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halogalopaghost · 1 year ago

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As It Never Will Be

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“What is this, some kinda game? Like hide’n seek or somethin’?”

Raph chuckles ruefully. “Yeah, somethin’ like that.”

Donatello sits down. In the middle of the lair, surrounded by his family, he sits down before he can fall.

They're all on top of him instantly, Leo kneeling beside him while Splinter puts a warm paw on his head, and they're all trying to talk to him. Donnie can’t hear them through the high-pitched whine buzzing through his skull, everything around him is all blurred and muffled. And he can't breathe—why can't he breathe?

“—Donnie, Donnie please—” Leo, beside him, shakes his shoulder. The world tilts to the left.

“—bruised, he needs to—”

“—son?”

“Can you hear me? Donatello—”

“Bro, take a breath!”

It's Mikey’s voice that cuts through the fog. The flash of orange in his peripheral vision—so bright and happy, not a single stain in sight—snaps him out of it. Suddenly he’s groping for Mikey, grabbing his arm—both arms, and just releasing control of his own body. He feels the lurch as his full weight falls against his baby brother, but there are so many other hands on the both of them, they don't fall.

“Donnie,” Mikey murmurs, stroking his brother’s head, “buddy, you're kinda freakin’ us out here dude.”

He closes his eyes, which are suddenly burning for some reason. Why are his eyes burning? “Eight days,” he murmurs. He can't even feel his mouth moving.

“What?”

He hooks his shaking fingers onto the edge of Mikey’s plastron, memorizing the feel of the waxy smoothness and trying to replace it with the memory of the jagged, dulled scutes he last touched. “ Eight days , not ten minutes.” He gasps for breath, but his chest still feels too tight. Did the air in the lair get thicker while they were gone? Terror grips him as he wonders—is this even the right reality? Is this his earth?

He can hear them talking now, their voices are clearer, but he’s panting too hard to try to respond. His head is spinning, and he hasn't had anything to eat but small dry rations for days, and he can still feel The Shredder’s blood on his skin. He can feel it .

“Mikey, we’re going to the lab, come on,” Leo says in the most Leo-like way possible. God, it’s good to hear his pitchy teenage voice again.

His brothers haul him to his feet and practically have to carry him into his own lab, depositing him on the cot against the far wall. His little doctor’s station is there, with his magnifying lamp and sterile gauze and needles and antibiotics—stuff he would have killed for two days ago, when he saw to rebel after rebel with infections or burns or skin torn from bone—

“Donnie, what's hurt?” Leo asks urgently, hands hovering over his brother.

He takes in a thin, gasping breath, but hot tears are still coming down his cheeks and he still can't speak past the lump in his throat or that dull ache in his chest. Oh, is he having a heart attack?

Raph shoulders his way into the space beside Leo. Donnie’s vision goes double, giving him four brothers instead of two. “He ain't hurt, he’s havin’ a panic attack. Donnie, try to breathe with me.” He kneels and takes one of his brother’s hands, placing it on his own chest while taking deep and exaggerated breaths.

That matches up, he thinks as he gasps for breath. Accelerated heart rate, chest pain, shortness of breath, all classic symptoms of a panic attack. But no amount of logic can stop his body now, auto-pilot has taken over and he can’t stop the short, wheezing breaths that are quickly making him more and more lightheaded.

“Just breathe, Don,” Raph urges.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembers being years younger and teaching Raphael how to do this when their roles were reversed. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries, really tries to synchronize his breathing with Raphael’s, but he can barely take in any air at all.

“Can't—” he gasps, shaking his head. “Can't, Raph—”

He feels Splinter’s paw rest heavily on his forehead, thumb smoothing the creases in his temple, and senses, rather than hears, his Master’s soothing words. “ My son. Whatever you have seen, it is no more. You are home, you are safe. Let your mind and body be at rest .”

The world around him goes dark.

“His chest is bruised, he has four lacerations on his right leg that probably need stitches, he’s got other cuts and bruises everywhere , and I think he might have a concussion. I—I can't tell, Sensei. Usually I would ask him…”

“I know, my son. Look! He is waking up.”

Donnie’s head is pounding like a three year old with a drum kit and his eyes are crusted shut, like he’s been sick or crying, but he can’t quite remember when he fell asleep. He forces his eyes open anyway. He wants—no, he needs to see his family.

Only Leo and Splinter are there, sitting side by side at the cot. They both have their hands on him at once—Leo on his chest, gently applying pressure so he can’t get up, and Sensei holding his hand. He lifts the other hand to rub his eyes and nearly hits himself in the face with the IV tube they affixed there. He glares at it. “How long was I out?”

“About twenty minutes,” Leo says softly. “You're a bit dehydrated, so…”

Damn. At first, he felt like he slept for days.

“Are you alright? You really scared the shell out of us, Don.”

