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"Are you hungry?"
Donnie paused what he was doing, the tap of his fingers against the tablet going still.
There was no sensation present in his body that could be called hunger. If anything, his body felt like it was a wisp, blended into the background of everything else. His stomach didn't exist. Hunger itself was created by the hormone ghrelin triggering the muscles to contract after a period of fasting, creating a bodily sensation meant to motivate a someone to eat. No such sensation was present, just a fuzzy blankness.
"No." Donnie answered honestly, tipping his head back down to his screen. He might've fallen down a rabbit hole reading about sudden amputations getting tissue necrosis or becoming infected, causing sepsis, and killing the person long after the initial danger passed. He was telling himself that it was a useful thing to be researching, given the situation. The longer he sat at Leo's bedside reading, the more it felt as if his brain was sloshing in a bath of acid instead of cerebrospinal fluid.
It was Mikey in the doorway of the med bay, giving a little frown. He said, "When was the last time you ate?"
Now that was a very different question. Donnie had something he mentally dubbed a 'fist-fight' with a yogourt tube earlier in the day, which was mostly attempting to choke food down and instead staring angrily at it.
"A few hours ago." Donnie replied, because technically some of that yogourt entered his digestive tract. He said, "Did you know that septic shock is where the infection fighting processes in your body dramatically drop your blood pressure and damage your organs?"
"Maybe you should come have something else to eat." Mikey said. "Get away for a minute. I can sit with him."
Both brothers turned to face Leo. He was silent, as he had been for days. Donnie had learned far more about medical processes in the last week than he ever wanted to know. There was a reason that he'd let his twin take all medic responsibilities, and that reason largely had to do with the consistency of blood between his fingers and the nauseating sight of any mauled flesh. Helping Casey and Draxum cobble together what remained of Leo's arm really put Donnie at his limit.
And yet here he was, hit his limit and gone beyond, staring at a medical journal with stark photos of amputations gone septic that made his whole body shiver. But if the dumbass wasn't going to wake up and help, Donnie was the one who would take over medic duty. Under duress and pushed beyond all his comfort zones.
Anything for Leo. Everything for Leo, if only he'd open his eyes.
"I'm really not hungry." Donnie told Mikey, voice small, thoughts cobwebbed and caught up in everything. There were too many horrible bouncing statistics in his mind. And that didn't even consider the fact that he'd entirely lost all harmony with his own body after the Technodrome, feeling like his shell was a separate, external entity that he needed to remove. That his body was violated and disgusting and something was living inside him.
There wasn't. He'd checked.
"Do you mind if I sit anyway?" Mikey said, sounding equally small. His hands were earthquakes, folded together in front of him, and the red rimmed eyes tugged on something in Donnie painful and vulnerable. No bigger weak spot than his only baby brother.
"I'm sure he'd love that." Donnie replied, trying to sound sure. He stood, giving up the prime chair and shuffling around to check all the needles and tubes poking out of Leo. The flossy gossamer that was his mind brushed the edges of distress inside him. There was no time to think of anything other than ensuring that Hamato Leonardo was going to continue to exist on this Earth another day.
Donnie tapped through his tablet with his free hand, pulling up the blood pressure chart Leo had for his own reference years ago to cross reference. Everything looked stable, as best Donnie could tell.
A gentle tap-tap on fabric. Donnie turned, seeing Mikey's distraught stare with tears streaming down his face and falling onto his lap.
The quiet of Mikey's misery was jarring, there was no wailing, no begging for someone to soothe his pain. As if he could sit there for hours and cry and cry and cry, steady and drowning in it.
None of them liked to see Mikey cry, it was always like the sun went dark. Donnie hesitated, stumbling with his own fragile state, the fact that being touched at the moment made him want to violently implode, but aware that he could not leave Mikey to suffer alone. If Leo wasn't about to open his fucking eyes, Donnie would have to pick up the slack both as the medic and for this.
