revivalproject

Entry tags:

Retry

WHO: Donnie and you...ie
WHERE: Temba
WHAT: R&R (Rest and Recuperation)
WHEN: Latter half of April
WARNINGS: N/A
NOTES: Will match tag prefs!

It's like he's missing a whole chunk of time. It's an unsettling thing, only remembering last being on the Agrii ship, and then more or less finding yourself back on Temba. What did he miss? How long had he been out? Everything in between was fuzzy or non-existent. He vaguely remembers waking up in a strange bed and medical monitors beeping around him, but before he could fully panic, he'd found Leo there beside him. Snippets of things like that, of faces and voices that he can't even say for certain he hadn't just dreamed it all.

He's not sure how he'd gotten back, he doesn't remember the trip, or making the trek out to the farther end of the city where he and Sonic had staked claim to one of the warehouses. It's annoying and perhaps more than a little frightening, but the only reason he hasn't freaked out has been because Leo's always been nearby. Feeling weirdly weak and exhausted as he's been, Donnie was relieved enough to just leave things at that.

And that's how it's been for the first few days back. He can't remember the last time he'd felt so awful, but then this was largely different from recovering from a cold or (*shudder*) a case of rat flu. But eventually he gets to the point where he's tired of being stuck in bed and tries to actually do things.

I. Out of Alignment
Tired and still kind of weirdly detached from things as he's feeling, it doesn't keep Donnie away from trying to get back to work around the warehouse. He can't help but feel like something's missing though, and even though it should be blindingly obvious, that one detail just seems to be evading him, and thinking too hard starts to make his head hurt.

He doesn't seem terribly inclined to go out, and mostly he's relegated any activities to indoors, interspersed with periods where he just feels like sitting or zoning out somewhere. His main communicator's still a mess and its consistent inconsistency with notifications have started to give him a headache enough that he's opted to mute it and leave it to scream in silence on a countertop somewhere. At least he's programmed his new primary tablet to get forwarded actual correspondences from the main network, but Donnie hasn't been terribly inclined to check it of late.

There seems to be a lot that needs to be sorted through when it comes to acquisitions from the spaceport. Crates of salvage and boxes of tech-related purchases, and no small amount of clothes. At any other time Donnie would have been eager to dive into it all but right now every time he looks at it, it just seems incredibly overwhelming, so he ends up backing off. Everything feels that way, if he's being honest with himself. He feels like he's fallen behind somehow but he's not sure where to apply himself first to get things back into gear.

Maybe he just needs a breath of fresh air.

II. Plant Matters
In hindsight he's thankful he'd put some effort into setting up an automatic system for watering plants. Long before their space-venture, Donnie had converted an end of the lower level of the warehouse into a private greenhouse, knocking out the wall and installing large panes of glass in its place. It had all definitely been a process but ultimately worth it, and the natural light it let in during the lengthy daylight hours was a nice bonus. Inspecting the progress of the plants there is a relaxing enough duty, and plotting out where to add his new acquisitions isn't all too difficult. He hadn't gone overboard with those at the spaceport, not when he was already aware that many of the plants around Temba were already considered some sort of invasive species.

The plants he'd established outside of the warehouse are another matter. There are a few shelves with a variety of potted plants, and the ones that have weathered the winter climate have started to show their springtime colors. ...and then there are the suspiciously spiked, scarlet vines that have started to wind their way up a couple corners of the outside of the warehouse. But that had been Donnie's intention, a natural sort of security measure, and in the case of an E.V.E. (Extreme Vampire Emergency), a potential alternative for any new bloodsucking residents that might appear. (He wouldn't go so far as to say he was paranoid so much as that he just likes to be prepared.)

Donnie's outside doing some careful trimming just to make sure they don't get too out of hand. He remembers how the train station in Sh'Ka had looked, so he's keeping the vines to very concentrated lines instead of having too many branching out. Bloody walls are not a thing he wants to end up having to clean up, but thankfully the vines haven't spread too much and no berries have developed just yet.

III. Un-Forge-ttable (for Tony)
Eventually Donnie gets back into his projects. He can't not work on things for long, so he's finally tackled sorting through some of the things he'd gotten at the spaceport. A lot of the salvage he'd dug up hadn't been for specific ideas but there had been plenty of parts in decent shape, wiring and computer components, fuses and gears aside from a variety of other things. He'd taken things apart until his hand decided it didn't want to hold tools any longer, so now he's packed up the parts into a box to bring over to the Forge.

Tony's not the only one who builds things, true, but he's the first who naturally comes to mind, and it seems like it's been far too long since Donnie'd last interacted with the man. They'd worked on fixing things on the ship, hadn't they? But he can't be sure as to just how long ago that had been. Well, he's got parts that can likely find use by the man, and if he's not in then Donnie will just leave it there with a note.

