Chapter Text
kosmara: (ironic) the world or unreal state in which one lives.
* nightmare
***
Oh, hell.
Donnie winces as he feels his brain start to reboot, neuron by excruciating neuron. He hangs suspended in an uncertain murk, his body as if non-existent in the wake of shock - but he’s conscious, which means he isn’t dead, cogito ergo sum, which means he must still have a body.
Okay then. Let us tally the input.
Donnie’s ears are ringing - that’s the first thing that becomes apparent to him. The high pitched, hysterical whine that he’s unfortunately becoming more and more familiar with after every explosion he happens to get too close to - it kind of just never leaves at this point.
Because, yes, there was an explosion. In his lab. It–
Donnie frowns it away as corralling his thoughts in that direction turns out to be actually, physically painful. He’ll need to tally that too, evaluate the damage, map out strategies from there - but in just a moment.
Ah - he could feel his face frown just then, so that’s another sense returning to him. Nice.
The sense of smell reboots next, and with it its twin sense of taste which, yuck, he’d rather turn it right back off because his nose, his mouth, his throat are coated with - what, dust? chalk? - and the air his lungs keep insistently pulling in tastes like…tastes like…
Like sunlight, and asphalt, and the dense mush of fall leaves.
Donnie’s frown deepens. None of those are things he generally gets to smell down in the Lair - well, except for leaves when they get laundered into the sewers, but it’s summer right now, isn’t it? Fall is far away still.
So what gives?
Donnie’s vision is blurry when he manages to creak his eyes open. It blurs further into incomprehension as they well with tears at the bright stabs of light - whites and grays and sporadic smudges of blue which is, to reiterate, not at all the palette he’s come to associate with his lab.
He’s topside.
Huh?
Was the explosion that bad? Bad enough to - throw him out to the surface?
Oh shit - the others…
The sudden panic is sharp enough of a stab that it wrenches Donnie into a sitting position from where he’s been sprawled on his back, and he groans in surprised, bruised misery - and then coughs when the groan catches on the dusting of chalk, and groans again when the coughing rattles around inside his banged up shell, knocking painfully into his ribs.
His head hurts. His head hurts, so badly Donnie’s fighting the reflexive urge to vomit. Must be a concussion - he’s definitely blacked out there… But he doesn’t appear to be bleeding, at least. His hands are decidedly empty and he didn’t wear his shell - had yet to put it on, and even his gauntlet was charging - but in a moment he’ll convince his eyes to work and look for his bō and do a scan and go from there. Easy.
Still, bō or not, it’s obvious he isn’t injured nearly enough for the strength of explosion that must have gone off. What–
“–can’t be, there’s no way–”
“It is though, look! It’s him! Come–”
The voices cut through the din between Donnie’s ears so suddenly that he nearly keels over, dizzy and ill, mind reeling as it tries to place the voices - gruff and strange and distorted, but scratching at his brain the way his hands itch when he reaches for a tool without looking and finds it missing. A break in the pattern that shouldn’t be there, a fracture in the bone healing all weird, a…
“Donnie? S’that really you?”
Two shadows tower over him, slicing up the sky. Donnie stares up, wide-eyed - squints immediately when his eyes whine with pain, irritated tears wetting his mask, cutting tracks in the dust he feels coating his cheeks.
Pizza supreme in the sky, his head…
“Who–” he tries to demand in a hoarse voice, willing his hand to come up and shield his streaming eyes, willing his head to stop splitting at the seams, willing the dust and the topside and these bloody voices to make sense.
But they don’t, nothing does, nothing listens or obeys, and even as Donnie is trying to concentrate enough to feel indignation, the world gives up on its balancing act and crashes sideways, pulling him along into the darkness.
***
“We gotta take a better look, what if he broke something?”
“We are not unsealing it! Look at all the bruises - I’ll bet you anything he’s got a cut on him somewhere, and even if he doesn’t - he was out in the open without a suit! That’s mental!”
“Oh, more mental than our brother coming back from the dead? Dude, think: if he got it, he would’ve shown it by now. It’s been hours. We can let him out!”
“No way. You remember what happened when…”
“I’m right here,” Donnie manages through clenched teeth. He’d keep eavesdropping with his eyes closed but god he hates it when people talk about him as if he isn’t even in the room.
