Don isn't an immediate comfort to Daphne. His outward gentle demeanor downright freaks her out initially when she meets him. Granted yes he's in the middle of patching her up after a brutal encounter with a crazy guy who tried to abuct her and other homeless people, so she's naturally on edge.
BUT
She isn't used to being treated with care. Don has her laying down on a blanket, his coat bundled up and placed underneath her head to act as a pillow so her neck didn't stiffen while she was unconscious from the pain of her injuries, and he's tending to her wounds as gently as he possibly can.
When she wakes up panicked, he gives her space and lets her calm down, talking to her with a steady even voice. He tells her his name, that he's only here to help her.
He waits patiently as she gets her bearings and once the situation eventually registers, she realizes he isn't a threat. Through all of this, he does not touch her again until she gives the go-ahead to continue.
It's months until she sees him again and years until they get to a place in their relationship where she feels comfortable being totally vulnerable with him. In that time, she slowly adjusts to being treated like a person by the community she's built around herself.
It never occurred to her before just how lonley she had been at the EPF until she made it out. There had been no lack of privacy in her old life, every aspect of her diet, education, and training schedule controlled and scrutinized by Bishop, her overbearing father/commander. When she made a mistake, he made it known and let her deal with the aftermath. Approval and praise were less than rare, kindness and comfort, practically nonexistent.
When she finally escaped the base, she had no reason to believe the real world would be anything different than the one she had known. But there were people who were kind. Not a lot, but enough.
And Don...he was like no one else she'd ever met. He was smart, insanely smart, but he never spoke down to anyone not on his level. He was warm and thoughtful and caring towards everyone, not just the people in his personal circle. He engineered solutions to near impossible problems all because he wanted to help someone who needed it. He was even tempered, gentle, and soft hearted.
After a lifetime spent amongst mostly apathetic soldiers and under the thumb of a cold calculating commander who only claimed her as his child behind closed doors, Don was a breath of fresh air.
He was a spark in the darkness, a soft place to land.
Every single thing about him was gentle.
And despite her intentions to keep her distance, she soon found it difficult to do so. He was so easy to talk to.
Even after he learned that she'd been lying to him for years about her past, all he wanted to know was why. And when she told him the truth: that she was terrified that he and his family would want nothing to do with her if they knew she had been bred to hunt people like him and how desperately she wanted to keep her new life separate from her old one, all he did was ask if she was okay.
Immediate understanding, no judgement, no accusations, just compassion.
That's when it sank in how deeply he cared.
And when put into those terms, is it any wonder how hard she fell for him afterward?
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I know it's a lot, but you could you answer nos. 6, 9, 13 and 22 about Daphne and Don? I am soo excited to read the latest chapter! 🥺 🙏🏻 💞
Absolutely!
6. What is their favorite thing about the other? (Physical/personality/habits/etc etc)
Personality wise, Don loves how passionate Daphne is about certain topics and the fact that she loves to learn. She's very politically aware and stubborn when it comes to her views (kinda ironic given how her worldview shifted so much upon getting to know him and his family and The Incident before that which led to her beginning to question her upbringing under Bishop) and that's because her current worldview as a young adult is firmly staked within her own cultivated sense of morality rather than the one her father tried to push upon her. For example, since she grew up within the strict bounds of the EPF as a child soldier and went on to reject that life, she is not at all trusting towards traditional authority figures especially those in the military and law enforcement. This fear was validated when she spent more than a year after her escape as a homeless teenager and got to witness and experience the apathy of law enforcement firsthand. When prompted she will voice her opinions about how flawed and untrustworthy police and the military are, not just on an individual basis but the entire systems these people support because she knows intimately how the military operates and what purposes they serve. (And do NOT get her started on the militarization of police in the US, she will get angry and not shut up).
She has a tendency to go on passionate rants about serious and nonserious stuff (doesn't matter, if she cares enough she will TALK) and Don will always be sat for it. He genuinely likes hearing her perspective and will always be actively listening even if he looks like he isn't. It's like his own personal podcast to listen to while he's working on a project at his desk.
For Daphne, she loves his instinct to help others, how his default setting is to be patient, gentle, and kind. It's such a contrast to the cold, demanding, and impatient demeanor of her father (and generally other men) that she grew up around, that it actually set her on edge when she first met him. Her nervous system wasn't used to feeling a lack of imminent threat. But after several years of warming up to him and his family and getting used to being treated like an actual person on the regular, this trait of his is the most attractive thing about him. She loves that his care extends to those outside of his family and circle of friends. He's also always happy to explain something to her in terms she can understand and is never condescending about it. That last bit is especially relevant because she's taken her education into her own hands as an adult and she's more than a little self-conscious of how ignorant she is in a lot of areas like history, literature, art, etc. (Bishop was very STEM focused and even then, he only taught her things that he saw as relevant to her future position at the EPF).