He stares at Leo for a long moment, then laughs. The giggle burbles out of his throat suddenly, hysterical even to his own ears. The last time he heard Leo swear, his voice was thirty years older and he didn't say shell .

“I'm—I'm okay,” he stammers out, trying to hold the hysterics in his chest. If he laughs again, he might just burst into tears afterward. “Where’s Mikey and Raph?” He swallows thickly. “I need—I need to see them, Leo. I need to see you all side by side.”

Leo moves to stand, but Splinter beats him to it. He pats each of his sons’ hands, then excuses himself.

Leo scoots into Sensei’s chair, closer to his brother. His hand still hasn't strayed from Donnie’s chest. “I understand if you don't want to talk about it, but—”

“I don't.” That giddy feeling from just a moment ago is gone, and the hollow that it leaves behind might collapse into itself like a dying star if he has to say another word about it. He lays his head back against the pillow and fixes his eyes on a blank patch of brick wall somewhere behind Leo, suddenly drained of any ability to pretend.

He nods. “Okay. That's…that's okay.”

It's gonna kill Leo until he knows, because he thinks he always has to know everything. But Donnie is unequivocally certain that Leo doesn't want to know what he saw over the last few days. Hell, Donnie wishes he could unsee it himself.

“Bro!” Mikey enters with two plates of pizza. They ordered it just before everything went down days ago—hours ago?—so it’s hot and fresh and the sight of it makes his mouth water instantly. “Thought you might be hungry, who knows what they were feeding you…wherever you went.”

Leo throws a look over his shoulder as Mikey sidles into the seat beside him. It shuts him up pretty quick.

“Thanks.” He takes the plate and lifts the slice to take a bite, but the smell of the grease and cheese suddenly sends a wave of nausea over him. Mikey has a point—he hasn’t eaten much in the last few days, so maybe he should start with something milder.

He sets it aside and swings his legs over the side of the cot, aware of Leo’s watchful eye. He reaches out and puts his hands on Mikey’s biceps, gripping them firmly. He knows it's weird, he can plainly see how they're both looking at him, but he just has to convince himself that it's real , and he's home, and maybe it was all just a nightmare after all.

“You sure you're feeling alright?” Mikey asks, mouth full of pizza.

He pulls his little brother into a bone-crushing hug, smiling at the surprised squeak. He doesn't bother answering the question.

“Hey, don't go crushin’ Mikey without letting me in on the fun,” Raph says as he shuffles in.

Don parts from Mikey just in time to see Leo reach up and wipe a smudge of pizza sauce off Raph’s chin, only for Raph to glare down at him with an energy of do it again, I dare you .

As soon as Raph is sitting (and thus within arm’s reach), Donnie reaches out and snatches the bandanas from his and Leo’s heads. He just looks at them for a long moment—eyes intact and seeing, faces free of scars and age spots and sunken frowns. Sixteen years old, voices still a little pitchy, not yet grown to their full height.

“The hell are you lookin’ at, brainiac?” Raph snatches his mask back. “Exactly how hard did they hit ya on the head?”

Yeah. He's home alright.

Leo breaks the uncomfortable silence by standing up and dragging the med cart closer. He starts ripping open sterile packages and setting out things for sutures to tend to his and his brothers’ wounds. Luckily, it looks like Mikey and Raph were more or less unharmed. The other two weren’t quite as lucky, though Don is sure he looks the worst by far.

“Okay so I know it was bad and everything, but the place I went was kinda awesome,” Mikey gushes. “We were superheroes! But like, it wasn’t really us or something, none of them went by the same names as us. It was spooky, dude.”

“Mikey, we’re giant turtles that practice ninjutsu, how much closer to ‘superhero’ do we really need to be?”

“Uhhh, I dunno, Raph, can you change size and shape at will? Can you fly? Huh ?”

Donnie sits back against the pillows while Leo gently positions his leg to do the stitches. Just a pinch of local anesthetic, exactly like he taught them, and he’s ready to go.

“Pfft, doesn't matter, I got to race across multiple hostile planets on a bike the size of the battle shell.”

“No way! Did you win?”

“‘Course I won!”

“That must be awesome for you dude, since you lost the Battle Nexus so hard .”

Donnie smiles idly at his brothers as the youngest receives a vicious noogie.

“I went to Usagi’s world,” Leo says quietly, not looking up from his task. Donnie barely hears him over the other two bickering.

“Oh, that’s…nice, I’m glad you were among friends.”

He chuckles. “It was weird, being in a world where anthropomorphic animals are the norm. I walked through cities in broad daylight.”

Donnie only hums in response.

Leo doesn’t look up until he’s finishing off the stitches on the first of three cuts that would receive them. Don doesn’t meet his eyes, just pretends he can’t see him at all. The look Leo gives him is a knowing and expectant one—usually this is how they have hard conversations, one exchange of information at a time. But Donnie isn’t interested in that bargain. Not this time.

