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Brick and dust surrounds him, the smoky, thick air choking him as it works it’s way down his nostrils and sliding down the back of his throat, Donnie coughs once, then twice and a third time as he sits up with a pained wince, blinking through the newfound darkness that blankets his senses.
There’s the slow rolling echo of stone moving against stone. The last of the cave-in coming to a halt now, the tunnel is left in an eerie silence, his own ragged breathing floods the room with a heaviness that feels unnatural.
Donnie sucks in a breath, trying to ignore the tickle of dirty air that licks at the inside of his bruising lungs.
“Mikey?” He wheezes, voice sounding like it’s gone through a cheese grater first. “Mike? You okay?”
He waits with bated breath for a response. One moment they’d been strolling the sewers together, just a few easy feet apart as Mikey had lagged behind, spewing out nonsense about how bogus it was that they’d been sent out to gather raw sewage for the Shell Raiser, because they always got sent out for that job.
“It ain’t fair, Dee!“ His brother exclaimed, voice carrying dramatically through the tunnel. “We always get stuck with the worst jobs while Leo and Raph sit back and do zilch.”
The next… darkness, and pain. Lots of pain.
Now, his previous words sit in the air like ghosts as he waits for his response, Donnie sucks in a breath through gritted teeth. Brick and stone and collapsed pipe forms itself around him.
Lucky, he thinks to himself, his own inner voice sounding breathless. Lucky because he’d been in a good spot to be in when the tunnel had closed in on them. Had he been just a little to the left then the slab of concrete that’d made itself at home beside him, wouldn’t just be sitting there on the sewer ground, but maybe embedded into his skull instead.
He pushes himself up, a slight relief in the fact that he can feel, and move his legs, arms, fingers and toes, and so far there doesn’t seem to be much to report on in terms of any outside injuries.
As for what his insides were doing…
His gut twisting up with an anxious coil. His heart ramming furiously against the inside of his plastron. The back of his throat closes in on itself, a second cave in for the day, and so when he tries to call out again, the words come out strangled and meek, carrying only a few feet out ahead of him, dying somewhere in the rubble.
“Mikey!” He calls, his words wobble, wracked with a rising tide of fear. “Mikey! Where are you!”
More stone grinding against stone. The wet drip of stagnant water from overhead making each leap of faith downwards to join them, the noise coming from under the collapsed pipe is small and almost missable, but Donnie doesn’t miss it.
He doesn’t dare.
Another groan and Donnie pushes himself upwards. He feels the skin on his knees tear and rip and his pads must’ve come off sometime during the cave in, but he can do just about with skinned knees and fixable booboos. He lurches forward and curls his fingers around a particularly heavy slab of stone, and begins to pry.
It takes a few attempts; his vision is swimming with each passing second, the air around them is thinning and whilst he might have made a lucky escape with his head all in one piece, it didn’t mean that his brain hadn’t been rattled just a bit.
He blinks hard, just to keep his focus. A few more rocks and stone and bits of broken off pipe and—
There, buried under the wet, slimy grey of the once intact sewage tunnel, is a sliver of green and orange and then…
Baby blues.
“M’okay,” Mikey’s smile is wonky, sliding halfway up his face, eyes heavy and drooping and his words slip right out of his mouth with a heavy slur.
He’s pinned on his front, his shell having taken most of the hit, Donnie can’t see much of the damage but there’s a thin line of red slick against his shoulder, a paper cut really. Nothing too noticeable. Nothing too frightening.
“Stay there,” Donnie tells him. Not the smartest choice of words, and Mikey must realise that too. He doesn’t make his usual remark that he’d usually poke him with, but he laughs, all air rushing out of him at once, his eyes sliding shut ever so slowly.
“Hey.” Donnie places a hand on his shoulder. He had a bruise forming around his wrist, a little puffy and swollen and suddenly now that he’s seeing it, he feels the pain creep in. A bad sprain, most likely. But he doesn’t let that falter him. He nudges his brother and watches as his eyelids flicker back open again.
