanism from his door in case the illness took him sooner than calculated. He leaned against his bō staff and used it to hobble from his room. 

Donnie found a spot to settle down in the corner of Leo’s room as his brother played a strategist video game on his laptop.

Leo was mostly focused on the game, muttering a quick greeting as Donatello staggered in with not much more. He tapped away at his game, the tides of which began to turn in his favor.

Donnie closed his eyes and leaned into his position up against Leo’s wall. He stared at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the keyboard tapping and the mouse clicking. A wave of calm washed over him, and for a moment he felt as though he might fall asleep.

“Hey, Don,” Leo’s voice suddenly cut into his calming sounds. He opened his eyes and blinked. His brother had turned around in his chair to look at him.

“Hey, Leo,” he croaked back, a flimsy smile crossing his features. 

“You okay, Donnie? You don’t look so good,” Leo asked, concerned, getting up from his chair and sitting down beside Donnie. 

There was about an inch of space between them, before Donnie leaned into him at least. He buried his face into the space between Leo’s jaw and his shoulder, letting go of an exhausted sigh. 

Leo wrapped an arm around him and grimaced. “You feel really boney, man, are you sure you’re eating right?”

“I’m eating fine,” Donnie hummed.

Leo waited a moment, rubbing Donnie’s arm with the one that was around his shoulders. His arm was thin, deprived of all the muscle it once had before the illness struck.

Donnie made an undignified, squeaking noise as another brush of shivers hit him.

Leo hugged him through the tremors. “You’re sick, aren’t you?”

He was silent, clinging onto his twin, who was only younger than him by two minutes.

“Raph said it might be true, but I didn’t want to believe it. He told me you fainted trying to stand up after hanging out in his room.”

“I did the test fourteen days ago, but I was too scared to say it to anyone. That would make it too real,” Donnie whispered into the crook of Leo’s neck.

“How long?”

“A month by my calculations.”

A harsh sob cut out of Leo’s throat and he held onto Donnie harder until Donnie swore he was going to be bruised from the grip, but he didn’t care. That was one bruise he would be happy to hold.

Donnie was still too exhausted to cry.

“Are you—“ Leo had to pause to sniff away his tears, “—are you going to tell the others?”

He nodded. “They should know.”

He didn’t want anything official. At first, he didn’t want to tell them at all, but he knew he would have to. So, he waited until someone found out. He wasn’t surprised when it was Leo, his medically inclined brother, who found him out first. But as he mentioned, he didn’t want to have this big official sit-down.

They had it anyway, as official as Donnie allowed. With his family all gathered in the projector room when he limped in with most of his weight being supported by his tech bō. His tech bō was basically a glorified walking stick now. He was even forced to deactivate it so he didn’t activate anything from leaning on it. 

It was his siblings, blood and not. Just Raph, Mikey, Leo, and April, all gathered in the room waiting for something Donnie had to tell them. They all looked somewhat excited, except Leo who still seemed on the verge of tears.

Dad wasn’t there. He was already gone thanks to the invasion. It was hard to believe Splinter managed to make it all the way through the invasion, only to die a day later because of his injuries. At least Donnie would see him again in a month.

Everyone, except for Leo, who already knew the cause for the meeting, looked up at him, expectant of great news. Donnie prepared himself to disappoint.

“So,” Mikey chirped, “what did you need to tell us?”

Donnie still looked dead on his feet, gripping his tech bō for dear life knowing it was the only thing keeping him from ungracefully meeting the floor. Everything still hurt. He held a grimace on his face, both at the various aches and pains which now plagued him on a day to day basis, and at the news he had to break.

“I need to tell you all something very important,” he began, “and I’m sorry I waited this long to say as such . . .”

Leo looked away. Donnie understood why, he would have to hear the news all over again. It wasn’t fun to hear your brother admit to having cancer the first time, let alone all the times after.

“Donnie?” April now asked concerned. 

If Donnie wasn’t so exhausted he would be broken down, crying already, but he didn’t have it in him. “Brothers, sister . . . I—I got sick a, a uh few days ago.”

Raph suddenly caught on very fast, his pleasant smile turning to concern, then to fear. “How sick?”