“You think we’ll ever see Draco again?” Mikey asks.

“Nah, that lizard’s done for. Though I woulda liked to get in a few hits first,” Raph grumbles. “Make the world’s ugliest snakeskin boots.”

“And Lord Simultaneous just recreated the Daimyo's son! Talk about a bad idea.”

“Maybe not,” Leo says with a shrug. “He’ll have a chance to do things over, and he’ll know what to watch for this time. People aren't inherently evil.”

Mikey shrugs it off. “What about you Donnie? What crazy shenanigans did you get up to?”

“Oh. It was…” he tries to formulate a lie that isn’t too far from the truth, but boring enough that they won’t ask for more details. “It was basically the same as here,” he shrugs. “I manifested in the lair, met you guys…”

“Boo, lame,” Mikey pouts. But Donnie catches the look that he gives him—he’s reminded that Mikey has always been more perceptive than they gave him credit for.

Donnie barely manages to beg off sleeping in the lab—Leo wants them to take shifts through the night, sitting at his bedside and observing him, but Donnie insists that they all need rest in their own beds after whatever-the-shell-it-is that happened to them in the last few days. (Minutes? Hours? He’s still not sure, and at this point he doesn’t care either.) He desperately wants to sleep in his own familiar room and listen to the groaning water pipes in the wall behind his bed, with Raph snoring just next door. He craves that normalcy like oxygen.

Leo seems especially loath to leave him alone as he lingers in the doorway of his bedroom later on. He watched Don like a hawk all evening as he forced down some Gatorate and a few stray pizza crusts, and now he apparently wants to watch him sleep too.

“Leo, I’m fine,” he insists. And he really is, tucked into his warm bed and truly comfortable for the first time in days.

His eldest brother still hesitated, gripping the door and staring uncertainly into the dark room. “Are you sure you don’t want someone to stay with you?”

“ Leo .”

“Okay, okay,” he sighs. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll see you in the morning.” He pulls the door to behind him, leaving a thin sliver of light across the floor and up onto the wall. Someone flicks off the hall light, and then that disappears too.

Honestly, Don is one hundred percent down for any and all of his brothers piling into his bed for the night, but admitting that to Leo would just raise more red flags on his already-sensitive radar, and he simply did not have the energy to deal with that tonight. So he lay in bed alone, pillows and blankets all tucked in around him the way he likes, glow in the dark constellations wishing him goodnight from the low ceiling, and tries to sleep. And tries.

And tries.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious that he just isn’t going to be sleeping tonight. Every time he begins to drift off, he sees flashes of his brothers from the future; blood, scars, the horrible things they said to each other, Master Splinter’s grave in the park, the way Mikey would occasionally grip the stub of his arm and faintly grimace like he was in pain—

Enough of that, he needs to get up.

Don rolls out of bed decisively, coming up a little wobbly on his feet. He doesn't have a concussion, that much he’s sure of, so he shouldn’t feel this unsteady. Maybe it’s just the too-quick pumping of his heart inside his shell, screaming like a steam engine about to fly off the rails, or the fact that he still can’t draw a full breath without feeling the tug of panic in the pit of his stomach. No matter what it is, he can’t just lay in bed like this. He needs to do something.

He pads out into the hallway and takes the stairs down one at a time, mindful of the stitches all up and down his right leg straining against the movement of his muscle and skin. In the dark, it’s easy to imagine his home as he’d briefly seen it in that other reality: broken, scorched, empty. Utterly devoid of life. He has to remind himself that Mikey’s ripsaw snores are real, and the flickering light of Master Splinter’s one ever-lit candle from behind the screen of his door are real, and he isn’t alone, and his brothers are safe, and he is safe.

But The Shredder isn’t dead.

He has a feeling that the fact is going to haunt him for a while—even more than usual, anyway—maybe until Saki really is dead. Next time he faces The Shredder (and there will be a next time), he won’t be making any assumptions about whether he’s dead or alive. He wants whatever the Utrom equivalent of asystole is, to see him bleed out then burnt up until there isn’t a single atom of him left to identify. Because even if those turtles weren’t really his brothers, that Shredder was the very same that he’s faced again and again—the same one that has tormented and abused his family again and again. And he’ll have his preemptive revenge, that is no question.