"Do you require comfort?" Donnie asked, skirting around the bed and turning Mikey's chair away from Leo before crouching in front of it.
Mikey gave a watery smile. He was wearing April's college sweater, the too-long sleeves covering his hands when he reached up to swipe at his wet face. "Aw, D, don't hurt yourself."
"Scoff." Donnie said, admittedly a little stiff, but opening his arms wide nonetheless. "Offer will expire soon."
Mikey gave an almighty sniff then crawled into Donnie's open arms. The weight pushed Donnie back from his crouch to settle Mikey directly in his lap, curling up around the smaller turtle and stroking the back of his neck just like he would when Mikey was young and would cry over the tiniest thing.
This was not tiny. This was the whole world in the balance. The two of them stayed on the floor, a whole host of sensations in Donnie's body as he rocked the silently crying Mikey back and forth. The crawl of invisible worms under his skin when Mikey brushed the edge of his bandaged shell. There was no hunger, no thirst, no tiredness, only the wash of numbness, flooding over him in waves, that this wasn't actually something he could fix. He could only hold Mikey while he cried and told every inch of the cosmic universe over and over that he would give absolutely everything he had if Leo only opened his eyes.
[]
Leo opened his eyes. Donnie came to realization that it was not the biggest battle they had to fight.
Donnie was the one who discovered that it was catatonic dissociation. All the tests and vital signs said consciousness, that Leo was awake with active brain waves but everything else showed no response. No reaction to other people but his body behaved normally to other automatic stimuli, like the pupil contracting to light.
The Wikipedia article for catatonic dissociation had an absolutely bone-chilling black and white photo of a person in a strange posture, showing off the characteristic way they would stay waxily frozen in place. Something about it made all his skin prickle in heart-sinking dread and red-hot alarm. It overwhelmed him so suddenly that Donnie realized he was going to throw up, and ran to the bathroom hoping no one would hear him.
Raph found him immediately, which wasn't a surprise since he'd been Donnie's protector for his entire life and had some scary sixth sense for it.
"Heya buddy." Raph said, lowering himself on the bathroom floor, offering a can of ginger ale.
Donnie shut his eyes, feeling the sting, pushing down hard. The picture burning in his retina. The idea that this was completely out of his control, the waxy movability of an empty body, that Leo could just stop responding so much that he withered and died. Then Donnie threw up again.
"What's goin' on, huh?" Raph gripped his shoulder, and Donnie's body lit up with unfinished nerve endings, firing with nowhere to go, the crawling of maggots under his skin. The empty sensations, the loss of unity between body and soul.
Donnie shrugged off the touch and hugged the porcelain, trying to breathe through a relentless wave of horrified nausea.
"Don, come on." Raph tried again, stern. "Talk to me."
There was no solid ground, only a haunting black and white photo of someone trapped in a grotesque position.
"What good would talking do?" Donnie asked the bowl, hearing the bizarre echo it created.
"Dunno. Maybe you'll feel better, or I can help you brainstorm, or something. But if you're only thinking and not telling me, then I can't do any of those things. I can only watch you suffer and feel bad that my brother and best friend doesn't trust me enough to let me in."
"Low blow." Donnie muttered, and reached out to push him.
Raph let it happen, star-fishing onto his back and staring at the ceiling.
Donnie reluctantly admitted in a dead voice, "It's about Leo."
"Raph guessed that much, thanks. And you're having a hard time with it."
"Don't worry about me." Donnie scoffed.
"What part of brother and best friend are you forgetting? I'm not gonna leave you alone about it, not today, not later, not ever."
"I wish you'd leave me alone about it."
Raph laughed. "And I wish you'd stop being a pain in the ass all the time, but we don't always get what we want. Now sit up and talk to me, then we'll go eat something to help your stomach. In that order."
Donnie gave Raph his fiercest glare.
It only earned him a grin, Raph saying, "There's that loving face. Talk."