“Hey,” he says again once he has half his attention now. “Don’t go to sleep. Stay awake, hm? I’m gonna try and call the others, okay? See if they can get us outta here.”
He’s already reaching for his T-Phone tucked into his belt. His thumb traces along the spider web of hairline fractures that run across the screen. He holds his breath, hoping that cosmetic damages are all that he’s working with here, and that it isn’t totally lost.
But the screen greets him with a flash of brilliant white and he exhales, a little giddily, one hand still on Mikey’s shoulder as he punches in Leo’s number.
“I’ll send them the coordinates,” he says outloud, eyes darting back to the younger turtle, he’s struggling to keep his eyes open, but he’s fighting against sleep it seems. Blinking hard, his mouth is drawn into a thin line. “That way,” Donatello continues to explain. “I can keep the battery going, and they can track us. Calling them won’t be of any use. They have our location now. They should be here soon.”
Mikey hums, diplomatic. Then, he huffs another breathless laugh.
“That’s good, ‘cus I don’t really wanna hear Raph gloat about having to bail the B team out again,” he says, his mouth twitching into another smile. “You know they’re gonna be riding our shells for this for weeks, right?”
Donnie manages a thin smile. His hand slips away, the ache in his chest gnaws at him. There’s still a lot of rubble and rock and god knows what pinning Mikey to the floor. Like a rodent caught in a trap, he’s uselessly stuck.
“Well,” Donnie says, magically being able to keep his voice level even as he feels his entire body tremble from the inside out. “I guess we’ll have to get ‘em back next time,” he tells him. “Raph won’t like that.”
Mikey shuts his eyes again, for a few long seconds before dragging them back open again. His pupils are small, shrinking into the white. He looks pale, like the green had slipped away from his skin entirely.
“Yeah,” he rasps. “Sucks for him.”
Donnie reaches for Mikey’s hand. They may be ninjas but… the darkness can feel suffocatingly unfamiliar at times.
“Yeah,” his words form around a forced laugh. “It does.”
The tunnel breathes a gust of cool wind around them. Sewage water is pushed from the leaky pipes in fat droplets, landing beside them both, it pools in a dirty, brown circle. Mikey rolls his shoulder, hissing, his arm sinks into the wet.
“Hey, Donnie?” His voice is thin, small. Whispery and worrisome. His words worm around his heart, threatening to squeeze.
“Mmhmm?” He hums back. His head feels thick and heavy and the ground is harsh against his bleeding knees, pain zapping through his nerves like electricity. Mikey’s hand loose in his is what grounds him when he feels a short, brief squeeze of fingers around fingers.
“D’you know how far th’others might be?” He asks, his words string together now, Donnie flicks his tongue around in the inside of his mouth. Runs it along the inside of his teeth and pushes it through his gap like he’d done a million times before. Anything to keep his words from failing him when his brother needed them the most.
“Not far now, Mikey,” he tells him. He truly has no idea. They surely couldn’t be far. “Just hold on, okay?” He sighs. The burning panic and fear is slowly washed out with pain and exhaustion. When did he start to feel so tired? When did he start to feel so out of sorts?
Maybe he hit his head harder than he could remember.
But he pushes through the sludge of confusion and distortion. He rubs a finger over the back of Mikey’s hand and exhales shakily, like the fight was finally bleeding out of him.
“Just…” he breathes. He swears he can hear footsteps. Or maybe it’s just the sound of more stone falling away, making the escape that Donnie and his brother couldn’t attempt by themselves. “Just… hold on. Okay?” His eyes are closed now, the darkness engulfs him and he can hear muffled, faded voices. “Hold on…”
And then. It really is quiet.
***
“Just. Hold still, okay? I know. I know. Quit fussin’, you big baby.”
Raph’s voice floods his senses. It’s loud enough to wash over him and the entire room, but when Donnie peels his eyes open, he can’t see him. Just the tall, sloping ceiling of his lab.
