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Leo doesn’t really think until he’s already halfway there.
It strikes him, still walking one foot in front of the other along the chilly floor of the lair, that this is more than likely a bad idea. He knows how Donnie feels about… well, a lot of things. And even on a good day, Leo knows he’s a walking collection of Donnie’s red flags. All the little things that annoy him, or that he says are bothersome or irritating, Leo’s pretty much got them covered. He’s loud and has a hard time keeping still. He makes jokes that always have Donnie groaning and rolling his eyes. He can’t help touching whatever new, shiny equipment has popped up in the lab. And he’s too touchy-feely, slinging an arm over Donnie’s shoulder or throwing himself onto Donnie’s back before his brain catches up with his body and he realizes maybe he shouldn’t. That’s on a good day. With the way his throat stings and stuffy heat and chills take turns swarming over his skin, there’s really no salvaging this day into a good one. Or, rather, one where he’s remotely Donnie-friendly. Now, he might as well have a big red flag plastered on his face, because sick people are high up on that list of things Donnie does not tolerate well.
But, he finds himself crossing the threshold into Donnie’s lab anyway, dragging a thick, heavy blanket behind him and clutching a pillow and a comic to his chest. There’s the familiar hum and whir of machinery he doesn’t understand, and the click of a keyboard that means Donnie’s at his computer, rather than up working on a battle shell upgrade or some other tech fix.
Leo pads over to stop beside Donnie’s chair and tosses his stuff down to the floor. The only acknowledgment he gets to his presence, and the only hint that Donnie even knows he’s there at all, is a brief pause in the rapid typing. Though, when he sits down beside the desk, fiddling with his pillow and blanket to try and find a way to get comfortable on the hard floor, Donnie comes to a full stop. His chair swivels around so he’s facing Leo, or more like looming over him, with the extra height he has. The big shadow he casts, backlit by the neon glow of his computer screen, only makes him look bigger, more imposing.
“May I ask what you think you’re doing, bringing your germ-ridden, contagious self in here?” Donnie asks flatly, a brow raised. “You’re contaminating my lab.”
“Relax, I’ve got the flu, Dee, not the plague,” Leo replies. He’d paused in trying to sort out a comfortable position, but gets back to it. Maybe he should have brought more blankets. One isn’t really enough to soften up the lab’s floor. Still, he works it out as best he can, laying on his side, pillow wedged under his head and shoulder. As soon as he gets settled, Donnie kicks at his blanket-covered knees, not hard enough to hurt at all, but enough of a forceful nudge to get his annoyance across.
“That’s irrelevant. You’re sick and I don’t want to increase my odds of catching what you have by letting you breath my air,” Donnie argues.
“Come on, you won’t even know I’m here,” Leo appeals, tucking his legs in a little farther to get them out of Donnie’s reach. He curls up some, makes himself small, and keeps a hopeful gaze trained up on Donnie.
For a moment, there’s no answer. Donnie just looks down at him, crunching numbers or running calculations or turning gears, whatever it is he does behind his eyes. After a bit though, he scrunches his nose a little. And when he does speak up, his voice takes on a curious tilt. “Why are you here?” he asks.
There’s a cough prickling in Leo’s chest, the ends of each breath just starting to rattle when they touch it. He forces it back; coughing up a lung right now definitely won’t help his case. It’s tough to talk around, though, without feeling his chest start to hitch. “Raph won’t quit with all his mother hen fussing, and I think I’m gonna puke if Mikey keeps looking at me with those huge, sad eyes. Seeing him all worried just doesn’t sit right, you know?”
After a quiet beat, Donnie swings back around to his computer and sets back to work. Leo isn’t the most tech savvy beyond surfing the web or playing video games, so whatever Donnie gets up to usually flies over his head. Now, though, he’s typing a measure slower than usual, and he still has his head cocked slightly towards Leo. “If you’re wanting space, do I have to remind you that you do, in fact, have your own room?” he questions without so much as a glance.