His voice rasps like a file over his parched throat. The pounding in his head is slower now, lower in frequency, an ambient deep sea current that keeps rolling him along the bottom to the point where he forgets which way is up.
Concussions suck.
Donnie opens his eyes. Laboriously, he sits up on a - what appears to be a bare mattress, on bare floor, yikes - in a tiny pod-like room with a sealed exit not unlike the ones they have in the Lair for when Dad gets sick with something.
Ah - quarantine, then.
The sealed side connects to a bigger, proper room, with a low ceiling and dimmed lights that are low enough to plunge the edges of the room into unidentifiable shadows. Their reddish hue makes Donnie think of emergency lighting, but at least it’s not as harsh on his eyes.
He wills them to focus on the two shapes in front of him - now that he’s shown signs of life, they stopped bickering and are watching him.
“What– Leo? Mikey?” Donnie asks, looking between them. The break in the pattern gains a patch. “What’s up with you two? Where are we?”
‘Why am I in quarantine,’ he means to ask next, but his voice fizzles out, not nearly as authoritative as he wants it to be. He coughs, a hand coming up to grasp at his throat. The action is enough to tip him off balance and into the curved wall of the enclosure and Donnie sighs in brief relief, the bare concrete cool on his temple and the edge of his shell despite his thick hoodie.
To put it plainly, Donnie feels like crap. Which is, admittedly, a small price to pay for getting blasted all the way up to the surface. Although the idea of going back down and surveying the damage done to his tech alone is nauseating. He’s too afraid to think of the rest.
“There’s– by the bed,” he hears Mikey say, the sound muffled slightly by the clear plastic of the seal, and sure enough, there’s a small canteen on the floor next to him.
Donnie wrinkles his nose as he sniffs it (metallic, dry with chlorine, who drinks that?) and takes a sip, feeling it wash away the coating of dust in his throat.
‘What’s going on?’ he signs with one hand, the other still gripping the canteen. It’s sharp-cold against his skin, the sensation enough to force him a little bit more awake.
Donnie watches his brothers share a look of confusion that quickly morphs into something else, facets turning into each other so fast he’s got no hope of parsing any of it before they settle into - what? What is it?
“Sorry, Dee,” Mikey grimaces. “We’re kinda - out of practice with sign.”
…Is it shame?
Donnie peers at them, noticing that he’s leaning forward only when he has to catch himself on the mattress before he falls over again. Something is wrong. What?
His vision swims and doubles, his brothers’ silhouettes swimming with it, distorting until they almost appear bigger than he knows them to be - well, Leo at least, bulkier and taller than he has any right being, really, dwarfing the chair he’s straddling. Mikey is different too, swathed in robes, lanky and angular and–
Is that hair?
He appears to have hair. Black, tied in a top knot. Hair.
Donnie must have really hit his head.
‘Hair?’ Donnie pinches the air by his forehead. Then, after a look at Leo, at the weirdly thin, lifeless shirt sleeve hanging by his right side, the cuff tucked in between the buttons - empty, it’s empty - ‘Arm??’
“We, um…” Mikey pauses and steeples his fingers where he is sitting cross-legged on a stool. His hands are wrapped in compression bandages. “We would really like to know how you ended up outside with no protection. Kinda out of character for you on all accounts.”
“What Mikey is really trying to ask is,” Leo rolls his eyes before Donnie can scowl at them - he’s obviously unable to talk and they don’t understand him - “where the hell have you been these past ten years?”
And, okay, apparently the shock of it finally compounds enough to break right through his silent spell because– “What?” Donnie croaks out. “Ten years?”
What kind of a joke is this?
“And why do you still look,” Leo gestures at him with his left hand - his only hand, “like this.”
Which, scoff, Donnie asked that first, and feels like he’s got much more of a right to that question. But it looks like he’ll get answers only if he provides answers first.
“I was in my lab,” Donnie grumbles, because acknowledging the law of equivalent exchange still doesn’t mean he has to like it. “Something went–” he cuts himself off, unwilling to admit the mistake. “There was an explosion, and I woke up when you weirdos came for me in your hazmat suits or whatever. That’s all.”
His brothers exchange a look, some sort of urgency passing between them.
“You think it might be the same explosion?” Mikey murmurs.