Donnie’s lip quivered as he tried to say it out loud again.

“It’s cancer.” Leo answered for him, his voice quiet. 

Mikey started crying immediately, Raph and April looked too stunned to cry. Leo still looked drained from the moment in his room earlier.

“But-but, there’s still hope right?” Raph stammered, standing up. His thrashing tail neary knocked into Mikey and April. 

“If you call a 23.4% chance of survival hope, though I’ve broken down the numbers and even that chance is likely inaccurate by now.”

“What?” All the hope drained from Raph’s eyes.

Mikey sobbed harder. 

“It was correct when I found out fourteen days ago,” Donnie clarified.

“You found out two weeks ago and you didn’t tell us?” April exclaimed, standing up too.

“There’s nothing to be done about it either way, terminal is terminal.”

April ran over to him and hugged him. Pain shot down his spine from the impact but he didn’t care. He hugged her back, leaning his weight off his bō staff and onto her. Mikey and Raph soon followed until he didn’t need to hold himself up at all.

Raph scooped them all onto his lap and they spent the rest of the night watching movies. Donnie tried to hold onto every second that went by with them all, even as his mind raced with all there was still left for him to do and with how tired he felt, it would be easy to fall asleep right where he sat.

The family festivities didn’t last forever. Donnie was back in his lab, alone by the following week. His siblings were trying to avoid how sickly he looked so they could remain in their little ‘my brother’s not dying’ bubble.

Donnie finished Leo’s gift that day. He had nothing else to focus on to ignore the pain eating away at his rapidly deteriorating body, so he started Raph’s too.

Early that day he’d only seen Mikey briefly. He told Donnie that he was making him something and would show it to him that night. Donnie smiled and told him he couldn’t wait to see it. 

Raph’s project was harder to work on than he thought, and was scrapped and restarted more than he would like to admit. He couldn’t seem to get it right, and the constant haze lingering in the back of his mind wasn’t helping. He documented the process of all his gifts on his computer, of which he turned the passcode feature off on for the event of his death. Raph’s files dragged on much longer than the others, and each one seemed to be more of a clouded rant about what he should make. 

He ended the last log and moved it into the ‘Raph’s last gift’ folder. Donnie felt tired and worn through. He continued to struggle with drawing up a good design for Raph late into the afternoon.

His eyes started to droop and he must not have realized how tired he was. He felt like he was sleeping all day and despite it was still tired. He could hardly keep track of the short periods of time he could force himself to stay awake, and those short bits were agonizing as it was.

He couldn’t stay awake this time. He closed his eyes and gave in, slumping over his workstation on top of all the barely comprehensible scribbled drawings for Raph’s gift. The last thing he thought about before his head completely clouded, was that he hoped he would wake back up before Mikey came in with his surprise.

He didn’t get to see Mikey’s surprise. He had passed still thinking he still had three weeks left. He never told his stepfather, he never told his friends. He had certainly planned to after finishing the gifts, but in the end, he didn’t get to finish his last gift. 

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[masterpost] | [next]

[polishandpaperbacks]

Hey everyone! Today on the blog I have an excerpt post from one of my favorite author’s next books, Chosen. Chosen is the second book in the series, and it takes place in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Presumably there are spoilers from the first book below this line, so don’t read on if you haven’t read Slayer. Instead, go out and buy Slayer and devour it immediately!

Nina continues to learn how to use her slayer powers against enemies old and new in this second novel in the New York Times bestselling series from Kiersten White, set in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now that Nina has turned the Watcher’s Castle into a utopia for hurt and lonely demons, she’s still waiting for the utopia part to kick in. With her sister Artemis gone and only a few people remaining at the castle—including her still-distant mother—Nina has her hands full. Plus, though she gained back her Slayer powers from Leo, they’re not feeling quite right after being held by the seriously evil succubus Eve, a.k.a. fake Watcher’s Council member and Leo’s mom. And while Nina is dealing with the darkness inside, there’s also a new threat on the outside, portended by an odd triangle symbol that seems to be popping up everywhere, in connection with Sean’s demon drug ring as well as someone a bit closer to home. Because one near-apocalypse just isn’t enough, right? The darkness always finds you. And once again, it’s coming for the Slayer.

