devArt TMNT Secret Santa exchange: gift fic for Lady-Date

Prompt: Leo/Don or Raph/Don, Boys and Their Toys

This TMNT Secret Santa thing was an awesome idea! Here's what I came up with—I hope it's as fun to read as it was for me to write. It's set a little bit after the CGI movie.

I don't own the Turtles in any way, I just like to play with them.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

or

Good Things Come In Small Packages

or

Baby, It's Cold Outside

by a-big-apple

A Christmas blizzard up top means leaks and chilly dampness down here in the sewer, but it's like that every Christmas, so I don't really mind. It's kind of nostalgic, as long as nobody gets sick and we're well stocked in blankets. April has seen to that for years, and she saves the best ones for our father, even though his fur keeps him warmer than our thick skin keeps us. He just goes on getting older, though, so we don't begrudge him the fleece and the flannel.

It's a Christmas Eve just like any other; we're all sitting around wrapped up to our chins, sipping mugs of cocoa and munching the Christmas Cake that Father somehow picked up for us. He says it's what the fathers in Japan do on December 24th, and we don't ask how he gets it. Being a ninja master and a rodent probably helps. We just eat it, and watch whatever heartwarming holiday classics are on tv, because Mike won't let us watch anything else. We've all seen them a million times, but I think even Raph likes the routine—this is the one time of year that I can see the hard edges of him soften, and the one time of year that he doesn't care if I do.

I'm finding it harder to concentrate on Rudolph than usual, though. I've never had trouble with self-discipline, but the season has made me lax, and my eyes keep slipping over to Don, curled up with Mike on the loveseat. He's just a lump of blanket, with a corner of it draped over the top of his head—"to keep the heat in," he protested when Raph laughed—but now and then he slips an arm out of the mound of cloth to spear a piece of cake, or to warm his fingers over the cocoa mug, and my attention is caught. It's not as though we don't all have muscley arms, I tell myself. I don't listen. Through the haze of…whatever this is, this strange new thing we've been doing since I came back from the jungle, Don's arm looks divinely sculpted and extremely appealing. Once, when Mike and Raph are both caught up in Yukon Cornelius' fight with the Abominable Snowman and our father is dozing, Don turns his head just a little to look at me out of the corner of his eye. I'm watching him, and I know he can feel it, and it makes me feel strangely daring. So when his eye slips back to catch mine, I smile just a little; he blushes, which is something we've only just discovered he could do—it makes a sort of purply color in his cheeks that I find fitting, and startlingly attractive.

I think about the book I've been reading about Japanese celebrations, and how for them, Christmas Eve is a sort of national romantic date night, and how Donnie's blush is making me feel pretty romantic right now. It's a train of thought that keeps me occupied until Rudolph is over, which generally marks the end of Mike's restraint.

"Time for presents!" He announces with glee, leaping up from the loveseat to retrieve the modest piles under the tree. Some of them he leaves there, glittering under the tree's many lights; we'll open those tomorrow, with April and Casey and Shadow. Tonight, though, we'll exchange our small gifts to each other, an enduring tradition left over from our younger days when Mike (and, admittedly, the rest of us too) woke Father hours before he would have liked on Christmas morning.

We open them all at once, at Mike and Raph's insistence; the former because he's impatient and loves to throw paper wildly around, the latter because he finds expressing thanks less awkward if we're all distracted. It's a routine that I, to some degree, was counting on. I watch, trying to appear casual, as Don opens the little box wrapped in snowflakes, and pulls out a pack of reusable 9-volt batteries and their charger. His face lights, in just the way it would have any other year--he goes through batteries like nobody's business--but then he looks over at me, and behind the smile I can see his brain working. He knows there is more to this than meets the eye. I smile my big-brother smile, and open the gift I know is from him. He's the only one of us who ever bothers with gift bags, because he loves the tissue paper, and there's a ton of it crinkled up inside. When I've pulled it all out, I empty the bag's contents into my lap; a package of heavy-duty ceiling hooks, and three blue all-purpose-y candles. I look over at him in genuine confusion, and he grins.

"You were saying you wanted to hang plants in your room, because you miss the jungle."

I chuckle. "You'll have to build me a plant light, too...."

"Oh, that's easy to do," he says a little dismissively, and my stomach churns in a very good way. These are definitely not hooks for plants.