As for physical aspects, Daphne loves his eyes and his hands, specifically the little imperfections of old injuries that speak to his devotion to mechanical and electrical engineering and continued self-education. He's a very hands-on kind of learner and that's something they have in common.
Don would say that he loves how Daphne's face lights up when she solves a problem or sees a cute animal or a book she enjoys, and while that is true, his more truthful answer is...well...
He's got muscle girl fever
9. Are there any AU ideas involving them that shake up their dynamic or story?
YES AND THEY RANGE FROM TRAGIC TO HILARIOUS
I will do my best to be brief:
SAINW AU:
Similar to the 03 series episode, Don has been missing for the past 20 years and everything has gone to shit. Daphne sticks around with April and Mikey to aid in resistance efforts against the Shredder, quietly mourning the person she fell in love with all those years ago and still desperately hopes is alive no matter how unlikely that might be. Before he disappeared they did have a baby named Artemisia (Misa for short) who was born from a lab accident rather than biologically. Daphne spends those two decades protecting and training their daughter and being an active resistance member.
Meanwhile Don is in fact alive and has been spending years trying to get back to everyone.
The whole premise is basically the Odyssey as Don is roadblocked at every opportunity from returning home to his family and Daphne is busy fending off aggressive attackers while yearning for her husband.
I like the idea of exploring how they develop as characters separate from each other for so long and getting to write them just YEARNING for each other.
Rise! AU:
In this iteration I wanted to really shake up their dynamic especially since Rise!Donnie is so different from 03!Don. I also wanted to explore Daphne choosing to take the dreaded darker path of staying with the EPF and fully embracing Bishop's influence, something that she resists and struggles with heavily in my New Friends, Old Strangers AU of the 03 series.
Here, however, she's a fully realized EPF agent and she's scary good at her job which entails hunting down "criminal" yokai for her father to interrogate. In this iteration the EPF is fully aware of yokai and aliens and Bishop is still the head of it but he has to take a more diplomatic approach more often than not so he can actually protect humanity. This often entails working with more powerful yokai like Big Mama to accomplish his goals. Under the condition that he leaves her Nexus Tournament and her underlings alone so she can continue her own work and whatnot. Much more complicated politics.
Obviously this position Daphne holds makes her an enemy of the Rise!turtles so she and Donnie have a legitimate enemies-to-lovers arc to their relationship.
She and Donnie HATE each other off the bat and that comes across in their combat. He particularly hates that she finds ways to evade or disable his tech (using magic no less!!) whenever they cross paths. Antagonistic banter is a given.
Leo actually teases Donnie about it and starts sarcastically referring to her as his nemesis and eventually his girlfriend which obviously annoys his twin. And of course it ends up coming true.
I'm going back and forth on whether or not I want her story to take the direction of her turning away from her father after getting to know the guys or if I should mark them as doomed.
13. What is one of the most pivotal moments when they are well within the timeline of their romantic relationship?
Oh this is a good one. I gotta go with the fallout of Don's mutation arc.
After the gang successfully pulls off the deal with Bishop in 'Good Genes' (s4 ep25) and Don is physically back to normal, he is absolutely not okay emotionally or mentally. The reverse mutagen impacted his initial memory after the incident but he slowly begins regaining bits and pieces from when he was mutated. These mostly come in the form of nightmares which impact his sleep and mental health. He struggles heavily with this and resorts to his normal coping mechanism: locking himself in his room, lab, or workshop to work himself to exhaustion.
Daphne notices this and gently confronts him one night. He breaks down and explains what's been going on and how he feels like he was a monster and can't reconcile with that feeling. He doesn't understand why she's still willingly sticking with him after seeing what he turned into and how he hurt her and his family while in his mutated form. This is a legitimate concern because Daphne has trauma related to witnessing a mutant killing her parents when she was very young.
She does everything she can to reassure him that she doesn't see him as a monster, that he's never been one even when he was mutated and that she would never hold against him anything he did while in that form.
It's meant to be a nice little parallel to another moment in their relationship. After Daphne's history with Bishop came out in the worst possible way, Don was the one that insisted upon checking in with her while she was isolating herself. He made it clear to her that he didn't think she was a monster for having grown up under Bishop and that he'd be there for her regardless of what she thought about herself because HE CARES.
