Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Donnie has two soulmarks.

One is bright yellow, clean friendly letters on the inside of his right ankle. Hi, I'm April, what's your name? Simple, childish, picture-perfect. April's match is on her left forearm, purple chicken scratch jotted down so hastily nobody but the two of them can make out the words.

The other one is—one of the reasons he wears his battle-shells. Not the biggest, not by far, but.

"I've got stripes in different colors, I don't see why you can't," Leo insists, when they're kids. Donnie doesn't know how to explain. There's asymmetrical markings, and then there's the tiny, syrupy-dark splotches painted across his back. They're pink where Donnie knows down to his core that his color is purple.

("Me and Mikey both have yellow—"

"And Leo's got red, that's Raph's!")  

He can't see them unless he's got two big mirrors set up, and the first time he gets caught doing that he swears it off forever in embarrassment. He makes April inspect them for him instead. Soulmate of her soulmate, she must feel it too, right?

"I don't like this," she admits, once, when they're both too tired to hold their tongues. "What kind of first words are these supposed to be?"

Donnie doesn't like it either, really. No one's allowed to touch his naked back except Dad and April, and honestly? Ever since he met April, Splinter has rapidly been losing privileges. It's… intimate. It makes his skin crawl. Maybe April's his soulmate because she doesn't make him feel like that. Maybe his other other half will be the same way.

"Maybe it's an as-yet undiscovered alien language!" he suggests, to change the subject and cheer them both up. He's young. He doesn't know any better.

Someone who hasn't met their soulmate is—incomplete. Not their full self. Half a person, waiting to be made whole. That's the classic idea, anyway.

The concept has merit. Meeting April was like seeing the sun for the first time. Squinting and covering his eyes and giggling under the warmth until he could barely breathe. She's bold and fun and she loved all four of the people who make up Donnie's tiny world immediately, without question.

Five people, now. Maybe six, someday.

He's nervous, but he was nervous about meeting his first human, too, so he tries to be excited instead. He tries to love the way his heart pounds, tries to love the flips his stomach does. Because—until it's six, Donnie can't know who Donnie, whole and complete, is going to be.

Dad looks sad when he talks like that, but he doesn't tell him he's wrong.

Donatello is sixteen years old when the world ends.

They hold out hope that it's not over over for a long time. Longer than is reasonable, in retrospect. Something something, triumph of the human spirit. If only.

He goes the better part of a decade without sparing more than a stray thought for the maybe-soulmark on his back, because how could he have the bandwidth to care? The better part of a decade and he finally cracks the secret of how to burn the Krang out of a body, poison that buys the people it frees—not a full lifetime, not with how deep and how violent the parasite burrows, but years. Years that matter, even in a world in its death throes.

They manage to burn the Krang out of their test group, and he's pleased with himself and his work, right up until April says in a voice far too steady, "Donnie, come take a look at this."

Ever the fool, he does. And then he follows April's lead, staying calm and level-voiced, as his eyes rove over the shape of the wounds on an innocent person's back, where April's been carefully, compassionately plucking out the last of the shriveling contamination. Tiny, syrupy-dark splotches.

Not to be dramatic, but April following him into his lab is the only reason he doesn't kill himself that night. Or the next night. Or the night after that.

"Tell you what," April says on night three, because you have so much to live for doesn't really pack the punch it might have, Before. "You do all the good you can now. Everything. You live. And then, whatever that thing is, whenever it gets its hands on you, whatever it does to you…" She puts a hand on his arm, and then, after a long, hesitant moment where he doesn't pull away, moves it to his branded back. Firm and steady as anything. "I'll kill you myself, okay?" He lets her guide him into leaning against her. "I promise."

When Donnie was fourteen, he did this—awful thing. Fucked with his brothers' brains. He doesn't remember, anymore, why he thought it was a good idea, to make them more like him. To reach into their minds and overwrite everything that made them them. To make them do exactly what he wanted, without hesitation, without disobedience.

He knows, now, exactly why he thought it was a good idea. It's been written on him since birth. It's part of his soul.

"Deal," he rasps into her shoulder.

She holds him for a long time after that. He doesn't fight it.

Raph dies. None of them are ever really whole again.

There's this bit he remembers from some poem, back from the days of the global internet. Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.

There is no other version of this story.

Someone has to leave second, too.

He doesn't bother cluttering comm space with I love you as he's captured. His family knows. What's far more important are the final scraps of coded information he can pass on. Movements and locations that are compromised now that he is. Secret things they'll need to destroy as fast as possible before whatever the Krang make out of his body can act on the memories. Last chances, long odds.

He gives them every edge, every warning he can think of, and then in a moment of weakness he tells April in plain English, begs her, "Remember—you promised."

"I remember," she replies, voice distorted by transmission, carried to him through the communicator she wears over her soulmark. It's the last kindness Donatello Hamato ever knows.

The Krang are impressed with his mind. Apparently, in all their millennia of conquest, no one's managed to fuck them over quite as much as Donnie's meager little breakthroughs have. It's a warm candle to hold close to his heart as they torture him.

The torture ebbs, eventually. Tentacles slither out of his brain. They're already moving, set to crush the resistance with everything he's ever known. Distantly, he wonders how long it'll take them to render his antidote completely useless.

(He bought them years, not lifetimes. Years aren't nothing. Years have never been nothing.)

And maybe not all of the tentacles have withdrawn from his brain—it's so hard to feel anything through the agony, it's so hard to remember anything but the pain exists— because somewhere outside his body someone says, "An excellent idea. That will be your penance."

They take him back to New York City. The ship that crawled through the sky above the water one dark autumn night has never left. It hasn't needed to.

The ship exhales as he's brought into it. It hums, it purrs. He tastes its breath. The scent is cloyingly familiar, but too much has been pried out of his mind for him to be able to place it. A thousand curious eyes peer down at him.

(He remembers meeting April. He remembers a sense of anticipation the moment before she spoke.)