Leo knows. And he also knows he very much does not want to go curl up alone in his bed right now. The thought alone feels something like a rusty spoon, poised to dig at the soft edges of his insides. He shudders a little, glad Donnie doesn’t see. Raph and Mikey might be a bit much for him to stomach right now, no matter how well meaning they are, but going and shutting himself in his room sounds worse. The medic in him knows he should probably isolate, quarantine, to keep everyone else from getting sick. And if it were something more serious, he probably would. But buy in large, for his family, the flu doesn’t pose a real threat so much as it does an annoyance, so the tightening pit in his stomach wins out. His chest tightens, too, at the notion of an empty, lonely room, and it’s nearly enough to make him cough. Holding his breath for a second, he waits for the urge to die back. It hurts a little, an ache set deep in his lungs, but eventually the cough dissipates.
“Can I stay with you?” Leo asks, rather than trying to put messy feeling into words. “Please,” he adds, genuine. And when Donnie doesn’t turn him down right away, hope washes warm over him. Or maybe it’s just the fever. It’s getting harder to tell.
Finally, Donnie huffs a little through his nose. He rummages around through the clutter on his desk, and when he picks up a welding torch, Leo’s heart lurches into his throat. For a delirious instant, he’s actually afraid. But then Donnie sets the torch aside to snatch up the flash drive that was sitting underneath it and Leo can breath again.
“Just try to be quiet,” Donnie relents, brows stitched in.
Gratitude blooms warm and nectar sweet in Leo’s chest. “You got it,” he says, and curls up a little more comfortably in his makeshift blanket nest. He could do better with more material, but hunting down spare blankets and pillows sounds too exhausting, so he settles with things as they are.
Honestly, Leo can breathe a sigh of relief in the relative quiet of the lab. There’s ambient noise blurring in the background, the tap of Donnie’s fingers skimming over keys, computer fans whirring, the occasional computer happy chime or error warning, but it’s all soft and muted. And nicer still is the lack of any attention. Usually, Leo loves attention, laps it up and begs for more. But right now, he feels gross and crummy and the worried gazes and ginger questions about how he’s doing put dents in his armor, bruising dangerously close to his heart. Donnie cares, he knows, he just wears that care his own way. Shows it more quietly. And while sometimes that’s easy to forget, sometimes, it’s just what Leo needs.
Having abandoned his phone somewhere in the depths of the couch cushions hours ago, Leo isn’t sure how the time passes. For a while, he flips through the pages of his comic, eyes slow and fingers clumsy. Mostly, he tries to smother the coughs in his chest as they come, to tamp them back down his throat. But when he can’t help it, he muffles the coughing fits into the back of his wrist or the meat of his shoulder; the only thing Donnie asked of him was to be quiet, so he does his best. Still, by the time they ease up, he’s left breathless, with aching ribs and a burning throat. Eventually, they start to stir up a dull pound in his head, too.
He makes it about halfway through the comic, reading at a pace even a snail would laugh at, before his brain feels too foggy to pick up the words anymore. The pictures swim before his eyes, so he sets the booklet aside, face down and still open to mark his page, and pinches at the bridge of his nose instead. Tugging the blanket up higher on his shoulders, he settles for trying to get some shut-eye. Something about resting being good for getting over being sick and all that. He’s never been much good at sleeping, but at the very least, he figures the downtime will do him good.
Over the next… while, Leo slips in and out of awareness. He hears the computer pop up an error message, and snorts at the resulting swear Donnie mutters under his breath. Raph would be mad if he heard. Tossing and turning a bit, he shifts around on the floor, sometimes ending up sprawled out face down, relishing in the cold ground under his feverish cheek. Other times, he huddles into as small of a ball as he can manage, shivering even with the blanket pulled over his head. The dull pain in his chest comes and goes in waves too, flaring up hard in unavoidable bouts of coughing, then burning out to embers that let him check out and rest a bit.
Donnie sort of fades in and out of existence too. Sometimes, Leo hears him typing, or humming a considering little noise to himself as he works. Other times, he’s still and quiet. He leaves, once or twice, too, disappearing for fuzzy stretches of time. Small screws of… something unpleasant twist in Leo’s chest when it feels like he’s been gone for too long. But then, he blinks drowsy, heavy eyes open and Donnie’s there again, tinkering with something over at his work bench. The screws unwind, come loose. Leo breathes in air and relief.