This was before they became a couple too so it hit Daphne very hard. (It's also the triggering event that made her begin to fall for him 💜)
So she does the same thing for him when he's struggling with similar feelings after his second mutation. She tells him that she isn't going anywhere and neither is his family for that matter, that he's so incredibly loved and cared for and valued far beyond his "usefulness" on the team or his "use" in their relationship.
He was her light in her darkest hour and she does her best to be his even if being gentle is not something that comes as easily to her as it does him. 😭💜💜
22. What is each of their ideal date night ideas?
If Daphne were to plan the night, she'd take Don to a small Turkish restaurant that she discovered during her homeless days. (The owner is a very kind couple who would feed her and other homeless people any leftover food they had at the end of the night). Then she'd take him to the scrap yard and they'd make a game of who could find the best parts and construct something cool out of them. Loser buys dessert 🍨 💗 which would be from a little ice cream stand on their way home. Don loves the yard and getting to flex (ahem show off 😋💗) his engineering skills in a no pressure environment so she'd want to cater to that as much as possible.
Don's would definitely involve introducing her to the planetarium and then taking her on an introductory flying lesson in a helicopter (the one he stole from Shredder's tower at the end of season 1 and keeps stored at the junkyard). One of Daphne's dreams as a kid was to become a pilot. These aspirations usually revolved around her getting to see new places and meet new people since she mostly grew up pretty secluded on a military research base. So Don would probably center his date plans around her getting to see and experience things she could only dream about as a kid. 💜
I loved answering all of these! Thank you 💜💜 @mikubobba
cw/tags: whump, hurt, angst, torture, Bishop is a sick bastard even towards his own daughter, oc x canon
One of the more innocuous things Daphne hated the most about the EPF base were the floors. The constant waxing of the hallways. Her boots, newer but now well past broken in, still managed to squeak slightly as she strode down the corridor, the gray tile stretching on for what seemed like an eternity.
She had no idea why it was cleaned as often as it was. Likely something to do with Bishop's vanity or rather some vanity adjacent aspect given how he saw his work as something within the realm of godlike virtue and so naturally the structure housing such activities required more the maintenance of a temple than a military compound.
Or maybe it had something to do with this end of the base housing the laboratories and cleanrooms. Probably the second option.
Probably.
She had been occupied in the shooting range when one of the soldiers, Shepherd, came to fetch her.
"Commander wants to see you." He said nothing more than that and she didn't bother inquiring further.
Mild irritation swelled inside her chest at the thought of leaving her sanctuary early and facing her father this late in the day. Sighing through her nose, she removed her ear protection, unloaded her weapon, and dropped it off at the exit counter before heading in the direction of the research floor Shepherd wordlessly pointed her towards.
Whatever lecture Bishop wanted to give her, it could surely wait until tomorrow. She already felt the twinge of a migraine creeping behind her eyes and up the front of her skull. It was only escalated by the unreasonably shiny endless fucking floor. But just as soon as she reached the genetics lab, she wished she had more time to wander the halls.
She took a deep breath, steeling herself, as she so often did these days, and readied herself to face her commander. Then she pushed the door open.
"If this is about Robinson's sidearm backfiring again," she began preemptively, "I already showed him twice how to—"
Her feet halted as her attention settled upon the scene in front of her. For a moment there was only the sound of the door shutting with a quiet click that seemed to echo through the oppressive silence of the lab.
Don.
How was he here? He couldn't be.
She had seen Bishop release him and his brothers weeks ago when she made her way back into the EPF with a singular intention: to give up herself in exchange for their release. To her surprise at the time, it had worked. He had even allowed her to say goodbye. Don had been more than reluctant to let go of her, but he had left in the end. All of them had.
Yet here he was not ten yards away. Kneeling on the cold tile, arms restrained behind his back, held in place by two heavily armed soldiers.
An ugly leather muzzle was fastened firmly over his face, hiding nearly everything but his eyes which caught hers in a silent desperate expression she could only decipher as an apology and plea for her to run. Her feet felt rooted to the floor.
As her eyes traveled over him in an effort to determine his physical condition, her heart dropped into her stomach when she spotted the collar around his neck. Each of the men held some sort of pole attached to either side of the contraption and she had a deep-seated nauseating feeling that the objects were not solely meant to keep Don at arm’s length.
“Good to see you in active spirits.” A familiar cold voice emanated from her left and served to yank her back into her body.
