It all started when Donatello dropped a knife at the dinner table.
"Oops, clumsy me," he said, which was weird, because normally he wouldn't say anything about such an incident. Leonardo had never understood why his brilliant brother couldn't seem to refrain from calling attention to his own mistakes.
And so Leonardo watched more closely than he normally would have as Don leaned over to pick up the utensil. He didn't allow himself to be distracted by Mike saying "Watch this" and then cramming three whole slices of pizza in his mouth at the same time. Or whatever. Leo didn't know because he wasn't looking.
It seemed to take way too long for Don to get the knife.
"Put that down," Leo ordered, when Don had finally straightened up, knife in hand.
"Aww," said Mikey.
"Not you, Mikey."
"Really? Not me for once?"
"Is something wrong?" Don asked, as he set the knife down beside his plate.
"Now pick it up," Leo said, which wasn't exactly an answer to the question.
"You got a problem, Leo?" demanded Raph, who as usual wasn't understanding the logic of Leonardo's orders.
Leo had no need to deal with that - not to accomplish the goal he was focused on, and certainly not for any reasons of power or ego. Donatello wasn't arguing; he was merely giving Leonardo a curious look as he reached for the knife again.
"With your other hand," Leo said.
Now everyone was watching what must have seemed like bizarrely controlling behavior. Leonardo was well aware of his reputation for insisting on discipline, precision, and obedience. He hardly thought they were bad traits.
Donatello could not seem to close his fingers on the knife.
"What's wrong with your hand, Donatello?" Leonardo asked, in an even tone.
"Oh, it's nothing," Don said, as he continued pinching at the knife and missing. "I'm just experiencing a little bit of -"
Leonardo stood up abruptly. "Let's spar."
"Ah, well, I'm kind of in the middle of -"
"Now, Donatello."
"Aw, yeah." Michelangelo settled back in his chair. "Dinnertime sparring. I love dinner and a show."
"I don't know what's going on," said Raphael, who looked half a second away from taking Donatello's place on the mats.
"It's fine," said Don, and pushing his chair back, he followed Leonardo to the cleared space in the middle of their home. He hadn't touched the pizza yet; his hands weren't greasy; and keeping his eyes on the enemy he drew his bo and popped the release mechanism.
Leonardo didn't go easy on him. Without warning he pressed the attack, forcing Donatello to block. Don's reach, speed, and rumored ability to see three seconds into the future always gave him advantages. But Leo practiced more, knew more forms, and did not accept failure.
With a deliberately weak disarming move, he sent Don's bo flying across the room. Don shifted seamlessly to unarmed combat, as they'd been trained, but he was so obviously off that Leo pulled his next strike and stood down.
"What happened there, Donnie?" He lowered his katana, but didn't sheath them yet.
Don's gaze swept the room. "Ah, lost my bo," he reported, which was completely accurate, and yet completely left out the information Leonardo was looking for.
"Your grip was weak," Leo said.
"Not enough psi," Don agreed - or, at least, his tone was of agreement. Leonardo had long since learned that Donatello could lie with cadences, sounding like he was saying one thing while his big words said something else.
"Why?" Leonardo asked, a pointed question.
"I told you, my hand -"
Leonardo sheathed his swords, strode forward, and grabbed Donatello's wrist, flopping the hand back and forth as though the answers he wanted might be written on his brother's skin.
"Hey. Hey, wait a minute." A chair scraped back, and that was the sound of Raphael barreling towards the same conclusion Leonardo had been stealthily approaching for the past ten minutes. "Does this have something to do with that thing Mikey saw? That thing Donnie did to his hand?"
"Say whaaaat?" said Mikey, who still had a string of cheese hanging from his mouth.
"It's just some minor paresthesia," Don said. Leo let him pull away and go to retrieve his weapon. "I'll be fine."
"Will you be fine?" Leo asked.
The slightest hesitation before Don kicked up his bo from the floor. "Probably."