There was a minute of quiet, Donnie dropping his head between his arms and breathing through the revulsion. Raph waited, picking at scabs on the back of his knuckles from the punching bag that had seen a lot of recent use.
"What if it doesn't get better?" Donnie asked, barely a whisper, not raising his head.
"Don." Raph leaned closer. "What if what doesn't get better?"
The wobbly feeling inside. He had nothing left to vomit, spewing words instead, and watching the horror spread from his body to Raph's. They did not get around to the part where they got something to eat after that.
[]
Donnie wasn't an idiot, he knew that he needed to eat to live. The avoidance of food was so many things, all at once, that it seemed impossible to tackle every single hurdle and win the fist-fight that was eating. Sleep tended to happen whether he wanted it or not after long enough, becoming almost an involuntary act on top of his keyboard. But it wasn't the same with food.
First of all, he wasn't hungry. The autism broke it somewhere in the middle of all the stress, his body deciding not to signal hunger anymore. This had happened to him in the past, usually after an illness, but also during big life changes. If he did not eat at regular meals his body simply would never signal otherwise.
Secondly, stress made the metaphorical 'fist-fight'. This was how he'd place food in his mouth and it always seemed to expand to twenty-times its size. The lack of appetite made the act of eating a marathon, a heavy sodden lump in his throat impossible to push through to swallow. The idea of placing more food in his mouth a disgusting task. A constant stare down between the logic of sustenance and the full body denial of the act.
Finally, the recent body trauma. After the Technodrome, Donnie had completely disconnected from this physical form, repulsed by his own skin and flesh. Likely exasperated by the autism, but it was all pouring into the same feedback loop. Food was a nightmare, an echo chamber that never stopped circling back and back and back.
April caught him in the middle of his fist-fight. He was sat at the kitchen table, tablet scrolling through a research paper on dissociation grounding techniques, his lunch directly in front of him.
"You're still here." April said, blankly surprised. She stepped inside, carrying a nearly empty boba with some pearls still in the bottom. "Mikey said you left to have lunch like, an hour ago."
"I got distracted." Donnie muttered, instead of admitting that he'd been sitting there losing a battle with a cup of applesauce. It was true, he had been distracted by the sheer enormity of dissociation research and grounding techniques.
The research could help but only if Leo was present to hear it. Watching the living corpse of his brother completely fail to react to any external stimuli really killed whatever dregs of his fucking appetite he had left. Which was almost none. Less than none. The research felt pointless and futile but he couldn't stop scrolling. He just wanted Leo back. He was selfish and greedy and he wanted to see his twin smile.
April walked up and took a spoonful of applesauce. She said, "Mm, the strawberry one, that's the best."
It was. Donnie tried not to look daunted. When April offered back the spoon, he stared.
"Oh, sorry." April threw that spoon in the sink and got him a fresh one. "Here, dude."
Donnie took the spoon. He stuck it in the applesauce. Determined not to have April clock him, he put the applesauce in his mouth. It instantly felt like the granules of apple where bulbous and huge, rolling around his tongue and clogging his throat. The swallow thickened it into cement.
"I don't want this." Donnie said, heart pumping hot and high, like it was hanging in his larynx.
"I'll have it." April said, sucking up her last boba and trading for the little tub. "What are you going to have instead? Usually applesauce is your safe food."
Usually. Usually. Donnie looked at the cupboards and felt a crushing weight of decision paralysis, of overwhelmed anxiety. He didn't want to eat. He had to eat to live. He wasn't hungry. He hadn't eaten anything in ages, realistically he needed to eat something. If he didn't eat something, he'd get shaky and spacey and he might hurt Leo. He was Leo's caretaker, he needed to eat. The pressure of needing to eat didn't make it any easier. His body began to shake like he was cold, trembling from the inside out.
"Oh, whoops." April said, putting down everything. "Nevermind, hey, hey, D, you're fine."