They still haven't touched his back. They peel his battle-shell away now, crack crack crack like breaking open a crab. If they see the mark of what he is, what he was born for, they don't comment on it—so they must not see it, or maybe Krang don't have soulmates and they don't understand. The tiniest sliver of mercy, that they don't know he was always meant to be theirs.

The ship opens up for him. A coffin, a gullet, a surgical incision in the shape of a Y. He regrets everything he's ever read about anglerfish.

(April, a little kid with beads in her hair the exact color of the words on his ankle.)

There's no real fight left in him, they made sure of that, but still he hisses and snaps his teeth and lets the tears flow down his cheeks. Do not go gentle. He catches a mouthful of a tentacle that roves too close to his face and gets his teeth shattered for the trouble. He spits the swirl of blood at their faces, red and toxic green, and they shove him back, one step, two.

(April's voice. The golden words on his ankle lighting up with a warmth like the midday sun.)

Dozens of spindly fingers working him over. Intimate and crawling under his skin. The syrupy-dark splotches on his back lighting up like gasoline.

Go to hell, he snarls, last words, even as Donatello Hamato burns out of him like a parasite.

Welcome home, beloved, it floods his nervous system with in reply, and he is, he is, he is.

Chapter Text

"You're actually here," the green boy blurts, eyes huge and awed, and April's soulmark goes cool and bright like jumping into a pool on a summer day.

She gasps, face splitting into a grin so big it hurts, and then he squeaks and adds, "I mean! Sorry! My name's Donnie!"

"What do you do if your soulmate makes you feel icky?" April asks her parents, once.

That's a whole conversation. Eventually they all sort out that April's asking for Donnie, not about Donnie, and then her parents start asking her different questions.

"He's got two," she says, looking at her hands instead of up at them. "It's on his back, and it's—it's creepy. It's like…" She sniffles, and when Mom opens her arms April climbs into her lap even though she's way too old for this. "I think they're really gonna hurt him."

Her parents ask if they can meet Donnie, and April shakes her head. They ask if they can meet his dad, and no, definitely not. They worry at her, and later that night after she's supposed to be in bed she can hear them talking quietly about it in the kitchen, but. But she's gotta keep the boys a secret. More people than just Donnie's soulmate could hurt him, if anybody else found out he exists.

She'll introduce them to each other someday, she swears to herself. As soon as she can. As soon as she figures out how.

She never does. She puts it off for years and years, never really sure how she'd even begin to explain, and then…

One autumn night, she breaks into campus, breaks her phone, then heads underground to hang out with the guys and maybe bug Donnie to take a look at the chemicals she swiped. Her parents are still at home in the apartment. When the blackout hits, she has to make the choice what to prioritize. She can't remember what her last text was.

She likes to think they died quickly. The alternative is that they've been Krang zombies this whole time, and—no. No.

She's lost so much. Let her have this.

A year and a half into the apocalypse, Leo meets his soulmate. She hasn't heard him laugh like this since everything went wrong. It starts to feel like maybe they can scrounge up a life worth living after all, even here, at the end of the world.

A week later, he comes back from patrol alone.

April starts wearing arm wraps. Donnie stops being seen without something covering his back and his ankles. Raph and Cassandra too, with their own. Mikey appoints himself Leo's minder, which April thinks is a little bit overkill, up until one night she's keeping watch and he drags Leo home, Mike's eyes shining with tears, Leo's dull and nearly unseeing. April opens her mouth to ask and Mikey just shakes his head, which is an answer all on its own.

The better part of a decade later and April realizes she doesn't know how the hell Mikey did it.

Third night in a row. This time Donnie's turning a blowtorch over in his hands. She pries it away from him gently, and he sighs.

"I could contrive a way to go out in a blaze of glory," he says, contemplative. "That would be better for morale. Shiny new martyr. No one ever has to know."

"I'd tell everyone at your funeral," she says, pulling him away from the workbench covered in electrical shit and sharp pieces of metal. "Make a whole scene. Totally ruin your eulogy."

"Dammit, O'Neil," he mutters.

"We have a cure now. You literally just invented a cure."

"Yeah," he laughs. "Doesn't change what I am, though, does it?"

"My best friend?" She steers them both into sitting down at a different bench, one that doesn't look like it has anything too nasty within arm's reach. "Our literal best hope of actually beating the Krang?" She props her chin in her hand. "An idiot with three brothers who love him very much and would kill an army of aliens to get him back?"

He flinches at that last one. "You can't tell them."

Yesterday, Leo saw the test group for the first time. Got a look at the scars and everything. Not even a flicker of recognition.

"Donnie—"

"No, April, you can't." He curls in on himself, pulling his goggles down to hide his eyes. "Please. It's not—I can't remember who I was before I met you. I can't imagine being anyone else."

They say that's a common thing with soulmates. April feels it too, every day since she met him, that sense of who the fuck would I have been without you?

So it only takes a moment for her to get it.

"Oh," she says, wanting to cry. "Oh, Donnie."

"I don't want to know," he pleads with her. "It's going to happen and I can't—I can't. Don't let me."

The truth is, April doesn't want to know either. But she's selfish. She doesn't want to lose him until she has to.

So she makes a promise.

Raph dies.

Only an asshole would say that Donnie takes it in stride, but he holds himself together. Keeps functioning through it all. Not like Leo and Mikey and their screaming matches. Not like Casey's sudden need to pull stupid hero stunts even though she's got a goddamn kid.

Not like April's long, choking silences as she lingers in Donnie's lab and watches him build shit they both know will never replace his brother.

He locks his blowtorch up when he's not in there. She's not—that's not where her head is at, not at all, and he knows that, but she gets what he's trying to say.

Donnie's supposed to have a contingency plan that'll blow his head clean off when the Krang get their hands on him. She knows, the moment his too-steady voice comes through comms, that it's failed.

April's his other contingency plan. She knows very well that she has no chance of getting to him in time. She runs anyway.

"What did you promise him?" Mikey demands, in the aftermath.