As he reaches the threshold of his lab, the comforting whir of computer fans and the blinking lights on various equipment greeting him like a warm blanket, and he’s absently surprised to hear Mikey’s voice in his head instead of their father’s. “ Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,” says Mikey’s uncanny Master Yoda impression in his head. It used to drive all three brothers crazy that the Jedi code sometimes matched up so perfectly with principles of bushido; Mikey could spout Star Wars nonsense and Sensei, none the wiser, would simply nod along with him and tell the three that they should be more mindful like their brother. Of course, that had long since passed when Leo practically forced their father to marathon the entire Star Wars hexalogy for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

The memory brings a smile to Don’s face. He won’t let anger consume him like it had with Darth Vader—or indeed with The Shredder himself. He’s going to be intentional about involving his brothers every step of the way and make sure they’re all united and equally prepared when the time comes. If he’s learned anything in the last week-and-some-change, it’s that no one of them could take on Shredder without all three of the others.

He leans into the doorway of the lab for a moment, just breathing in the familiar smell of motor oil and hot CPUs and trying to relax his tense body. Honestly, now that he’s gotten up, he feels more tired than he had when he was in bed. Maybe he just needed the change of scenery; a cognitive shakeup. Whatever caused the change, his body suddenly feels like it weighs a hundred tons, and he’s overcome with an all-consuming need to lie down. He easily crosses the lab in the dark and finds the soft edge of the cot against the wall. He lays down on his plastron and pillows his head on his arms. The moment his eyes close, the sleep which had so evaded him swallows him whole.

Mikey kept staring at him, eyes narrowed and suspicious, the whole way to the rebel base. Donnie thought about addressing it a few times, but quite frankly, he didn’t know how to address this older, cynical version of his brother. He hadn’t seen him smile once, or even crack a joke, or make an obscene gesture. This Mikey was covered in scars, missing an arm, and utterly suspicious of Don.

And looking at the world around them, Don couldn’t blame him.

Mike stopped short at a street corner. Donnie rushed to melt into the shadows of an alley anxiously, assuming his brother had spotted something or someone coming around the way. Instead, Mikey just stood there and kept staring at him with those shrewd, narrowed eyes. He’d be lying if he said it didn't feel a little threatening.

“Mikey?”

“How old are you?”

“Uh—sixteen.”

Mikey’s expression went completely blank, shrewd gaze gone into a faraway stare.

He moved to take a step forward, then falters and stops. “I told you Mikey, I didn’t abandon you guys. Something happened . I haven’t—I mean, I didn’t live through the last thirty years.”

Mikey leaned heavily into the crumbling brick facade of the building Don had his shell pressed against, staring wide-eyed at the ground.

Donnie had a hundred questions he could’ve filled the silence with. First and foremost, he wanted to ask how the heck old he thought he was, half a head shorter than his younger-but-older brother as he was, but he thinks better of it. There was no good way to frame a question like that, and Mikey was clearly reeling.

“So you, what…time traveled here? Is Renet involved in this?”

Donnie almost laughed. “I wish, Mikey. It was Draco and the Daimyo’s son.”

Mikey uttered a string of colorful profanity. Well that, at least, was more like the Mikey he knew. “We spent all that time looking for you, we were all so angry with you…”

That stung. That his family could ever think him capable of outright abandoning them like that... He had to remind himself what this Mikey had been through, and the extremes that it must have taken for them to arrive at that conclusion.

“I’m not sure that I’m really…from this timeline,” he added hesitantly, voice small and uncertain.

Mikey straightened out. “Doesn’t matter. I just needed to know you weren’t…some kind of trick of The Shredder’s. I couldn’t live with myself if I led them right to the base, after everything. Come on, we have to get in before sunrise.”

Fuck, fuck , there’s blood running down the side of his face, and his hands are pinned, what happened? He vaguely hears the cries of a brother in the distance, but which one? Which brother, and where, and does he have enough strength to save them?

He groans and tries to gather himself, tries to force himself to think through the fog in his head. He feels paralyzed and stiff—something must have hit him in the head. But he can’t hear his brothers anymore, he’s alone now, and his entire body is slick with blood.

No, something seems wrong about that.

He peels his eyes open, almost forcing them, and slowly, slowly comes down from the false adrenaline high. He’s in his lab still, on the infirmary cot instead of the unidentified rocky terrain he’d seen behind closed lids, but he is definitely damp, that much is real. His hands, pinned beneath his plastron, are vaguely prickly and numb. He moans again, more conscious of it this time, and rolls himself onto his side. The prickling floods full force into his fingers as blood rushes to fill the oxygen-deprived tissues and his nerves respond in kind. His entire body buzzes in the dark.

He lurches to his feet and sways dangerously, righting himself at the last moment on his rolling medical cart. Something crashes to the floor and takes a few other items down with it, but the sound barely registers to him. He’s still wet, and in the dark he really can’t tell if it’s blood or not. As he stumbles out of the lab, he has one hazy goal in mind: shower.

Don feels drunk on his own exhaustion and the leftover panic from the dreams he can barely grasp. He gropes for walls to support himself as he makes his way around the lair the long way, slowly skirting the edge until he comes to the stairs. He ascends them just as carefully as he’d descended them earlier. (How much earlier? His foggy mind hopes it was enough that he won’t have to go back to sleep, that maybe he’ll shower and feel rested enough to face the day, but the silent darkness of the lair betrays that hope.)