“You heard it too?” Donnie cuts in before Leo can respond. They don’t appear to have any fresh injuries, but - “Nobody got hurt, right?”
“Oh, we heard it alright,” Leo says, and there is a hardness to his voice that makes Donnie pause. “When your lab imploded on itself and you disappeared. Ten years ago.”
“Donnie, we really just wanna know what happened.” Mikey places a hand on Leo’s shoulder, his tone soft. Leo grinds his teeth. His expression is unreadable. “And where you’ve been. We kind of…” His throat works for a moment before he continues. “We kind of thought you were gone.”
Donnie stares at them, lost, something unspeakable hanging between them and he - he doesn’t know what to do with it, he doesn’t.
“I don’t have any answers!” he tries, teeth gritting at the fresh wave of headache when his voice jumps out of formation. “I told you all I know, I– I was in my lab. I was going to work. You guys wanted to see who could hold their breath the longest and I already knew it would be me so I wasn’t interested. You,” he points at Mikey, “you gave me your board to fix, I remember it lying on one of my benches– oh. I guess it’s gone now too. Uh. Sorry.”
If he had his bō, if only he had his bō, he’d have answers. He’d have something he could offer them and finally wipe those expressions from their faces because for the love of Vygotsky he can’t make sense of them.
Where’s his phone?
“You sent a pic in the groupchat right as I was setting up my stuff. I don’t remember if I responded. Let me see.”
Donnie rummages in the pocket of his hoodie, but his fingers only encounter - a ziplock baggie.
Shit, he’s lost his phone. “Shit, I’ve lost my phone,” he glares at the baggie.
Useless.
“Is that– are those gummy worms?”
Donnie stares at Leo, puzzling out the look of elated surprise on his face. “Why?” he asks defensively. “I didn’t take them from your stash if that’s what you’re getting at. They’re sour. You don’t eat those.”
“Dontron, do you know when was the last time I saw a gummy worm, sour or not? Years, hermano.” There’s a predatory glint to Leo’s eyes that Donnie decidedly doesn’t like.
He holds the baggie closer. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch - whatever it is you’re afraid of catching - if you eat them?”
“Zippy, dude. It’s safe. I’ve eaten worse.”
“But of course you have. Naturally. Silly me.”
“You really did just…end up here. From that day, all the way here,” Mikey says quietly, ignoring their banter. His eyes are unfocused - or focused on something else entirely, invisible to Donnie. “Way to skip ahead, I guess.”
Time travel. Time travel? “Are you implying time travel?” Donnie asks. “Are we seriously implying time travel?”
Oh, but it makes sense - if one is to look past the uncompromising weirdness of it all. It makes sense, and time paradoxes are already clamoring for his attention as they compile themselves into a list on the back burner of his mind, the how’s and why’s and…
Well. The Universe hasn’t already collapsed, which means it probably won’t. That’s something.
There’s an insistent itch on another back burner, the implications, the possibilities - oh, the multiverse is real, it must be - but trying to think about it gives Donnie such a violent stab of headache he gags.
And most importantly - and most nauseatingly so - the question: how does he go back?
“You look…not very surprised by this hypothesis,” Donnie ventures once he manages to swallow the bile back down, which is a fair observation considering they’re talking fucking time travel.
“We may have had a few hours to consider the options while you were passed out,” Mikey gives him an apologetic grimace. “It may have crossed our minds, and, well - finding you again, like this, after so many years - any explanation would be wack as hell. Considering - things - this one’s hardly the weirdest.”
The way he speaks catches Donnie’s attention, his brow furrowing, but he jumps to a more relevant question instead. “How did you find me?”
“You kinda landed in a pile of debris - we heard the noise, saw the dust cloud. That area is dead, more or less, and we’ve scavenged it for supplies ages ago - which means there shouldn’t be anyone there. So we went to investigate.” Leo brushes it all away, as if physically setting the conversation aside, and leans in. “Now. I’ve got an important question for you. Are you bleeding anywhere?”
“I am not.” Concussion aside, his entire body is throbbing with the sweet-salty pulse of bruising - this ‘debris’ Leo mentioned must be the culprit - but none of it, as far as he can see or feel, crosses into the sharp, sour tang of connective tissue exposed to air.