Pressurized everything, pushing and pulsing. Like the world was ending, right there, like everything was wrong.
That persistent sense of wrong wrong wrongness that came from Leo being in trouble never went away. It was like that, times a thousand. An overflowing burst of condensed wrong.
Donnie had kept waiting for hunger to happen but it just kept not coming, no matter how long he waited. It seemed like his body forgot how to do hunger. The feeling of hunger was just broken, it didn't work, and it wasn't a reliable indicator anymore. He needed to force himself to eat. Eating was important.
Food was literally a chemical energy ingested to sustain activity. Units in joules, converted to basal metabolism to support organs and tissues. Something like 20% of energy needed was for the brain alone.
All the logic in the world couldn't override the physical sensation that food was not welcome in his body. It was such a struggle, such a pain, and he was tired of it.
Donnie pulled his legs up to his chest and hugged them hard. He had a soft sweater on and it still felt like it was dragging against the sores on his shell. He'd changed the bandages three times today, obsessively checking for pus and for any evidence of Kraang material remaining. There was neither.
April pulled up the chair. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize food was being difficult right now or I wouldn't have come and made it worse."
Donnie shook his head. She wasn't making it worse, there was just no possible way to make this better. He was still shaking uncontrollably, nerves jangling, as if he was ice cold even though he knew he wasn't. Just broken.
"I can make you something or fetch you something, whatever you want if it means you'll eat it." April offered, leaning over the table with earnest eyes behind her glasses. "Do you want boba? This place was great, I'd totally go back."
He liked boba when he had the capability to tolerate textures for the pearls, which he did not at the moment. He shook his head again, feeling the frozen weight of his tongue adding to the shittiness of the situation. The hurdle of speaking suddenly a mile from his starting point. Broken broken broken.
"That bad?" April guessed, searching his face, with something knowing in her tone. Considering she'd come over to visit their catatonic brother still in the med bay, she must've known it was really That Bad. "When was the last time you ate?"
Donnie really didn't think anyone would like the answer to that question. He got up instead and paced the kitchen, stimming his hands so hard they hurt. Back and forth. Working off energy he couldn't afford to lose if he couldn't choke something down.
There wasn't time for this. He needed to find a way to help Leo. He needed to find a way to help Mikey and Raph who were struggling with the reality of the situation, unable to pry themselves from Leo's bedside, watching him collapse in real time.
The whole room spun in a dizzy circle, and all the conflicting sensations slammed into him at once -- a sharp pain somewhere unidentified in his middle, maybe his stomach, but maybe not. Impossible to tell if it was hunger.
Donnie opened every cupboard in the kitchen then slammed them shut again when no easy solution presented himself, returning to the painful rapid hand flaps as he paced the length of the kitchen.
Soon the spin won and Donnie sat on the floor, worn out and heaving for breath.
"Okay." April crouched a safe distance away. "I've made a plan. Ready?"
Hopefully she could stop the rapid spiral around him, the room twisting, and the piercing shot of pain through his core. Helpless and crushed with overwhelmed everything. He wanted to cry. He was too overwhelmed to cry. He nodded, glad the decision was out of his hands.
April pulled his headphones from around his neck, set them to noise cancelling, and settled them over his ears. The hum of the fridge disappeared, making his shoulders drop. Muffled nothing, no sound.
Then she tugged him from the middle of the room to gently press his shell against the cupboards, leaning against it for support and cutting off anyone sneaking up behind him. She wiggled a bottle in front of his face, flavourless juice, and put a long straw inside so he didn't even have to lift it.
Feeling flustered, Donnie took the straw into his mouth and drank, almost until the bottle was empty. Not as much energy as solid food, but at this point better than nothing at all.
She offered the applesauce silently. Donnie shook his head, and she took it away without complaint. She offered chocolate pudding. Same response. A small frown broke her composure and Donnie hid his face in his knees, trying to breathe through all the sensations and trying to stop shaking like he was freezing because he wasn't.