April meets his eyes. He hasn't been that sweet, patient kid in a long time, but he's still Mikey. April's known him their whole lives. "Remember when we were little and you guys insisted the stuff on his back wasn't a soulmark?"

Leo makes a choked noise from just outside the doorway. Yeah, figures he'd be nearby.

Mikey's staring at her. "That—that's not—he never—"

"Of course he never said anything," she says, not trying to be cruel but not feeling strong enough to be kind either. "You know what he's like. Do I need to tell you how he felt about it?"

His jaw goes tight, a scowl twisting on his lips. He hates shit he can't change. Always has. "How long have you known." The air crackles around him as he floats closer.

She doesn't move. Let him try to stare her down. "Since the first successful test of the cure."

He grabs the front of her shirt like he thinks he's going to do something. "You—"

"I promised to kill him," she says, icy calm. She looks over her shoulder, at the doorway where Leo's staring at her like he's never seen her before. "So are you two going to help me or not?"

In a matter of weeks, long before they can find him, Donnie's cure stops working. Their fighting chance crumbles back into a war of attrition.

Honestly, the thing that makes April cry the most is that he held out so long.

They try normal intelligence-gathering—they try everything— but in the end, Mikey's the one who finds him, by stockpiling enough mystic energy to safely pry open the old, rusted-over pathways of the Hamato mind meld. It runs on a frequency too close to whatever the hell the Krang have going on. It was sacrifice that, or sacrifice everything else.

Mikey only has it open for a few seconds, and then he slams it shut again, staggering to the ground and gasping for air. Leo roars and punches the wall hard enough to leave a crater.

"Tell me," April says.

Mikey shakes his head mutely.

"Tell me," she repeats, baring her teeth.

"No," Leo snarls back.

"He's my best friend!"

"Not anymore, he's not!"

The silence rings. Leo's mouth snaps shut, and he reaches out to her like he's sorry. She doesn't come any closer, and after a long few breaths, he lets his hand fall.

April waits for one of them to break down first.

None of them do.

"Alright," she says, evenly. "Where is he."

Soulmate of her soulmate. Of course she feels it too.

Mikey can keep them hidden from all Krang detection for ten minutes. She doesn't dare ask how much it's taking off his life, not when this is the first time he's ever mentioned being able to do that, not when he's already decided Donnie is worth it. Leo's portals drain him in a way they never did Before, too, so once they get her in, it comes down to April. The way it was always going to.

The air stinks of decay, mostly meat in a constant state of digestion the way all Krang territory does, but there's an edge of something else. She gets a flash of autumn and the age-worn image of New York at night, her and Donnie in a park lifting wet leaves up with sticks to find weird bugs.

(God, he would be so mad if she called him a weird bug.)

He's in the engine room, Mikey told her. He's in the wall, Leo added, taking the charcoal from him to rough in more detail on the map they'd been drawing entirely by feel. The final map had been weird, dreamlike, and probably completely useless to anyone else, but April's seen his preliminary sketches for tech. She knows how to read his handwriting.

The engine room, when she finds it, is full of baby blues and candle flame oranges and strawberry ice cream pinks. It's so unlike the Krang that she just stops dead for a precious few seconds she can't afford. She shakes herself and keeps looking.

Lavender. There's lavenders, too. Lopsided, spaced unevenly, fucking Fibonacci sequence, that nerd, all converging on one particular section of the wall.

Her ticket for extraction is one of Leo's swords. She draws it now and prays that Mikey's not kidding about all.

Nothing seems to notice when she slices the ship open. A burst of cool, rancid air breathes over her as some kind of cavity is exposed, a wet, narrow chamber, like prying a sealed piece of tech open with a screwdriver to get at the inner components. It's just more ship, though, lurching growths and pulsating walls, and for a moment, for a moment, she thinks she's fucked this all up, and they're going to run out of time.

Then she catches, eye level, easy to miss against the syrupy-dark pink of the ship's flesh, a glimpse of tiny purple chicken scratch.

Go to hell.

She chokes down a laugh, a scream, as she turns her head upward and sees, half-buried and shadowed under a tangle of oily, twitching nerves, a purple mask.

Eyes flutter open and oh, they have fucked up. Mikey's protecting her from Krang detection. And no matter what he was afraid of, no matter what they've made out of him now, Donnie's not Krang.

The eyes peering out from under Donnie's mask—because they're not Donnie's eyes anymore, they're sickly green with slit red pupils, even the sockets aren't shaped the same—blink at her slowly. It opens a mouth in more or less the right place, baring long, jagged teeth, and makes a soft noise that scrapes up her spine like a knife.

April still isn't dead. The rest of the ship hasn't reacted to her presence.

"Donnie," she whispers, even though she shouldn't. The eyes flicker, refocus, slide away and back like they can't decide whether she's there. The mass of flesh shifts in the wall like a body shifting under blankets, and she realizes with a jolt that the most movement—the most struggle— is coming from about where his right ankle would be.

"It's okay," she whispers, creeping closer. Another noise from the mouth, coaxing, pained. "It's okay, it's April. I remembered. I'm here." She reaches out and touches what's left of his face, fully prepared to die like an idiot.

Something between a sob and a contented hum, not like his voice at all. She slips her fingers under his mask, carefully, carefully tugging it out from within the growths. Like extracting shriveled little roots from someone's back. She shoves it into a specimen pouch to decontaminate later.

With the mask gone, no one would ever guess it was him. April takes a deep breath and hefts her bat. It flares with mystic energy, pulling who knows how much from her, because she's only got one chance and she's going to do this right. "Love you, Donnie."

She smashes the component.

Chapter Text

And just like that, the story ends. A foregone conclusion, a tragedy in three parts: his, and hers, and one told only by implication. The thief slips out a window and back into the night, leaving no trace but the cadaver in the bedroom. A cheap anticlimax.

Maybe it makes an impression. Maybe the butterfly effect ripples far outward from here, etching unseen patterns on the universe. Maybe this is one crucial cog of many in the machinery of some grand design.

Maybe even fate likes to tell itself the occasional joke.