“I remember how awful at lying you we– are, so this tracks,” Leo raises his brows. His mask is from much darker fabric than what Donnie remembers, the difference evident even in the unsteady light. “If you give us the gummy worms, we might be convinced to let you out early.”
Donnie stares at him. “You’ll have to let me out anyway. This whole thing,” he gestures around his enclosure, “isn’t sustainable.”
He isn’t about to pee in a bucket, thank you very much - oh god, what if they all have to pee in buckets here? Does plumbing still exist? Sweet Aqua Claudia…
“Besides, there isn’t any ‘early’ - you said it’s been hours already. Which, great decision making, by the way, leaving me passed out with a concussion for that long,” he cuts his eyes in Mikey’s direction.
“We did some healing,” Mikey wrings his hands, suddenly sheepish. “Is it...very bad still?”
Donnie looks at the bandages covering his hands and snaking halfway up his forearms, stares hard until he can tell there’s a dusting of white on his temples.
Ten years, they said - they’re still in their twenties. This is still too early.
“I’ve had worse,” Donnie says after a pause the way he might walk out onto untested ice. He waits for Mikey to react and raises his voice only after he catches him chew on the corner of his mouth. “ Anyway, you weirdos,” he shakes the baggie, not missing the way his brothers’ eyes track the movement, “let me out, I’m feeling magnanimous enough to share.”
The air in the room is cool and smooth, clearly ventilated, very unlike the stuffy pocket of the quarantine pod. Donnie moves slowly, careful not to trip or sway when his horizon refuses to stay level. Leo’s hand is gripping the back of his chair as he watches him sit down on Mikey’s vacated stool. Mikey is all twitchy, as if suppressing the urge to hover.
His little brother, hovering.
It’s been ten years, Donnie reminds himself. They haven’t seen him in a decade.
He’s still unsure how to reconcile this with the fact that he ended up swiping the gummy worms because Leo stole his Goldfish Colors™ the night before. With the fact that his gauntlet’s battery was dead because in the morning Mikey asked him if they could use it to try and port Doom to every possible device in the Lair.
(They succeeded, of course. The waffle maker had never been more entertaining. Nor had Raph’s white noise machine.)
“Hm. Not as sour as I remember them being,” Leo remarks, his face screwed in poorly concealed misery.
Donnie snorts. “Yeah duh. I stole them from Raph. He’s a coward with these, although nowhere near the level of you two.”
He expects a retort - maybe something about Mikey’s sophisticated palate, or Leo’s complete lack thereof in his habitual chase for sugar high - but Leo’s expression shutters. Mikey stops chewing, and Donnie feels the ice creak and whine beneath his feet. Shadows move down below.
“Hm. Still hate these,” Leo decides. The line of his mouth is unhappy. Tense from more than the spasm of sourness.
He grabs another.
Something pokes at Donnie’s mind, a sharp little thing just beneath his skin.
“Guys…” Donnie reaches for it. “Where’s Raph?”
A thin wheeze of the vents sifting through air. Leo and Mikey share a look - again. Donnie is growing tired of these, tired of these impenetrable layers around him that they seem to dive through so easily, bound by shared - what? Secrets? Fears?
Tragedies?
“Guys!! Where are you– I left as soon as I got the bird–”
A voice reaches them from outside the room, from beyond– one of the doors, hell, Donnie didn’t even think to count them, and in the first moment he thinks he hears Raph because that would be incredible timing. But that is a ridiculous thought: the voice is higher, softer, nasal. It’s–
“Donnie!”
The door whooshes open. April stands in the maw of it, the helmet of her worn mustard-yellow suit clutched under one arm, the hood pulled hastily down. She is taller now too, her hair darker and meticulously braided into cornrows. Her eyes are wide above the sharp slopes of her cheekbones.
“April,” Donnie murmurs, without even registering that he moves until he finds himself already standing, already taking a step towards her.
And it's weird and cringe as hell - he's literally just had a sleepover at her place, it's only been like the night before - but something small and terrible that had twisted in his chest only minutes ago at Leo’s hardened expression, at Mikey’s hovering, and then moments ago again, at the thought of Raph, twists tighter and crueler still. And so when April embraces him, her helmet clanging to the concrete floor, he finds himself clinging right back.