He doesn’t even turn the light on in the bathroom, just goes by the nightlight and touch as he opens the hot water tap and steps underneath before it’s even warm. The pipes in the wall shudder alongside him until they finally open blessedly hot water over his skin, scalding away what he now recognizes only as sweat from a restless, nightmare-filled sleep. His heart pounds in his ears over the rush of the water.

In the darkness, he rests his hands on his knees and rests his shell against the tiled shower wall. Vaguely, the logical part of his brain is aware of what’s happening: he’s tripoding—the medical shorthand for the posture a patient commonly assumes when experiencing mild to severe respiratory distress. He’s seen his father, his brothers, and his friends do it after a battle or a particularly brisk run, and he’s seen his brothers do it the few times when panic overtook them. He can feel his neck straining as he breathes, notes the peripheral muscle involvement to his list of symptoms. His heart rate…was still less than ideal, but it never really slowed down since he got home from that nightmare earlier in the day.

Simply put, he’s having another panic attack. Alone, in the shower, in the dead of the night. He drags in steamy breath and forces it back out too quickly, shaking under the scalding water. He doesn't understand—he held it together so well with those alternate versions of his brothers, kept cool and level headed and led them to victory, no matter how pyrrhic it may have been. And now, even though he intellectually knows what’s happening and has experienced this sort of post-trauma breakdown before, he doesn’t understand why it’s happening to him . Can’t he just catch a break for once? Can’t he just sleep through the night, suffer through whatever nightmares his traitorous subconscious deals him, and move on like the rest of his brothers? Does he really have to be such a crybaby about it?

He pounds his fist into the tile, grits his teeth together as it gives and cracks beneath his fist, then sinks to his knees in the shower stall. Even if he has to tape his eyelids open, he won’t be risking sleep again tonight.

Mikey, usually the earliest to rise out of all of them, looks positively shocked when he catches sight of Donnie sitting at the kitchen table at zero-dark-thirty, coffee mug and book laid out in front of him. If Leo and Raph are equally surprised to see him up and about when they file in, they don’t show it.

Sensei suggested the night before that they skip the day’s training, giving everyone a chance to rest and reorient themselves in their home. Donnie had a sneaking suspicion that it was solely for his benefit though, as his brothers appeared more or less unaffected by their adventures, and he just isn't going to take any of the misplaced sympathy. Just before the clock strikes seven, their normal gathering time, Don stands up and pointedly enters the dojo. He supposes Sensei really meant it about taking the day off—no one has lit the candles nor dragged out the sparring mats, so he sets to the task himself.

He hears the telltale dull thunk of a shell hitting the wooden frame of the dojo door and pointedly ignores it.

Raphael clears his throat loudly. “Don,” he starts evenly, “whatcha doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he mumbles in reply.

Raph doesn’t say anything right away. Instead, he waits until Donnie has dragged the first mat into the center of the room and stands panting over top of it, shell still toward his brother.

“Looks like yer being more stubborn than Leo. Which I’d usually commend, but you look like shit.”

Don wipes a thin sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, pretending that it wasn’t shaking, then turns to face his brother. “Gee, thanks. Are you gonna help me or not?”

Raph, arms crossed over his chest, shrugs. “Nah, I’ll letcha wear yourself out.”

Donnie rolls his eyes and goes for the next mat, pulling it from its place leaning against the brick sewer wall to rest on the ground, then dragging it into place. It doesn’t usually take any effort at all for him to do this, but today it feels like he’s trying to drag an entire continent across the dojo. Fcine, so he hadn’t gotten the best rest or nutrition while he was in that godforsaken future, but he can’t begin to recondition his body until the dojo is set up and his Sensei has stopped babying him.

When he finally pulls it into place, arms trembling, he centers himself on the mat and sinks into a lotus pose with less grace than he’d have liked. He holds no delusions that he’ll be able to meditate like this, but he wishes his brothers would at least sit down with him so that he could pretend to join them and have that deep-meditation connection.

Eyes closed, Donnie listens to Raph close the dojo door, heave a great sigh, and assume a matching pose beside him, knees just barely touching.

“You look like shit,” he repeats. “What happened, Don?”

He flinches. “I spent a week in an alternate reality. It was just—tiring, is all. I’m fine.”

“Bull-fuckin’-shit you’re fine, you look like ya lost fifteen pounds and ten years off your life. I don’t need all the gritty details, but I like t’think you trust me enough with the gist of it.”

“It’s not about trusting you,” Donnie snaps, opening his eyes and jerking his knee away from Raph’s. “I just don’t want to talk about it. Is that a crime?”