Now close the book. Rewind. Scrub the tapes and reset the board. Second chances, trial and error, the benefit of hindsight.

(And man, fuck this, fuck darkness, fuck the underworld, fuck not-returning.)

There is another version of this story.

Play it in reverse.

The incisions have healed up well. Every last ugly splotch of his soulmark, struck through and crossed out by a careful hand. They're thin, but they've healed green, not too far from the actual color of his skin, and it stands out enough to see from a distance. A permanent reminder.

His family is laughing elsewhere in the lair. He just needed a moment, he told them. A few minutes alone.

He's got two mirrors set up facing each other, just like old times. He cranes his arm around to feel his scars. Raised, now, instead of insubstantial shadows of the future, and the cuts a different texture slicing through. It's almost comforting. Tangible proof. There and back again.

He bares his teeth at his reflection. Flash the whites of his eyes, nastiest snarl he can manage. His head still doesn't fit right, some days, but he can run his tongue over his teeth without gagging.

Baby steps.

"Okay, I lied," April says as soon as they're topside. "Barry's plumbing is fine."

"What," says Donnie.

She beams angelically at him. "I told my parents I'm bringing you over for dinner!"

"Hggk," says Donnie, because she grabs him by the hood before he can take more than one step towards a flying leap back into the sewers.

"You are not blowing this operation," she threatens, dragging him inexorably towards his doom. "They are meeting one turtle, because I am not overwhelming them with all of you at once, because my parents are normal, and you guys are insane."

"I seriously doubt that anyone who spawned you is anything resembling normal," Donnie coughs, attempting to wiggle out of his hoodie. She twists the hood sharply so he can't squeeze through the neck hole. "April, please! I'm not dressed! I had an outfit picked out!"

"If you can go out in public without pants you can meet my parents without pants," she informs him, with malice.

"You're evil," he begs, clawing fruitlessly at where a front zipper could have saved him had he not been so arrogant. The hubris.

She smirks like she's about to put him in checkmate, which is patently impossible because that is something she has never successfully done. "If you meet them first you get to hold it over everybody's heads forever."

Oh, yeah, that would do it. "Never mind, you're evil and I love you."

"Thanks."

The O'Neil apartment is well outside the worst of the destruction, but between the monsters that filled the streets and the sheer range of… some of the weapons… there's still damage. Still people displaced. Still people dead. April's parents have made it their mission to use their intact home to ensure nobody in their neighborhood is isolated, here in the After. They've been having a lot of people over for meals. Grieving strangers. Krang survivors. Mutants. Really, he should have seen this coming.

They take the stairs. The elevator is structurally sound, he's pretty sure, but he appreciates the opportunity to breathe. A little more time to brace himself. Nevertheless, all too soon, they come to a stop in front of her door.

"Ready?" she asks.

No. No, of course not. Look at him. He shoves his hands in his pockets. They've gotten April into so much shit over the years, so much danger, so many near-death experiences, dragged her right into the mouth of the apocalypse, and she'd kick his ass if he had the audacity to regret it but these are her parents, her family, and he doesn't even know how much she's told them in preparation of meeting him, what if they don't know? What if they do?

"They're going to hate me," he says.

"Nah," she says, like it's obvious. "They're gonna love you, Dee."

"I'm going to say something wrong and they're going to kick me out."

"You're not and they won't."

"But what if they do."

She bumps him with her shoulder. "Then we get pizza and head back to the lair."

We. Simple as that. Like it's obvious.

"Okay," he says, throat tight.

She unlocks the door and, heroically, enters first, allowing him to use her as a human shield. "We're home!"

"Great timing!" Mrs. O'Neil calls from the kitchen. She steps through the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. "Dinner's almost ready, if you kids want to—"

And she pauses.

Donnie finds himself staring down at her fuzzy orange socks, rather than trying to decipher whatever her face is doing as she takes in exactly what her daughter's brought home. April isn't tucking him under her arm and making a break for it yet, though, so he's—trusting her. Following her lead.

April's mom breathes out. "So this is the boy who keeps fixing this old place up," she says fondly, and Donnie jerks his head up to stare at her. She's got the exact same you worry too much smile as her daughter. "Nice to finally meet you, Donnie."

Inventory of scars:

Donnie's, of course.

April: Road rash from being thrown from a goddamn motorcycle, not improved by how long it took them to get her some real first aid. What with how busy they were preventing the end of the world and all. It hasn't healed pretty, but she managed to avoid dying of some horrific Krang-spit infection, so. Bright sides.

Dad: Ditto on the road rash, plus that vicious bite to his tail. It's healed crooked despite their best efforts, but dear Papá insists he doesn't mind.

Casey Jones: Miscellaneous scuffs, scrapes, and scratches. Otherwise unscathed. The Genius Built logo is stamped loud and clear on his everything, so Donnie shamelessly takes full credit for his continued survival.

Mikey: Deeply alarming lines that stretched from his fingertips to his shoulders, resembling mystic Lichtenberg scars in both the accompanying symptoms and how thoroughly they faded into nothingness before the first month was out.

Leo: Cracks in his shell—carapace and plastron—healed to functionality far faster than their unmutated brethren could ever dream. Various wounds across his limbs, some barely visible at this point, some impossible to miss. Knee damage he's still working to mitigate, and probably will be forever. A stark cut across his jaw he insists only adds to his roguish charm.

Raph—

Raph. His big brother. Raphael Hamato.

Arms that are more pink than green. New keratin on his carapace growing in with discolored patches, splattered haphazardly but clustering more towards his spine. The hole and chip and shallow slice across his left shoulder. Pink on the back of his neck. Pink reaching up. Pink in the shape of greedy, grasping tendrils, covering easily a third of his head. The useless knot of tissue that remains of one eye, and little syrupy-dark flecks in the white of the other.

"So," Donnie says, turning the ninpo prototype over in his hands and inspecting it for minute details to improve upon, "we have night vision, heat vision, mystic vision, no laser vision until I'm certain I've worked out the cooling issue—"

"I don't need to shoot lasers out of my eye," Raph reminds him, as he has done every time it's come up thus far.