The middle pain was gone, replaced with something sloshy and uneven. Donnie shuddered through a breath then reluctantly raised his hand to sign, touching his mouth then away. Thank you.
April touched her fingers to her lips. Eat.
He signed back, jabbing a finger at himself then rapping at his forehead with a flat hand. I know.
April plucked an her finger with the other hand. Pick.
Knowing that he had to eat did not make it any easier to do so. Flickering hot frustration sizzled and popped, and he sharply cut his open hand into the opposite palm. Stop.
April sat back on her heels, mouth thin, looking unhappy but stopping. Donnie shook out his hands hard, shaking his head, feeling nothing get better even with the rapid stims. All the sensations crushed and ground him up. Nothing was going to be okay, ever again.
His big sister waited. She still had the applesauce and the unopened container of pudding. She had the two spoons and she filled each one with a scoop of applesauce, holding her own and offering Donnie his.
After a minute, he took the spoon. She gestured up, and they ate at the same time. Immediately it felt enormous in his mouth and he grimaced, fighting the urge to just spit it back out.
April offered his bottle of flavourless juice and he took a sip of that instead. They swallowed together, and April set them up again, eating spoonful to spoonful through both the applesauce and then the pudding. By the time they finished, the food sat like a rock in his stomach, nausea hooking deep.
But April gave him a thumbs up, some relief smoothing over her face, so it was worth the struggle. She helped him stand and held his hand as they returned to the real battlefield, Leo's room in the med bay.
[]
Donnie was holding Leo up, the dead weight of his body braced against him, while Casey checked his ribs. He'd been standing there for a few minutes, trading tense words with the apocalypse-trained medic, when the room started to feel alarmingly hot. A wash of warmth throughout Donnie's body, making him fall silent as he tried to interpret the sudden feeling.
Then ephemeral weights pulled him down, like the blood left his head all at once, gravity increasing and a phantom yank towards the floor. Donnie blinked dazedly and said, "Casey..."
"I've got him." Casey replied, brisk and taking Leo's weight. "Sit down, holy shit, you just went grey."
Donnie handed off Leo and sat down directly on the floor, only to immediately decide that wasn't good enough and lowered himself slowly and carefully to lay prone, breath shaky and trembling. The room spun like a top, relentless and fast.
Casey settled the unresponsive Leo and joined Donnie on the floor, taking his pulse with practiced fingers on Donnie's neck. "Looks like vasovagal syncope, keep breathing steady. Good job making it to the floor without passing out."
"Syncope." Donnie repeated through numbs lips, the cold sweat broken out over every inch of his skin. "Blood pressure drop?"
"Yeah. Common with, hm... Heat, anxiety, pain, hunger, or stress." Casey recited, tapping his lip as he thought. "Give yourself a minute, it's gonna feel like shit even if you don't pass out."
Casey was right. His body immediately felt like hot garbage, like he'd been dumped with a thousand terrible sensations at once. He couldn't stop shaking and his stomach felt indescribably weird. Maybe that was hunger? Or maybe it was the stress.
The blood pressure cuff was taken off Leo and brought to Donnie. He did not move from the floor, unsure if he could manage it.
"Not great still." Casey said, deflating the pinch of the plastic on his upper arm. "How's your shell? It's not infected right?"
Donnie had checked twice already today and it was only noon. "It's healing adequately. I have changed the bandages recently. The anti-septic did it's job."
"How's the pain?" Casey skirted his shell, not touching, inspecting with his eyes. Professional, just like Leo in medic mode.
"I took some ibuprofen at first, but not since then. April offered something stronger but I didn't want to be incapable of treating Leo."
"Does it still hurt now? Could we take some more ibuprofen?" Casey asked, standing up and rooting through the supplies.