He wants Raph to rise to the challenge, meet his anger in kind and start a fight. He wants someone to yell at and blame and be angry at instead of the hollowed-out, bone-deep exhaustion in his chest. But his brother’s gaze doesn’t harden, and his hands don’t ball into fists. Damn him for having compassion, damn Leo for helping him get his anger under control, damn him for losing an eye, damn him for his recklessness that will eventually get him killed.

Raph’s face softens instead. “I heard ya bumpin’ around last night. Did you sleep at all?”

Donnie searches his brother’s eyes for a hint of mockery, a thread of wayward anger he can pull at and unravel, but all he sees is a reserve of compassion that Raphael keeps on tap just for him. He wants to scream, wants to hit something, wants to rip his metaphorical hair out and go apeshit, but he’s the smart one. The level-headed one, the one holding everything together, the one that they look to for strength when things are uncertain. He can’t waver, he can’t let them know their potential future, he can’t let them know how horrible it could be if he fucks up even a little bit.

Raph reaches toward him, and when Don flinches away, he drops his hand into his lap instead. “When you decide you wanna talk, I’ll be around.” He waits a moment, watches as Donnie shifts his gaze to the mat and tries to keep his breathing level. Eventually, he leaves and closes the dojo doors behind him.

Don lays down on the mat and buries his face in his hands.

“Wait, so you aren’t our Donnie?”

In the basement of the rebel hideout, after two days of waiting, Donatello finally had this battered version of his brothers together in one place. They sat around a battery-powered lantern and talked in hushed tones so as not to wake the infirmary of rebels sleeping on the far side of the room, and the harsh shadows cast at harsher angles made his brothers’ weathered faces look truly foreign.

“Well, not exactly,” he said slowly. “I think your Donatello and I are one and the same, but this timeline seems to be a result of my disappearance at Draco’s and the Daimyo’s son’s hands,” he mused. “If you—that is, the younger version of you—are able to put me back in my own time and place, this all may not come to pass at all.”

The three turtles around him, simultaneously his brothers and not his brothers at all, let out a collective sigh that sounded like relief.

“But that’s a lot of maybes, and since you all have no clue what happened to me in this timeline...it’s far from the only possibility, or even the most likely one.”

Leo reached under his dark glasses and scratched at a scar. “If there’s a chance that you could go back to your own timeline, then you need to stay here. Whatever you’ve cooked up in that brain of yours, we can do it ourselves, the three of us, and leave you out of it. You’re of more use to your brothers than...us,” he said awkwardly.

What he meant was if you die here, now, that cements this future, and we don’t want that. Donnie didn’t want that either, but there was nothing to say that this wasn’t already cemented. If his brothers, or Lord Simultaneous, or Draco or whoever was going to pull him back into his own timeline, it would make the most sense to do it at the moment when he showed up. Honestly, there were a thousand different possibilities and Don didn’t have the time or brainspace to do the necessary calculations to rule some of them out. What mattered was that he was prepared to face this reality as the only true future and do whatever it took to save his brothers, these brothers, even if that meant death.

“I’ll be careful,” he said, trying to brush it off. But the Leo of the past wasn’t that gullible, and this elder Leo for sure was not.

“Yeah, sorry Don, that’s not gonna fly,” Raph grumbled out, beating Leo to the punch. Leo’s words died on his lips. “Losin’ you once was bad enough,” he adds, voice cracking at the end.

The foursome grew silent, each willing the other to speak first. Finally, it was Mikey who broke the silence with a harsh laugh.

“Seriously, he’s here after thirty years, offering us a solution on a silver platter, and you’re gonna turn him down on the off chance he can prevent this altogether? This is our chance , guys.”

“Our last chance almost cost you your life, Mike,” Raphael snaps. “And it did cost ya an arm. We’re not draggin’ him into this.”

“Hey, don’t I get a say here? You’re not dragging me into anything, it’s literally my plan .”

Leo held up a hand to silence the argument, and to Donnie’s surprise, the other two actually listened. Even after all this time. “Donatello, I won’t let you put yourself in harm’s way. I failed to protect you once, and I will not make that mistake again. You can go, but you’re going to stay inside the tunneller.”

Donnie bristled, crossing his arms over his chest. He’d spent the last two days, while he and Mikey waited around for him and Raphael to show up, treating the wounded and ill. He’d sewn more stitches than he could count—so many that his fingers were sore and stiff—and held more than one hand while its owner passed into the next world. He helped April dig graves while Mikey stood by watching, physically unable to wield a shovel to help. He watched his brother sleep, whimpering in pain and pleading with invisible enemies in his dreams. He might be thirty years younger than them, but he’d done enough damn growing up in the last forty eight hours to at least make his own decision.

“Let me get this straight. Leo, you’re assuming that I’m not your Donatello?”

