"Raph, do you have a minute?"
Raph stretched languidly on the couch, expecting another request from his suddenly-shorter brother to help him reach something. "Yeah, what's up?"
"In my lab," Don said, which wasn't quite a logical completion of anything said so far, but that was typical for the nerd, and Raph got up and followed him.
"I ain't helping with any of your crazy experiments," Raph said, as he ambled through the doorway.
"It's not a crazy experiment," Don said, already climbing up on the stepstool he used now to reach his workbench. "It's robot first aid."
Raph leaned on the back of the chair. "It's what now?"
"Robot first aid," Don repeated, in that infuriating way he had, like maybe in the last three seconds you had become a super-genius like him and could understand the exact same words he already said. Raph tried real hard to like all of his long-lost brothers, but he just didn't get this Donnie guy.
He circled a hand. "Which is…?"
"First aid for robots," Don replied impatiently. "Is that really not clear enough for you? I'm a robot. Sooner or later I'm going to get broken. Someone needs to know how to fix me."
"Yeah, so what'm I doing here?"
Don looked over his shoulder at him, turning his head just slightly too far to not be unnerving. "Is there anyone else in this family you think would be better at it?"
Raph thought about that. Splinter was powerful with spiritual stuff, but his technological know-how only seemed to extend as far as half a dozen buttons on the TV remote. Mike was a badass buddy in a fight, but outside of that context he didn't like to do much of anything without somebody holding his hand. And Leo… well, all Raph knew about Leo was that he wasn't supposed to touch anything mechanical without supervision.
"Yeah, guess not," he said. "Tell me something, though. You keep saying you want to go back to your body, but you're working awfully hard at getting used to Metalhead. What's the deal?"
"I play both sides," Don said.
"Yeah, no kidding."
Don's electronic eyes narrowed. "I did what I had to do, Raph. Now, come look at these diagrams."
Raph looked. "They're garbage."
"Right now, they're me, thank you very much."
Raph ran a hand over his head. "I dunno, Donnie, why don't we just take you back to Harold when you get broken? He built the damn robot, didn't he?"
Don was quiet for a long minute. "You're still new to this family, Raph," he said finally, "so maybe you don't know how we do things. We take care of our own, as best we can, even when we don't know how. There was never anyone else."
"Don't tell me about there not bein' anyone else," Raph said in a low tone.
Don held his gaze.
"Ah, damnit." Raph grabbed the diagrams, studied them again, then threw them back on the counter. "Tell me what all these symbols are."
He didn't even know what subject Don spent the afternoon teaching him, but if it would help his family, he was sure as hell going to learn it.
The next morning they were at it again, and despite his determination, Raph was feeling hopelessly defeated by the tangle of lines and the squiggly symbols. Don didn't have the fine motor control for writing, so Raph had to take dictation for formulas, then endure corrections, and then sit through an explanation of what he had just written.
"I give up, Don," he said, tossing the pencil across the desk. It bounced off the metal surface, ricocheted off the underside of a shelf, and vanished somewhere in the detritus. "I don't get this. I gotta get my hands on something, you know?"
To his great surprise, Don simply said, "Fine," raised one arm, and nodded towards the back of his hand. "Open up that panel."
Raph stared back at him. "You're joking, right?"
Don didn't move. Any movement took a lot of effort for him now, so, like a cheaply-animated cartoon character, he remained perfectly still unless there was a good reason for him to do otherwise. "Why would I be joking?"
"You're seriously going to let me mess around in your circuits?"
"Why not?" Don replied. "It doesn't hurt me. Robots don't need to heal; they just get repaired."
"But I don't know how," Raph said. "That's kinda the whole point."
"Then we'll sit here until you learn," Don said. "Better now than when I can't help you."
It was hard to argue with any of that. Raph reached for a screwdriver - he didn't know how many the little nerd had, but at least one always seemed to rise to the top of the junk piles - leaned towards the proffered arm, then stopped. "Wait a minute. You've got weapons in there and I know you don't know how to use them. Are you going to accidentally vaporize me?"
"I am almost certainly not going to accidentally vaporize you."
Raph pulled back. "Almost certainly? I ain't a big fan of those odds, Don."
Don regarded him coolly, though how Raph could tell, he wasn't sure. "You like ten-on-one but not almost certainly? Remind me, after the robot repair lessons, I should teach you some remedial math."
Before Raph could reply, there was a cough from the doorway. He turned to see Leo standing there in that awkward way that didn't really inspire any confidence in his leadership abilities.
"Don, do you have a minute?" Leo asked.
"I have lots of minutes," Don replied. "Not needing to eat or sleep has really freed up my schedule."
"I kept forgetting to tell you," Leo said, "but while I was at Harold's he mentioned that Fugitoid went back to Burnow Island to work on dismantling the Technodrome. He -"
"Okay, I'll join him," Don interrupted, and turned back to Raph.
"You - Don't you want to talk about it?" Leo asked.
"What's there to talk about?" Don said. Leo opened his mouth to reply, but Don didn't let him talk. "If I could sleep, I wouldn't until that thing is reduced to microscopic scrap. Krang tried to render our entire planet unfit for any type of life as we know it. Why are all of you too caught up in your own problems to see that this is more important?" He got down from the stool, stiffly. "I need to go blow off some steam. I'll see you later."
"Guy's got some kinda issues," Raph commented, after Don had left.
"Yeah," Leo said, but Raph could tell it wasn't really a "yeah" of agreement.