And onto the Excerpt!

Chapter 1 1

THE DEMON APPEARS OUT OF nowhere. Claws and fangs fill my sight, and every instinct screams kill. My blood sings with it, my fists clench, my vision narrows. The vulnerable points on the demon’s body practically flash like neon signs. “Foul!” Rhys shouts. “No teleportation, Tsip! You know that.” Even while playing, Rhys can’t help but be a Watcher, shouting out both advice and corrections. He’s not wearing his glasses, which makes his face look vague and undefined. Cillian passes him, mussing Rhys’s carefully parted hair into wild curls and laughing at Rhys’s frustration. I take a deep breath, trying to clear my head of the impulse to kill this demon I invited into our home and swore to protect. “It’s just soccer,” I whisper. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t even like soccer.” “Football, bloody American,” Cillian sings, neatly stealing the ball from me. His shorts are far shorter than the January afternoon should permit, but he seems impervious to cold. Unlike those of us who are translucently pale at this point in winter, his skin is rich and lovely. He passes to Tsip. Tsip is a vaguely opalescent pink, shimmering in the sunlight. She paints her claws fun colors when we do manicure nights, and I try desperately not to miss Artemis. I stay rooted to the ground where I’m standing. Tsip caught me off guard, but that shouldn’t matter. I like her. And the fact that I went from trying to score a goal to plotting a dozen ways to kill my opponent in a single heartbeat is frankly terrifying. I can’t get my heart under control, can’t shake the adrenaline screaming through my veins. “Gotta take over for the Littles. I’m out.” I wave and jog from the field. No one pays me much attention. Jade is lying on the ground in front of the goal, the worst goalkeeper ever. Rhys and Cillian are bodychecking each other in increasingly flirty ways. Tsip keeps shimmering and then resolidifying as she remembers the no-teleportation rule. They’re all happy to keep going without me, unaware of my internal freak-out. I’ve deliberately kept them unaware. Things here are going so well. I’m in charge. I can’t be the problem. So none of them know how I can’t sleep at night, how my anger is hair-trigger fast, how when I do manage to sleep, my dreams are … Well. Bad. They don’t need to know and I don’t let them. Except for Doug, his bright yellow skin almost nineties Day-Glo levels in the thin winter sun. Annoying emotion-sniffing demon. He watches me from our goal, his nostrils flared. I can’t lie to him the way I can to everyone else. I shake my head preemptively. I don’t want to talk about it. Not with him. Not with anyone. There’s only one person I want to talk to about it, but Leo Silvera’s not exactly available. I do a quick sweep of the perimeter of the castle. Leo loved me. Check the woods. Leo betrayed me. Check the locks on the outbuildings. Leo saved me. Pause and just listen and look, feeling for anything pushing against my instincts. I let Leo die. I keep walking. Leo loved me, betrayed us, saved us, and then died, and I can’t be sad without being mad or mad without feeling guilty or guilty without feeling exhausted. Past the meadow, the tiny purple demons are taking turns pushing each other on the tree swing. That, or they’re trying to push each other off. It’s hard to tell with them. With nothing else needing my attention outside, I end up at the front stairs to the castle. “Hey, Jessi.” I wave halfheartedly to our resident vengeance demon. She’s leading the Littles through an elaborate game of hopscotch. George Smythe, bundled up and barely able to see under a floppy knit hat, is shouting each letter as he lands on it. “G!” “What?” Jessi snaps at me. “E!” “I can take over for you.” I find the Littles soothing. They might be three incredibly hyper children constantly needing snacks, entertainment, and education, but at least none of them ever randomly triggers a kill reflex in me. “A!” “No,” Jessi says, her voice as sweet as summer fruit. “G-E-what-comes-next …” “O!” George course corrects, wobbling on one short leg before jumping to the required O. “Good! Oh, you’re so clever. Priya, how are your letters coming?” Priya, a tiny moppet with shiny black hair, is crouched over her own chalk work, which looks more like Klingon than any alphabet I’m familiar with. “Very good, darling! You’re really working hard. Hold the chalk with one hand, like we talked about. Thea, love, fingers out of noses, please—that’s a dear.” And to think, we once considered these