Finally, Leo spared a glance for Raph, who had come to stand at his shoulder. "How can we do better than 'probably'?"
Don shrugged as he collapsed his bo and tucked it back into its holster. "Rest, I suppose."
"Rest," Leonardo echoed, only this time it was a command and not a clinical suggestion. "Two weeks, or until it's back to normal."
"But Leo -"
"Don, you're the only one of us who can't fight one-handed," said Leo. "You need to take care of this." And he turned and went back to the table.
"Harsh, man," said Mikey, as Don sat down and looked at the knife that had started it all.
Raph helped him bandage it.
It was weird to be bandaging a body part that looked perfectly healthy, but Raph laid on the thick layers of gauze as though Donatello's hand were in imminent danger of falling off.
"Explain this to me again," said Raph. "You did what to your hand?"
"Okay, you know how I said we'd stay the same on the inside?" said Don.
"Yeah?"
"Well, that's not entirely true."
"Cripes, Donnie," Raph muttered, but Don ignored him.
"So, humans are a lot different from us, physiologically."
"You think so?" Raph said, but Don didn't pay any attention to that interjection either. Sometimes Raphael wondered if Donatello ever noticed anything that was happening around him as he gave his little science lectures.
"If we had mutated ourselves to look human, on the outside, we would have been human. The fingers and ears and hair and so on wouldn't have been illusions or anything like that. They would have been real. And that obviously requires a certain degree of internal reorganization. Otherwise, the extra parts would be nonfunctional. And, as I observed in the test run, that was definitely not the case."
"What?" Raph said as he jerked the bandages tight.
"Ow," said Don, but Raph knew he didn't mean it. "What I'm saying is, I could move the third and fourth fingers. I could feel them. That would only be possible if the mutagen caused not just external, cosmetic change, but a highly complex change in the underlying configuration of ligaments and fascia and so on."
"Donnie!" Raph shouted, barely refraining from punching his brother in his stupid external face that concealed his smart internal brain. "English!"
"Nerves, Raph," Don said, moving his other hand as if he were casting a magic spell. "The mutagen caused extremely rapid nerve growth to serve the extra fingers. When the effects wore off a minute later, everything should have gone back to normal. But I think it didn't. Something didn't get put back together right on the inside."
"And so now you can't feel your regular fingers?" Raph asked, trying to steer the conversation back to the level of medical effects he understood and cared about.
"Like I said," Don repeated, because he always seemed to think that repeating himself made things clearer, "just a little numbness. I'll be fine."
"Rest," came Leonardo's voice in his ear.
"I am sitting down," Don said, without taking his eyes off the computer screen or his hands off the keyboard.
"Rest," Leonardo repeated, so at least Don wasn't the only one with that particular habit.
"I am literally consuming almost zero calories right now," Don said.
Leo put a hand on Don's wrist, preventing him from typing until Don turned and looked at him. "Don't make me put it in a sling, Donnie," he said in a deceptively friendly tone.
Don put his hand in his lap.
"You know," said Don, "it's probably a good thing Raph destroyed the mutagen." He was sitting up in the pipes, one leg dangling, one hand tucked against his plastron, the other hand balancing a book against the other leg.
"Bro, you're killing me," said Mikey. "That stuff was our ticket out of here!" He made a gesture encompassing their underground amusement park.
"Maybe not," said Don. "I may have seriously miscalculated its effects on us."
Mike didn't understand what Don was saying, only that he was being disagreed with. "I feel so betrayed. So alone. You guys don't aspire to anything."
"I'm saying," Don said, "the mutagen could have had severely deleterious ramifications. The effects could have been partial, or temporary, or -"
"Bro." Mike held up a hand. "You don't have to make excuses for your lack of ambition. You're just an underachiever."
"... Right." Don settled back against the pipe and turned his eyes to his book.
"You had better be resting up there!" Leo shouted from somewhere below.