The next voice is Mikey’s shaped around a pout,
“It hurts, Raph! This stuff stings like crazy and– ow !”
Donnie tries to lift his head, but it currently feels like a brick. He listens to the sound of bickering siblings as his clarity starts to emerge from the depths of his consciousness. His eyes slide shut again despite it.
“It’s gonna hurt, Mikey, it’s rubbing alcohol.” Leo informs him, his voice as steady as ever. “You need it or you’ll get an infection. Here, lemme–”
They must switch places, Raph and Leo. There’s the shuffling of feet, the creak of Donnie’s office chair and grumbling from their red banded brother as he’s obviously sidelined of medical duties.
“Are you sure this is the right stuff?” Mikey’s tone is tentative. There’s another squeak of the old lab chair, maybe Mikey squirming his way out of his brother's grip. And then a pained hiss. Leo must’ve kept him still long enough.
“You’re lucky Donnie keeps things organised ‘round here.” That’s Raph again, his voice sounding a little closer, he must be standing right by him now. “Otherwise we would’ve had to have chopped it.” He can hear the smirk in his words. “Clean off.”
Mikey whines and Leo scolds Raph with no real intention behind his words. They get a bit rowdy before Leo is shushing them.
“Guys. Donnie is still resting. Everybody out before we wake him.”
A pause. Mikey’s voice is closer now. They all are.
“Will he be okay?” He asks, voice small.
A hand on his. Then another. Then, tentatively, a third. It’s a warm, grounding feeling.
Donnie musters up the strength to peel his eyes open, his brothers haloed around his head, grinning at him.
“Seems like it, little brother,” Raph says around a smile. “How’re you feeling, Don?”
Donnie swallows. His mouth still feels dry but his chest feels like an over flowing water balloon of emotion. Mikey is okay. He’s standing and he’s grinning like a loon. He’s alright.
It’s his hand that’s resting over his.
“Like I had a sewer tunnel fall on my head,” he jests dryly. It doesn’t stop the corners of his mouth curling upwards into the faintest of smiles, however.
Leo’s shoulders droop back down, hiked up previously with tension, he exhales a short breath, the sharp uncertainty in his dark eyes seem to edge away, replaced with a certain kind of softness that is reserved for big brothers only.
“Glad you’re okay, Donnie. Both of you. You knocked your head pretty hard but you’ll be alright.”
They eventually file out, leaving him in the echoey chamber, beside a frozen Timothy and a scattering of his previously abandoned experiments, it’s Mikey that lingers.
He always had a natural draw to the lab, poking his head around the garage doors when boredom crept up on him. Or whether it was brotherly aptitude to waltz in here and annoy Donnie to no ends possible, he really didn’t care at all. The room had a tendency to feel rather barren without his brother’s energy occupying it, so it felt fitting that it was just them here now.
“So,” Donnie croaks. “Did they totally rip into you?”
Mikey flops down on the chair, doing a few dramatic spins before righting himself to sit next to Donnie’s head beside the infirmary cot.
“As soon as they saw I was fine,” he grins. “I told ya.”
Donnie lets his eyes slide shut again. He knows his brother won’t be offended if he falls back asleep again. If anything, maybe Mikey is waiting for it, just so he can be sure he’s really okay.
“At least maybe we won’t have to go sewer scavenging now,” Donnie says, a hopeful lilt to his words.
Mikey hums, leaning over so he can rest his head on the front of his plastron.
“Nah,” his words are thick with tiredness. “They’ll make us go back,” he says. “We lost all our trash in the collapse anyway.”
Donnie pats absentmindedly at his head. It appears they both might be falling asleep here tonight.
“We’re okay,” Donnie says, and it’s an effort to stay awake now, exhaustion has him in a tightening grip, and it seems to be dragging them both down. “The Shell Raiser will survive and so will we.”
Mikey hums, and even with his eyes shut, Donnie knows that it’s worn with a smile.