#nooo ..(is unspooled)
Text
all the things that i could live without
rise of the tmnt
pairing: don & leo
word count: 1349
title borrowed from if i didn’t have you by banners
post-movie
read on ao3
x
“Hamato Donatello,” Leo said, his even tone riding the line of good humor and sternness both. “How much shell time have you had today?”
Donnie pointedly doesn’t look up from his iPad. Making eye contact in these moments is too risky. Leo can clock a lie with such accuracy that Donnie thinks it must be a secondary mutation or something, because it certainly isn't natural. The only reason any of them get away with anything is because Donnie’s twin is an agent of chaos, more likely to encourage their stupidity than put a kibosh on it.
Shell time, however, is one of Those Things Leo Takes Very Seriously.
“Scoff,” Donnie says. “I’ll take a break in a minute, I want to finish reading this dissertation I found about chronic musculoskeletal pain and physiotherapy. Not all of it can be applied to us, given that it’s written by humans for humans, but—”
“Dude, it’s like four PM.” Leo’s tone has made its choice, leaning away from amused and into firm. Nooo. “You’re not gonna be able to sleep tonight if you don’t stretch out soon.”
“And I will, soon,” Don replies. It’s the pinnacle of absurdity that they’re talking about his stupid spine when Leo is the one recovering from multiple traumatic injuries.
Leo doesn’t think so, because of course he doesn’t. He’s like a dog with a bone. His persistent personality has saved all their shells more than a dozen times but that doesn’t mean Donnie has to like it when it’s aimed against him.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the slider says with no small amount of showmanship.
Despite himself, Donnie glances up from his tablet. He can feel himself go soft to match his dumb shell, even if it doesn’t show on his face. He loves Leo so much, even when Leo’s being his absolute worst self, and right now Leo is being his best. Warmth unspools like fiber cable in Donnie’s chest, prickly and sparking.
They came so close to losing him. What would they have done without him? It’s frightening to think about. For once in his life, Donnie doesn’t want to know.
He sits back in his chair, ignoring the twinge in his lower back the way he’s ignored it for the past three hours, and says, “What does the hard way look like?”
“You’re gonna hate it.”
“Color me intrigued.”
Leo shrugs and starts to lift himself up. The infirmary bed is raised at an angle, to help Leo breathe and reduce the risk of pneumonia that has kept Don awake at night, but now he’s pushing himself upright all the way, kicking at his blanket with the foot that isn’t casted.
“Oh my god, stop, I hate it,” Donnie blurts, all but flinging his tablet aside in his rush to put an end to this nightmare. “You win, you monster!”
Smugly, Leo says, “I always win. Even when I lose.”
“Oh, you must be feeling better,” Don tells him, easing him back down with gentle hands that don’t match his annoyed tone. “Because once again, you are completely delusional.”
It earns him a chuckle, a wheezing shade of what should have been a loud, lively thing, but it feels like a victory anyway. Don will take it. He won’t let it go.
Leo pats the bed beside him. Donnie sighs performatively, but he’s turtle enough to admit when he’s been outplayed.
The battle shell disengages with a hiss of hydraulics and he sets it aside. It’s such an immediate relief to work out his shoulders, and twist his fragile spine, that he maybe should have taken it off earlier, after all.
“Bring your tablet over here,” Leo says. “I wanna watch that baking show where no one knows what they’re doing.”
Donnie settles in beside him, and he doesn’t outwardly fuss the way Raph and Mikey and Casey all do, but he’s very, very careful behind the casual manner. His brother’s body was so broken, almost beyond repair. He has months of recovery left, and as the team medic, Leo knows that.
But he did what he did for the sake of his family and now he just wants to be close to them. He doesn’t want to be shut away in the infirmary and tiptoed around and hugged so gingerly that the mean voice in his brain is able to convince him that the space and distance and reluctant touches are because he did something wrong.
That mean inner voice that Leo sometimes listens to is as much his siblings’ sworn enemy as the Shredder ever was.
So, after a clan meeting taken when Leo was finally, fitfully asleep, and one educational screening of Patch Adams that made Casey and Raph both cry, they decided to forgo all the values of traditional medicine and give Leo what he needed instead.
They’re hardier than baseline humans are, and if the Krang couldn’t kill Leo in its own dimension than it’s likely nothing can, and these are the arguments Leo makes to be allowed out of bed.
It’s all a moot point. As soon as he lifts his hands toward Raph, Raph is already stooping to pick him up, no matter what side of the argument he’d been on a second ago.
Leo gets carried around so much he hasn’t even used the ethically-sourced wheelchair April dragged to the lair for him. There are so many people willing to hold him at all hours of the day and night that mobility is the least of his issues, even with all his broken bones.
They have to keep an eye on him. Sometimes Leo actually is too sore or too tired to do much of anything. Right now, there’s a rattle in his lungs that Donnie doesn’t like, so he’s stuck in bed for real. But that doesn’t mean they can’t keep him company anyway. And it’s not like they don’t want to be near him.
His infirmary bed is parked in the lab for now, but Mikey has made more than one passive-aggressive remark about brother-hoggers since lunch, so it’s likely they’ll end up having a sleepover in the living room again tonight.
It’s hard for Don sometimes, being in the middle of a group. It’s easy to feel smothered. His skin starts to itch if he can’t slip away. Sometimes a hug makes him want to slide into his shell the way Mikey hides in his when he gets spooked, even though it’s a biological impossibility for his species.
But it’s not hard all the time. There are some days when it’s the easiest thing in the world.
So Donnie is very careful, but it’s the work of seconds to get settled, because he’s done this about a billion times by now. He’s on Leo’s good side, so Leo can shuffle in as close as he wants, and he brings up the first season of Nailed It! on his iPad even though he knows Leo isn’t going to last a single episode.
Sure enough, in a manner of minutes, his brother’s head on his shoulder becomes a heavy weight and Leo’s breathing evens out in his sleep.
Donnie lets the rest of the episode play even though he could switch back to his dissertation now. The lights in the lab dimmed automatically when Leo started to doze off, and Donnie is too comfortable to bring them back up again.
He tips to the side until his cheek comes to rest on the top of his striped brother’s bruised head and when he exhales all the tension he’s been carrying around all day blows out of him.
Belatedly, Don realizes that he’s been conned into taking a nap.
“Ugh, Nardo, you are good,” he mutters, with grudging admiration.
Maybe there’s a different version of himself out there who really lost his best friend and better half. Maybe in some other timeline, they didn’t save Leo, and they had to make sense of a world without him.
Donnie thinks he feels sorry for that world, because there’s absolutely no way the Donatello who lives there hasn’t already torn it to pieces to get his brother back.
#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles#rottmnt#rottmnt movie#hamato donatello#hamato leonardo#disaster twins#my writing#tmnt fic
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