Donnie almost agreed, but clicked his mouth shut after a moment. Any time he'd ever taken ibuprofen without eating it made his stomach hurt for days. But he didn't want to volunteer that he hadn't really eaten anything. He said, voice weird, "It doesn't hurt."
"You're lying." Casey said, not turning around. "Where is it..."
"How'd you know?" Donnie complained, pulling off his purple bandana to mop at the cold sweat on his forehead.
"You lie the same way when you're older, too. Aha! Found it." Casey popped two in his hand, turning to the sink. "Want some water?"
"And food." Donnie reluctantly admitted, caught between a rock and a hard place. "It's too hard on my stomach otherwise."
"Oh! Okay. What do you want?"
Donnie grimaced, because he didn't want anything. He turned his face into the linoleum floor and muttered, "I don't know."
There was only a momentary hesitation. Then Casey said, "I got you. Be right back!"
Donnie was left alone with his shivers and the icky disgusting sensation of almost passing out. The strangest feeling in the world was to be distressed in a room that contained his twin and have absolutely zero reaction from him. Leo was awake, his brain waves said so. But there was not even a twitch at the fact that Donnie had just about passed out in front of him. A crush of sorrow and misplaced grief, that he'd lost Leo in all the ways that mattered even if his body was sitting right there.
Casey returned, offering out his spoils. He explained, "I remember whenever you would take any pills, sensei would find you crackers and peanut butter to eat with it."
The kid had scrounged up a packet of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. It was admittedly a pretty good solution. And for a moment, even though Donnie didn't have Leo, the echoes him remained regardless.
"Thank you." Donnie said, voice completely blank. He took his time sitting up, dunking the crackers directly in the jar and eating five before taking the ibuprofen. He admitted defeat because the pain was nagging and he'd like it to be slightly less right now, with all the other overwhelm he had going on.
"I don't have to tell anyone else that you almost passed out." Casey said, back to Donnie again, checking Leo's IV line. "Though I'd feel better about it if you finished the crackers."
Donnie eyed the package. It was almost full. "What if I ate five more?"
"Ten."
"Deal."
Donnie sat on the floor and ate crackers with peanut butter until he could stand. Leo said nothing.
[]
Donnie was aware that he was being a hypocrite, but he had argued with his brothers that maintaining a regular sleep schedule was important. So he had created the little purple monitor to track Leo's vitals during the night, so the brothers could actually try to sleep normally after days in horrible stasis at his bedside. Leo had surfaced from his dissociation a few times, and Donnie was surprised that he could find new ways to be tortured by the state of his brother. To have him in his grasp only to vanish away again into nothing. Leo lived to make his life difficult, but fuck at least he lived.
They had been talking. Or, Donnie had been talking, and Leo had been giving some non-verbal replies. It was the first time since the invasion that when Donnie looked at Leo he actually felt like he had him back, like his twin was in the room with him.
And then he was gone again. Just like that. Eyes going blank midway through Donnie's sentence. He didn't refocus, not even when Donnie shook him. Not even when Donnie pleaded for him to come back.
A magma bubble of frustration popped, searing him inside out. After ensuring that Leo was comfortable, he fled to go have a breakdown in peace.
Gasping for air, curled up underneath his desk and raking his nails down his inner arms. He was always more prone to shutdown than meltdowns, but it was still certainly possible. The need to scream at the top of his lungs was only stopped by the fact that he could not catch his breath to do so. The rhythmic rocking back and forth was entirely unconscious, only realized when he whacked his shell against the wall and lit up an explosion of pain.
A choked yelp broke through the gasps, feeling the spider-webbed aftershocks of agony from jarring the still healing wounds. It dissolved into miserable sobs, because everything was terrible, everything was awful, he couldn't sleep, he couldn't eat, he was responsible for keeping Leo alive and the pressure of it was almost completely suffocating, because Leo was so important and Donnie wasn't sure if he had enough strength to keep that light in the world if he was struggling so hard himself.
