If You Think I'm Gonna Come Up With A Title For This, You're Dead Wrong

Chapter 12

Donatello stares at the small knife intensely.

It is an incredibly boring-looking one. Knowing as little as he does about culinary arts, he does not know the exact use of it, its size and shape giving him very little insight into its use in that environment. He is willing to make an educated guess and assume the blade itself is made of carbon steel, which is not exactly a strange choice for a knife in his opinion. It is not a combat or survival knife. It is hardly sturdy enough to last long in a combat setting. He is tempted to call Mikey to ask him to identify it for a second but thinks better of it.

After all, it fell out of your pocket. Questions would be asked.

He picks it up off the floor, weighing it in his hand. 'This is a kitchen knife, right?' He picks your jacket off the floor, folding it neatly and placing it on the back of a chair. 'Why would she carry around a kitchen knife?' He rests his head on his arms, holding the offending tool in front of his eyes, continuing to analyze it. 'To fight? She knows carrying around a knife like this with no combat experience is a bad idea, right? Don't people usually use pepper spray or something when they want to defend themselves?'

An image flashes into his head. You, standing alone in an alley, pointing this poor excuse of a weapon at a member of The Foot or the Purple Dragon. You, falling back and hitting your head and bleeding out with a knife sticking in your side because you fell on it wrong—'It's not even in a sheathe'—and trying to crawl back out into the street, begging to god not to—

He blinks, noticing his knuckles going pale around the handle, mouth weirdly dry.

He swallows. He forces his grip to loosen. 'That's dramatic.' He gets up, slipping the knife back into the pocket of your jacket, hoping he put it in the right one. 'She's fine. She's probably just scared after everything that's happened. It won't come to that.'

He sets back down, picking the last gas mask up and turning it over in his hands to give him something to do. He will not have time to properly test whether it works exactly as planned, but he is fairly certain that it and its brothers should allow them to breathe with little difficulty when they need to go into the TCRI building through the elevator shaft. If that is the plan they go with, anyways-- he had elected to stay out of the planning party, seeing as creating explosives strong enough to destroy the portal is enough of a challenge on its own, and he has faith in you and his eldest brother to come up with a good course of action. You guys always did. Bradford was dead after all, a fact that he had been informed made their lives considerably easier. In your words, "Mousers are the fucking worst, and if Bradford had gone off and recruited Stockman, we would have to deal with all of that way sooner." You had quickly admitted that you did not know how long the peace would last, but you seemed pretty satisfied by the way things were happening overall, despite his accidentally causing the power cell to be stolen—"We'll have the whole thing under control after this mission, don't you worry."

You had also claimed that you had the staking out of Shredder's lair under control, but that is neither here nor there.

The door to his lab slides open. "Donnie," you call, "we need to go over the game plan. How're the explosives coming?"

'Why is there a knife in your pocket instead of a taser?' "Theoretically? Well." He shrugs, getting to his feet. "I can't really test if they work, but they're good to go, probably."

You smile teasingly. "They're not gonna go off randomly?"

"Probably not."

"Probably?" Your smile widens.

"No promises."

"Well," you grin, "I sure hope they're good explosives in that case; wouldn't wanna almost bleed out again."