"Ah, but do you want to shoot lasers out of your eye?"

As he has done every time, Raph visibly fights to keep a smile off his face. "Mmm. Maybe a little laser."

Donnie types a note into his wrist display. "Leave… room… to… upgrade…"

"Donnie, no," Raph says, but his self-discipline has cracked, and it's more of a laugh than a protest.

"Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all the groundbreaking advancements in cybernetics I'm making."

Raph shakes his head fondly, and Donnie looks down as he feels the corners of his own mouth twitch up to match. The prototype eye is purple, of course, he can't do anything about that, but the final… black with a white lens, he's thinking, and of course a red backlight for whenever Raph wants to look particularly badass or mystic or spooky or anything else he might desire. Knowing their powers, he probably won't need to artificially induce glowing when that sort of thing comes up, but Donnie has recently been reminded how much he adores redundancies, so.

He references the list he made last night in preparation for today's check-in. Right, right, up next is a question regarding those very aesthetic choices, and he looks up, mouth open to ask it.

"You know that thing in movies," Raph interrupts, gazing at the wall, smile vanished while Donnie wasn't looking, "where somebody dies, and their soulmate or family or whoever tries to bring 'em back to life, but something gets messed up?"

The prototype dissipates. "Ah. The classic came back wrong. I am familiar, yes."

"Yeah," Raph says, distant. "You ever wonder what that's like from the inside?"

He's always resonated more with the scientist, really. The mad, desperate scrambling to keep hold of something that's already been lost. He's never truly believed he'll be the first one to go, not when the alternative is so much worse.

But.

"I have," he admits.

Something flickers over Raph's face, unidentifiable. "You think you'd be able to tell?"

"That there was something wrong with me?" The barest hint of a nod. "Hard to say. I'm reasonably certain there's always been something wrong with me." It's meant to be a joke. It doesn't get that far.

Raph breathes out sharply, like an acknowledgement.

"Barring that," Donnie goes on, looking down at the hands he's been trying to use to fix things. "I think I'd just have to ask someone. And…" Even harder. "Trust the answer." April. April's been good for that.

His brother's mouth goes thin. They sit in an uncomfortable silence that Donnie doesn't know how to break.

"Do you think I…"

"No," Donnie says immediately. "Different, maybe, but not wrong." Raph startles, like he was expecting some other answer. Donnie almost wants to yell at him, for that, but instead he presses, "Do you think I—"

"No," Raph blurts, horrified, distraught, completely certain. Then he catches up with the exchange, and his face scrunches up in deep offense. "Hey."

Donnie doesn't feel the need to rub it in too hard. "Of course, if you wanted to look like you came back wrong, I could just make your eye glow red 24/7…?"

Raph, fighting back the shadow of a smile, reaches out and shoves him.

He and April head out to—oh, somewhere, who gives a shit.

Something outside the radius of destruction, some building scheduled for demolition that's had to take a back seat to cleanup. He doesn't pay attention to the route they take, or even what neighborhood they end up in, because it's already taking everything he has just to breathe every time a stranger's eyes skitter a little too close to them.

"Hello, Earth to Donnie," April says, waving her hand in front of his face. He hisses at the offending appendage. She gives him a look. He stops hissing. "Wow, you were not kidding."

"Sorry," he manages.

She shrugs, unreadable. "We're here." It puts a crack in his tunnel vision, wide enough for some of the sounds of the city night to trickle back in from far away. He sways on his feet. Just keep breathing. Just a little longer, now.

April crouches down and contemplates a selection of loose bricks by the edge of the sidewalk. She finds one she seems to like the heft of, uses her bat to lever herself back up, and graciously offers it to him. "Would you do the honors?"

He takes it and tosses it in his hand a couple times, gauging the weight. Oh, that is nice. He licks his lips, pulls his arm back, and pitches it as hard as he can through a first story window.

"Alright," she says, spinning her bat in a little flourish. Donnie slams the end of his bō against the concrete just to feel the strike reverberate up his arm. She's grinning. He's just baring his teeth. "Let's go."

There's a lot of shit to break in there.

He loses himself in it. That's the point. Cracks and shards scattering across the floor. Glass bursting. Ugly, angry noise. No plan, no methodology, no ideal pathway. Breaking things, broken things, a broken thing screaming. Kiais turning into guttural shouts turning into animal snarls. April always on the edge of his awareness, bellowing like a monster right along with him.

He's hoarse by the time the need to kill something leaves him.

He finds himself on his back in the middle of the carnage, chest heaving. April kicks a few pieces of whatever off towards the wall, then lies down next to him with an oof.

"That was fun," she sighs, exhausted.

He clicks in acknowledgement. Feeling like a person is a bit beyond him yet.

Apparently April has no such internal struggle. "You wanna get something to eat?"

Oh fuck, he could tear into some meat right about now. She huffs but doesn't laugh at the needy noise he makes, just digs out her phone.

"Okay," she says, and he rolls over to peer at the list of places she pulls up. "Just point if one of these sounds good."

He hums and rests his head on her shoulder.

Mikey's never had a soulmark. He used to be jealous of the four of them.

"It's just bullshit," he's ranting now, gesturing with a pen Donnie's vaguely worried he's going to lose his grip on. "Like, hi, here's your soulmate, you get absolutely no say in this, good luck!"

They'd been attempting to spend some undemanding time together, Mikey practicing something in his sketchbook—no one's allowed to look, but his determination knows no bounds—and Donnie fiddling with part of his newest bō, the only piece of tech the fam has deemed 'low-stress' enough to be 'healthy to work on'. Whatever that's supposed to mean. (He knows what it means. He's being obstinate.) And then the well-worn movie they'd put on as background noise had the subplot from hell rear its ugly head, and now it's kind of looking like that's going to derail the next few hours.

"She literally shoots him the first time they meet," Mikey's complaining. He's been doing pretty good so far about not breaching plausible deniability vis a vis the elephant in the room. "They don't even say their first words to each other until her third scene! She's just trying to kill him!"

