Chapter Text
Donnie has two soulmarks.
One is bright yellow, clean friendly letters on the inside of his right ankle. Hi, I'm April, what's your name? Simple, childish, picture-perfect. April's match is on her left forearm, purple chicken scratch jotted down so hastily nobody but the two of them can make out the words.
The other one is—one of the reasons he wears his battle-shells. Not the biggest, not by far, but.
"I've got stripes in different colors, I don't see why you can't," Leo insists, when they're kids. Donnie doesn't know how to explain. There's asymmetrical markings, and then there's the tiny, syrupy-dark splotches painted across his back. They're pink where Donnie knows down to his core that his color is purple.
("Me and Mikey both have yellow—"
"And Leo's got red, that's Raph's!")
He can't see them unless he's got two big mirrors set up, and the first time he gets caught doing that he swears it off forever in embarrassment. He makes April inspect them for him instead. Soulmate of her soulmate, she must feel it too, right?
"I don't like this," she admits, once, when they're both too tired to hold their tongues. "What kind of first words are these supposed to be?"
Donnie doesn't like it either, really. No one's allowed to touch his naked back except Dad and April, and honestly? Ever since he met April, Splinter has rapidly been losing privileges. It's… intimate. It makes his skin crawl. Maybe April's his soulmate because she doesn't make him feel like that. Maybe his other other half will be the same way.
"Maybe it's an as-yet undiscovered alien language!" he suggests, to change the subject and cheer them both up. He's young. He doesn't know any better.
Someone who hasn't met their soulmate is—incomplete. Not their full self. Half a person, waiting to be made whole. That's the classic idea, anyway.
The concept has merit. Meeting April was like seeing the sun for the first time. Squinting and covering his eyes and giggling under the warmth until he could barely breathe. She's bold and fun and she loved all four of the people who make up Donnie's tiny world immediately, without question.
Five people, now. Maybe six, someday.
He's nervous, but he was nervous about meeting his first human, too, so he tries to be excited instead. He tries to love the way his heart pounds, tries to love the flips his stomach does. Because—until it's six, Donnie can't know who Donnie, whole and complete, is going to be.
Dad looks sad when he talks like that, but he doesn't tell him he's wrong.
Donatello is sixteen years old when the world ends.
They hold out hope that it's not over over for a long time. Longer than is reasonable, in retrospect. Something something, triumph of the human spirit. If only.
He goes the better part of a decade without sparing more than a stray thought for the maybe-soulmark on his back, because how could he have the bandwidth to care? The better part of a decade and he finally cracks the secret of how to burn the Krang out of a body, poison that buys the people it frees—not a full lifetime, not with how deep and how violent the parasite burrows, but years. Years that matter, even in a world in its death throes.
They manage to burn the Krang out of their test group, and he's pleased with himself and his work, right up until April says in a voice far too steady, "Donnie, come take a look at this."
Ever the fool, he does. And then he follows April's lead, staying calm and level-voiced, as his eyes rove over the shape of the wounds on an innocent person's back, where April's been carefully, compassionately plucking out the last of the shriveling contamination. Tiny, syrupy-dark splotches.
Not to be dramatic, but April following him into his lab is the only reason he doesn't kill himself that night. Or the next night. Or the night after that.
"Tell you what," April says on night three, because you have so much to live for doesn't really pack the punch it might have, Before. "You do all the good you can now. Everything. You live. And then, whatever that thing is, whenever it gets its hands on you, whatever it does to you…" She puts a hand on his arm, and then, after a long, hesitant moment where he doesn't pull away, moves it to his branded back. Firm and steady as anything. "I'll kill you myself, okay?" He lets her guide him into leaning against her. "I promise."
When Donnie was fourteen, he did this—awful thing. Fucked with his brothers' brains. He doesn't remember, anymore, why he thought it was a good idea, to make them more like him. To reach into their minds and overwrite everything that made them them. To make them do exactly what he wanted, without hesitation, without disobedience.
He knows, now, exactly why he thought it was a good idea. It's been written on him since birth. It's part of his soul.
"Deal," he rasps into her shoulder.
She holds him for a long time after that. He doesn't fight it.
Raph dies. None of them are ever really whole again.
There's this bit he remembers from some poem, back from the days of the global internet. Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story.
There is no other version of this story.
Someone has to leave second, too.
He doesn't bother cluttering comm space with I love you as he's captured. His family knows. What's far more important are the final scraps of coded information he can pass on. Movements and locations that are compromised now that he is. Secret things they'll need to destroy as fast as possible before whatever the Krang make out of his body can act on the memories. Last chances, long odds.
He gives them every edge, every warning he can think of, and then in a moment of weakness he tells April in plain English, begs her, "Remember—you promised."
"I remember," she replies, voice distorted by transmission, carried to him through the communicator she wears over her soulmark. It's the last kindness Donatello Hamato ever knows.
The Krang are impressed with his mind. Apparently, in all their millennia of conquest, no one's managed to fuck them over quite as much as Donnie's meager little breakthroughs have. It's a warm candle to hold close to his heart as they torture him.
The torture ebbs, eventually. Tentacles slither out of his brain. They're already moving, set to crush the resistance with everything he's ever known. Distantly, he wonders how long it'll take them to render his antidote completely useless.
(He bought them years, not lifetimes. Years aren't nothing. Years have never been nothing.)
And maybe not all of the tentacles have withdrawn from his brain—it's so hard to feel anything through the agony, it's so hard to remember anything but the pain exists— because somewhere outside his body someone says, "An excellent idea. That will be your penance."
They take him back to New York City. The ship that crawled through the sky above the water one dark autumn night has never left. It hasn't needed to.
The ship exhales as he's brought into it. It hums, it purrs. He tastes its breath. The scent is cloyingly familiar, but too much has been pried out of his mind for him to be able to place it. A thousand curious eyes peer down at him.
(He remembers meeting April. He remembers a sense of anticipation the moment before she spoke.)
They still haven't touched his back. They peel his battle-shell away now, crack crack crack like breaking open a crab. If they see the mark of what he is, what he was born for, they don't comment on it—so they must not see it, or maybe Krang don't have soulmates and they don't understand. The tiniest sliver of mercy, that they don't know he was always meant to be theirs.
The ship opens up for him. A coffin, a gullet, a surgical incision in the shape of a Y. He regrets everything he's ever read about anglerfish.
(April, a little kid with beads in her hair the exact color of the words on his ankle.)
There's no real fight left in him, they made sure of that, but still he hisses and snaps his teeth and lets the tears flow down his cheeks. Do not go gentle. He catches a mouthful of a tentacle that roves too close to his face and gets his teeth shattered for the trouble. He spits the swirl of blood at their faces, red and toxic green, and they shove him back, one step, two.
(April's voice. The golden words on his ankle lighting up with a warmth like the midday sun.)
Dozens of spindly fingers working him over. Intimate and crawling under his skin. The syrupy-dark splotches on his back lighting up like gasoline.
Go to hell, he snarls, last words, even as Donatello Hamato burns out of him like a parasite.
Welcome home, beloved, it floods his nervous system with in reply, and he is, he is, he is.