IV. Re-what
Recovery sucks. Go figure after you've been stuck in bed for a couple of weeks (? who knows anymore), your body just doesn't feel the same way it used to. Is this how dad feels? Gross.

Donnie had never figured he'd ever catch up with sleep for the abnormal hours he'd been used to keeping, but he feels like recently he's made a pretty good effort in trying, and not at all intentional on his part. He just finds himself getting tired quicker, napping a lot more in between doing things. He hates it, so naturally he tries to push himself to get back to some normal levels of activity.

At least the weather's nice. He doesn't mind the random showers, but perhaps that's to be expected from a turtle. Now if only he didn't feel so winded heading out to the ruins where he'd set up one of his plant experiments. Or, you know, walking everywhere else. Maybe he should've brought his rocket boots, but his tech-bō comes in handy as a walking staff.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It sure is a dead giveaway. "Oh, gross. Who let you pick the plant names?"

At the smirk, Leo scowls even harder. "Literally nothing! Pretty sure he's just jealous that I'm more handsome and cool and awesome than he is."

It's Donnie's turn to scowl at that. "Oh like you can do better. It sounds more professional than 'cumato'," he huffs.

Of course Leo's defense only further condemns him for having misstepped with the speedster in some way, but Donnie also knows that Tommy also has questionable opinions, such as Hawaiian pizza.

"Uh-huh. You know, it's not wise to get on the bad side of the people in charge of the kitchen."

“Oh, but see, that’s great!” He claps his hands together. “You have cucumber and tomato! Cumato!”

Leo huffs and shifts in his seat, arms folded.

“Look, all I said was that if I was going to be kidnapped all the way to space, it should be for something cooler than trying to fix up this dump.” He gestures to indicate all of Temba. “He’s the one who took that to mean I’m a terrible hero.”

Of course his brother would be on board with that name. Donnie rolls his eyes, looking back down at his bowl to start working on some noodles.

"Ah." That explains things, more or less. His brother may be the face man, but sometimes his tact is about the same as the rest of the turtle siblings. "Heroes help people and solve problems. The Agrii probably took this idea for face value, so...here we are."

He chews on a mouthful of noodles. It's kind of sad now that he knows how more expensive food tastes to be able to tell the slight differences, but they're still good. As he eats, he picks his phone up again, resuming swiping through pictures. "I forgot we took so many at that restaurant," he says, smirking slightly. Had Leo seen them yet? He sets the phone between them as he continues flicking the screen. Look'it them, all cool posing in fancy clothes with the best backdrop.

Leo looks offended. "I help people! It's just easier for me to help people who need a monster defeated or an evil organization infiltrated."

Because he feels like it's been pretty demonstrably proven that he isn't useful when it comes to fixing up the city. He tried to help Donnie with one thing and Donnie ended up electrocuted.

He does lean in to look at Donnie's phone, grinning when he sees what he has pulled up.

"Man, we look good. Me especially, of course."

"Oh, you are going to be so bored here," Donnie can't help but note, sipping his soup. While the monster attacks aren't unheard of, it did seem pretty rare. But then after the instances Donnie had been thrown into, he can honestly say he's glad of that.

"I think we can both safely say I wore it better," he snorts, still swiping through pictures. There's a few shots of the food, there's random shots of the spaceport and the obligatory selfies scattered throughout, once they do get past all the dinner photos. There's a couple of him and Te Mi back at the Agrii ship. And then he comes to the last picture in the gallery of Leo, decked out with his goggles and bracer computer. Donnie blinks, brow furrowing in confusion.

"..huh?"

"Doesn't count, they were your clothes. I would have smoked you if I had a sugar daddy buying me clothes."

Leo chills back, watching the pictures go through. He grimaces when they get to the one of him in the goggles and bracer, both because it reminds him of a very unfun day and also because he told Donnie to delete that.

And he's about to comment as much when Donnie's reaction counts him off guard.

"...What do you mean, huh?"

Donnie picks his phone up to stare at the picture, flicking back and forth between that and the one before it but there's really no context to it so far as he can figure.

"When was this..?" he frowns.

"You... seriously don't remember?"

Leo searches Donnie's face for any hint that he's making some kind of joke, sighing when he doesn't see one. Donnie's a pretty bad liar, so he doubts it anyway.

"Ah geez... that must have scrambled your brain harder than I thought."

"Should I..?" He looks more concerned at that. "I don't..." Donnie looks at Leo, his words not exactly encouraging.

"Leo, what happened..? I...don't remember getting here, or when we even left the ship..."

"Yeah, you've been pretty out of it, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised."

