tushanshu_logs | (no subject)

Again, Donatello fell asleep at the console. Again, he was surprised by a soft light at an ungodly hour of the morning. Again, he jolts awake and then immediately sags forward again, fatigued beyond belief but still with so much work to do.

He pries himself off the desk and stumbles to the kitchen for what feels like his ninety-millionth pot of coffee since Mike led him back to this suite just a few days ago.

He can solve this, he knows it. If only he could focus enough so that the virus didn't seem to change every time he looked at it.

Mike turns with a start at the sound of someone moving towards the kitchen, his bamboo stirring spoon drips with warming milk as it's raised in a defensive position. He looks ridiculous, also only half awake. If he had hair his bedhead would be spectacular.

Don doesn't even notice Mike as he drags himself to the coffee pot and goes through the motions of starting it on pure force of habit. While it's brewing, he stares vaguely at the wall, waiting for the ding that will trigger the next sequence of steps.

Mike holds his position as Don lumbers in as if on auto-pilot, watching silently as the mild-mannered turtle makes coffee. Slowly he returns the spoon to the pot on the stove, setting the heat to the lowest setting before turning towards his cousin.

"Don," he says quietly at first, so as not to startle. "Go to bed." This second bit he can't quite get out without yawning himself. Not back to bed because Mike knows that's not where he was in the first place.

"Just got up," Don mumbles, because clearly the location where sleep happened, and the amount of time it happened for, are not relevant here.

The coffee pot makes a cheerful noise, and Don decants it into the largest mug immediately available - big enough, as it happens, that he almost might as well drink the pot directly.

He puts the pot back on its stand, then drinks without moving from that spot. The coffee is hot and strong, enough to keep him going a few more hours. He'll be fine, really.

"For a given level of up, yeah, but..."

Then the drinking begins and Mike is momentarily rendered speechless, because...dude.

What? He's vertical, isn't he?

Don looks steadily, if emptily, at Mike over the rim of the mug as he drinks. Leave a message; Donatello will get back to you when the caffeine reaches his synapses.

His head tilts to one side as his foggy brain tries to make sense of what he's watching. It's...absurd. All of this is absurd. Not that Mike isn't used to absurd, but this is certainly earning him a new dot in Absurd.

The smell of simmering the milk behind him reminds Mike that he's got something on the stove. It's with great reluctance that Mike turns back to stir at his beverage, making sure it doesn't scald or otherwise stick to the bottom of the pan.

Blink... blink... caffeination achieved. Don's gaze slides into focus, and he looks at Mike with a reasonable degree of alertness.

"Oh. Hi. How long..." He glances around, answering that for himself. "Never mind." He yawns and rubs a wrist against his eye. "I'd better get back to work."

He empties the rest of the pot into his mug, and turns to do just that.

Mike's watching him in his periphery as the caffeine takes hold and realization dawns. There's an audible click as he turns the heat off his milk and moves the pan its in to a cooler burner.

"Sit," he says, pushing back another yawn through sheer force of will. "At least let me make you something that'll absorb some of ...that." He gestures to the coffee pot.

"Mike..." Don leans a hand against the doorframe. The offer is tempting, but he has so much to do. "The consoles aren't fixing themselves."

And anyway, he's fine. Through years of dedicated practice, he's trained his body to achieve previously unheard-of caffeine saturation levels.

"They can not fix themselves for a couple more minutes, you need to rest before you keel over."

It seems to Mike that Raph and Leo are Raph and Leo, regardless of where they're from. But Don, this Don, is as different to Mike as Mike knows he is to him. And it's...interesting.

"...please?"

Hey, can't fault a guy for trying.

Don looks at the table, looks toward the console, looks back at the table. Sighs and slides into a chair.

"A couple minutes."

Judging by Mike's expression...he was not expecting that to work.
At all.

But...HOLY HIPPO SPIT! It did!

Mike wastes no more time than he already has by gawking, and pours the milk from the saucepan into two mugs. The first goes to Don, the second he keeps with him when he returns to the fridge to see what they have left over from dinner the night before.

"How'd you feel about an omelet?"

Painful experience has taught Don that when his brothers - or now, cousins - tell him he really needs to take a break, he ought to listen. His own body's signals aren't enough to pry him away from his work for food or sleep, but fortunately he has a secondary alert system.

"Sounds good to me." Though he doesn't sound especially excited. Any food Mike might name would sound about equally good to him. He's not picky, especially when someone else is offering to do the cooking.

"Woah woah woah, there big guy," he says kicking the fridge door closed with a foot due to his arms being full of omelet provisions. "I wouldn't want you to strain yourself with excitement." Mike shoots a smirk at his cousin as he unburdens his arms. As time progresses he begins to wake up more fully, and so his movements shift from utilitarian to showy.