Leo hesitated, clearly trying to follow his brother’s train of thought. “Yes,” he said hesitantly.

“Good. Then you’re not my Leo, and I don’t have to follow your orders. I’m going, and that’s the end of it. You guys need me.”

Mikey, sitting between Leo and Raph on Raph’s blind side, grinned and gave Donnie a wink. It was the first bit of the Mikey he knew that he’d seen in two days.

Leo opened his mouth to speak, a finger raised, and Raph once again beat him to it with a harsh, grating laugh that sounded more like silverware in a garbage disposal than his own brother.

“I always knew ya had more balls than brains, just like the rest of us.” Raph sighed and cuffed him on the shoulder affectionately. “Let’s hear the rest of the plan, you little maniac.”

Donnie couldn’t help it—despite the gloom and terror and hopelessness around him, he smiled. And for the first time in who knows how long, so did all three of his brothers.

He wakes in a sticky sweat for the third time in one night, on the living room couch this time. He tried replicating the success of last night’s nap by trying the cot in his lab first, then the couch, but he keeps having the same results no matter where he falls asleep: visions of blood, of swords, of the Shredder’s angry pink face, of the angry pink gore that spilled out of it as the crystal drill bore into him—

Enough to keep him awake again.

He sits up, panting, and freezes completely when he sees a shadow of a figure across the dark lair. He has the nearest thing in his hands in an instant, which just so happens to be the oversized, unlosable TV remote that Master Splinter scavenged after the third time Mikey misplaced the old one. It makes a poor replacement for his staff, but a stick is a stick, and he’s got killer aim.

“Whoa, I come in peace,” Mikey stage-whispers.

Don’s entire body sags back into the pillows, tossing the remote aside. He lets out a dizzying sigh and resumes his labored breathing, hand over his eyes. “You scared the shell outta me, Mikey.”

“Duh, Captain Obvious.” Mikey comes closer, the soft plap-plap of his feet on the stone floor a comforting metronome. “You okay bro? You were having some killer nightmares.”

Don scoots over and makes room for his brother on the couch, gesturing to join him. He obliges, lazily throwing an arm around his brother’s shoulders. Ah, so he isn’t hiding the distress very well. He never could hide much from Mikey, anyway.

“I’m fine,” he insists. “The usual stuff.”

“Shredder?”

A ghost of an ironic smile flits across Don’s face. “Yeah.”

Mikey’s quiet for a while while Don gets his breathing and heart rate under control. It’s easier than it was yesterday night, but still harder than he’d like it to be. He’d never been the praying kind, seeing as he and his brothers were somewhat of an affront to any god that might exist, but he would do damn near anything to forget those images of his brothers’ battered bodies, covered in blood and the scars of too many years on their own, lungs stilled by his failure. He knows he has many more sleepless nights to come, but the reminder that he doesn't have to face them alone is more than a little comforting.

These brothers aren’t dead, they aren't maimed, they aren’t at odds with each other. At least no more than usual. He shouldn’t push them away—he needs to drag them in closer and make sure they all know how much he loves them.

Stupid Raph, forcing perspective on him and making him see reason. Of all his brothers.

“Donnie?”

“Hm?”

His little brother hesitates, hand idly tracing patterns over Don’s scaly shoulder. “I know you saw something bad, wherever you went. You don’t have to tell me about it, but you’ve been acting funny—like, not ha-ha funny, and what you said about…my arms? It's just been wiggin’ me out, man.”

Wow, he barely remembers saying that. The confusion and sheer emotional gut punch of going from Shredder’s throne room to standing beside his brothers, young and whole again, it was…something else.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Don opens his mouth to dispense an automatic reply as he’s overwhelmed by horrible images of his brothers’ mangled bodies and the sharp smell of their blood in the air, but finds himself stopping short. He didn’t want to talk about it with Leo at first, or with Raph earlier, but Mikey…

Even if it wasn’t this Mikey, a Mikey had been his anchor throughout the whole ordeal. Maybe Donnie going missing was what kickstarted the apocalypse or whatever, but he realizes now with a start that Mikey was the glue that held them all together long enough to get anything done in that dismal future. Maybe their older brothers don't need to know about it just yet, but Don is seized by the sudden realization that Mikey deserves to know.

“It was a future where Shredder won,” he begins quietly. “Not our future, I'm going to make sure of that. But he ruled the entire world and you—you were in hiding. Near the lair, but the lair had been destroyed.” He smiles a little, in spite of it all. “You were a badass . I mean, not that you aren't already, but in the future you were seriously wrecking the Foot’s shit. But you were…well, you only had one arm. The other was gone.”

Mikey mumbles out a dulled “huh” that sounds vaguely horrified, but it’s hard to tell without seeing his expression. “That—uh, that's messed up dude. But everyone else was fine, right?”