He comes more properly awake sometime later, though at first he isn’t sure why, exactly. It’s with the slow sinking back fully into his bones that he realizes it was probably just the general awfulness of being sick that pulled him away from sleep. In short, he feels worse, now. In more words, he’d only really had a chill and a cough, and the resulting sore throat, when he plunked himself down in the lab. Now, his head is throbbing, skull feeling liable to crunch like a soda can. His whole body hurts, too, though he isn’t sure how much of that he can contribute to flu achiness, and how much is because he’s been laying on the floor for hours. He thought he’d gotten off without all the stuffy nose issues too, but now he sniffles, and his head feels all clogged up. The pressure, building somewhere behind his eyes, really isn’t helping the headache either.
Breathing kind of sucks now, with his nose stuffed up and his throat stinging. Coughing is even worse, making all the other aches and pains flare up. Somewhere deep behind his plastron, there’s a resounding soreness stuck in his rib cage. He feels too cold, and the shivery, jittery tightness pulling at his muscles isn’t fun. A cough bubbles in his chest, swelling up, and he chokes over it a little, but manages to keep it down.
Bundling a little tighter in the twisted mess his blanket has become, he closes his eyes and lets out a cautious, measured breath. The next one he pulls in is just as slow and careful. Miserably, he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until the pressure has lights and shapes bursting to life behind his eyelids. After a count of three, he eases back, huffing out a resigned breath.
Then, before it even registers in his brain what he’s doing, he hears himself chirp. The urge is strong, albeit rusty after years without use. The sound builds in his throat, and twice more, he lets out the instinctual little sound, before his foggy head jerks more towards clarity. Embarrassed heat crawls up the back of his neck, and he clamps a hand over his mouth. He hasn’t done that in a very, very long time. In truth, he thought it was a childhood habit he’d long since grown out of. But the instinct still pulls at him, self-consciousness prickling in his stomach.
Out of the corner of his eye, he glances out for Donnie, and finds him back at his computer again, sitting just a foot or two away. If he heard, he doesn’t show it, still working away. Absently, Leo notes that, when he’s feeling better, he should really bug Donnie about how long he spends hunched over at his desk in his battle shell, but that’s a problem for another time. Now, he’s too busy trying to shut out all the fifteen different kinds of awful he feels. And, to choke back or muffle the little chirping noises being wrenched from his throat.
Shivering through another chill, Leo decides maybe it would have been better to keep away from his family. He feels properly miserable now, and he wouldn’t want to infect them with what he has. It’s probably too late at this point though, so he stays glued in place on the lab floor. Still, even if he wanted to get up, to leave and shut himself away in the med bay or his room, he doesn’t exactly feel up to moving. His limbs seem weak and sluggish, and even just turning his head to the side makes his headache flare.
All of a sudden, a vicious ache bundles in his chest, though at this point, it’s getting hard to tell if it’s from bottled instinct or repressed coughs. He chokes over both, trying to keep them back, but both the ragged coughing bout and the following distressed chirping noise come out anyway. And by the time he’s finished, there’s tears gathering hot in the corners of his eyes. He presses a fist into his plastron like it might bring him some kind of relief. It doesn’t, really.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
Donnie’s voice makes Leo jolt, startling him out of the relative quiet. Though, the surprise wears off quickly, and shame singes warm at his face instead. There’s a droplet of dread, too, dripping down, down, down through his ribs. He doesn’t want to get kicked out. He knows all too well what it feels like to have those big, metal doors slammed in front of his face. (It hurts, a little, even if he knows he was asking for it.)
“Sorry, I know, I’ll try to be quiet,” Leo rasps, throat raw. Turning over, he puts his back to Donnie, tucks his knees to his chest, and scrunches his eyes shut tight.
Moments later, he feels Donnie looming over him rather than seeing it. For a beat, he keeps his eyes closed, hoping Donnie will just give up and go back to work. But his twin has always been the immovable object to his unstoppable force, so of course it isn’t that easy. When he does crack open an eye, Donnie is standing at his side, looking down at him with a strangely bunched expression. Though, when Leo catches his eye, he drops into a crouch instead, putting them on a closer level.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Donnie says. There’s a seriousness to the slant of his brows that makes Leo want to squirm. “Your chirping,” Donnie clarifies, “why are you trying to hide it?”
In an instant, Leo feels like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, like snagging someone’s saved slice of pizza. His stomach flips, and all of a sudden he’s too hot again. Shrugging off the blanket, he’s almost grateful for the feverish sweat breaking out across his skin; at least kicking frustratedly at the blanket tangled around his feet keeps him from having to answer. But, before long, Donnie must get fed up with him and unceremoniously pulls at the fabric’s end, freeing him and leveling him with a hard, expectant stare all in one move.