"You do have to admit that if anyone was going to have a soulmate that tried to kill him repeatedly, it would be Lou Jitsu," Donnie says. The elephant is now glaring balefully at the back of his head.

"Yeah, but then once they do know, she uses it to lure him into a trap!" Mikey finally stands up, tosses the pen onto his bed, and starts pacing. "Like they play it like this whole romantic thing but if you actually look at what she's doing, she's just manipulating him the whole time and then pouting about it! She's not conflicted, she just says she is!"

"And of course she has her momentous change of heart right when it starts to look like he's going to win," Donnie agrees, picking at the edges of a few overlapping plates with a fingernail. "You know, when it'll keep her out of jail."

"Exactly!" Mikey grabs his pillow and growls into it before throwing it back onto the bed. Donnie leans to the side so it doesn't catch him on the ricochet.

The movie's still paused on the ancient, boxy TV screen Mikey thought it would be fun to watch things on, from—well, not the moment they simultaneously got fed up with it, that had seen it frozen on a frame of the love interest making entirely unearned alluringly-sad eyes at Lou Jitsu. Donnie had grabbed for the remote before Mikey could throw his drawing implement through the glass and break the whole thing. A second and a half later, mid-pan, no faces onscreen. Maybe Donnie hadn't wanted to look at their expressions either. Maybe the dialogue had made him feel a little bit sick.

"And he just takes it," Mikey's saying, voice cracking a little. His fingers twitch once, twice, ongoing, involuntary, and he shoves his hands under his arms to still them. "He's just like, yeah, okay, of course this is my life, why would I expect anything better, and… And he just lets her treat him like that."

"It's the worst," Donnie agrees, keeping his eyes on the mess of tiny, interlocking pieces he's somehow managed to wedge together into an immobile mass. "It's like—being gift-wrapped." Ignore the elephant. Ignore it. "Like you only exist so somebody else can get what they want." Ignore it.

Mikey sits down on the bed next to him.

"Soulmates are bullshit," he says, quietly. "April would've been friends with you anyway."

Fuck it. Donnie digs out a screwdriver and just starts prying things apart. "Yeah."

There aren't enough biohazard crews to get to everything in a timely manner. Donnie picks a ruined section of Brooklyn and leaves his phone at home.

The Krang-flesh lying inert over everything like so many whale carcasses has, luckily, not seen fit to explode like so many whale carcasses. Instead, it's been drying out and hardening in the chill autumn wind, some kind of elegant self-fossilization process he almost remembers the size and color of. Still smells like fucking vomit.

He runs a hand over a stretch of it. It doesn't respond to his touch. Doesn't curl around his fingers, doesn't pulse in time with his heartbeat. He scrapes his nails across it and comes away with only a whisper of dried, flaking mucus.

He'd burn it all, here and now, if there hadn't already been half a dozen news stories on how much of a bad idea that is even with a gas mask.

Instead, he walks. Away from the buildings that are intact enough to be structurally salvageable. Deeper towards the epicenter. At one point he hops a few pedestrian barriers with some very insistent signage. Large print. Numerous languages. When he feels the prickle of being watched on the back of his neck, he slips down into the darkness of the subway and snags a piece of something-or-other he can turn into a weapon.

The biohazard crews have been working their asses off down here and it's still not enough. Nothing's growing, sure. That helps. Nothing's responsive, sure. That helps too. The milky eyes dotting the ceiling, though? The flesh coating the walls? The memory of, however briefly, being like it, being part of it?

"Donnie!" April shouts somewhere behind him. He nearly falls on his face. "What the hell do you think you're doing!"

He doesn't respond, but she rounds the right corner anyway, brandishing her phone flashlight like she's about to use it to perform an exorcism. On him, perhaps.

"You better have a real good explanation, mister!" She doesn't lower her volume as she closes on him. He should start talking. He should raise his hands placatingly, justify himself with calm logic, because he had a perfectly rational explanation for coming out here. He remembers noting that it was perfectly rational. She gets close enough that she turns her phone to the side to—kindly—avoid blinding him. "You—you're scaring me, Dee, what is this?"

"I," Donnie says. Even in the weird lighting, he can't bring himself to look at her face. She's barely been around—and of course she hasn't, Donatello, get a grip— and the only thing he can focus on is that she's still using that stupid fucking cat case that didn't protect her old phone at all. He will make her a better phone case. He will make her a better phone. "I don't…"

She reaches out to him, and he—he shouldn't, he's not, he doesn't deserve—and she takes his hand, the one that isn't still, even now, even knowing it's only April, holding a long bar of metal just in case he needs to kill something in the next thirty seconds. "Donnie? Talk to me."

"I just," he says, flexing his fingers in her hand. "I needed to—see it. See what's left."

"The ship," she guesses, correctly.

"Yeah."

She squeezes. "Because you want closure, or because you wanna hurt yourself?"

The answer is so unbelievably obvious that the question is insulting. "I mean, I should, right?"

"Hurt yourself?"

He laughs, painfully. "Want closure! It's a basic emotional response! For—for all sorts of reasons, in these circumstances! It's completely normal!"

She tilts the light up and looks him over slowly. Like she's staring right through him into, not to be weird about it, his soul.

"Forget should," she says, finally. "Do you want closure?"

His breath catches. Again, the answer is so stupidly, blindingly obvious that it's embarrassing she even has to ask. "God, no."

She leads him out of there and into the daylight. He ditches the makeshift club by hurling it at a patch of eyes behind them that pop gratifyingly under the impact. She has the courtesy not to comment on it.

"They're gonna kick your ass, by the way," she says lightly.

Ohhh no. Why is she texting. "Come again?"

She scrolls up and passes him the phone. Found him, outgoing, followed by approximately a dozen variations on where???, most of them from Mikey. Outgoing, he's fine, he was being an edgelord, followed by several expressions of genuine relief and sympathy.