"April! Hey! I have a job for you."
She smiled at him through the camera he had installed in her watch.
"Sure, Donnie. What do you need?"
"I need you to steal me an MRI machine."
She was cute when she was disbelieving.
"What?"
"An MRI machine." His fingers skittered across the desk, checking that books and schematics were still there. "Magnetic Resonance Imaging. An advanced piece of medical equipment used for -"
"Donnie, I know what an MRI machine is. Why do you think I'm going to steal one for you?"
"Well, you've stolen things for me in the past, so I thought this would be right up your alley."
"Yeah, but an MRI machine?" She looked away from the camera, glancing around, as if checking she was not being overheard. "Not really in my wheelhouse."
"Oh," he said, in disappointment.
"Why do you need one?" she asked, and his hope gauge rebounded a little bit.
"Ah, well…" Slowly, he raised up his bandaged hand in front of the webcam.
"Donnie!" She leaned forward to get a closer virtual look at the injured limb. "What did you do to yourself?"
"Well, you remember the mutagen you stole from TCRI?"
"Uh, yeah."
"And you remember how you helped Raphael and Michelangelo break into police headquarters to steal more of it?"
"Kind of hard to forget."
"So I'm establishing the pattern here of how you have stolen things for us."
"Donnie."
"Right." He lowered his hand again. "The reason Raph wanted you to help him steal more mutagen is because Mike saw me use the first batch of it on my hand."
"And it burned you?"
"No, of course not. It mutated me. My hand. Sort of."
That little headshake she did when she was somewhere between shocked and furious. "What?"
"Just for a minute!" he said, as if that made everything okay. "And then the fingers fused back together. But I think the nerves didn't. And if I had an MRI machine, I could see what's going on in there, and, and … you know."
April pressed a hand to her face. "Donnie, I can't steal you an MRI machine."
"Okay," he said in a small voice. "It's - I mean, it's fine. Patterns are meant to be broken, I guess." He reached for the End Call button. "See you, April."
"No, Donnie, wait wait wait." She held a hand towards the camera, small and five-fingered and perfect. "Why don't you just go to a hospital and use their MRI machine?"
His brow furrowed. "Well, I'd never get through an exam before security showed up."
"No, I mean go to a hospital," April said. "Chief Vincent can get you in. Hospitals have procedures for protecting patients, you know, like famous people, or, or criminals. No one will know you're there except a handful of doctors."
Donatello looked at his hand, and tried to imagine more than three seconds into the future. "I don't know, April."
"Donnie." That warm smile that made him forget he was three times her size and could squash her like a bug. "You have the keys to the city. Use them."
The hand that wasn't consigned to bedrest crept up to the golden key that hung against his plastron. "Thanks, April."
"Bye, Donnie."
The screen went dark. He looked at the ceiling, and thought.
Rebecca Vincent didn't look up from her paperwork when the phone rang. "Hello?"
"Chief Vincent. Donatello. Turtle, four eyes -"
Vincent snatched up the receiver, shutting off the speakerphone. She was alone in her office, but she wasn't about to take chances with her new consultants. "Yes, of course."
"- keys to the city," Donatello went on, just in case she needed more prompting to remember who he was.
She nestled the receiver against her ear. "What can I do for you?"
"I need you to get me into a hospital."
"What for?"
"I need an MRI."
Vincent lowered her pen, her attention now entirely on the phone call. "Any particular kind of MRI?"
"It's - it's for my hand."
D hand MRI, Vincent wrote on a post-it. "All right. I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks, Chief. Um, bye." And rather abruptly, he hung up.
"You cannot go to the surface!" Leonardo paced furiously. Where had he gone wrong? "What part of rest do you not understand, Donatello?"
"It's a medical procedure!" Don protested. "It is totally in line with the spirit of 'rest'!"
"You - cannot - go - to - a hospital!" Leonardo said sharply.