Bishop looked for all intents and purposes like his normal self: dignified, reserved, and arrogant to a degree only regularly achieved by dictators, as though he was owed the world for all the work he did in the name of protecting it.
Daphne, however, couldn’t help but take fearful note of the almost gleeful look in his eyes as he addressed his prisoner.
“See, Donatello? I told you she’d be happy to see you.”
Donnie, unable to respond, fixed Bishop with a glare that could have melted steel.
“What is this?” She demanded once she found her voice again, low though it was. “You said you’d let him go.”
“I did.” Bishop’s eyes returned to her, his posture slightly more relaxed than his usual militaristic stiffness, visibly comfortable in the control he held over the situation. “It seems someone couldn’t bear to be apart from you for very long.”
Her eyes caught Don’s and the expression in them all but confirmed Bishop’s words before he couldn’t hold her gaze any longer.
Don, what the hell?
“He was caught trying to sneak in through the airducts,” Bishop explained rather matter-of-factly. “Presumably to find you since the first thing he did was demand to know that you’re alive and well. Isn’t that sweet?”
Her feet suddenly regained the ability to move when Bishop began approaching Donnie. Before she could take more than a few steps, however, a pair of strong gloved hands gripped her arms and held her back.
Had Shepherd followed behind her to the lab? Had she been too consumed with her thoughts to notice him?
Instinctively she struggled to break the hold. A muffled outcry came from Don as he began vigorously straining against his bonds. What began as stifled protests quickly turned into sharp guttural screams, audible even through the thick material of the muzzle.
The pain in his voice cut through her focus on the man wrenching her arms behind her back. Fresh panic settled over her like a suffocating blanket as sparks flew from the ends of the poles and into the collar on Donnie’s neck.
“Stop!” She cried out, ignoring the pain spiking up her arms as the soldier held her wrists tighter. “Leave him alone!” She didn’t know the exact amount of electricity coursing through his body but she knew it was likely enough to seriously injure him if it went on for much longer.
One word from Bishop and the sparks dissipated as quickly as they started. Don’s body shook from the aftermath as he nearly collapsed onto the floor, held upright only through the leverage the two attending soldiers had on the attachments to his collar. She could hear the deep breaths he struggled to take through the slats in the muzzle.
“Ingenious little device, don’t you think?” Once again Bishop’s grating casual tone dragged her attention back. He held up what looked like a remote, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. It looked as though it could have been Triceraton tech but she was beyond caring enough to inspect it further. “It’s best use case is for subduing prisoners but it also has a more lethal feature.” One of his fingers pointedly grazed over a red button on the remote.
Don was still struggling to catch his breath, aftershocks occasionally twitching random muscles all over his body. Despite this clear absence of threat, one of the soldiers’ fingers twitched above what she could now see was some sort of trigger on the end of the pole in his hands.
“So I would suggest against riling him up again,” Bishop said as he pocketed the device and turned to fully face her. The gleeful spark in his eyes had grown into well disguised yet barely contained excitement, the kind of expression he wore when dissecting a new specimen.
A sudden heat in her chest began to overtake the nausea in her stomach, as though her father’s words had lit a fuse inside her. When she spoke her words were quiet, dangerously sharp.
“You made your point,” she said, making a conscious effort to keep still, to not struggle against the painful grip of the soldier still holding her in place. “Let him go.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “I’m afraid that’s off the table.”
“You said—”
“I said I would release all of them provided that you met my conditions. And I did.” Bishop glanced back at Donnie who was only then finding the energy to lift his head. “Our deal had no bearing on what I would do if one of them decided to return to the base and stage a half thought out rescue mission.”
“You don’t need him,” she tried to reason, blunted nails buried themselves into her palms. “You already have his DNA.”
“That hardly rules out his use in any further research,” he replied. “But I’m willing to hold off on that so long as you start meeting our prior agreed upon expectations.”
“What are you talking about?” She couldn’t hide her naked confusion at the accusation. “I’ve carried out every order you and any other superior has given me.”
Bishop fixed her with a look suitable for scolding a child caught lying about stealing a treat from the kitchen. “Your progress reintegrating into your position has been less than remarkable. Yes, you do as your told, but your attitude is less than acceptable, and your work is passable at best. Not to mention the fact that you’ve hardly made significant advancement towards our agreed end goal.”
