When his skin is tingling with heat and he's soaped and rinsed twice, then three times, Don shuts off the water.

He wipes a clear streak in the steamed-up mirror and tries to look himself in the eye. Looking at his own stupid fucking face makes him cringe, a flutter of self-hatred that makes him feel sick in the pit of his stomach, and he drops his eyes. But then he scrubs his hands over his face, and tries again.

Better.

'Hello,' he says quietly into the mirror. 'Hi. Yes, good thanks. Thirty seconds. Yes.'

He follows up with a smile. Ugh, not good. And again? Passable.

He scrapes his belt, mask and pads off the floor, and a flicker of revulsion runs through him, no caked-on gore, just his mind trying to reconcile clean and not-clean at the same time. He'll throw them in the trash later.

(What he really wants to do is to toss them in the incinerator he built in the lab for medical waste and biohazards and crank it up until it obliterates them, but that would be crazy. So trash it is.)

He opens the bathroom door and Raph looks directly at him, right into his eyes like he's trying to look inside him too. It feels like a brick to the face, and Don feels a flare of anger – Leo – but it crumbles to ashes even as he looks away.

'All yours,' he mutters, and heads off down the hallway.

Maybe he's the only one who notices these things. Maybe he sees it where the others don't, these little eddies of action and interaction that usually spell disaster, in one way or another, for him. He'd tried to explain it once to Leo, who'd looked at him with his brow furrowed, kind but not understanding, and put a hand on his shoulder.

'You're just… sensitive, Don. We get that.'

Heading for the kitchen, Don registers Mikey falling into step beside him. 'Ramen okay, bro? Sorry, it's stock-up day tomorrow.'

'Sounds good,' he says lightly, and then, because he can feel Mike is going to say something else, and he doesn't think he can talk, not yet, not naturally, he turns left instead of right, away from the bright glare of the kitchen toward his lab. He slips through the steel door and closes it behind him without locking.

Nonetheless, the feel of it at his back is comforting, as is the cleanness of the air-conditioned atmosphere, as is the dim light and the quiet, electronic hum – like sliding into a cool, dim pool.

The equipment – which in the end was useless, utterly useless – blinks quietly, and Don's heart lurches as his eyes come to rest on the incinerator, squat and unlovely between the counter where he sets bio samples to propagate and the medbay.

The lever is cold in his hand, it clanks as it opens its oily maw to him, and the wet thud the fabric makes as it hits metal makes him feel sick. The heavy metal door clangs shut, and he flicks the switch and then has to step back from the sudden, leaping of the flames.

Sensitive. He doesn't want to be sensitive. He doesn't want to feel at all. He wants to batter things, smash it all to useless shit, throttle the scream buzzing to get out past his teeth, peel off his filthy feeling skin and throw it into the incinerator too–

'Don?' Leo is standing behind him. He realises he is breathing hard. Don forces his muscles to relax, and turns to Leo, who is looking uneasily from him, to the flickering furnace.

'Food's ready.'

Don smiles.

'Sure. Let's go.'