"Uh, yeah, he can." Raphael's bulk loomed up behind Donatello, and something incongruously tiny dangled from his hand by a thin chain. "You forget about these, Leo? We got the keys to the city. We can go anywhere we want."
"They're symbolic," Leo said, even though he hadn't taken off his own key since he had gotten it, keeping it tucked neatly behind the straps of his scabbards.
"Symbolic my ass," Raph replied. "We earned 'em. Why shouldn't we use 'em?"
"We stick to -" Leo began.
"The shadows?" Raph stepped forward, deliberately, into the glow of one of their neon signs. "Yeah, Leo, we kinda blew that when we introduced ourselves to the whole police department."
"You introduced us to the whole police department," Leo pointed out.
Raph refused to be baited. "What's done is done." He gestured to Donatello, who somehow had gotten left out of a conversation about his own medical treatment. "You want him to get better? Let him go to a hospital."
A staring contest; Leonardo up, Raphael down.
"Fine," Leo said. "Do what you want."
"Thanks, Leo!" Don called after his retreating shell.
Raph pivoted to face his younger brother. "Why you thanking him?"
"Oh." Donatello scratched his nose and pushed up his glasses. "Good question."
"Yeah," said Raph. "Good question."
"This case will require your utmost discretion." Rebecca Vincent sat in a plush chair, hands folded on top of a closed manila folder. At the polished table with her were two nurses, an MRI technician, and the best hand surgeon in the city. "You are here because you are the best in your fields, and because the head of the medical center assures me you have no PHI violations in your long and distinguished careers. I expect your full cooperation."
The providers nodded as though this were routine. They had all dealt with sensitive cases before.
"What I am about to show you may be hard to believe," Vincent continued. "But I assure you he is real, and he is a credit to this city like few others I have ever had the honor of meeting." She slid the folder forward, and opened it facing the staff. "His name is Donatello."
There was no answer at first, as the doctors and nurses studied the photograph and the accompanying records with the thoughtful air of highly intelligent people.
"I'm not sure what I'm looking at," the MRI tech admitted finally.
"What you are looking at is a seven-foot talking turtle," Vincent said, "and a hero. He believes he has nerve damage in his hand. He needs your help."
The male nurse pushed his glasses up on his nose, a gesture oddly reminiscent of Donatello himself. "Chief, we don't treat animals here."
"I assure you," said Vincent, "he is not an animal."
They gathered again a few days later, in the MRI room. The windows had been papered over, and the surrounding hallways blocked off by Vincent's officers. An escort had been provided to assist Donatello in travelling from wherever he lived - the Turtles had not exactly shared that information with the force - to NYU Langone.
The staff were apprehensive. Vincent knew they suspected this was some sort of set-up, a hoax, though they couldn't guess what her angle might be.
Personally, she just leaned against a wall, surveying the room. She was on relaxed alert for danger. She trusted her officers to secure the area, but she hadn't gotten to be chief of the NYPD by letting her guard down.
The door opened, and a small brunette woman entered.
The MRI technician cast a scathing look in Vincent's direction. "Seven-foot talking turtle?"
"Yeah," said April O'Neil. "He's right behind me."
A huge shadow darkened the doorway, and Donatello shuffled in, the strange gear he always carried making him look even bigger than he really was.
"Um, hi," he said, with a small wave. Vincent noticed his other hand, hanging at his side, was heavily bandaged.
"Well, okay then," said the hand surgeon, after a long moment of dead silence. "Let's get to work, everyone."
The female nurse - Ruthers - bustled forward, and Donatello shrank away as though he were afraid of her. "Come on in," she said, pushing the door shut behind him. "I'm going to need you to take off any metal you're wearing." She looked him up and down with a critical eye. "I mean all of it."
"Yeah," said Donatello. "I know."
Ruthers pointed to a door standing ajar at the far end of the room. "You can use the changing room over there. There's a gown, though we may have - underestimated the size a little."
