Chapter Text
“You,” Donnie hisses as he barrels into Leo’s room.
Leo flails in surprise and playing cards go everywhere. “I didn’t do it!”
Momentarily derailed, Donnie squints down at him. “I look forward to following up on that statement with proper retribution. But no, brother, I have something far more pressing to discuss.”
A spider arm emerges from his battle shell and thrusts a tablet in Leo’s face. Donnie cuts off Leo’s complaints with a stabbing finger to the screen. “Care to explain this?”
Leo stares at the image, makes a show of furrowing his brow and cocking his head. He can pretend all he likes; Donnie’s onto him.
“Well… looks like there were dirty dishes in the sink. Mhm. And if you look closely, you can see Mikey rinsing them. Now, I’m guessing that next he’s gonna put them in the dishwasher, y’know, to clean them? Yeah.” Leo nods with conviction and smirks up at Donnie. “You think a guy who builds AI for fun could have put that much together, but hey, they call ‘em idiot croissants for a reason.” He starts gathering the scattered cards into a messy pile.
Little does he know that Donatello cannot be baited by such juvenile tactics! Nonetheless…
“Idiot savants, you mean, though certainly not in regards to me. After all, I noticed your little scheme, didn’t I?” Donnie plops down on the floor across from Leo and grabs some of the further cards with his spider arms. They’re crisp, not like the ones they keep in the projector room for family game nights. “Doing the dishes is supposed to be your chore this week, and yet there stands dear Michaelangelo, slaving away at the sink. You tricked him somehow.”
“Relaaax, Donnie. Mikey lost a bet, fair and square. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.”
As he speaks, his hands reassemble the deck, face down, and with quickstep tempo, he shuffles them. He slips cards in and out of the deck, first by the short edge, then by the long edge. A brief stillness, edges perfectly aligned, before he splits the deck and smoothly twists the halves into parallel. With a sound like a dozen bird wings, he bends their middles into each other and cascades them into rough uniform, then arches them into a bridge to blend the deck. The whole process takes less than thirty seconds.
“Not what I meant.” Leo didn’t understand, perhaps deliberately. He may keep his face slack, but his hands move fast. Donnie summons the same care he usually employs when soldering wires to two-inch circuit boards. “Mikey hates doing the dishes almost as much as you do. Why would he bet against you, a veteran odds-stacker? Either you offered him something good… or you gave him one hell of a sales pitch.”
Leo at least has the good sense not to pretend he doesn’t know what Donnie’s talking about. “Your doubt hurts me, deep inside. What if I got my hands on the long-lost copy of Jupiter Jim’s Adventure on Planet Cola?”
“Highly unlikely.” Donnie’s web trawlers will alert him the moment the movie forward-slash hour-long fast food commercial hits the Internet. “So, what did you do to convince him?”
“What’s it to you, anyway? Mikey giving you the runaround? Need a few tips from Neon Leon to smooth the bumpy road to peace? I’m happy to help, of course, anything for a brother in need, but I gotta say, not sure how much I can offer on an empty stomach…”
One stack into two, again. Bent into a wishbone, interweaving, then arched and released until it was a neatly reunited. Leo doesn’t need to concentrate on his hands, which leaves his vacant gaze free to drift between Donnie and his bedroom door-curtain.
Donnie ignores it and the blatant grab for snacks. “Again, not what I meant. At the moment, Mikey and I are in good standing. I just want to know…” Donnie searches for the least humiliating (for him), least flattering (for Leo) way to say this. It’s nothing that Leo doesn’t already know, so why does each word feel he’s bending a pin in his CPU?
Unfortunately, Leo doesn’t believe in contemplative silence, or silence at all, really. “Know what?” He shuffles the cards in the same wishbone-bridge, but upside down this time. “The secret to looking this good? Well, we can start with your skincare routine…” And he’s off to the races, talking about something and nothing all at the same time.
Donnie tunes out the environmental white noise of Leo’s cadence with practiced ease. He humors him with a few acknowledging noises, but the bulk of his processing power is devoted to considering and discarding rhetorical avenues.
Getting Leo to have an honest conversation is like catching mice with a cannon (not a laser one, obviously). If Donnie doesn’t step carefully, he will either trip into a bickering match or stumble out with some pyritic consolation prize. Donnie can barely remember the last time the two of them had really talked.
…Never mind, yes, he can. Eugh.
His heartbeat thuds, dum-dum, dum-dum, in his ears.
Donnie says, “I invoke the Prisoner’s Dilemma Accords.”
