Booyakasha!

creative touch

you are a gem. you pride yourself on creating and sometimes you feel it defining your personality. sometimes you can be a bit scattered and messy, but it just helps your brain think that way. you have your own aesthetic and you know its incredibly cool. you are most in your element when you are doing what you love. sometimes the process is SO frustrating but the proudness of a finished product is what keeps you going. you often compare yourself to others and are the harshest critic of your own work. you are immensely talented and you are inspire others. keep doing what you are doing, love.

Tagged by: @lxkexbxss

The blade against his throat didn’t end him. 

It had been stupid coming alone. 

“I know you don’t believe me.” Don said, voice cracking. This version of his brother had so far given him no leeway, no matter how hard he’d tried to make Mikey remember-

Because who COULD forget the time Mikey broke his arm when they were eight? It had been the first time Don ever had to put a cast on a member of his family, and he overcompensated by wrapping Mikey up from shoulder to fingers. He had to make the plaster from some kitchen flour, water and torn strips from an old bedsheet. In his defence, he had panicked.

Mikey’s favourite pizza toppings where cataloged in his mental encyclopedia. He didn’t know how Mikey convinced him to shell out 30$ on a jalapeno, pineapple, banana slice and anchovy pizza; only that it was well worth the entertainment of getting that phone call back from Antonio’s very Italian and very IRATE chef cussing them out for the Culinary Declaration of War.

Talking had only gotten his shell HANDED to him. He knew Mikey couldn’t appreciate the irony, not when he was literally brainwashed.

Twelve whole seconds passed and Donatello still wasn’t dead. 

“I give up.” He put his hands in view, wincing as his left arm gave way. “You’ve disarmed me and I’m down. So you win. You can take my weapon.” He waited. There was only one way to know. An experiment of sorts.

“Besides, if you kill me now, then how can you ever judge for yourself if I’m telling the truth or not?”

Believe him? Michelangelo wanted to laugh.

“Why would I believe your lies?” he spat, but again his voice betrayed him. There was a wobble to it that undermined the threat. “You’re just... just a thing. Just a thing that Yoshi uses to torture me. Master Shredder told me all about it.” 

And of course he believed Shredder. He believed the man who had saved him, who had took him in when Hamato Yoshi had burned his life to the ground. The Foot Clan had become his family.

“You... You’re just pretending to be my bro, but I’m not stupid. I can see right through it.” All those things ‘Donatello’ had said to him were just a trick. Trying to mess with his head. It should have been easy to kill him right now.

The more he looked at ‘Donatello’, the more his stomach twisted and curled in on itself. Battered and bruised, shell to the wall, cowering in fear from the metal at his throat. The sight of a blade at his neck should have made him happy, but for some reason the opposite was true. It hurt to look at him like this and Michelangelo had no idea why. Didn’t know why his head was pounding and his skin was boiling.

So when ‘Donatello’ offered surrender, it lifted a bit of that weight from his gut.

Michelangelo regarded the other turtle for a few seconds, as if sure this was a trap. His breath rattled and heaved and his mind spun like a top. Was he being made fun of? Was he being mocked? His hand trembled, fingers clenched around the grip of the blade. Kill him. Just kill him. Just do it. Seconds stretched to minutes and his eyes burned with uncertain rage. Donatello’s staff lay scattered on the ground beside him, but Michelangelo made no move to confiscate it. He was too lost in his head to care.

Why did the idea of actually killing him make him feel sick? 

“Why... WHY?” He was a Foot Elite. He didn’t cower or--or hesitate, so why couldn’t he push forward? Why did the blade feel like lead in his fingers? Why did his voice crack and creak and his breath fall heaving and ragged from his lips?

Michelangelo bit back tears.

It was the third time in as many minutes that Don thought he was going to die. Mikey had him pinned against the wall in the same muddled heap he’d landed in, looming above in the black and red foot insignia that still felt so, so wrong to look at.

It was all wrong to look at. Mikey was wrong to look at. Don struggled to take an even breath against the knee digging into his plastron, dimly wondering when his little brother (His sweet, goofy, ever-smiling, kicks-your-ass-during-sparring-but-gently, little brother) had gotten so strong.  “Please, Mikey-” “Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”  The cold sheen of the tanto sent his thoughts scattering. He held his breath, unable to pick where to focus as his eyes darted between the naked rage contorting his brother’s face, and the cutting finality of the blade. He kept waiting for there to be a moment where the old Mikey would shine through, because Mikey wouldn’t go through with it. The person looking down at him with such hatred couldn’t be the same brother who filled the silence of his lab with inane ideas, and handed him tools between comfortable conversations. This was Mikey, this was Mikey and he couldn’t, he would’t, it would destroy his little brother and Don couldn’t bear to think of what the HELL Shredder did to have turned Michelangelo so far in on himself that he couldn’t even recognize his family. Against every one of Sensei’s lessons, Donatello shut his eyes. If he was going to die, he refused to go looking at his brother like this. “Then at least let me tell you I’m sorry.” Every second he didn’t feel the tanto was another second he threw into desperately trying to undo the last three weeks. “Idon’t…you must have been so alone. I’m sorry.” 

There was something like pain carved into his enemy’s face, fresh like the blood dripping from the many cuts along their bodies, but this pain wasn’t physical. It was something deeper than that, something that cut far deeper and far harder than any cut or broken bone. Was he scared? Afraid of death?

Pathetic, the thought came quick and raw, but it wasn’t enough to smother the shards of pain floating around his head. Not even all the hatred he could muster for Hamato Yoshi was enough for that—not when he was fighting one of these fakes. Not when he was staring them in the eyes and they were always, always pleading with him and he didn’t understand why.

Michelangelo continued to tremble, his blade wavering without purpose. Every time he urged his arm to strike forward it refused and that made his head hurt all the more.

Why why why?

‘Donatello’ had closed his eyes and was mumbling at him. No movement, no attempt at struggle -- just words. It should have infuriated him, but for some reason every word latched onto him like a hook. 

“ — you must have been so alone. I’m sorry.”

Something sharp coiled around his stomach. Michelangelo’s chest ached and crunched and he wanted so bad to laugh because OF COURSE he was alone. His brothers were dead and he was fighting the ghosts of something he could no longer get back. But this was his life. This is what Yoshi had done to him and he had accepted that.

So—So why were tears rolling down his cheek instead?

“Are you kidding me? You’re lucky it wasn’t a WORSE disaster. We couldn’t get that ink off for months!’

 Don supressed a shudder. How Michelangelo got his hands on tattoo ink, he’d never know, but to this day he was only grateful that Mikey hadn’t had access to a tattoo gun.  “If you’d applied it subdermally, you’d *still* be walking around looking like a picasso.”  Without looking up from the innards of the Shellraiser, Don gestured at the wrench sitting by where his brother had perched himself, hand outstretched.  “You know, if you want to make some money, there’s other ways of going about it other than NFT’ing your face.”

“Is that really a problem when the Picasso looks this good?”

Mikey kicked off the ground, setting his swivel chair into motion. “Meh. You guys just didn’t get it. I guess it just takes a real artiste to really appreciate all this stuff. Someone brave and cool like me!”

Incorrect usage of that word aside, he followed Don’s out-stretched hand, settling his gaze on the wrench. Mid-spin, Mikey snatched the tool up and made another full rotation on the chair before reaching out and placing the wrench into his brother’s waiting hand.