"Ah, that's okay." said Donatello. "I'll just -" He pointed vaguely towards the changing room. "Yeah."
He disappeared into the tiny cubicle. The staff took advantage of the moment to exchange looks with each other.
"Just when you think you've seen everything," said the hand surgeon, LaMont.
"Sorry for doubting you, Chief," said Gregory, the technician.
They all settled into their places, their routines, trying to ignore the thumping sounds coming from the changing room.
After a few minutes, the door opened, and Donatello, the paper gown draped ridiculously over his frame, felt his way along the wall.
"April? I can't see. Everything's white."
"It's okay, Donnie," she said, as she strode forward to meet him. "You're literally going to walk five feet and lay down on the table."
"Yeah, but five feet in which direction?"
She took his wrist and pulled him gently towards the MRI machine, until she could touch his fingers to the padded bench. "You got this?"
Donatello took a deep breath. "I got this."
Making sure April had moved out of the way, he swung himself onto the bench, trying to get settled in the awkward position.
"Now, the important thing is that you not move," said Ruthers, as she arranged Donatello's hands on his chest. "Whoops," she added, as the gown slipped sideways. As she reached to tug it back over Donatello's midsection, she said, "Normally I would say you don't have anything I haven't seen before, but in this case..."
Donatello laughed, an uncomfortable and desperate sound.
"The machine is pretty loud," Ruthers said, "so I'm going to put these headphones on you." She hesitated, looking at where she was going. "Let me know if I found your ears, all right?"
She leaned over, getting the headphones settled in place.
"Yep, you got 'em," Donatello said, a little too loudly.
Ruthers touched his elbow, a reassuring gesture, and then retreated into the control room, sweeping April and Vincent with her.
"All right," said Gregory. "Let's take a look."
The machine roared to life, drawing Donatello into its maw.
"Is he going to fit?" April asked, as the Turtle's massive shoulders approached the opening.
"It's bigger than it looks," said Gregory. "We've done morbidly obese patients. I mean -" He touched a control. "No offense to your friend."
As Vincent watched, a picture filled in on the screen. It meant nothing to her, but Gregory studied it with interest.
"All right," he said, drawing a finger across the image. "Definitely we have a mismatch here. One of these hands isn't like the other." He tapped a button, zooming in. "See this? Right hand, normal arrangement of nerves. I mean, normal for him, I'm assuming." His finger slid to another jumble of colored patches. "Left hand, obvious nerve damage. Fragmentation and misalignment." He withdrew his hand, tapping his chin. "How did this happen?"
"You wouldn't believe it," said April.
"That's classified information," said Vincent.
"Well, all right." Gregory waved the hand surgeon over. "Leah? What do you think?"
LaMont leaned over her colleague's shoulder to study the images. "I'd like to test for function, but I don't think this is going to repair itself. If he can't live with it, I'd recommend surgery."
"You get that?" Gregory asked Ruthers, who was taking notes. She nodded. "Okay. Let's get him out."
"What did they say?" Donatello asked, as soon as he was sitting up. He leaned close to the face in front of him, squinting myopically at it. "Oh. You're not April."
"No," said Ruthers, "but I am a registered nurse. Dr. LaMont wants to test your motor function before making a diagnosis."
"Can we do that in here?" Vincent asked, thinking about the logistics of moving Donatello to another wing.
Ruthers nodded. "I can have PT send up the materials."
"Here," said April, pressing something into Donatello's good hand.
He ran his thumb over it, then put it on - his glasses. "Thanks, April."
"Near-sighted too, huh?" Ruthers said. She tugged up the gown where it was slipping off Donatello's shoulder again.
"Just a little," he murmured.
"Right."
Dr. LaMont joined them, speaking half to Vincent and half to Donatello. "Normally PT assessments are below my pay grade, but in the interest of not involving more people, I'll make an exception. The tray should be here in a few minutes. Why don't you take a break?"