Leo, who has graduated to actual tricks during his monologue, sends his cards to his left hand, a good two feet below his right, and claps them to a halt. As he squares the deck, his golden eyes dart up to meet Donnie’s, dagger-sharp.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma Accords arise from the perfect storm of two quick-thinking turtles being seven-and-a-half in close quarters. They know each other past the point of love. Donnie waits until Leo finishes preparing his aerial unit to gruesomely decimate his beloved pincer formation, little green men melted onto the sewer floor. Leo throws in jargon from Donnie’s speeches tilted just left enough to infuriate, but the joke gets lost when Mikey asks him to say the word again, slower. They push each other during ninja tag, hard to enough to bruise, and bring each other their favorite bandaids.
Raph knocks their heads and tells them to find other enrichment for their enclosure before they poison the community water hole. Well, he doesn’t use those words. The sentiment is the same.
Here’s the rub: neither of them wants to hurt the other; neither of them wants to not hurt the other. They dance between the two and for the most part, manage not to step on any toes. The family’s concern arises from the times when toes get broken.
They would probably prefer if Donnie and Leo simply stopped dancing. That’s the simplest option, certainly. Unfortunately for them, it’s not on the table.
They compromise; the twins will follow rules of engagement, twist their bodies into choreographed steps and constrain their moves to the dance floor. Knocking elbows under a shared blanket, they shine a flashlight down at a muddy magazine and learn to move, 1-2, 3-4.
They call it the Prisoner’s Dilemma Accords.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners decide on a betrayal that might save or doom themself, or cooperation to earn a little bit of both. The magazine’s graphic of the decision matrix simplifies the four outcomes into smiley faces, winky faces, and frowny faces. Leo points at them and contorts his face into an exaggerated, wounded pout, like one of those crying clowns.
Donnie smacks him and reads the description out loud, to mutual disgust. It has too much science for Leo and too little for Donnie, making it the perfect candidate to adapt (or misinterpret, depending on the lighting) for their own purposes.
The premise: if Donnie hands Leo a blue gun with one purple bullet, and Leo hands Donnie a purple gun with one blue bullet, they each have a loaded gun.
What’s a twin to do with it?
You can waste your bullet on your twin. In fact, that’s the context in which the bullet does the most damage. You can also waste your bullet on another target, if you want. The fire will be smaller, but it’ll still burn hot. Afterwards, even if you’ve used your only bullet, you’ve dealt glorious, explosive damage, and you still have this sick, color-coded gun to wave around. There’s a lot of things a turtle can do with a gun.
Then again, life is so much more fun when it’s loaded.
Not only can you do everything with it that you can do with an unloaded gun, but it also has your twin’s color in the chamber, ready to fire. You can hold it to his head. You can point it at every offending sidewalk crack and brussel sprout. You can even keep it tucked close to your shell, angled perfectly to catch the light at the most dramatic moment.
A loaded gun has such a delicious potential energy, the kind of heft that makes you smirk while your twin grits his teeth. Are you going to shoot him with it? Or are you going to find something more worthy of his bullet?
Either shot will hurt him really, really bad. He knows this and knows you know this. Firing it, betrayal would fill his golden eyes, right before the rage, right before the entry wound. This alone won’t stop you.
You must also consider the very significant chance that your twin survives, as is your nature, or otherwise he sees your smoking gun. He’s going to turn around and hurt you even worse. Maybe with his gun, maybe with two guns. Maybe with something a little more creative. This too won’t stop you.
But isn’t life more fun with a loaded gun?
“Alright, first you make your case,” Leo says. He squints at the scrawled crayon on the ancient rules sheet. “Then I’ll decide the rate of exchange.”
This deep in the sewers, none of their family can eavesdrop, and the air is cool and damp from the lack of HVAC. The only source of light is the dim-setting floodlights from Donnie’s battleshell, and the only source of warmth is the line of Leo’s arm against his own.
They sit side-by-side so they can both read the rules, at Donnie’s insistence, lest Leo get any funny ideas about live-editing for personal gain. They both need a refresher. Donnie is surprised that Leo had managed to dig up the original document.
“You propose a level of exchange. We decide it. There’s a negotiation period.”
“Hey, this was your idea. Let’s not have a repeat of the Macaroni Debate.”
“No idea what you’re talking about.” Donnie clears his throat. “…Anyways. My case. Yes.”
“Dude, just spit it out already. Don’t overthink it.”
Donnie bristles. “Thank you for your insightful advice,” he grits out. But when he glares at Leo, he softens. The corner of Leo’s mouth is ticked down, his version of regret. “Whatever. Do you remember the mission last week, with the Dragon’s Tooth?”
“Which one?” Leo asks, side eyeing him.
Donnie’s eyes widen. “You remember that?! You should’ve told me sooner! I have so many tests I could— Ahem. I mean the first one, the one foiled by your obsession with Pizza Pigeon.”