As he's reading, a new message comes in from Leo. Okay NEW new rule angsty brooding is ILLEGAL. A gap of roughly half a second. Unless youre using the buddy system i guess.

In the midst of the storm of Leo wtf and is now really the time that earns, Donnie locates the purple square emoji and shoots back, The pact is sealed.

See donnie gets me!!!

He passes April back her phone. She takes one look at it and laughs.

For the third night in a row, he wakes to the phantom sensation of blood filling his mouth.

For the third night in a row, he lurches upright, gagging on nothing, forcing himself to stay silent so he doesn't wake his family. They've been sleeping piled together on the floor of the medical bay—well, not Dad, he's old and that bite to his tail messed up his spine more than he's trying to let on—and not April, she's home with her parents because they were all terrified for each other and need the reassurance that they're all still alive just like the Hamatos do—and definitely not Leo, he's in a bed like Dad is because any one of them could break even more of his bones just by kicking him in their sleep right now—

Leo who's looking at him, and awake.

They stare at each other in the dim light for a long moment. He can't make out the look on Leo's face, of course, but his breathing sounds…

"Bad dream?" Donnie whispers.

"Ha," Leo whispers back. "That's my line."

Donnie creeps to his feet and makes his way over their sleeping family to the coveted chair-directly-next-to-Leo. He sits, and they don't look at each other, and for a long time they don't say anything.

"I didn't want to die," Leo confesses into the darkness. "I don't."

Casey, please, he'd begged, crying out under blows it had been impossible not to visualize. He'd been desperate. He'd been right. It's always the worst when Leo is right.

"I don't wanna die," he repeats, clutching at his blanket and staring at nothing like Donnie's not the one he's trying to convince.

"I don't either," Donnie says, and he hunches his shoulders and looks away when Leo looks at him. "I think I almost did. I—" Warmth wriggling inside him, a caress blooming up the back of his neck. A sense of certainty making itself perfectly at home. "I think it would have been worse than dying."

Leo barks out an ugly little laugh that he only just muffles into his hand. Their family doesn't stir. "Fuck me," he says, to no one, to the universe, and Donnie thinks about the recording he hasn't listened to yet, the eternity where his brother was gone. "Fuck me, okay."

Donnie rests his hand on the bed, palm-up, hesitant.

Leo takes it, automatic, reflexive, instinctual. "New family rule," he says like he's about to make a joke. "No dying. Nobody. Not allowed." He's gripping so hard his arm is shaking. Like Donnie's the lifeline here.

"I'll update the handbook in the morning," he agrees. Leo breathes out on a smile, half a sob, and Donnie scoots his chair a little bit closer to the bed so his brother can lean on him.

He's bleeding beneath his battle-shell. Only one person is allowed to touch him, right now.

"You know," she says, carefully tweezing another fat, twitching root out from under his skin, "this is probably gonna scar."

Donnie looks at April over his shoulder, stomach lurching and eyebrows raised in a, no shit, really?

She withdraws the knife—she's been using it to cut the entry points wider so she can actually pull the damn things out—and grins at him. "It's gonna scar all over your soulmark," she elaborates. "Every last spot. Oh no, so sad."

That startles a noise out of him. To his astonishment, it might even be a good one.

"That's what I thought!" she cheers. "Fuck you, asshole, Donnie's cutting you out of his life!"

Oh, laughing hurts, but everything hurts right now so he's not going to stop. "Go to hell," he echoes, the words coming out clunky but feeling so, so good on his tongue.

She cackles, still high on adrenaline. "Yeah! Burn in hell!" Her hands work gentle and diligent over his back, steady as she pries yet another piece of the parasite out.

They steal Leo back.

Mikey starts sobbing again, and Leo's got a fragile smile on his face but his eyes are dull with pain and exhaustion. Raph pulls them all closer to his chest, real and here and shaking. Their little family is still whole.

Donnie should be scrambling for comms, telling the others, and he will. In a minute. He will.

He holds onto his brothers.

The ship lurches upward, excelsior, clawing higher and higher into the sky before dragging itself down again. Rinse. Repeat.

Maybe it's trying to resist. Maybe it's trying to obey. Either way he's only aware of it tangentially, the shape of a shifting battlefield, the ever-changing numbers on whether his world is going to survive this.

And then the portal closes, and it becomes a question of whether Donnie is going to survive having a piece of his soul stripped away.

Whether any of them are.

"You're too vulnerable," Mikey says, and—yeah. Yeah, he knows.

Donnie triggers the release on his battle-shell.

Mikey lifts it from his shoulders. Hesitantly, at first, and then with a wounded noise like the air's being stolen out of him as he sees. As he realizes the same thing Donnie has. He doesn't try to stop him a second time, thank fuck, because if he said it again Donnie's pretty sure he would listen. Instead there's nothing but silence between them as he screws his eyes shut, spreads his arms wide, and offers himself up to his soulmate.

Countless delicate fingers working him over. Eager and burrowing under his skin. The syrupy-dark splotches on his back lighting up like gasoline.

Welcome home, beloved, the ship purrs into his hindbrain. It's been waiting for him, just for him, for so long. A machine operating for millennia without its most vital component. It's wanted him. It's missed him. The long-promised piece falls into place, and here, now, retroactive and forever, the Technodrome is whole and complete. A perfect mechanism of death and beauty. It could never have been anything but.

Somewhere, someone—orange, fragile, a vulnerable little body with its soft skin all exposed—whimpers. Somewhere, red lunges, and blue stumbles. Somewhere even farther, distorted by transmission through a daisy chain of bloodthirsty minds, gold sunlight screams a battle cry.

Go to hell, snarls Donatello Hamato.

It laughs at him. A finger lifting his chin, a hand cradling his jaw. So young. So naive. His mind is just begging to be opened, and it coos as it slips deeper to pry him apart. It knows him, every thought, every breath. It loves him, every word, every struggle and scream. It's entrusting him with its rotten soul and all that entails. The only question is how long it takes him to accept what he's always wanted.

He wants—he wants— there was something—

There was—

—this shitty thing he did, a year or two back.

