Title: Working to Exhaustion
Day: Whumptober 2023, Day 26
Prompt: "Sometimes I get so tired; I don't even know myself" Seeing double/Working to exhaustion/ "You look awful"
Fandom: TMNT 2012
Word Count: 1365
Author: aquietwritingcorner/realitybreakgirl
Rating: K/G
Characters: Donatello, Raphael
Warning: NA
Summary: Donnie working late in his lab again. Raph sees this, and decides to put a stop to it.
Notes: Another one written late and posted quickly. Oh well.
Working to Exhaustion
Donnie sighed, picking up his pencil and scribbling down another note. This batch of retromutagen had been another failure. Of course, that didn't mean that Donnie was going to throw it out. No, he could learn from mistakes, any scientist worth his weight could, and so he was analyzing it to try to see just what had gone wrong. He had to. He needed to. He couldn't cure Mr. O'Neil or Karai without this.
Donnie set his pencil down, stretched, and then looked back into his microscope. It was interesting to see how the chemicals had reacted together in this attempted batch of retromutagen. They had reacted badly, of course, but the ways that they did were useful. He could probably use this information to make adjustments to his mixture to try to keep this and maybe other batches from failing.
Donnie pulled back from the microscope and rubbed his eyes. Maybe he'd been staring into it for too long. He was starting to see double. Shaking his head, he reached for his pencil, but he didn't quite reach far enough to grab it. He did, however, reach far enough to knock it off the table. It rolled, and then fell, landing on the ground with a hollow sounding plink! For a moment, Don stared at it, and then he sighed and pushed back his chair to go after it.
Raph automatically looked in the lab as he passed it, heading towards his room. It was a habit of awareness, but this time it caused him to stop and backtrack. For a second, he watched from the doorway as Donnie went under his table for the pencil. Raph frowned. Don's movements were slow, and clumsy, and that made Raph's brow furrow.
Making a decision, Raph made his way inside the lab. He stood there as Donnie pulled back and crawled out from under his table, pencil in hand.
"Geeze, Donnie, you look awful," he said as he looked over his brother. "When's the last time you got any sleep?"
Donnie blinked up at Raph, too tired to even come back with a sarcastic answer. Instead, he just stared at his brother from the floor. "You know…sometimes I get so tired I don't even know myself when I last slept."
Raph stared as his brother and then huffed. "Yeah, because sleep deprivation is going to lead to scientific breakthrough." He reached down and grabbed Donnie's arm, hauling him up. Donnie may have been the tallest of the brothers, but Raph was the strongest. "Come on, up you go," he said.
Donnie offered up a token resistance to the treatment. "Raph—what are you doing? I'm fine, let me go. I have important work to do!"
"Important work?" Raph said. "So important you can't take a few hours to sleep or thirty minutes to eat?" he questioned. "Something tells me you don't know the last time you ate either, do you?"
Donnie paused, trying to think of a way out of this trap. "Well… actually… no." Donnie's shoulders slumped. "No, I don't."
Raph frowned. "Donnie, you can't keep doing this to yourself, man. You're working yourself to exhaustion." He pulled on his brother's arm, tugging him along with him out of the lab.
"Actually," Donnie said as he stumbled along behind Raph. "Exhaustion isn't just feeling tired. It has an actual medical definition behind it that includes three different kinds."
"Uh-huh. Fascinating," Raph said, letting Donnie prattle on as he took his brother to the kitchen, sat him down, and started to pour him a bowl of cereal. He honestly didn't care what Donnie was talking about at the moment. All he wanted was his brother to eat something. He pushed the bowl in front of Donnie, gesturing for him to pick up the spoon. Exhausted as he was, Don didn't even notice that he had followed a command, and started to eat while talking.
"Do you know what I see?" Raph said, interrupting Donnie's tirade on how to see the signs of one of the types of exhaustion.
Donnie blinked at him, the spoon halfway to his mouth. "No, Raph, I don't know what you see."
Raph leaned forward, making sure that he had his brother's attention. "What I see is a brother who is working himself to a state of exhaustion. What I see is how tired you are. What I see are the bags under your eyes, the shake to your hand, the slump of your shoulders. What I see is an overworked brain and a heart that's too busy thinking about what others want than to realize that you need a rest, too. What I see is a brother who isn't taking care of himself and could be a risk to himself or on a mission."
Raph leaned in closer. "What I see is that you're gonna end up with all those symptoms that you're talking about if you don't stop it and start eating properly and going to bed!"
Don had been mechanically eating his cereal the while Raph talked, even though he was also staring wide-eyed at Raph. He blinked a little, though, as Raph finished, and scowled, although the effect wasn't very effective with the obvious exhaustion he had hanging on him.
Still, though, Donnie did scowl at him, and gestured sloppily with the spoon, sending bits of milk flying around, not that he noticed. "I can't just stop, Raph," he said. "I have things I have to do. April is counting on me for a cure for her dad. I mean, I know she blames us for it, but who else is going to help him? And Splinter needs a cure for Karai—and maybe for himself too. It's hard, but I have to keep working on it, I have to keep working hard."
"Oh yeah?" Raph countered. "Tell ya what. How about you use that big brain of yours and tell me what happens when a person doesn't get sleep? How about you tell me what happens when a person doesn't eat? I don't think you have to tell me, I think you know it and so do I. You're gonna make mistakes, Donnie, and can you really afford to do that? Mutagen isn't easy to get. Can you really afford to lose what you've got because you were tired?"
Don shifted uneasily in his seat, bringing the spoon back to the cereal bowl and scooping up some more. Finally, after a few bites, he looked at Raph. For a moment, he looked at him, brother to brother, unguarded. "…But if I don't work on it, who will? And what if there's a time limit? What if I only have so long before it's all too late anyway?"
Raph reached across and put his hand on Donnie's shoulder. "Then you won't find it any faster if you keep screwing up because you're exhausted." He sighed. "Look, Donnie, finish eating and then go to bed, okay? I'll wake you up in six hours, and then you can get started again. But how are you going to help anyone if you collapse because you didn't take care of yourself?"
Donnie sighed and looked down at his bowl. Finally, his shoulders drooped. "Alright. But you better not let me oversleep!"
"No on purpose," Raph reassured with a grin.
Don finished his food, and Raph made sure he made it to his bed. Donnie was practically asleep from the moment he crashed into his bed. Raph made sure to cover him up and turn out the light before closing the door behind him. Then he walked to the lab and looked in.
For a moment, Raph just stared at all of the stuff that Don had in there. Things that he considered important or projects that Raph knew that Donnie would rather be working on sat to the side, gathering dust. With a set jaw, Raph turned out the light to the lab and closed the doors. Tomorrow he'd work on making sure that Donnie made time for himself, instead of sacrificing it all for the retromutagen.
He wouldn't let his brother work himself to exhaustion, no matter what anyone else said.