No argument came to her lips and offered her defense. The last several weeks at the base had felt more like a bad dream than anything else. A nightmare she would eventually hopefully awake from. She had no doubt that her resumed training progress was lacking in his eyes, especially given Bishop's ruthless standards of performance. Standards her body was intimately familiar with and woefully underprepared to immediately jump back into after years of less than rigorous training away from the EPF.
“That’s what this is about?” It was becoming much more difficult to keep herself cooperative and stationary. “You’re going to keep him here because I’m not—enthusiastic enough?”
One of Bishop’s hands slipped into his pocket, the very picture of composure and control. “More or less.”
Her body felt rigid and cold as she watched him rest his other hand on the back of Don’s neck, who didn’t have the energy or freedom to put any significant distance between them.
“Think of it as motivation, a reward even,” Bishop continued casually. “So long as you perform adequately within your position and make proper progress, you’ll be allowed to see him, say once a week. Time permitting, of course.” The smallest smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “In the meantime, he’ll be secure and well cared for.”
Don caught her gaze, dark eyes beseeching and frantic, and gave her an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“Or,” Bishop’s arm tensed slightly, earning a small sharp exhale from Donnie as he tightened his grip, “If you want to keep being stubborn and useless, I can busy myself with another project where Donatello here can be a more worthy use of my time.”
The furnace in her chest was raging, her heart fighting to crack through her ribs. There was no choice here and Bishop knew that.
So she swallowed down the fire rising up her throat and did her best to blunt the edges of her words. “No. I’ll improve. Just leave him alone.”
“Excellent.” A satisfied grin settled fully onto Bishop’s face as he released his hold on Donnie’s neck. A wordless look from him to the soldier restraining her and she found herself released. “Tomorrow you’ll report to the range at 0500 before any other responsibilities. I expect to see the actual skill you’ve managed to retain since the last time you trained here. Am I understood?”
Teeth gnawed on the inside of her cheek as she fixed her posture and avoided Don’s attempts to catch her gaze. “Yes, sir.”
“You’re dismissed.”
Of their own volition, her eyes flicked down to Donnie’s, softening slightly as a silent exchange passed between them.
I’m sorry.
It’s alright. I’ll fix this, I promise.
It was less than a second before her father’s sharp gaze cut through her momentary distraction with a silent repeat of his order.
Knowing better than to test his patience, she forced her feet to move and carry her through the lab exit, actively resisting the urge to look back over her shoulder. She was halfway down the hall when she realized she had not registered the familiar irritating squeak of boots on waxed tile until after she heard the door shut with a definitive resonant thud.
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"Don't move," Daphne ordered, pressing her hand over the wound on Don's neck. The more rational part of her mind reminded her that the injury had to be more superficial than it looked otherwise he wouldn't be this lucid. Still she had to check. "Are you lightheaded at all?"
"I'm fine." Don appeared to have no issues speaking, which was a relief. One of his hands came to rest on her forearm. "It's just a scratch."
The blood seeping through her fingers begged to differ. Although it was not a great amount, it proved more than enough distraction from any further logical thoughts.
"It's more than a scratch," she bit out, searching his belt pockets until she found a small roll of gauze.
"Daph, really--" he began to protest
"Just hold still," she said firmly. She didn't have the words to explain that this was just as much for her as it was for him. If she kept her mind focused and hands occupied, she could stave off the inevitable tremors that wanted so desperately to take over her body.
Her hands moved of their own accord, dressing the wound to the best of their ability as she fought to keep her heart inside her chest. All she could think about was how much worse this could have been. Had Bishop been quicker with that knife, had Donnie not moved as quickly to avoid the worst of it, had she been slower to raise her gun, less accurate in her aim when she shot it from Bishop's hand...
It would have been far too easy for Bishop to sink it into Donnie's neck, to angle it just enough to pierce the vulnerable skin and thrust upward to split the soft palate of Donnie's mouth before it reached his brain. It didn't take a terrible amount of force to do it. She had seen him do it before.
When she was twelve years old, one of the few live aliens breached containment at the main EPF base. Bishop had been teaching her how to properly dissect a specimen when the alien flew through the doors. Within seconds her father figure had swiped a scalpel and thrown himself at the creature--no the person--and then it was done. They dropped to the waxed laboratory floor with a heavy wet thump.
She blinked and for a moment she saw Donnie in that same position. Body limp, head turned to the side as blood leaked through his parted mouth, the puncture wound at his neck, the red ghoulish in the cold light of incandescent overheads and so inconceivably bright against the white linoleum floor--
"Daph?"
Her eyes snapped back up to his face. She didn't remember her hands finishing the job of dressing his wound. Her hand was still pressed against it.