Leo sighs, his leg bouncing under the table. Just thinking about it is making his anxiety spike again.

"You remember the stasis beds, right? They were in the new part of the Agrii ship, and you wanted to go check them out, so you had me come with you?"

Donnie hunches up his shoulders, looking down at the picture again. He doesn't like troubling Leo, he's already been pretty worried...

"Stasis beds..." His brows furrow together again as he tries to dredge up something, anything. "I think so? Down...under engineering, right?" He remembers that there was something there, anyway.

"Right, in the part that got opened up when they broke through that force field thing."

Leo points at the picture, where part of the stasis bed is just visible beyond his own grumpy form. "See? We found out that these things can teleport. Not just between the ship and here, but maybe even between the ship and other worlds. So you wanted to see if we could reverse engineer the teleportation part of it.

"It had some kind of security measure, though. So you told me to run the diagnosis command on it, 'cause I had Comms, and you thought maybe that would shut down enough systems to make it safe. But... I don't know, maybe I did it wrong." Leo worries at his lip. "You tried to open it up, and you got shocked."

Leo'd never admit doing something wrong under normal circumstances, so him doing so now just makes Donnie feel doubly guilty. He sets the phone down even as he still studies the picture, what can be made out of the beds, the background.

You tried to open it up, and you got shocked.

He folds his arms tightly against himself. If it were just a warning sort of shock, it shouldn't have taken him out like that. His right hand twitches before his fingers curl tightly around his arm.

"...how bad was it?" he finally asks, quietly. He feels bad not being able to reassure his brother that it couldn't have been on his end, even if he doesn't think it was. Everything just seemed to be actively designed to be difficult if not impossible to get around. He just wishes he could remember what all he might have found out when he was there.

“…Bad,” Leo admits, slumping in his seat.

He hates this. He doesn’t want to admit to Donnie that the situation got out of control, that he didn’t know what to do or where to go, but Donnie deserves answers about what happened to him.

“One of the beds teleported you inside, so… they must have some way of knowing our vitals? I guess. It knew you were really hurt, anyway. But it wouldn’t let me open the pod up, and I wasn’t even sure if I should, so… I messaged that Tony guy, then I ran to get help.”

That makes Donnie wince. Recalling Leo there at those times when he did wake up makes a lot more sense now.

"Hurt because it caused the damage. That seems awfully convenient," he murmurs, unable to help for being bitter about that point. Someone didn't want them dead, but they wasn't afraid of exacting punishment. The thought makes him curl in tighter, his soup for the moment forgotten. How bad was bad? How hurt was really hurt? He's not sure he wants to know the exact answers, especially with how Leo's acting, or for the look on his face.

He can understand how Leo must have panicked. Donnie might have too, especially considering the specific information one seemed to need to be able to even understand the things. He looks a little surprised that Leo had contacted Tony, but then maybe he shouldn't be, given what he'd admitted to his brother about the man. So that's at least one other person that had been aware of what had happened.

Donnie doesn't want to ask but he glances at Leo, wondering if he wants to continue.

Leo doesn’t really want to, but now that he’s started he’s on a roll.

“I found some guy - he said he was a doctor, and apparently he is, but he’s also a crazy weirdo- Anyway, when I got back with him Tony was already there, and whew those guys do not like each other.”

Leo gives his head a shake.

“Anyway, I told them both what happened but I don’t think either of them actually listened to me.” Leo’s frustration at the whole situation starts to leak through, showing in his voice and posture. “Because they both just start doing stuff without explaining and then fighting with each other while you were laying there not waking up!”

There's only one guy Donnie can think of who's claimed to be a doctor but would fit with Leo's appraisal. He frowns. Tony had warned him to keep his distance from Wesker, but aside from that, Donnie really didn't know how things were between those two.

He looks even more uncomfortable as he can clearly see that Leo had been suffering through that. It really shouldn't have been so complicated. His brother shouldn't have had to go through that. As Leo's voice starts picking up with his frustration, Donnie forces himself to untangle from his own arms, pushing out of his seat so he can come around to where Leo is and wrap them around his brother instead.

After being away from his brothers for almost a year, he feels extremely bad about making his brother worry about him. It seems clear enough that it's his fault for putting Leo into such a spot in the first place. And what if he didn't make it? It's a scary thought that slips its way in and Donnie can't help but tighten his arms around his brother.

Edited 2024-04-23 00:16 (UTC)

Leo freezes when Donnie gets up to hug him. He hadn’t meant to get that worked up; he wasn’t trying to stress Donnie out about it, when he was the one recovering.

After a second, he lifts his own arms and hugs Donnie back, squeezing tight. It’s okay. Donnie is alive and recovering; he’s been more awake the last day or so, too. He’s going to be alright, so Leo can calm down, too.

