TMNT: Ricochet ▶ON HOLD (till gets more reads, votes and comments)◀

Chapter 12

Sometime near the artificial dawn of 05:00, an eerie flickering of the lights rouses Donatello from a light doze. After recovering from his migraine, he'd spent the rest of the night grappling with sleep, ghosting between bed and a makeshift workstation on a nearby table. Scraps of paper stick to his arm and cheek, littered with his narrow, slanted scrawl. Paper was a rare commodity on the ship, but in their hurry to escape from Earth, the utroms had managed to squirrel some away among the archaic mementos of the centuries they had been stranded there.

The utroms themselves had no need for such a thing. Everything they needed to write was chronicled in a universal database. Their technology had evolved beyond the need for hand-writing thousands of years ago. But Don needed to take notes. He needed something tangible, and something to take home if he needed.

When he asked for something to write on, Don hadn't been expecting it. And even though it was the middle of the night, Glurin had arrived with it wrapped in neat packaging not long after he put in the request, signed in English from Mr. Mortu himself.

But thoughts still reel around his head like a tilt-o-whirl. Half-baked ideas and observations, notes about his family's medical conditions, thoughts of home and flashes of memories from the Shredders ship collide in a vacuum of chaos that only started to make sense when pen was put to paper. Not before, sometimes not even after, but only in that flashpaper moment of finally making the chaos tangible.

Another odd flicker of light has him blinking owlishly at the nest of papers, running a slow hand over his freshest set of diagrams.

His head is a mess.

"We are now entering the planetary gravitational field," a smooth voice on the intercom announces. "Please prepare for landing."

Landing. On the Utrom Homeworld. The thought jumpstarts a little flutter in his chest Don hardly thought he was capable of in his current state of mind. It feels good to be nervous, even excited about something that didn't directly affect the well-being of his family. Things were starting to get better. Today, Leo was being discharged, everyone lived through the night, and they were about to land in the middle of one of the most technologically advanced civilizations in the known universe.

For a moment, through all the pain and exhaustion and worry, Don actually lets himself feel happy.

Though happiness comes with a fair helping of guilt. Should he let himself be happy when Master Splinter still floats in stasis, or Raph remains too unstable to see his own family? It's a hard question to answer. The sloppy, left-handed charts and tables scrawled in front of him make much more sense, and it's easy to get lost in them, to file things down to their minutest details. To categorize, graph, and record until everything has its place. Until life can be boiled down into facts and logic and equations.

In a turbulent world, this is what makes Don feel safe, makes the world seem a little less scary than it actually is. Makes him feel as though he can predict, prevent, and find new ways of avoiding future catastrophes.

Though he's never dealt with a catastrophe quite like this. Not one that so directly impacted the lives of his family in such a devastating way. And there's still too many variables. Everything is still so unpredictable.

It makes him feel on edge, like the universe has gotten a little less structurally sound. (And it always was precarious at best.) In turn, it makes him feel less stable, has him resorting to his best methods of self-comfort: isolating himself with nothing but his thoughts for hours on end, and taking notes until things start making sense again.

When he'd woken up to an empty hospital room, he was almost relieved. After almost losing his entire family, there was still that twist of sick panic that came with being alone. Not knowing where every one of them is at any given time leaves a spiraling worry hardening in his gut. But solitude has always been his friend, and the last few hours had felt nice, like finally being able to breathe again.