"Why would you do that?" she whispered, not trusting her voice to remain intact if she dared speak louder.
Donnie blinked. She could feel the quick steady thrum of his pulse under her thumb. Evidently the adrenaline was wearing off on him too. "He was hurting you."
"He was trying to disarm me," she countered. "If he wanted to actually hurt me, he would have."
"Right..." Don's eyes flicked pointedly downwards at the bruise on her wrist.
Bishop had been attempting to wrench her weapon off her when Don literally jumped in and tackled him off her. By the time she had managed to catch her breath and get to her feet, Bishop had Donnie pinned against the wall with a jagged piece of metal dangerously close to his throat. And Don was visibly struggling to keep it from reaching his neck.
She caught Donnie's look of doubt and moved her hand away from his neck to pull down her sleeve. "What the hell were you thinking anyway?" She demanded.
"I was thinking," he replied dryly in a tone that poorly masked an undercurrent of rising irritation, "that he was going to shoot you once he got your gun."
She wished she could argue with that. It would not help her case to insist that the man who raised her would not take such an easy shot. Not because it was false, but because she knew well enough that he could have easily killed her without it. And he hadn't for some reason. Which was why she now wanted to kick herself for not taking the opportunity to make a more fatal shot. She didn't know why she hadn't.
Shooting the weapon from his hand, in fairness, had not been her first decision either. A smaller moving target that could easily evade her shot, and worse, risk injuring the person she was trying to aid. Bishop had left her with little choice, however, especially when she caught the taunting look he threw at her over his shoulder.
Take the shot, it seemed to say. Go ahead and try.
So she did.
There was surprisingly less blood than she had anticipated, indicating she may have only grazed her target. Regardless, it had been enough to disarm him.
"Still," her heart began to finally slow down. "You shouldn't have done that."
"Too bad." The terse reply seemed to surprise them both. Donnie ran with it, shifting his weight to sit up straighter. "I'm not leaving you to fend for yourself if it looks like you're about to die."
"I wasn't--"
"I don't care," he said firmly. "That's what it looked like to me."
His expression was one of stubborn defiance, the kind he usually reserved for solving a difficult problem or standing fast against a plainly stupid suggestion he was too polite to insult to your face.
He winced as he moved his neck slightly in an attempt to get his feet under him. Her hand rested firmly on his plastron and kept him seated. "Don't hurt yourself. Just wait til we get back and I'll help you up."
"I just have a scratch--"
"And likely bruised ribs," she said pointedly. "I saw you take that kick."
"Fine." He reluctantly settled back against the wall of the train car and gently closed his fingers around her forearm. Her hand was still against his plastron, palm flat and radiating warmth. "But when we get back, I'm looking at your wrist."
"Fine."
For several moments, there was only the steady clacking of wheels on steel rail and cool underground air whistling around the train car as it headed towards the lair.
"You guys are really bad at flirting." Mikey said, abruptly reminding the two that there were three other passengers not ten feet away.
A carefully practiced neutral expression rested on Leo's face as Don and Daphne turned their heads. Raph, however, looked like he was simultaneously smothering a smile and about to hit Mikey for interrupting their show.
Daphne's hand retracted and Donnie's fingers released her arm almost immediately.
"Hey don't stop on our account," Raph grinned broadly, raising his hands in mock surrender at the murderous looks both of them threw his way.
Daphne stood, dusted herself off and moved towards the other end of the car, busying herself with examining the controls and trying to look like she was doing something productive.
The expression Donnie gave his brothers provided the distinct impression that no projects around the lair would be seen to in the foreseeable future.
While not as numerous as his brothers, Donnie has his fair share of hand scars. Most are from experiment accidents or soldering iron incidents (ie the burns on the pads of his fingers), but a few are from run-ins with Purple Dragons (the overlapping scars on his pointer finger). Most superficial wounds are shed with his scute when he molts annually but more serious wounds tend to remain visible.
Daphne's are mostly the result of years of training under Bishop, both in combat and lab environments. Her adoptive father was hardly patient when it came to her progress as a soldier in training, and as such, her body bore the cost of his unyielding expectations.
The scar on her thumb was born from a scalpel slip during one of her first attempted dissections within one of the EPF labs.
The one marring her knuckles was a training injury during a particularly brutal hand to hand sparring session with another soldier who felt threatened by her skills and envious of the favor Bishop showed her.
The slice on her outer palm, on the other hand, was a defensive wound sustained from her fighting off an attacker when she was homeless after her escape from the EPF.
