Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Donnie is not, by nature or nurture, a good person.

No duh, says the hypothetical listener, and yes, he is aware! Not being a good person is part and parcel of the supervillain lifestyle, after all! However, Donnie finds it a useful fact to reiterate occasionally, given that his professional commitment to playing by the rules of engagement can occasionally lead certain naive heroes to believe otherwise. Minimal civilian casualties; cheating is fair game, but unsportsmanlike conduct is strictly discouraged; and of course, blows… behind-the-mask, so to speak, are off the table entirely. It keeps things interesting, consistent, and most importantly, fun.

So, when Donnie happens to stumble across the superhero Red Angel bleeding and unmasked in an alley, the hypothetical listener will understand that he reacts completely proportionately.

Red Angel is the classic type. Superstrength and a big bleeding heart. Absolute conviction that anyone can change, Dynamite, it's never too late. Very cheesy, very sincere. Narrates to himself, usually under his breath but sometimes loses track of his volume. Enjoys smashing Donnie's poor maltreated inventions, but never without finding something to put a sparkle in his eye, some okay that's pretty badass or perhaps a you know if you just—you could help people with that? Donnie may possibly have started constructing some of his work with an eye for what would be more entertaining to see destroyed through brute force. Not that he's willing to settle for having such a non-intellectual as his nemesis, of course, but Red's… fun. They banter. They play by the same rules. Even the offers of a redemption arc are friendly, not particularly condescending, and his frustration when Donnie gleefully rejects him is always within the bounds of the comfortable back-and-forth they've built.

Red is the classic type. He's courageous and infuriating and refuses to stay down.

When his head snaps up at the sound of Donnie's power armor, there's nothing but fear in those eyes.

That alone is enough to give Donnie pause. Fear is… a bad look on Red. It's clunky. Inelegant. Fits on his face like the wrong size of shoe. And yet there it is, plain as day. Donnie opens his mouth, then closes it, grateful for the full-face mask.

Painfully slowly, Red heaves himself away from the ground just enough to drag himself backwards to the wall. His arms shake the entire time. He leaves a trail of blood as he goes. When he hits the wall, he just stays there, resting his head against it and baring his teeth at Donnie instead of using the leverage to pull himself to his feet the way any sensible person would. One hand is gripping at his torso like maybe the dark material of his costume is hiding a growing patch of red. The other hand lifts a single tonfa like he thinks he can do literally anything from that position.

Donnie is, suddenly and unaccountably, furious.

"This is why I hate you hero types," he hisses, stalking forward. "You're all talk. As long as you're on top, you're all smiles, but the moment the tables turn…" He looms over Red Angel, fists trembling and armor systems rapidly cataloging every injury. "The very instant I have total control over the situation…"

Donnie's gaze flits over the unmasked face he's desperately trying not to look at. Absolute failure of an attempt, completely worthless. He stares. Red has tears in his eyes.

"And now he's crying!" Donnie snarls, throwing his hands open at the wounded superhero at his feet. The armor returns its assessment—it's bad, nauseatingly bad, professionally bad, but nothing the medical suite in his lair can't handle, and if Red doesn't fight him he should even be able to move the big idiot. "Our brave hero, defeated at last!"

"If you kill me," Red growls. The rest of the warning is cut off by a nasty cough, his hand spasming into a fist over the injury in his torso, but it's hardly a secret. Heroes have their own rules of engagement. A certain amount of danger and personal harm is simply the price of doing business, but hero-killing is something different. Hero-killing is how you bring the wrath of every single one of them down on your own head.

Donnie makes a show of turning and inspecting the sole security camera in the alley. Deleting security footage, doctoring it to make it look like Red died of these injuries? That would be trivial. He walks away with no one ever knowing he was here, and whatever idiot thought they could get away with beating Red and leaving him to crawl gets to take the full force of the backlash.

When Donnie looks back, Red's eyes are stuck on the security camera, and the tears are running down his face now.

Total resignation… is a very bad look on him.

"Yes, well." Donnie crouches, finally, running a rapid calculation on things like body-weight and super-metabolisms. "If I kill you."

Red's shoulders have started shaking by the time Donnie pricks his neck with a sedative.

Chapter Text

Raph wakes up.

That's nice. That's good. He likes waking up. He'd like to do a lot more of it in the future.

Raph wakes up lying on something soft, which is nice too. Really great contrast from that foot that was grinding his face into the pavement recently. He does a quick inventory of his teeth. All still where they should be, good, that's good, he likes that.

Raph wakes up under a ceiling, which seems like it should be nice, except, uh. No, something's wrong here. There's something bad about this ceiling. Give him a sec. It'll come to him.

"Master Dynamite, he's awake!"

Shit.

Okay, so, a couple seconds too late, warning sign he should have figured out right away: literally everything he can see right now is black and purple. Raph, with great effort, turns his head and comes face-to-face with one of Dynamite's drones. The little surfer dude. "Hey, Shelldon."

"Hey, Red Angel!" Shelldon gets way up in Raph's face, squinting his big round robot eyes in a smile. "So you might feel slightly woozy and totally unable to move with the drugs we've got in your system, but—"

"Shelldon," says Dynamite, somewhere out of sight, and any temporary maybe-this-is-gonna-be-okay Raph was feeling from the welcome party evaporates. "You're on monitoring duty."

"Okay! I can monitor everything from here—"

"Out," Dynamite snaps.

Shelldon zips out of the room, leaving Raph alone. Raph tries to at least turn his head the other direction to get eyes on the guy, but a hand lands on the side of his face and pushes him back down.

"Stop moving," Dynamite says coldly. Raph takes stock of just how bad every single inch of his body feels and stops moving.

So.

As far as Raph knows, Dynamite's never actually killed anybody. Injured, sure, loads of people. Threatened, constantly. Property damage, through the roof. But not killed. The guy honestly doesn't seem like he's out to hurt anybody, more like he just… doesn't know any other way to be. Raph tries to make sure he knows there are other ways to be. He hasn't gotten through to him yet, but… listen, any day, whenever they want, people can just wake up and change. It happens all the time. Raph's been counting on Dynamite making that choice someday, and when it happens, Raph will be there, ready to catch him and make sure he's not alone just 'cause he left everything he knows behind.

Raph and Dynamite get along, as much as a hero and a villain can. Fighting him's fun. So Raph kind of… forgot. That there's more than one direction people can change in.

He's feeling pretty stupid right about now.

"Are you stupid?" Dynamite asks calmly, like an echo. "An idiot, mayhap? A moron? Do you have any brain cells left rattling around in that cranium of yours that have miraculously survived the nonstop head injuries?"

Raph holds his mouth in a thin line and stares at the wall, trying not to focus on how vulnerable he is right now.

"Do you enjoy suffering?" Dynamite continues, finally taking his hand away from Raph's face. Raph doesn't turn his head. "Do you like to piss off hitmen recreationally?"

"Wasn't a hit," he grits out.

"Oh, wasn't it? I watched the security footage, you know." Dynamite starts drumming his fingers on something. "I assure you, however strong you think those two are, your skull is not stronger."

That was Rocksteady, he's pretty sure. He can still feel the phantom weight, the tread of the boot against his head. "Yeah. They could've killed me and they didn't."

"Yeeeess, I did notice that. Would you like to tell me what was so interesting about your face that it made Bebop and Rocksteady hesitate?"

Raph stubbornly doesn't react.

"Or, indeed, what was so interesting that they returned to the scene with their current employers in tow, looking for you?"

Oh.

Oh no.

"Well, Red?"

No no no no no—

"Red?"

They know. They came back for him.

"Red. Red Angel."

The Foot Clan know who he is now. They'll be looking for him. He's never going to—

"Oh, for—Shelldon!"

Red Angel isn't safe anymore. Red Angel was never safe, he's just been too stupid and reckless to see it. He should have just run. Why didn't he run? Why did he think he could help?

Black and purple moves across his vision. Something cold—he tries to spit it out but a hand clamps over his mouth.

"It's an ice cube," Dynamite snaps, scowling at him. "Stop having a panic attack."

...It does feel like an ice cube. And he can breathe a little easier, suddenly.

Dynamite takes his hand away, grumbling something about gross mouth germs. Shelldon, who's hovering anxiously nearby with a glass full of ice balanced on his back, pops a bottle of hand sanitizer out of a compartment for him. He gears up into a full rant under his breath as he accepts it, the way he does when he doesn't have an audience to rant at the top of his lungs for. It's weird, his voice sounds a lot less intimidating without the distortion from the—

Oh boy.

As Dynamite rubs the last of the hand sanitizer into his palms, still crouching by Raph's bedside instead of looming over him, he looks up with a glare. "What are you staring at?"

"You forgot your mask," Raph says weakly.

"You see, Shelldon, this is exactly what I'm talking about," he groans. "This absolute hypocrisy, not even trying to politely avert his gaze—" Shelldon rolls his eyes when Dynamite looks away from him and back to Raph, which is honestly kind of comforting. "I did not forget my mask. I do not 'forget' my mask. I deliberately omitted it from my fashion choices today as a show of solidarity that has clearly fallen on deaf eyes—"

"Can I have more ice?" Raph interrupts, because the piece in his mouth has almost completely melted and he can feel the freakout getting ready to come back.

"Of course. Shelldon, administer—"

"I got it," Raph says, managing to haul his arm up (ow ow ow) to grab at the glass himself. Shelldon helpfully hovers lower, tilting back and forth with Raph's fumbling so he doesn't knock the whole thing over. Dynamite watches with an intensity that'd be pretty creepy if his expression—crazy, him having one of those—didn't kind of remind him of Casey concentrating on memorizing something.

He pops the ice cube into his mouth. "Ok, go."

"I lost my train of thought," Dynamite says, the way a normal villain would say you ruined my life. "I had a monologue planned. A dramatic reveal. How is it that even critically injured and bedridden you manage to foil my schemes?"

"Good will always triumph over evil?" Raph suggests, because at this point it's definitely feeling like his read on the situation was way way off and he would love to chill out back to their normal banter.

"Yes, you certainly believed that yesterday when you were crying because you assumed I was going to kill you."

Or they could talk about it.

Raph tries to look serious and not nervous. "Sorry."

"Sorry?" Dynamite squawks, gesturing so violently he loses his balance and has to catch himself on Shelldon before he falls on his ass. "Years of work to establish my reputation, years of you trying to convince me you see good in me, and the second it would maybe theoretically be convenient for me to do something completely against every single one of my stated principles—"

His voice keeps getting higher. Raph's head is starting to hurt. "I get it. I was being dumb."

"You were being dumb?!"

"Ow."

Dynamite shoots to his feet and stalks across the room. "He was being dumb, he says! He's sorry, he says!"

"You can't win with this guy, huh," Raph mutters to Shelldon.

"He's major worried, dude," Shelldon whispers back. "You were in gnarly shape when he brought you home, he's been freaking out nonstop." Huh. That's… huh. "He blew those Foot guys up for you, by the way."

"What?!"

"Nonlethally!" Dynamite yells back, still pacing. "Your DNA was all over that alley, you should be thanking me!"

"All over—stop destroying buildings!"

"I barely did any structural damage, stop whining!"

They yell at each other about collateral damage and using explosives in populated areas for a while. Raph tries really hard not to be weird about how relieved he feels that they can still argue like normal, even if the scene here is less badass rooftop battle and more Dynamite helping Raph sit up without hurting himself. He doesn't actually need more ice after the second one, but he takes the glass from Shelldon anyway, holding it to his pounding head and occasionally grabbing a piece to crunch on.

"What I want to know," Dynamite says eventually, sitting in an ominous floating supervillain armchair he pulled out of nowhere and stroking the robot cat that came with it, "is what they intend to do now that they know your identity. Is your family in danger?"

Haha. He sets the glass aside before he can get all… superstrength-y on it. "No."

"What do you mean, 'no', they're villains who sent hitmen to unmask you, of course your family is in danger."

"They're really not."

"A tragic orphan," Dynamite concludes. "Your friends, then."

Yeah, no, Casey's still… "Don't have any."

"What the hell. Of course you have friends, you're the most disgustingly likable person I've ever met. Your friends are in danger."

"I don't have any." He gets along with some of the heroes he's met, but not that well.

"Your roommate?"

Raph scowls. Not really at Dynamite, he knows what the guy is like, he's been resigning himself to it since he woke up, just… "Look, can we stop pretending you haven't already done an image search on my face or whatever?"

Dynamite's face goes dark as a thundercloud. It makes sense why he goes for the full helmet look, he gets really expressive under there. "I haven't. That would be unsporting." He dumps the robot cat (purring, it's purring) in Raph's lap. "I don't know what else you think I could have meant by this," he goes on, waving a hand over his face. "How is this not clearly truce a la mutually assured destruction?"

Raph shrugs, burying his fingers in the fake fur. He always pets real cats too hard. He's not good at it. "You know I don't know enough about computers to do something nuts like that. And it's not like I have a camera to just… take a picture and show somebody else."

Dynamite's shoulders slump, inch by inch. "You really aren't going to believe I didn't, are you."

It's not like he's ever been shy about recording everything and invading people's privacy before. "I believe you're not gonna… blackmail me with it or something," Raph admits. Dynamite's always played this game like it has rules. It's one of the things Raph likes about him.

"Hm." Dynamite pulls his feet up into his hoverchair. He kicks the floor as he goes, turning so he's facing a bit left of Raph's shoulder and not looking at him. "My name is Donatello."

Uh. Wow. Okay.

"My name's Raph," he says, feeling—again, always—like he's missed a step or three.

"Nice to meet you, Raph. I'll permit you to call me Donnie if you stop looking at me like a kicked puppy."

Oh man, he is like Casey. "You got it, Donnie," he grins.

Donnie steeples his fingers. "So—and bear with me here—in the theoretical timeline where I didn't violate the most basic level of secret ID courtesy while you were unconscious and receiving lifesaving medical treatment, would I now have your consent to look up your civilian identity?"

Honestly? There's nothing Dynamite can do to him that's worse than what the Foot Clan must want to. Maybe, if he can at least talk to someone about it… "Sure."

Dynamite angles something at Raph's face like he's taking a photo, punches a few buttons on his wrist screen, and waits.

Scrolls a little.

...Raph's really glad Dynamite's not wearing the helmet, because he's pretty sure nobody could fake being that surprised. "Red, why is this a missing persons report?"

"Haha, yeah," Raph says.

Chapter Text

The facts, as Donnie understands them.

His name is Raphael Oroku. He has no social media presence of his own. He's been homeschooled his entire life, including into adolescence past the time when most people start dumping their teenagers into the dark alchemical cauldron that is the American public school system. Most of the accessible photographs of him, therefore, are from martial arts competitions through Komodo Dojo, which Donnie knows for a fact is a popular recruiting ground for junior-level henchmen. (Personally, he's never hired from there himself. The attitude is impossible to rubber duck at.)

Amongst the many, many championship photographs, he finds one of Raphael looking particularly bright and proud, being clapped on the shoulder by what appears to be… his legal guardian.

Donnie leans out over the arm of his chair, which he's fully turned around for the moment to afford Red some privacy. "I blew up your dad."

"He's not my dad," Red says, staring at the ceiling.

"Nonlethally."

"You said that already."

"It bears repeating." He looks back down at the pictures, skimming for other familiar faces. "Why have I never seen you at any parties?"

Red, who is currently lying on his back with the ever-soothing Missy Meow-Meow purring dutifully away on his chest, turns his head to point an incredulous squint in Donnie's direction. "Parties?"

"You know. Supervillain social events. Big Mama holds these high society engagements, I hear tell of pub crawls… Your guys come to the potlucks sometimes." He swipes backwards through a few. "See, here, this terrible girl standing next to you. She threw me into a punch bowl last October."

"Yeah, that sounds like Casey."

"She has a name?"

"Why would she not have a name."

"I was told it was a religious rejection of individuality," Donnie says slowly.

"That's a metaphor," Red objects, followed by a look of realization passing over his face, followed by one of horror and, "Oh, it's not a metaphor."

Donnie settles back into his chair so he doesn't have to watch Red have whatever crisis that's inspired. The dojo, a family-owned footwear business and good grief is that blatant now that he's looking for it, a vaguely-defined spiritual organization with a masterfully corporatespeak we can all be part of something greater website, blah blah blah, no apparent life or family outside of groups his guardian is directly affiliated with…

Raphael Oroku was last seen catching a train out of the city to parts unknown, less than a week before Red Angel's debut.

"Where have you been living?" he demands, feeling something like rising hysteria.

Red coughs. "Around?"

"Are you homeless?"

"Can we talk about something else?"

Donnie stands, abruptly invigorated. "Sure! Would you prefer a room with a window or the one closer to the kitchen?"

Raph, unable to leap up and object without displacing an adorable robo-kitty who's done him no wrong, gives him a frantic look. "What?"

"And what color do you want the walls? You seem like a red kind of guy but I would hate to assume."

"What?"

"Those goons of yours are going to be hunting you down, right?" Donnie cues a few screens over and pulls up the floorplan and his current shopping list. "It's bad enough for them to go after Red Angel, but Raphael has to sleep." He throws a glance over his shoulder. "You do have to sleep, yes?"

"Yes?" Raph says, wide-eyed and attempting to maneuver Little Missy-Miss into a less inconvenient location. She's resisting. Good kitty. "I—I don't get it? That's not your problem."

"Correct!" Donnie grins as he makes a few rapid-fire structural notes on plumbing, lighting, entrances… "It is your problem, and my solution!" He sweepingly indicates their surroundings. "You, my friend, find yourself within the single most well-defended evil lair on the East Coast!"

Raph has succeeded in partially detaching Miss Meowzers from his shirt. He appears to be struggling to follow the thread of Donnie's monologue, per usual. "How do you even check that?"

"Untraceable infiltration drones, of course!" He puts a little extra flourish into his wrist as he pulls up the lair inventory. "Any allergies?"

"Peanuts?" Raph's either almost laughing or near tears, Donnie's never had any skill at telling the sounds apart. "Are you asking me to move in with you?"

He dashes off an urgent kitchen decontamination order. "Of course not! Asking implies uncertainty. I have already made up my mind! I do need an answer on where you want your bedroom, though, come on, chop chop."

The noises Raph is making progress fully to whichever of the two it is, tears or laughter. "That's a weird way to say you're a good guy now but, okay!"

"What?" Donnie whirls on him and gestures emphatically in the negative. "No, you misunderstand me. This is strictly out of mutual respect as your nemesis, nothing more. We will cohabitate without incident by leaving work outside the residential portion of the lair like the professionals we are. Stop grinning at me!"

Raph does not stop grinning at him. "You wanna be a good guy."

"I do not!"

"Bad guys don't get sad when somebody thinks they can't be a good guy."

Donnie sputters. "I am not sad! I have never been sad in my life! I am vicious, I am capricious, I am diabolical—"

"You said I'm your friend," Raph informs him, positively beaming.

"I said no such thing! We are enemies! Cold, impersonal enemies!"

Raph finally extracts Miss Missy-Moo's robotic claws from his garment and gently sets her aside. "You saved my life, you were sad that I didn't trust you, and now you wanna be friends."

Donnie is about three seconds away from climbing on top of a piece of equipment to hiss at this… this superhero. Unbelievable. "Absolutely not!"

"I bet you want a hug," Raph says, developing a full-on Red Angel about to punch something that's going to spark beautifully when it breaks smirk as he hoists himself to his feet. (Fascinating. Donnie's met very few supers with this level of super-healing. Note for later.) "You look like you want a hug."

"Shelldon, sedate this man immediately!"

Donnie does, in fact, have to scale a piece of equipment to evade the playful (playful!) grabs for his person. His treasonous creation arrives in the doorway with an animated hologram of popcorn and a conspicuous dearth of attempts to obey his orders, a betrayal for which Donnie shall see him thoroughly grounded. Raph, for his part, tires quickly, presumably from the exertion of laughing too damn hard. He sinks into Donnie's chair, wheezing between his gasps for air, and the moment he closes his eyes Donnie sweeps down and neutralizes him via cunning reapplication of kitty-cat.

"You know," Donnie says once he's finished his own sensible bout of maniacal laughter, "if word gets out that it's this easy to effectively trap you, Red Angel can say goodbye to his street cred."

"Somehow I feel like you're gonna keep my ultimate weakness a secret," Raph says, shoulders still shaking.

He leans against the chair and pulls the screen with the floorplan down into Raph's view. "Correct. It's no fun if someone else defeats you before I do. Window or kitchen?"

Raph looks over the indicated bedrooms-in-potentia. "Can you, uh… make the window so I can see out but nobody can see in?"

"What am I, an infant? All of my windows are one-way."

"Cool. That one."

"Wall color?"

"Uhhh… not red red, but definitely something, uh…"

"I'll get you some paint chips."

"Yeah."

Donnie flips through a few tabs and passes him the screen. "Furniture catalog. Pick what you like."

"Are you gonna steal this?"

"No, I'm going to purchase it legally, with money I stole."

That gets another stifled round of snickering, for whatever reason. Donnie leaves him to it, focusing instead on modeling a few different prospective residential-side entrances for the lair, since of course the main entrance is on the villain business side. All they need is one superheroic witness dangled over a pit of clockwork sharks he forgot to text Raph a heads-up about and Red Angel's rep is permanently tanked. It's not too complex a construction project, it just needs to—

In a move completely unlike any chokehold Donnie has ever experienced, Raph very slowly hooks an arm around his neck and, without any force, tugs him down into an awkward bent-over side-hug.

"Thanks," Raph says near his ear, quiet and far too close to some of that earlier despair for comfort.

For lack of anything better to do, Donnie pats the shoulder he can reach. "You're… welcome?"

Raph huffs out a breath, lets go, and returns to browsing the catalog with no further fanfare. Donnie stares at him, lost.