Still…

“…I just wish I had known what to do,” he says, voice a little muffled where his face is pressed into Donnie’s shoulder. “So I wouldn’t have had to deal with those guys.”

So he wouldn’t have had to rely on other people. People who might not care about Donnie as much as he does.

This is part of recovering, isn't it? He might regret filling in the blanks but at the same time, this is Donnie and not-knowing isn't an option he's known to choose willingly nor very often.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and he really, really means it.

Leo's words resonate with him; it's part of the basis of why Donnie's worked so hard to do anything and why it always annoys him when there's something he finds he's overlooked, even if it's a small matter. Because he should have known. Because he should have prepared. Reality is a lot different though and he knows it, and here things just get even more complicated when you're physically limited to what sort of applicable information you can hold at any given time.

"Wesker's a jerk," he says, plainly. "Tony... is complicated, I get that. But he always means well, even if it's hard to tell.

"I think you did what you could, though. The way things are, here, it's like they're forcing us to have to rely on other people. Even if we know one part of how something functions, we can't understand the rest of it at the same time. Someone doesn't want any one of us to have all the answers or be self-sufficient, and...it's harder for some of us to deal with that when we're so used to being the ones that solve everything."

That's how Wesker is. How Tony is. Even how Donnie is.

He's had his own frustrations with that. You can't figure out how certain things work and understand the programming, not simultaneously. It isn't impossible to try and handle both ends but it is incredibly exhausting to have to keep switching between things, yet Donnie's suffered through it anyway because that's how he's always been. Except he knows it doesn't always work that way.

Edited (whoops words keep hiding from me) 2024-04-23 01:33 (UTC)

"It's not your fault," says Leo, because Donnie is the one who got hurt here, he doesn't have to apologize.

And the thing is, it's not like Leo minds not being self-sufficient. Or at least, he didn't used to. He knew he was nothing without his brothers backing him up. He could tell when he needed help. That's why he went to Hueso when he thought they were portaljacked; why he went looking for help when Donnie got podded.

But now he's wondering if he can let himself be like that. Always looking for help when he doesn't know what to do. Always turning to others instead of relying on himself. And he's starting to think he really can't. Because what if something like this happens again?

He'd felt like that more and more back home, too. Raph wanted them to work as a team, but wasn't it better for everyone, safer for everyone, if only one of them was in the line of danger?

Leo is rolling all those thoughts over in his head. He doesn't know the answers, but what he does know is that he doesn't want Donnie to ever be hurt like that again.

"Well... it'd help if the people we had to rely on didn't fight like dumb kids over everything."

(The irony of Leo saying this.)

But it is, Donnie wants to say. The silence practically says it for him. If he hadn't been so insistent on trying to reverse engineer that pod, none of this would have happened, right? And what if Leo hadn't been there? Donnie knows the chances were high that he would've attempted to do it alone. Would anyone have known? Or would he have been...

Without being able to recall what they had learned about the pods, all he can think about are worst case scenarios, and although his arms are getting tired and sore where they are, he still hangs on tightly as he rests his head against Leo's shoulder.

"...heh. Yeah." His heart's not into it but he can't say Leo's wrong there. "I don't know if people have really figured out how the data point stuff is supposed to work. I don't think I realized it either until I was talking with Robotnik..."

It's belated, but the missing puzzle piece, that nagging detail that he hadn't been able to place, finally clicks. "Hey, have you seen Sonic?"

Donnie hugs are rare, so if he wants to hold on Leo will let him. (He likes hugs anyway but shhh he’s cool and tough!)

The sudden subject change catches him off guard. Sonic? Oh yeah, the fast hedgehog guy…

Leo searches his memories, but since he’s been holed up with Donnie he hasn’t really been around the rest of the He Rows since Donnie got hurt.

“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him.”

He wonders what happened to him. Hopefully nothing bad.

This is well past his usual limit but all this has left him more than a little unsettled, and a physical connection seems to go a long way in helping him feel more connected with the rest of the world of late. Donnie might let up soon though. He hates that he still feels so tired. Getting exhausted from a hug? That's just unheard of.

"Oh."

That...probably doesn't bode well. The disappointment's clear, as is the subtle worry.

"I just figured maybe he was running around somewhere while I've been out. He gets bored really easily, you know? That's why we were going to build that other ramp."

Shoot. And right when Donnie is recovering, he may have lost a friend.

Leo hooks his foot around one of the nearby chairs and pulls it closer to him, nudging Donnie to sit. They can lean on each other if Donnie still wants, but hopefully it’s more comfy.

“…Sorry, Dee. You guys were friends, huh?”

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