Donnie had equipped all his brothers with the perfect equipment for the job and provided detailed intel of what to expect at each juncture. He had accounted for every variable, except for the astonishing depth of his brothers’ willful stupidity. Talking to them was like trying to chip titanium with limestone.
“It didn’t work and it was futile to even try,” Donnie clarifies.
“Seems easier to say it the second way.”
The data from the second mission supports his hypothesis that if they had just listened to him when he said something was important, saw things from his perspective for once, everything would turn out fine! Although later experiments suggest that the ideal solution lies somewhere beyond personality refinement. Lesson learned, hurrah for individuality and all that.
The conflicting data leaves Donnie with a quandary. If there was nothing wrong with Donnie’s plan, and there was also nothing wrong with Donnie’s brothers, where is the problem?
“Communication,” Donnie concludes. “Somehow, despite my thorough explanation, none of you understood how important this was. Something got lost in translation, somewhere along the way.” He takes a deep breath. “But you… you got Mikey to listen to you, and not just do what you wanted, but also act against his best interest. Tell me your secret, and I’ll tell you one of mine.”
Leo’s finally looking right at him, even if he’s still fiddling with the boxed-up cards he brought along. “Oookay. You’re coming to me to get Raph, Mikey, and me to pay attention to your plans, based off a single bet I made with Mikey?” He sucks his teeth, and his head falls against the sewer wall. “Level 3. I’ll tell you how I got Mikey to say yes to washing the dishes for a Level 3 secret of yours.”
This dumb-dumb is messing with him.
“Yeah, I’m just messing with you, jeez, get that look off your face! Level 2, Level 2, al-right, fine, Level 1, stop looking like you’re about to bite me!” Leo laughs and holds his hands up in surrender. He nudges Donnie with his shoulder as the box of cards leaps from one hand to the other. “I know the penalties, Don Tron.”
“You’re supposed to be honest, even with the proposal. No bargaining tricks.” Donnie grits out. His twin leans against him, boneless and warm and light as air.
“You caught me, didn’t you? Should’ve known better than to try to pull one over your eyes.” The box spins round and round in his left hand.
Donnie doesn’t dignify that with a response. Leo still hasn’t finished.
“We don’t have to do the Prisoner’s Dilemma thing, you know. Last week, it, ugh, it wasn’t my finest moment. I’m turtle enough to admit it.” Donnie’s hands tremble, but he forces them to stay flat instead of fisted. “I’ll just tell you, and we’ll call this one a freebie, okay? Plus, scout’s honor, I promise I’ll listen you next time.” Oh, this one stings.
“That’s your proposal? A functional Level 0?” Donnie asks. Leo’s gentle smile freezes, caught. So he does know the penalties; Donnie hadn’t been sure, from the way he had been acting. “Great. Counter: Level 5.” Highest level, biggest secrets, complete honesty, and worst of all, total vulnerability, baby.
His counter hits Leo like an anvil from sixty feet up.
“Level 5?!” Leo cries out, and the deck drops to his lap. Then he clears his throat and smiles disarmingly as his eye twitches. “Are you sure you read the rules right? Level 5 is like, nuclear launch codes, birthday surprises, Atomic Lass self-insert fanfiction. My bet with Mikey isn’t a nuclear launch code! You aren’t allowed to propose a Level mismatch to give me penalties.”
Donnie smiles, and the urge to throttle Leo fades. The actor onstage is floundering for his lines, and the tech in the catwalks is only too willing to focus the spotlight.
“I agree, your bet with Mikey isn’t a nuclear launch code, nor is it at the level of one.” Leo’s plastic smile crumbles, and his shoulders tense and rise. “But that’s not what I’m asking, is it? And surely you aren’t going to sell me the secret of your persuasive ability for less than a Level 5.”
Leo’s mouth twists into a scowl, the first unfiltered expression he’s made all day. “There’s no secret to tell.”
“Gasp! Nardo, I had no idea you were so eager for penalties. You already have one from the proposal, and now another from the negotiation table? Why, by the end of this, I wonder if you’ll have any secrets left at all. My twin, the open book! The other two will be delighted.” Donnie conceals a gag with theatric excitement.
“…that came out wrong,” he says weakly. “What I meant to say is that the way I do things won’t help you. Counter: Level 3, I tell you the stuff that will help you.”
“Level 4, you also explain what and why the other ‘stuff’ won’t help me.” As always, Leo won’t tell him everything, but Donnie won’t let him get away with telling him just enough.
Leo considers this. “Level 4, done.” Donnie almost misses the flash of Leo’s nasty little smirk.
They shake on it with bruise-tight grips.