"Dude, Leo, you got Don batteries? Maybe you were in the jungle too long." I shrug at my little brother, with the sheepish grin I know he expects. We decided we can't tell them, yet. It's too soon, it's too strange, and Don and I are both too good at keeping secrets. Mike shakes his head in disbelief, then goes back to playing with the Nightwatcher action figure Raph got him. It's clear from their faces that the irony pleases them both.

Later, after the third round of cocoa, both Mike and Father have fallen asleep, and Raph looks like he's moments away. The Christmas programming has come around to the beginning again, and I'm the first to rise, collecting the mugs and the scraped-clean cake plates. I'm quiet, but that doesn't matter; Splinter wakes, smiles with the blissful expression of a happy, sleepy parent, and shuffles off to his bed. Raph yawns and stretches, then in a rare moment of tenderness, goes to the loveseat and picks Mike up as though he were a child, still wrapped in his blanket and with a tiny bit of icing smeared on his face. See? I think to myself as my brawny brother carries Mike, the heaviest sleeper of the four of us, to his messy bed. Muscley arms. Raph, though, is almost too brawny. We're none of us lightweights, with all the natural body armor, and Raph's the only one who's ever been able to carry a brother any significant distance without struggling. Don, on the other hand…

Don unfolds himself slowly from the loveseat, looking less bleary-eyed now that we're alone than he did a moment ago. He turns, with the blanket still wrapped around him. For a moment neither of us can speak, and neither of us needs to; then Don blushes again and helps me bring the dishes into the kitchen. I wash and he dries, our fingers touching every time a plate or fork gets passed. By the time we're done, we can be pretty certain that everyone else is asleep.

"Your room?" I mouth, because he soundproofed it years ago, but he shakes his head.

"I'll put up those hooks for you." I retrieve them from the living room, and he hurries off to get a drill, and we meet at my door. His eyes flash up and down the hallway, and we slip inside, locking the door behind us.

My room is as it always is, with one exception--another gift bag sitting on my pillow, cheerfully wishing me a Merry Christmas in bright blue and green. That's another thing I love about Donnie--he color-codes his gifts, no matter what the occasion.

"Don't open it yet," he murmurs, looking at the ceiling. When he finds spots that he approves of, he pulls over my desk chair and climbs up on it, revving the drill. Like all his electric tools, it's been modified to be quieter, so I don't worry about the noise waking anyone; I just watch as Don installs the hooks in my ceiling precisely where he thinks they should be. With his arms lifted above his head, the softer skin between plastron and carapace is exposed, inviting. For a few moments I just stare, willing myself not to move, and then I remember that we're alone and go to stand beside the chair, laying my hands against the skin and resting my cheek on the lower scutes of his plastron. He pauses, looking down at me, and blushes again with a knowing sort of smile. Sometimes I think he can read my mind.

"Okay," he says, stepping down from the chair and out of my reach. "You can open it now." I do, quickly, sitting on the bed; inside is a huge coil of silky black rope, and a book.

"Kinbaku," I read, running the rope through my fingers. "The ancient art of Japanese rope bondage." I blink, looking at the coil of rope, then up at the hooks in the ceiling, then over at Don. The smile on his face is indescribably wicked, and I think my mouth drops open a little in shock. Then I laugh, low, because I can't help it, and it's just precisely the right gift, and he knows it. A moment later he's in my lap, his usual laid-back shyness gone.

"So what are those batteries actually for?" he asks. I reach under the bed with my foot and pull out his gift, wrapped discreetly in brown paper. He takes it and leans back a little to open it between us, glancing at the shipping label. "From "SexTech" dot com? Hmmm...." He tears off the paper and tosses it aside, turning the box over in his hands in momentary confusion. "Deluxe Electrical Kit...." But once he sees a picture, it's clear enough, and he laughs much louder than I did moments ago. He pulls the box open, drawing out pieces and turning them over in his hands. He holds up one that's two meshy rings linked together by a sort of handle, with wires all wrapped in. "So these…create a current? I hope they're big enough to fit," he murmurs, in all sincerity, poking his fingers through the holes to test their circumference. This is almost too much for me, and I can't help but laugh. He realizes what he's said, and blushes at the arrogant sound of it, then grins at my expression. Then his mouth is on mine, and we don't say anything else for what I think is quite a while. He's the first to break the silence.

"So," he whispers, breathless. "Let's move this to my room, shall we?"

And I'm inclined to agree.