"Yeah," said Donatello. "Sounds good."
Ruthers smiled, almost an apology for LaMont's brusque manner, and the medical staff withdrew into another room.
"Who wrapped this for you?" asked Tyrndall, the male nurse, as he struggled to remove the bandages from Donatello's left hand.
"Um, I did it myself," said Donatello.
"Really?" Tyrndall asked skeptically. Then he glanced at the size of Donatello's biceps. "Okay, maybe." He cut away the last of the wrappings, and with a little sigh of relief, Donatello bent his fingers for the first time in days.
"Does it hurt?" asked LaMont as she approached, guiding the wheeled testing table with a light touch.
"No," said Donatello. "Just a little, you know, pins and needles."
"And how long has it been like that?" LaMont settled into the chair Tyrndall had just vacated, and began laying out the testing materials.
"About a week and a half."
"Pins and needles constantly, or on and off?"
"Pretty much all the time." Don looked at the table as it came in front of him. "What did the MRI show?"
LaMont didn't answer the question. "Do you read and write English, Donatello?"
He blinked behind his glasses. "Yes, of course."
LaMont took a card from the testing box and laid it on the table, a precise movement. "I'm going to need you to copy this word for me."
She asked not a single question about who he was or where he came from, as they walked through the testing protocol, right hand, then left. ("Naturally right-handed, but trained ambidextrous," Donatello said, when LaMont asked him which was his dominant hand.)
"Well, not too bad," LaMont said, as she packed away the materials. "If you can live with some compromised function, I would say a few weeks of therapy would be sufficient. If not, I would recommend surgery." Setting the box aside, she folded her hands on the narrow table. "Donatello, the MRI showed nerve damage in your left hand. My plan would be to go in, repair it as best I can, and let it finish healing on its own. Nerves are generally good at that. I would use local anesthesia; I'd want you to be awake."
"Of course," said Donatello. "Given my unique physiology, general anesthesia would be incredibly risky."
LaMont looked surprised, and Donatello looked surprised that she was surprised; they were both used to being the smartest person in the room.
"Yes," LaMont said, with remarkable composure. She spread her hands. "The choice is yours, Donatello."
"I'll -" He looked down. "I'll think about it. I'll get back to you in a few days."
"Take your time," LaMont said. "So long as you don't strain it, I don't think the problem will get any worse." She gestured to Tyrndall. "Harlan, can you bandage him back up?"
"Not the way he had it," said Tyrndall, with self-deprecating good humor.
"I'll take care of it at home," Donatello said. He carefully pushed back from the little table. "Thanks for everything, Dr. LaMont."
"It was my pleasure," said LaMont, and then it was Vincent's job to get the Turtle safely out of there.
"And so I think I should go in for surgery," Don concluded, as Raph snipped off the loose end of the new bandage.
"Don't you think you should wait for Splinter to come back from his spiritual retreat?" asked Leonardo, just an opening salvo in a long litany of reasons why Donnie should not let a bunch of doctors cut his hand open.
"Master Splinter doesn't know anything about chiroplasty," Don pointed out. "You said it yourself, Leonardo, I need full function in both hands. This is my best chance of getting that back."
"And if they decide to amputate your hand and keep it for a trophy?"
"Uh -"
"Or just dissect you while you're unconscious?"
"I won't be unconscious; I said the plan is for local anesthesia."
"That's what they said the plan is!" Leo shouted. "Think, Donatello!"
"Whoa, bro," Mike said, gracefully interposing himself between his brothers. "I'm sensing some trust issues here."
"What do you wanna do, Leo?" Raph said, as he packed up their little box of medical supplies. "Don's hand is busted. You got a better plan for how to fix it?"
Leo pinched his eyes shut. He couldn't believe he was agreeing to this.
"You owe me for this," Vincent had said, after giving a long and opaque accounting of exactly how much it would cost her department to sneak four giant mutant turtles into the surgical wing of NYU Langone.