children the entire future of the Watchers. I watch as Thea spins until she falls flat on her bottom. Actually, the future of the Watchers is pretty accurately captured here. I pat Jessi on the arm. “So, you can take the afternoon off.” Everything sweet in Jessi’s voice turns to ice. “I said no. I don’t trust you with these three precious wonders. We have an entire day’s curriculum to get through, and we haven’t even done story time yet or finished our art projects. Are you going to do any of that with them?” “I—I could?” “You were going to turn on a cartoon and read while their fertile minds were filled with weeds.” Jessi doesn’t have her powers anymore, but I’m pretty certain if she did, I would have been vengeance-demoned right into something oozing and seeping. She’s already turned away from me and back to her three charges. Her whole face is full of gentle warmth and absolute love. “R!” George declares, hopping emphatically down on it. Jessi claps like he’s cured the common cold. Thoroughly dismissed, I skulk up the stairs and into the castle. Jessi could at least pretend to be nice. She’s got a lot of enemies out there—vengeance is a nasty cycle—and without her powers she’s vulnerable. We took her in despite her obvious hatred for everyone over the age of ten. There was some debate, given her history, but my mom argued in her favor. It’s a little easier to forgive a vengeance demon who made it her immortal life’s work to avenge children than a vengeance demon who specialized in, say, fantasy league sports rivalries. But Jessi’s dismissal leaves me with nothing to do. I used to have my medical center and my studies, all my little Watcher duties. Even with so few of us, the castle ran as near to Watcher traditions as we could manage. Which in retrospect was absurd, since we didn’t have a Slayer and weren’t actually doing anything Watchers should. But now everything has changed. We lost Watchers—Wanda Wyndam-Pryce, sulking off into the sunset, good riddance. Bradford Smythe, murdered. Eve Silvera, secretly a succubus demon and murderer, smushed thanks to my actions. Artemis, off to find herself with her awful girlfriend, the thought of whom makes my jaw ache as I grind my teeth. And Leo, who didn’t warn us what his mother was (and what he was) but fought her to give us enough time to stop her from opening a new hellmouth. And now we have a Slayer, again some more, thanks to Leo somehow returning the powers his mother stole from me. I don’t know how he did it, and it hurts too much to think about, like everything else. I spend so much of my days trying not to think, and it’s harder than it should be. I used to believe that all Slayers did was act without thinking. I was wrong, but I wish it were true. There’s so little acting and so much thinking these days. It’s good. It’s all good. It’s good, I remind myself, over and over like a chant. Sanctuary, what we decided to turn our castle into, is just starting out, but it’s exactly what we dreamed it could be. We’ve taken in demons who had nowhere else to go. We’re keeping them safe, and ourselves safe, and we’ll keep looking for those who could benefit from the generations of knowledge and abilities we have. We’re protecting, not attacking or destroying. Between our new demonic additions and existing Watchers, everyone has tasks and times to do them. It’s more work than anyone anticipated, keeping everyone taken care of and fed, making sure the castle runs like it should. But so far everyone is happy. Everyone is safe. I sink down against the wall, feeling the cold of the stone radiating outward. The unpellis demon, all four gentle eyes soft and brown and hopeful, snuggles up to my side like a dog. It’s more animal than human in nature, nonverbal, and still recovering from its frequent de-skinning treatment in Sean’s demon-drug manufacturing scheme. I saved Pelly from that cellar. I didn’t save everyone, though. I wrap my arms around Pelly and close my eyes. Everything is exactly what we dreamed it could be. Except I feel Leo’s loss everywhere, and I miss my twin, Artemis, with a constant, physical ache. And, worst of all, with enough time after Tsip surprised me to calm down and remind my body there’s no danger … I still feel like killing something. 

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And now for even better news...Chosen is on sale on January 7th!!! So go to wherever you buy your most anticipated reads and make sure Chosen is on your list. I will have a review of this one up **hopefully** within the next week or so.