“None of you guys do stuff like that,” is all that comes out of Leo’s mouth before he’s even had the chance to think. And pulled roots burn, ripped up from his chest, where the weeded truth was plucked out of him. Even when they were little, as far back as Leo can remember, he was the only one to make the little animalistic chirps and clicks and purrs. It didn’t bother him, for a while, until suddenly it did, and he just. Stopped. Even if the urge built in his chest, he swallowed it back and squashed it down until the habit all but disappeared.
“None of us tell the worst jokes known to man or mutant-kind either, yet that doesn’t seem to deter you any,” Donnie argues. He sits down, then, crossing his legs under him. And that’s how Leo knows this is about to be a whole thing. He doesn’t want it to be a whole thing. He’d rather just retreat into his shell and forget about it all, but that’s a surefire way to get Dr. Feelings called on him, so he resists the temptation.
“I’m serious, Don,” he says instead, rolling to lay flat on his stomach. Propping his chin on his arms, he stares straight ahead, avoiding Donnie’s gaze. “It’s embarrassing,” he tacks on in a mumble, reluctant to admit it.
There’s a moment of silence, and Leo’s keenly aware of his own heart thumping in his chest, of the stuffy heat clouding over him. Then, Donnie’s fingers smooth hesitantly over his shoulder. It’s a little awkward, nothing like Raph’s strong, steadying arm around his shoulders or Mikey’s warm hugs, but it turns his heart all soft and gooey just the same. He knows Donnie’s not a huge fan of touching people most days. And he also knows that Donnie knows how much Leo craves that touch, how much it comforts him.
The effort alone means a lot.
“Red-eared sliders are known to chirp if they’re distressed or ill, among other reasons,” Donnie says, matter of fact. “You’re more than likely both at the moment, so you do the math.”
His head still a little fuzzy, Leo takes a second to let the words sink in. Admittedly, he doesn’t know much about his little turtle cousins, having never put in the time or effort to research. Still, knowing it’s a red-eared slider thing doesn’t exactly help much. It still makes him feel… other. Different than his brothers. More animal, and he’s not sure he likes that.
He must make a face about it, because Donnie rubs comfortingly at his shoulder and breathes a little resigned sigh. “Look,” he says, changing tactics. And Leo knows Donnie didn’t mean it that way, but shifts to look up at him anyway. The eyes gazing back at him are startlingly open and earnest. “If chirping feels like something your body needs to do, then you shouldn’t try to stop it.”
Knowing he has Leo’s eyes, Donnie shakes out his hands twice in demonstration. Then it just clicks all of a sudden. Donnie gets it. Even if it isn’t exactly the same situation, stimming in one case, turtle instinct in the other, Donnie understands what it feels like. And he knows better than to bottle that sort of thing up. Leo’s reminded him as much before.
And now he feels kind of silly for trying to choke out the instinct. The storm brewing in his chest starts to part and dissipate. It’s not knowledge that fixes everything, and there’s still some element of shame burrowed deep in Leo’s gut, but it makes him feel immensely better nonetheless. Eyes fever bright, he grins up at Donnie, huffing a stuffy breath through his nose. Reaching out slow and with plenty of warning, he grabs one of Donnie’s hands and laces it with his, holding on tight. The lingering stress and tension rod stiff through his spine and shoulders begins to ease, making it easier to just melt into the floor. It feels like a near decade old weight lifts off of him.
“Since when do you give good advice?” Leo hums playfully, giving Donnie’s hand a gentle squeeze. His throat still really hurts, and talking makes it feel like it’s shredding apart, but he can’t bring himself to care.
Tipping his chin up, Donnie blows out an indignant breath. “I always have. You, dear Leon, just never listen to me,” he insists. Still, he squeezes Leo’s hand back and drops his gaze back down to meet Leo’s eye. For a moment, the familiar huffy attitude ebbs back away, something far more sincere and serious taking its place for a moment more.
“Don’t feel like you have to hide just because you’re different, alright? Don’t make me say it again, because I absolutely will not, but you’re just fine the way you are. You don’t have to change.”
