Chapter Text
Sixteen years old~ I....
The pink tinged sky hanging over the city is alien. Naturally, because the Krang are aliens. The technodrome that Donnie piloted only halfway back into the portal is suspended in the sky like a still frame from a bad Jupiter Jim rip off. Raph cuts off his tirade of data collection, voice strained.
“Donnie-- Leo’s still up there!”
They stare into the gaping darkness of the portal.
Calling them twins has always been Leo’s thing, and Don has always discredited the claim with science. No matter how many facts about their very distinctive species of turtle were spit at him though, Leonardo’s irrefutable truth since childhood was and always will be that Donatello is his twin.
“Casey, close the portal now!!” A heavy thud cuts across their comms as Leo grunts in pain, “Casey-- ungh-- Please!”
The portal whips closed like an elastic band released after being stretched past its limit, freezing only a moment around the technodrome before disintegrating in a blinding flash. The shockwave rips past them, flinging small bits of debris all the way across the river. Smoke plumes through the sky in elegant concentric rings, the graceful pattern beguiling of the massive destruction they wreak.
Donatello sees none of it as he turns his back, staring in silent shock at the piece of wreckage that has sailed across the bay with their initial fall. Behind him, Mikey is sobbing, and Raphael cries quietly curled on the ground in front of him. But Donnie cannot see him clearly, his vision blurs as something moist trails down his face.
The world feels sharp and wrong . Darker. Duller. Tilting on its axis, as if gravity has stopped working, yet the weight of the atmosphere crushes him from the inside out. There is a sharp ringing, but it isn't in his ear. It is somewhere, far off and yet somehow, inside .
Empty. Gone. Missing.
From a source he cannot name, deep in his consciousness, psyche... spirit ? Emanating from a place so integral to him that he can hardly begin to wrap his brilliant mind around it.
A gap, a breach, a void .
Something is gone. Ripped from him the moment the portal closes. And it aches like a gaping wound in his soul .
His breath hitches in his chest even as he lifts a hand to wipe at his eye, fingers coming away wet.
Donatello shakes his head as he stares at the tears glistening on his fingertips and comes to a startling realization.
Leo-- His twin .
His twin is gone .