A Shell of Himself

Chapter 1 - All Night Don

*Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise.

*Author's note: Thank you so much for reading. Please let me know if you like my story.  CJ  :)

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The system tray clock on the bottom right hand corner of his computer monitor informed him that the exact time was 3:06 A.M. The font of the digital clock was almost too tiny for his tired eyes to read, but all he had to do was slant his body forward slightly and squint a few times to bring the numbers into focus. Well, focused enough so that he could decipher them.

Donatello dragged his olive-green colored hands down his face and then rested his carapace against the worn back of the task chair he was stationed at.

3:06 A.M.

That meant that he was supposed to have gone to bed four hours and four minutes ago. The reason he knew precisely how long it had been since he was supposed to have gone to bed was because it had been 11:02 P.M. on that same desktop clock when his oldest brother, Leonardo, had ever-so calmly placed his hands down on the top of Donatello's desk, leaned over him, and ordered him to turn off all of his equipment in the lab and call it a night.

Now that it was past the three o'clock hour – ante meridiem rather than post meridiem – Donnie realized that he couldn't really call it a night any more. Not if he wanted to be entirely accurate, which he did. Technically, if he went to bed now, he would be calling it a morning. Of course, Donatello had no intention of calling it a morning at this point, even though he was well aware that Leonardo would be seriously ticked off if he found out that his little brother had directly disobeyed him and forgone sleep again, just as Donnie had done the past five nights.

Sure, Donatello felt a little guilty for defying his oldest brother's very explicit commands. Okay, strike that . . . He felt a lot guilty for defying Leo's commands, but, in Donnie's defense, he had shut down most of his equipment and switched off almost all of the lights.

That had to count for something, right? Okay, maybe not . . .

Truth be told, Donnie hadn't turned off any of those things out of the goodness of his heart or even just to appease his sometimes overbearing oldest brother. No, Donnie had done those things to protect his own shell. Not for selfish reasons. Being selfish wasn't in Donatello's nature. It was well-known that the dubbed genius of the Hamato Yoshi family did not have a selfish bone in his body. All of his close-knit friends and family would personally vouch for that. Donatello always put others' needs before his own, hence the reason he was currently depriving himself of all sleep and nutrition. He was doing so out of purely unselfish reasons. He was trying to help his friends. Friends that he had recently made solemn promises to that he fully planned to keep, and, in his mind and his heart, those vows came before fulfilling any basic needs that he might have. So for the past five nights, instead of wasting time on trivial things like eating or sleeping, Donnie had locked himself away in his lab, day and night, so that he could work on the cure that he had promised to find. He had promised his friend, April O'Neil, and he had promised his friend, Timothy (aka 'The Pulverizer'). Donnie had no intention of breaking his promises.

Now, more than ever, it was imperative that Donatello develop an antidote for mutagen as soon as possible, above all else. His friends were counting on him. That was why Donatello was pushing himself so brutally hard to find a cure. He had been ever since the unfortunate incident with Timothy . . .

Six nights ago, Donatello had been forced to make a difficult choice. One that Donnie wasn't so sure he could live with himself for making, even though, deep down inside, he knew without a doubt that it was the only viable choice he had. In order to save his three brothers and the human girl he was head over shell in love with from a crazed mutagen monster, Donnie had no choice but to take that monster out. And take it out he had. To be exact, he had tricked the demented creature into ingesting an unsuccessful, highly experimental batch of retromutagen Donnie had made earlier in the day. The altered mutagen had effectively froze the creature solid inside of a glass containment unit, just as Donnie had anticipated.