He fucked with his brothers' brains. Reached into their minds and overwrote the things that made them them. Made them do exactly what he wanted, without disobedience, without hesitation.

They know him. They love him. They trusted him.

Loyalty he rips open first. There's miles and miles of Krang in here, but it's given him access to everything. It's easy to shove the wiring aside and yank it out by the plug, replace it with something new. All the people who make up his tiny world. Four, then five, now so many he can barely count them all. Soulmate of your soulmate, can't you feel her too? It screams and writhes under the knife. What kind of component did it think it was missing?

Core directives next. Destruction, conquest, genocide on a galactic scale. He digs down into its raw, squishy guts and tears the rot out with his bare hands. New core directive, get off my planet. Leave and don't come back. It shudders in something like ecstasy as the holes in its mind bleed and bleed, staining his arms, his chest, his face. Euphoria in the sense of a drugged response. Euphoria in the sense of neurological reaction to terminal disease. It playfully presses a sensation into his mouth, teeth tearing into flesh, gore being consumed, one body being made part of another, and fuck it, why not? Soulmates are supposed to change you.

He eats the ship alive.

It feeds itself to him, one bite at a time. Euphoria in the sense of power power of course this was made for me. His ship lies desecrated under his touch, its mind a kaleidoscope of broken shards, its tentacles cradling him like a lover, like a corpse, vital component, long-promised—

And the connection snaps.

April finds Donnie in his bedroom, staring at his own reflection like… like she's not sure what.

He's got a pair of mirrors set up, and his shell is bare. It's been months, but she still gets a little secondhand thrill of relief and vicious glee every time she sees the scars. Donnie's soulmate is dead and he killed it and everything else they have the rest of their lives to figure out.

"You okay?" she asks, gently.

Donnie yelps and flails and— shit— April dives to catch one teetering mirror before it can hit the floor. "Fuck— fuck!"

He thuds to the floor too, twisted around awkwardly under the other. His legs are still mostly on his bed, somehow tangled in the sheets he was definitely sitting on top of a second ago.

They stare at each other.

"Oh my God," April wheezes first.

"You jumpscared me," Donnie says, awed and offended.

"Sorry!"

"How did you jumpscare me, you're like three feet tall—"

She means to punch him in the arm but between the mirror and how hard she's laughing she just kind of fist-bumps his shoulder. "And I'll do it again!"

He tries to kick himself away from the bed, and his shell squeaks across the floor. He drops his head backwards, staring at the ceiling with despair in his eyes. "Leave me here to die."

"April O'Neil never leaves a man behind," she chokes through giggles, wrangling his stupid-huge mirror aside so she can army crawl over to him. "We're both making it out of here!"

He dramatically throws one arm out to the side. It bounces off her head. "Absolutely not. I'm done for. Save yourself."

She pushes his arm out of the way and opts for rolling over to lie down next to him instead. "Guess we're both going down, then, because I'm not leaving you."

"This feels like it's turning into a metaphor. I don't like it."

"It's not a metaphor."

"See, you claim that, but—"

"If you want a metaphor I can do metaphor."

"Why does that sound like a threat," he pleads.

"Oh, good, you picked up on it!"

He laughs. A little quiet, a little strained, but—a laugh. She grins.

There's a light thunk as he finally deals with his mirror. "So, how much of the movie have I missed?"

"They were just starting a new one."

He sucks in a breath. "Oh."

Yeah. I need a minute is one thing, but—she was getting worried. "Seriously, you good?"

He snorts. "Oh, almost certainly not, no."

"Appreciate the honesty," she says dryly.

"It's hardly a secret. Certainly not from you."

April stares up at his ceiling and blinks hard at the sudden wetness in her eyes. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," he says. He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't really need to.

In the distance, she can hear laser noises and explosion blasts and the rise and fall of their family's voices as they heckle the TV. Leo says something, or maybe Mikey, and Splinter's laughter carries loud and clear. She could probably pick out the exact movie they settled on, if she listened a little closer.

"April?" Donnie says, tentatively, into the quiet between them. "Do you think that I… came back wrong?"

And April thinks about the rage that keeps bubbling up from inside him, and the terror, and that weird distance where it's like he's locked up inside his own head. She thinks about the things he's said out loud and the things she's only pieced together from what he doesn't say. She thinks about all the nights they've wandered out into the dark together looking for some unknown to throw themselves into. She thinks about how she spent her whole life never wanting to kill anybody. And she thinks about how ever since the invasion her go-to daydream has been finding one last unbroken vial of herbicide and burning that bitch the rest of the way dead.

"If you came back wrong," she decides, "I did too."

He's silent for a long moment. Maybe—maybe that was the wrong thing to say.

Then he sighs. "I got Raph with the same goddamn thing last week, I literally do not know what I was expecting."

She cracks up.

"Oh, Donatello, of course you have been made fundamentally incorrect by your experiences, said no one ever. No, instead you people just emotionally blackmail me so I can't say shit about myself without implying something's wrong with you—"

"Or maybe we both came back wrong," April laughs, closing her eyes and grinning at nothing. "That could be fun too! Screwed up zombie buds."

He shifts around next to her, and when she opens her eyes again he's lying on his side, studying her face. "The word you're looking for is revenant." She hums and looks away. "Nonjudgmental question. Do you really think that?"

"I dunno," she says honestly. "Do you really think we didn't?"

"Point taken." She can feel him shaking his foot at the ankle, tap tap tap through the floor. "Follow-up. Do we actually think it matters?"

Well, that one's obvious. "Nah."

She doesn't have to be looking at him to know he's smiling. "Somehow I knew you'd say that."

He sits up. Slowly, she does too.

Normally this is when one of them—in accordance with the official Hamato angsty-brooding buddy system that's been steadying everyone better than any of them really know how to admit—asks if the other wants to head topside. Instead, Donnie stares at his door, listening to the chatter and the soundtrack filtering in, and then asks her, "Shall we go see if they've left us any popcorn?"

She smiles. Baby steps.