Before he knows it, Leo’s eyes are flooded with heat, and he sniffles, dangerously close to crying. Except he really doesn’t want to cry; it’ll only make his throbbing head and clogged nose worse. So he swallows hard against the knot tying in his throat and gives a shallow nod, blinking carefully all the while. Something about that sentiment cuts deep into his chest, aching and relieving in equal measure. It feels like love, like acceptance, warm behind his ribs. Desperately, he clings to the feeling, holding tight and trying to commit to memory the honey gold sweetness of it.
Before long though, a fit of raspy coughs steal his attention away, harsh and searingly bright in his lungs. He lets go of Donnie’s hand to brace against the floor instead, choking over himself. When he gets the chance again, he breathes short and shallow, afraid of setting off more coughing if he breathes too deep. And when he just touches the edge of something rattly on a breath, he holds it altogether, fighting the way his chest constricts. Donnie clicks his tongue, a vaguely disappointed sound, and Leo would shove him about it if he wasn’t too busy trying to get oxygen back in his lungs as delicately as he can manage.
“Does nothing get through that thick skull of yours?” Donnie questions, a brow raised incredulously. “If you need to chirp, chirp. And if you need to cough, cough. Stop holding it in, you dumbass,” he says, fond, affectionate exasperation clear in his voice. It’s funny, Leo thinks absently with a fuzzy head, that those things seemed paired together so often.
He opens his mouth to argue, but Donnie beats him to the punch. “If you fight me on this, I’ll call Raph in here,” he warns, and Donnie doesn’t make empty threats.
“That’s low, Dee,” Leo grits out when he can finally breathe again. Flopping down on his back, he tries to catch his breath. Out from beneath his blanket for too long, he’s gotten cold again, but it doesn’t feel worth the effort to reach for it when every muscle feels weighted and sore.
“Scoff. Like you haven’t used that threat on me a thousand times.”
Leo shrugs a little. “Fair point,” he answers. But then the stifled cough from before comes back with a vengeance. He coughs hard enough that he feels liable to break a rib, and black haze starts to gather around the edges of his vision. There’s not enough air in the room. Something frantic is sewing tight between his ribs, panic tugging on the threads. Then, all of a sudden, there are hands pulling him around and the world tips and sways dangerously. When he settles in one place, still coughing up a lung, he realizes where he is with a jolt.
Thankfully, before he blacks out or throws up, the nasty fit finally subsides. And when Leo struggles to get his labored breathing back under control, he does it resting snuggly against Donnie’s chest. They’re sitting slotted together plastron to plastron, Leo’s chin resting on Donnie’s shoulder. There are steadying hands holding at his shoulders, and Leo is sure that the points where they touch are the only things keeping him upright.
Something sweet blooms in his chest, behind all the muscle pain, when he realizes where Donnie learned to do this. Memories come hazy, of smaller days and simpler times. But even when he was little, Donnie would get overwhelmed with this or that. And even if Leo didn’t always understand, he wanted to make things better. So if Donnie was okay with being touched, Leo would pull him against his plastron, let him settle and match to slower breaths, until he calmed down.
It’s been years since those little bubbles of quiet and relief, but Leo doesn’t appreciate them any less for it. And the gesture really does help, Leo managing to slow his hurried, heaving breaths to something as even and steady as the rise and fall gently pushing against his chest. And after a few nebulous moments, time slipping between his fingers, he starts to get dozy. His eyes slip shut, but after a beat, Donnie’s voice is quiet by his ear.
“You’ve been in and out on my floor for hours, so I think medic Leo would say it’s time you get your shell in bed instead of continuing to make yourself sore falling asleep here.” Leo kind of hates that he has a point.
A quiet chirp rises in his throat, and this time, he lets it come without a fight. Burrowing his nose into Donnie’s shoulder, he sinks more heavily into the softshell and lets out a deep breath. “Let me steal your bed?” he asks. Insomnia, loneliness, and a hoard of other wolves lie in wait under his covers, teeth bared, and he doesn’t have the fight in him to deal with that right now.
“I guess it can’t hurt,” Donnie relents, “I’m sure we’re all doomed to get your virus anyway. But you’d better remember this the next time I’m looking for a test subject.”
A faint grin stretches across Leo’s mouth, and he huffs the beginnings of a laugh. But despite the fever, the aches and pains, he’s content down to his core.
“Deal.”
Leo’s sure he’ll regret that later. But right now, there’s a soft bed with his name on it, so it’s worth the trouble.