Don isn't sure whether this is a joke or not - his sense of humor has been temporarily disabled as nonessential - but it's hard to miss that Mike is being a ridiculous show-off over making breakfast. It's partly entertaining, partly embarrassing, and partly alarming, as ingredients and utensils go flying through the air.

"Where's everyone else?" Don asks eventually. Surely Raph and Leo would also enjoy breakfast and/or a show.

"Sleeping. Like normal people." Mike turns to look at Don, a brow ridge raised. "You really don't know what time it is, do you? You, my good man, are up after Raph has gone to bed, and before Leo has gotten up."

Look at your life, Donatello.
Look at your choices.

Aside from "time for training" and "time for Donatello to be dragged bodily from his lab by well-meaning brothers", the concept of hours and days has never meant much to Don. He's pulled enough all-nighters, though, to be aware that the window Mike is describing is usually a narrow one.

"So why are you awake?" is the obvious question.

"Because somebody hasn't gotten around to building me a robot butler. Yet." He flashes a grin and then goes back to the omelet. "Get on the stick, dude."

Mike's a font of hope.
Also he wants a jetpack.

Edited 2014-06-07 14:53 (UTC)

Don's head gently comes to rest on the table. That is all the response Mike will get to that.

The only mercy Don gets from him is that when Mike laughs, because obviously he's going to laugh, he does so quietly.

The silence that briefly falls is quickly replaced by the sounds of cooking. Then the sound of a plate being carefully placed on the table next to Don's head, followed by a chair being pulled out from the table, and the overall feeling of Mike joining Don in breakfast.

"Order up," he adds quietly, before tucking into his own omelet.

In a moment Don sits up enough to eat, but after a few bites it's clear his mind has wandered off to do something else.

As they say, you can take the Turtle out of the lab...

In a past life it's possible Mike was a waiter, because the very next time Don's mouth is full of food is the exact moment Mike decides to start in on the conversation.

"I was thinking that maybe we need a cat."

Chewing proceeds at a normal rate, then gradually slows to a stop. Swallowing ensues after a brief delay.

"Why."

Mike half shrugs.

"Don't you think getting a cat would be nice?"

"You already have a turtle twice your size," Don points out, very reasonably. "What do you need a cat for?"

"Because i have a turtle twice my size. I'm more of a pet to Raphael, than he is to me."

"Do I really need to say anything else at this point?"

Pets do not keep pets, Michaelangelo.

"You could help me name this potential cat," he offers, willfully oblivious to Don's logic.

"No."

"...please?"

What? It worked so well before.

Okay, Donatello is closed for business. He rolls his eyes and goes back to just eating the omelet.

Mike can only smile as Don does his best to try and ignore him.

"You're a lot like my Don. Not exactly, but close enough for government work. Though I'm pretty sure he finds me a whole lot more charming than you do." His smile goes broad for a moment, but then returns to a more level befitting his sincere amusement.

"Back home it's usually me and him against..." Mike turns to look towards the kitchen doorway, and in the general direction of the two other turtles still sleeping somewhere in the quiet of the house.

"Anyway, if I was back home, and my brother was pulling the hours you've been pulling, I'd tell him that he'd need to take a break. Just for a little while. And I'd get him to do it by asking him to do it for me. But...I don't think that's going to work on you.

So instead I'm going to ask you to do it for your brothers. They need you. All of you. And if you burn yourself out...well, don't. Don't burn yourself out."

Well, now Don is paying attention. He looks down at the remains of his breakfast while Mike delivers this quiet lecture.

"They need me to fix the consoles," he replies, equally softly. Then he adds: "If your Don were here, what would he tell me to do?"

He means it in the "what am I stupidly missing" sense, but that's probably not the answer he's going to get.

"Before or after he picked his jaw up off the floor at the sight of those things?" he says with a laugh.

"This is like, alien levels of tech, I think even my Donnie would be in over his head. I mean, don't get me wrong, he's way smarter than the rest of us combined and I'm not exaggerating when I say I think he's a genius, but...we're from 1986. Apparently a lot changes between then and when you're from. "

The understatement of the year award goes too...

"He had to break out the pigeon puppet for us to break into TCRI."
This...is clearly a HUGE thing.

Don may have heard this "1986" thing before, but apparently it hadn't gotten through his head yet. He just stares at Mike, forgoing replying to all that other interesting information, to say faintly:

"You guys are on ARPANET?"

"....yeeess?"

He has no idea what you're talking about.
None. What so ever.

"I am so sorry," