hi! Saw the inbox was open, and wondering if I could slide in with a rise donnie boy x readerone-shot..
So essentially- donnie is STEM smart right? What if- what if reader was the opposite, like lit/history smart? Like, reads a lot, and almost never puts there book down, even when people talk to them (puts it down for donnie and gives him their full attention tho-) knows a lot about almost any point in history and adores archeology. (The only thing they understand when donnie goes science mode is biology.)
And so what if- what if reader, who's oblivious to almost everything and is a huge hopeless romantic bc of ✨️books✨️, decides to try and come up with ideas to ask donnie out in a more STEM way? But like, before they can donnie sees the list and is just like "smh ur math is atrocious/aff" and then fluffy stuff yaknow??
Lol sorry, went on a tangent. Anywhizzle, love ur writing! Don't forget to take a break, stretch and get some food and water if you need to!Have a good morning/evening/night!!! :))
U + Me = Date?
(this took a minute, but it’s such a fun and sweet request that I had a wonderful time with! Tysm, and please make sure that you’re taking care of yourself as well! Enjoy! Request guidelines are located here btw)
Word Count: 2371
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Everything on earth has a niche, a designated function it gets to act out, a role it gets to fill. The Cape May Warbler, Bay-Breasted Warbler, and Yellow-Rumped Warbler have the top middle and bottom of a spruce tree to eat in, respectively. Humanity has its niche of expansion, whether it be out through the globe or up in towering metropolises.
If you had to specify your niche, it would just about have to be reading. Now, of course your life is filled with numerous aspirations, but your multifarious interests can all be classified under your affinity for books.
Any form of literature, thrillers, epics, romance novels, they all did it for you, enveloped the entirety of your attention in an immersive world.
That was without a doubt: they entertained you.
At least, they made you feel inspired to do things, take action in your personal life, possibly commit to confessing certain feelings to a certain softshell turtle. Actually committing to the bit, though, was a completely different story.
In the extensive library you had under your belt, there were many a meet cute and innovative confession. However, just because it worked out in literature, it didn’t mean that you could actually do it. What if it ended up weird or cringe or downright friendship shattering?
The status quo was comfortable, subsisting off of shared time in your turtle-in-question’s lab, the two of you simultaneously performing your own tasks. You would sit and enrich yourself with a book, Donnie would tinker until he had something that piqued his interest, which happened rather frequently, and your attention would suddenly be on him. It was simple. It worked. Taking action could complicate things.
So, your inspiration remained squandered by doubt, an inkling of hope staying concealed internally.
At least, inspiration wouldn’t make anything occur unprompted, and, luckily, that nudge came swiftly.
Earlier, as you were straight chilling in a cozy bean bag chair in the lair’s living room, you saw Donnie enter the room out of your peripheral vision. However, he only seemed like a purple blur because your attention was on the thick, dense book sitting on your lap. The cover was of a similar slickness and feel to that of a textbook, the size was as well, but this read was solely for entertainment. The content could practically be summed up as history of the entire world, i guess but fleshed out with more anecdotes and primary sources.
You had been soaking in a finely written excerpt entailing early hominid tool use, accompanied by an image of a related artifact, when you felt a presence leaning over your shoulder. You opted to continue your train of thought through the lines until you heard a familiar timbre clear its throat behind you. With a sigh, you placed a finger on your spot and faced one Donatello.
“Something the matter?” You blinked slowly.
“Oh, nothing,” he shrugged, expression seeming intentionally cool, “just checking out the book choice for today.”
You lifted the book from your lap to display the contents to him.
His eyes skimmed over the page before he grinned slightly. “Ah, prehistoric archaeology? I could dig it.”
You pursed your lips, trying to keep your thought from spilling out of your mouth before ultimately giving in to your amusing whims. “Leo ahh humor.”
Donnie gaped. “Gasp, you wound me. I rescind my statement and shall not be partaking in any archaeological reading-slash-discussion with you.”
“I’m just messing around, ‘Tello. I can dabble in some crude wordplay.”
“Crude?”
“Crude. Heck, I’d bargain to say that was more archaic than the sector of human history I’m in right now, and they don’t even have wheels.”
He raised a curious brow, visibly less offended. You could work with that.
“Rather intriguing. Care to join me?” You patted the ample space on the bean bag next to you.
Curiously, he stared at you, then the space you were offering, and back, before slipping beside you.
“Care to enlighten me on this subject?” he parried, and with a grin, you were off, describing the main theme of the page, the early development of primates and humans, as well as outside archaeological examples that you knew of, the whole nine yards.
As you rambled on, you locked eyes with him occasionally, and his eyes were intrigued saucers every time you did. It made something in your brain click.
He played along with your banter. He was sitting right beside you, absorbing your words so vehemently and genuinely and ohmigosh this guy of all people wouldn’t judge you for trying something that could be weird. Heck, he’s a fanatic of oddities, anything mystic or scientific, so if he didn’t like you asking him out, at the very least he’d admire the effort. So, you were inspired to try something, finally take some action.
You were going for it.
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You set to work on your asking-out endeavor as soon as you arrived home.
At first you tried looking at STEM-related pickup lines.
Sardonically, of course. You wanted something that got your point across without seeming too vulnerable, something you could play off in the scenario you got completely and irrevocably rejected.
“I less than three you… That’s not that bad,” you scrolled through the results of your search, perched at your kitchen table.
You only made it down the list to ‘the square root of all my fantasies is you’ until you actually needed to call it quits on that route. There was a fine line between being intentionally corny and the monstrosity that was that line.
So you took the next completely logical leap: concocting a page full of intricate mathematical and scientific questions, the answers of which spelled out an encrypted message.
It was the sane thing to do.
4 1 20 5 20 15 13 15 18 18 15 23 ?
D A T E T O M O R R O W ?
You scribbled the message on a scrap piece of paper. You entertained the idea of writing a whole sentence, but just these two words covered the gist clearly and concisely. Plus, coming up with questions for only two words was enough to melt your brain.
“Limit as x approaches sixteen of the square root of x… equals… yeah, four. That works,” you mumbled. “One down,” you sucked in a deep breath, “eleven to go. Crud.”
The next few hours blended together aimlessly, riddled with just about every mathematical scenario you could conjure up. Sure, derivatives and Planck’s Constant and the unit circle (the bane of your existence) were all ambitious topics to have on the totally inconspicuous worksheet, but, to quote a phrase, go big or go home. When in Rome also works.
By the time you reached ungodly hours in the night, you had curated a functional way to surprise and ask out your best friend. With your brain oozing out of your ears, you put the paper somewhere safe and collapsed face down on your bed.
You would have mentally prepared yourself to give him the paper tomorrow if not for the calculus-derived headache already splitting your mind.
Instead, you immediately dozed off.
You could deal with the minutiae of tomorrow… tomorrow.
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The next day when you waltzed into the lair, he was conveniently seated at the desk in his lab.
“Heya D! I come bearing gifts.” You presented him with the paper as coolly as you could, keeping all the panic and nerves internal, and took up the chair beside him.
“A calculus sheet?” He grinned. “You shouldn’t have.”
After a moment of looking at it, however, his eyes dimmed and smile lessened. “...You shouldn’t have.”
You faltered. “Oh, gosh, is it that bad?”
“Which letter corresponds with negative one?”
“What?” you exclaimed. “Oh nononono no, I checked my math like five times, it’s not even possible-”
“The derivative of cosine theta is negative sine theta. Not positive. Simple mistake, really. It was a valiant effort of- whatever you were trying to do.”
You blinked, smacked your lips. Well, that was the end of that. You would just take your leave and move out of the city and change your name and never feel anything again. Easy.
“Just forget I did anything, forget this paper exists- like, what paper even?” You reached for the sheet of paper only for him to use the mechanical extensions on his battle shell to hold it out of your reach.
“No, my interest is piqued,” he smirked. You could almost feel the mischievousness emanating from him. “I will gladly continue, if you do not mind.”
You complied and sat stiffly, anxiously glancing about the lab, until you saw him pick up a utensil and start marking on the paper.
“Are you correcting it with a pen? Are you seriously grading this right now?” you muttered. You weren’t mad, just thoroughly panicked.
He stopped writing momentarily. “What? No, not grading, per say. This is just how I’m deciphering this.”
You knew that tone and you knew that was a lie.