"We saved the city from an interdimensional threat," Leonardo had pointed out. "I think our debts are paid for a while."
"Fair enough," said Vincent, a shrewd woman who knew when she was beaten. And, expenses be damned, the maneuver had been pulled off.
Now Leonardo, giant mutant turtle, was watching his brother be strapped to an operating table. "Just for everyone's safety," the nurse had said, and Leonardo had to admit that the canvas-and-Velcro straps would be pathetically easy for Donatello to break if he wanted to.
"I'm fine," Donatello kept repeating, whenever anyone asked, and quite a few times when no one had asked. "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm totally fine."
"You're not fine," Leonardo said, leaning over him.
"No, you're right, I'm not fine," Donatello agreed immediately. "I'm completely scared to death."
Leonardo gave the nurse a meaningful look, causing him to mumble something about needing to retrieve an item from another room. "Are you sure you want to do this, Donatello?"
"I - your logic is impeccable," Donatello babbled. "I need two working hands for everything I do. This is the best way to achieve that strategic end. Ergo, I should do it."
"Yes," said Leonardo. "But do you -" he paused a moment "- want to do this?"
Donatello's eyes ticked back and forth wildly behind his glasses. (Earlier, the nurse had attached his glasses to his face with surgical tape, to help them stay in place during the procedure. "Wow," Donatello had said. "This is brilliant. I should do this all the time.")
"Yes," he said finally.
Leo straightened up. "We'll be right up there," he said, pointing over his shoulder to the observation balcony. "If anything goes wrong, we will break the glass."
"Okay," Donatello said. "Okay. Leo -" He couldn't lift his hand to exchange a reassuring touch with his brother, so Leo pressed his bicep, then backed out of the room, not letting the returning nurse out of his sight.
"All right, Donatello," said LaMont. She was nearly unrecognizable in her surgical cap and mask. "We're going to make a couple of small incisions in your palm and see if we can't straighten out these nerves. If you feel anything, tell us right away, okay?"
"Yes," said Donatello.
LaMont turned to the nurse. "Harlan, do we have the right patient?"
Tyrndall looked Donatello up and down. "I would say so, Dr. LaMont."
"And what's our procedure today?"
"Nerve repair on the left hand."
LaMont nodded. "Good. Let's get going."
Raphael pressed his nose to the window, his eyes wide. "They got a knife! They got a knife!"
"Bro, it's surgery," said Mike, though he was watching the doctors just as closely as Raph and Leo were. "There are gonna be knives."
Raph made a little moaning sound, curling his fingers against the glass that separated him from his brother. "I can't watch this, Leo."
"Then don't," Leonardo said, his own eyes glued to the procedure. "Sit down, Raph."
"But -"
"Nobody moves!" Leo barked. "The last thing we want to do is startle the doctor while she has a knife in Donatello's hand. If you can't watch, sit down."
Raph didn't sit down, but he did pace across the room to lean his forehead against the blank back wall. "What's happening?" he asked, when barely thirty seconds had passed.
"They're putting something into the incision," Leo reported.
"It's like a sci-fi movie, bro," Mike added. A pause. "Oh my gosh, Don's totally geeking out. This is like the best thing that's ever happened to him."
"What?" Raph turned and paced back to the front window. "I gotta see this."
"Aw, lookit him talking shop with the doctor!" Mike crossed his arms and nodded approvingly. "Donnie made a friend! Good for you, bro."
Indeed, Donatello was talking animatedly to the surgeon - or, at least, as animatedly as he could with his hands strapped to the table.
"What are they talkin' about?" Raph asked.
"I dunno," said Mike, "probably how awesome it is that you can stick a needle in someone's hand and sew their nerves back together."
"I don't think that's how it works," said Leonardo.
