"Thank God Youre Back, I Need To Rant.

"Thank god you’re back, I need to rant.”

Let's have some ROTTMNT ranting! 🐢

"Thank God you are back. I need to rant. Stop screaming, it's me- OUCH! That was my head!"

"Donnie!" April screeches and quickly closes her bedroom door behind her. They are lucky her parents are still downstairs parking the car. For good measure she throws the last of her school books at his head as well, but this time the turtle is prepared and dodges the dictionary. She briefly considers throwing her backpack too, but in the end she'll be the one who'll have to tidy up again so she simply lets it slide from her shoulders instead. "I swear to the big turtle in the sky Donnie, one of these days I'll dropkick you right back into Witch Town. Stop lurking in my room in the dark. I'll die of a heart attack if you keep that up."

The turtle scoffs (he actually says the word Scoff, the big nerd) and crosses his arms. "How can you still be surprised? Didn't Papa teach you all of his secret ninja techniques?"

April rolls her eyes and ignores the decidedly jealous undertone in his voice. Her brother in all but blood (and kinda also that after Mikey heard about blood pacts and wouldn't leave them alone until everyone got a little nick in their thumbs to press against each other) is sitting on the edge of her bed, the long legs crossed over each other. She can't help but notice his foot whipping up and down and his hand repeatedly thumping against the mattress.

Before he can notice her watching and force himself to stop, April lets herself fall backwards onto the bed right next to him. She can feel him bounce up and down a little. April crosses her arms behind her head and stares at the ceiling. She has long since learned that he opens up better and faster if people aren't looking at him. If he can act like he is unobserved, trapped in a bubble of pretend privacy where he can just throw his words into the void, to either be heard or forgotten.

April never forgets.

"So, you need to rant."

"Surprised you heard that part amidst all your screaming."

"Doh-nnie!"

"Alright, alright. Geeze." He fiddles with something he's snatched from her bedside table. Looks like her alarm clock which means she'll probably be awoken by another awful techno song in the morning. She really gotta figure out how he keeps reprogramming that thing. "It's Mikey."

Okay. That is a surprise.

Usually when he is this worked up, it's about his 'annoying twin' or about 'overprotective Raph' or sometimes even about his 'totally-don't-crave-his-parental-attention Dad'.

Never Mikey.

She dares to glance at him. He doesn't notice, too wrapped up in pressing the buttons on her clock. "Mikey?"

His sigh is like a mini explosion. The clock gets put back on the table with a loud bang and he jumps to his feet to pace her room from one end to the other.

"He won't shut up about the spaceship and what happened. Pestering me about talking about it. Like something is wrong. Nothing is wrong! Why would anything be wrong? I was a spaceship! How cool is that? Super cool, that's how cool! A spaceship, Apes! A fucking spaceship!"

April sits up, abandons all pretense of the bubble, stares right at the heaving back that is facing her. The back that is covered with his most advanced battle shell. Big and clunky and heavy. It's thicker than all his other shells, usually reserved for the hardest and most brutal fights, designed to withstand everything and let nothing through.

He's been wearing it constantly ever since the Krang attacked. Even in the lair.

Yeah. 'Super cool', her ass.

Before she can get up to go to him, Don comes back to the bed. He falls face down onto it so his back is exposed, as exposed as it can be with the literal tank covering it, and something warm spreads through April at the show of trust.

"I was a spaceship." he mumbles into her duvet.

April hums and touches his shoulder, right above his battle shell. She can feel him shudder a little at the contact, but he doesn't squirm away or makes these clicking sounds in the back of his throat he makes when he is uncomfortable. So she keeps her hand right where it is, rubbing little circles into his skin, her thumb slipping a tiny bit into a gap between his skin and the metal. Her fingernail barely scrapes his soft shell underneath and he goes very still.

"Must have been scary." she whispers.

"It was cool." he insists. His voice breaks a little and after what feels like an eternity he adds quietly on a soft breath "And scary."

She can't even imagine what it must have felt like. Getting swallowed by technology created by beings whose only goal was to destroy. Who only ever operated on hate and disdain and a complete lack of empathy.

Donnie's tech has always felt warm to her. Alive and vibrant and fun. Holding one of his gizmos in her hands, April can feel the love he put into it like a physical thing.

Did the spaceship feel like the Krang as well? Did it feel like being buried under hate and darkness and a hunger for suffering?

Sometimes she thinks that Raph wasn't the only one getting possessed by the Krang. What Don experienced was a lot more subtle, a lot more insidious, but for a moment he'd been one with something that was completely alien to him and his mindset.

He wasn't just a spaceship. He was a spaceship designed to destroy.

Donnie, who creates, who programmed an AI so life-like that it went through puberty.

A creator, forced to become one with a weapon of destruction.

April lowers her head and keeps rubbing circles into his shoulders and neck and her fingernails keep scraping his soft shell. With every contact, he seems to grow less tense, his shoulders relaxing, his breathing evening out.

"It's alright", she murmurs. "It's gonna be alright."

Donnie’s first battle shell arms in the Family Webs AU

I am doing devious deeds

The elusive Mikey-Centric fic

“Mikey never really thought about it. He never really questioned it beyond the occasional ‘I bet my turtle mom is out there somewhere’, which was just mostly amusing to him more than anything. He had a family. He didn’t need to know about anything else.

He never thought that the thing that made them so different, so special, could just be…taken away. Stopped in its tracks.”

Piece 2 for @rise-fashion-zine

They are the ✨ BEDAZZLE DUO✨ (combining my two favourite things was a GREAT idea)

 Guys…I have made an amazing discovery. (Watch with sound on).