Donnie worries his hands together in his lap. “No,” he says hoarsely. “Sensei was…gone. Raph and Leo didn't talk anymore, and Raph was missing an eye, and Leo was blind —” He shudders and takes in a thin, trembling breath. “It was horrible , Mikey, like a horrible nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I helped you take down the Shredder, but it cost you all your lives . I couldn’t save you —”

Mikey pulls him into a hug so suddenly that he lets out a startled cry. With his little brother holding his head to his chest, Donnie finally just can't hold it in anymore. He cries bitterly for the broken future he saw and those brothers that he couldn't save.

“It was my fault,” he cries. “I disappeared and everything fell apart—”

“Hey, hey, bro, it's okay.” Mikey squeezes him gently. “That wasn’t me, or Leo or Raph, those were just some other guys that looked like us. See, I’ve got two good huggin’ arms here! Leo is definitely not blind since he’s been glaring at everything all day, and Raphie is perfectly capable of rolling both his eyes at us. You’re here now, and—I know you’d never leave us. It's okay.”

He hiccups another sob. “It could still happen. If I go missing, or die—”

Mikey pulls him out to arms’ length to look at him. He can barely make out the unusually stern features of his brother’s face in the dark. “Hey, you are not going to die. Don’t even think about it.”

His mouth hangs open for a moment, stunned by his baby brother’s serious tone. Then another wet sob strangles his throat, and he's falling apart all over again. “I'm so scared Mikey, there's nothing to say that isn't exactly what’s going to happen to us.”

Mikey must not know what to say to that, because he just pulls him back in to hold him while he cries. Donnie isn't even sure why he’s crying—it’s all over now, it maybe never even happened, there's no point in dwelling on it now. The tears fall all the same.

“Hey, what's with the ruckus in here? A turtle needs his— Donnie ?” Raph is up and over the second-floor railing and kneeling by the couch in seconds, his hand on Don’s arm as he continues to cry. He just can't stop , no matter how hard he tries.

Leo’s in a second later, a sheathed sword in one hand, the other on the hilt. At the sight of his brothers, he sets it down by the stairs and silently joins them, perched on the edge of the coffee table.

With Raph clinging to his arm and Leo gently stroking the back of his shell, he calms faster than he thought he could. The silent comfort of his brothers—his strong , stubborn, loving brothers—is like a balm on his aching soul. His cheek pressed to Mikey’s plastron, he takes in deep, shuddering breaths and tries to focus on the moment. He’s here now—they all are.

“I'm scared,” he says again, words slightly slurred by his position against Mike.

“It's okay to be scared,” Leo says softly. His hand’s gentle movements on Don’s shell don't cease.

“Yeah, Mikey’s scared all the time,” Raph suggests with a hint of a smile.

“I didn't think I'd ever see you guys again. I didn't—I didn't even know if I was in another reality, or if it was just too late to change things. I still don’t.”

Mikey makes a sad, strangled sound in his throat, and his arms tighten around Donnie. “We’re here, dude, we’re not going anywhere.”

Donnie can tell that Leo and Raph are both barely holding back on a million questions, but he can’t find it in himself to repeat any part of the story now. Now that it’s out of him, he feels like a weight has been lifted from his chest and he can breathe for the first time since the Ultimate Draco vanished him away. He has all three brothers, every part of them, and the next thirty years stretch out in front of him like eons. He knows they’ll get hurt, he knows they’ll have to face Shredder again, but for now just being whole and together is enough. Knowing that his brothers could live with him and this failure, the horrible reality that even though he has the smarts and the skills to match he can’t always save them , soothes something broken inside him that he didn’t even know was there.

“I love you guys,” he mumbles, the words mashed and mangled between the thickness in his throat and his mouth so close to Mikey’s shell.

They’re each quick to respond in kind, hands and arms tangling around him in a warm and confusing embrace of scales and shells and tears from more than one of them.

They sleep in a tangle across the couch and living room carpet that night, all as close to Donatello as they can be. Every time he wakes to a nightmare, at least one of them is there to assure him that he is not alone, the nightmare is over, and he hasn’t failed.

By the time morning rolls around again, warmth has curled up and made a home in Donnie’s chest, replacing the hollow and horrible feeling that had taken respite there ever since he had to look at his brothers’ broken and bloodied corpses. He watches them all sleep—Mikey sitting up at the end of the couch, Raph in Master Splinter’s armchair, Leo sprawled across the carpet with a blanket haphazardly thrown across his legs—with a smile, knowing they’re alive, and they love him, and he loves them. For now, that’s all he needs in the world. The rest of it? They’ll do what they do best, and take it one punch at a time.

#tmnt #tmnt03 #tmnt2k3 #teenage mutant ninja turtles #the ghost writes #turtleposting #fic #my fic #hurt/comfort #sainw #same as it never was

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