“I- ugh,” you flopped your head down on his desk and closed your eyes. “Just tell me when you’re done fixing it. I spent a needlessly long amount of time on this just for it to be terrible.”
He didn’t deny that it was terrible, though you excused that to him being busy and hopefully not him agreeing.
Although, with how quickly his pen was scratching marks on the page, the latter seemed more feasible.
You focused on taking deep, steadying breaths, relaxing to the sounds of the busy pen until it suddenly stopped.
Lifting your head from its place, you saw he had completely stilled, staring at the paper with wide eyes and upturned lips.
“What? Did you spot another comically egregious mistake?” you mumbled, halfway intrigued.
He took another few seconds to answer you. “Something like that.” And with that nothingness of an answer, he started writing again, much more fervently.
“Okay then.” You went to put your head down again before he slammed the paper down before you.
“Boom! Here is the revised and finalized version of the worksheet,” he grinned.
You narrowed your eyes at the comments about your inability to include units, corrections on when something was supposed to be negative, but the markings at the bottom of the page were what caught your attention the most.
When you looked at the corner of the page, you saw an odd combination of zeros and ones.
01101111 01101000 00100000 01111001 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101
“Actually, what is this?” You gestured to the code.
“It’s my response.”
“And you had to put it in binary?”
“You’re the one who wanted to talk in codes.” He sounded frustratingly nonchalant.
“Yeah, but-” you considered asking him to directly tell you, but maybe this was slightly less nerve wracking. Ripping off the bandaid be darned, you took the coward’s way out and pulled out your phone. “Man, I let you get away with way too much stuff. Has this interaction not dragged on painstakingly enough?”
“The greater the hardship, the greater the reward,” he commented with a shrug.
That pleasant surprise of a response made you copy the ones and zeros faster into the binary decoding website you’d searched up.
Just as you had everything in and your finger steadied over the button that would tell you what he was saying, you hesitated, steadied yourself with a deep breath, and hit it.
Nothing could have prepared you for the rush of adrenaline and euphoria that washed over you at seeing his answer.
“Ohmigosh, you’re serious?! Because you cannot be joking like this, Donatello.”
“As the plague.” One of his hands rested on his chest, the other was in the air as if taking an oath.
“Haha, yes!” you cheered, spinning the desk chair you were in. The late night and headache had paid off, and it felt great!
“So, where am I accompanying you tomorrow?” He mused.
Immediately, you paused. You’d only spent time thinking about the part where you ask him out, not the actual going out part.
“Where? Uhh, I hadn’t really gotten to that point of the planning stage.”
“You were too focused on biffing a math paper to actually plan out its intended purpose?”
“Yeah, not my brightest decision, nor my best work. It was a rather dumb decision on my behalf.”
“You are a dum-dum, but just because of how needlessly complex you made this, not because of your mathematical errors.”
“I genuinely don’t know if I should take offense to that or not.”
“Maybe you should be thinking about where we’re going tomorrow? Just a thought.”
You clicked your tongue. “Fine, uhh coffee?”
“A little trite for a first date, no?” Donnie propped his elbow up on the desk and rested his chin on his hand, smiling widely.
“Okay then, coffee and we go to the library?”
“Don’t we normally do that anyway? What about it makes it a ‘da-”
“Donnie, I am running on fumes from making the erroneous atrocity that is that worksheet last night. If you don’t have any suggestions, coffee at the library works. If you have a contribution, go right ahead.” You put your hands up in surrender.
Donnie’s smugness faded slightly and he lightly nudged your elbow. “Coffee at the library sounds great. And for what it’s worth, I appreciate that you tried to do something innovative. It was truly a highly admirable effort.”
“Thanks, D.”
“Of course. But from now on, let’s leave the math to the professionals.”
There it was again: the sass.
“Oh, that’s a low blow.” You shook your head, still smiling.
“A low blow would be mentioning how you confused the natural logarithm for a standard logarithm. You see, when you have e to the power of…”
The corrections and banter flourished on from there, the both of you giggling and getting mockingly, lightheartedly angry with each other.
Despite your interests in different subjects, the two of you understood each other. It was wonderful to have a partner that you could be niche with wherever and whenever.
It was almost worth all the math and science it took to get there.
(I actually made inconspicuous math worksheet that reader made for Donnie, and it is linked HERE!)
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