Footsteps picked across the lab worried face of his sister filled the space in front of the desk.
Donnie immediately flapped a hand at her for space, overwhelmed and crushed and dying. April sat back so the exit to the desk wasn't blocked, and said something that Donnie couldn't hear through the ringing in his ears. He shook his head blindly and tried to breathe. He couldn't look April in the eye. That was nothing new.
He could only hear ringing and the rush-thump of his own heart over and over. The world was ending. Nothing was ever going to be okay, ever again. It prickled him with too many sensations to name.
April wasn't looking at him anymore. She'd grabbed his Rubik cube off the desk and was flicking between the colours in random orders. Donnie's eyes helplessly tracked the movement, trying to see if she had absolutely any algorithmic basis to her attempt, but there was no rhyme or reason.
It was at least ten minutes before Donnie crawled out from underneath the desk to snatch it from her hands and solve it, flicking through the algorithms and solving it in sixty seconds.
April beamed at him, and the words were clearer when she said, "Oh, is that how you do it?"
Donnie flipped her off. He was swaying back and forth and it took way too long to realize how exhausted he was. When was the last time he slept?
"I've got the whole day off." April told him. "So I can watch our boy. You can take a very long nap."
Donnie shook his head despite his exhaustion, almost automatic.
"Aw." April said, with the same dangerous smile. "That wasn't a request, Donatello."
His conviction wavered. The meltdown felt like the world's worst hangover. He was so tired. And maybe hungry, but the thought of eating food was not a bridge he was willing to cross in that moment. His shoulders fell in resignation and he allowed his older sister to usher him to bed, kindly not touching him, but not leaving him alone until he was in a dark room wrapped in blankets.
Despite the bone deep fatigue, the crawling feeling on his shell woke him sixteen times. But at least the world stopped ending for a bit.
[]
The lack of appetite always felt like it would last an eternity. But it was never forever. Eventually hunger came back in fits, showing its head occasionally and inconsistently.
He was staring at his specs for Leo's new prosthetic arm when he was suddenly fucking starving. Hit like a freight train, whole body. Nearly painful with its intensity. He wavered, stuck between the desire to keep working and the knowledge that he needed to honour his hunger when it did happen or he'd never recover.
More indecision. He deliberated, unsure what the hell this hunger even wanted to eat. Because eating sucked, and he hated it, and it was stupid. But he thought of something, one single thing he'd want to eat.
Donnie clasped his hands in front of himself, wringing slowly, and wandered the lair until he found Mikey.
"Hey D." Mikey gave a tired smile, reclined on the armchair almost upside down, fidgeting with his phone case.
Donnie hesitated further, because Mikey was relaxing, and he didn't want to change that. He looked at the wall instead of his little brother, brow furrowed, pulling at his hands.
"Everything okay?" Mikey sat up, a twinge of worry in his voice.
"Leo's fine." Donnie said automatically, because he was. He'd literally just checked.
"Do you require comfort?" Mikey said.
Donnie couldn't help it, he laughed. "Michael, please."
"What! You ask me that, it's only fair." Mikey smiled back reflexively at the sound of Donnie's laugh. "Come on, what's up? Unless you just wanna stand there. That's fine too."
"Can you make me something to eat?" Donnie asked, too quick, like ripping off a band-aid.
Mikey leapt up like he was on fire. "Don, I would love to. What do you want?"
"Zucchini bread." Donnie said, because that was what his brain provided.
"I've got frozen zucchini right now, will that be okay?" Mikey was undeniably excited, grinning from ear to ear, tapping his fingers on his legs.
"Yup." Donnie just wanted Mikey's zucchini bread, didn't matter how.
He followed the bouncing turtle to the kitchen and sat on the counter to watch him whip up the loaf and put it in the oven. They talked a little bit about Leo but then moved onto conspiracy theories until the bread was done and Donnie ate three pieces in a row. Mikey looked like he'd won the lottery.