"Oh, look, look," said Mike. The tone of the conversation had obviously shifted, as the surgeon focused on her work. "Ah, I have found the problem," Mike narrated for the doctor, though oddly he chose to use a deep voice instead of a high-pitched one. "Now I will make it all better."
After that they mostly fell silent, watching the doctor work. Don's eyes would occasionally flick up towards them, and he would offer them a smile, letting them know he was all right.
"Wow," Mike said, about forty-five minutes later, as he leaned against the window, watching the procedure sideways. "Who knew watching a doctor cut your brother's hand open could get so boring so quickly."
"I thought there would be more cutting," admitted Leonardo, who frankly had imagined Donatello's hand flayed open on the table, bones and muscles pulled out like an exploded diagram, while the doctors picked through at their leisure, helping or harming with cold indifference. Instead there had been only a couple of tiny punctures, no worse than what Don occasionally did to himself by accidentally putting his hand down on a beaker in his lab, cursing more about the loss of the equipment than the shards of glass in his palm.
"Maybe you oughta listen to Donnie more when he explains how this stuff works," Raphael said, and Leonardo didn't answer.
They moved Donatello out a back door of the operating theater into a private recovery room, and his brothers followed as soon as Vincent's officers had cleared the hallways.
"That was amazing!" Donatello said, as soon as they joined him, as though he had just come off a carnival ride.
"You're kinda weird, bro," Mike said. "But I respect that."
"Does it hurt?" Leo asked.
Don shook his head. "I can't feel it. It will take a little while for the anesthesia to wear off." He grinned. "But can you believe it, guys? I had laparoscopic surgery!"
"Yeah," said Raphael. "Great."
An officer delivered some lunch trays, and they ate while Don gave a running narration on the gradually-returning sensation in his hand. It was a habit he'd had since childhood; his brothers had narrated for him to help him navigate a world he could barely see, and he had adopted the technique as a normal communication practice, even though his esoteric pronouncements had rarely helped his brothers navigate anything. Don just couldn't seem to accept that any occurrence was real unless someone was describing it out loud as it happened.
At one point, though, in the afternoon, the narration trailed off. "Wow," said Donatello, after a moment in which his brothers paid attention to the sudden silence. "The pins and needles are gone."
"Is that good?" Leonardo asked.
"Probably."
Leonardo sighed and ran a hand down his face. "How can we do better than 'probably', Donnie?"
"Call Dr. LaMont."
They had to wait half an hour for the surgeon to come with the therapy tray, but after Don had gone through all the exercises a second time, there was good news.
"It's definitely not worse than it was before," LaMont said, "which means it will almost certainly be better as you continue to recover from the surgery. I'm still going to recommend therapy, for optimal outcome, and in a few weeks you should be good as new."
Leonardo curled one hand into the other, and bowed, just slightly. "Thank you, doctor."
"It's no trouble," said LaMont, as she closed up the therapy box. "Officially, it never even happened."
"See?" Raphael said, after the doctor had left. He crossed his arms with smug satisfaction. "Still working in the shadows."
"It's amazing how far you can get on denial and judicious deletion of data," agreed Donatello.
"I just forget stuff," said Michelangelo. He made a small gesture away from his head. "Like, boom. It's gone."
Vincent leaned in the doorway. "Are you four ready to go? You're running down your credit balance really fast."
"What?" said Mikey.
"But I wanted to see the -" Don began.
"Yes," said Leonardo. "We're ready."
Don never went to therapy; his mutant healing ability had just needed a little surgical assistance, and then it was able to finish the job on its own. Within a few weeks normal feeling came back into his fingers, the pins and needles and phantom sensations went away, and he settled back into his own skin.
The incisions on his palm puckered up and faded away to nothing, as though they had never been. He stopped dropping things and recovered his ability with the bo and threw away the last, loose set of bandages.
He was a Turtle, and so, they had agreed, he would remain. But though all the evidence was gone, he would never forget that he had once been just a little bit human.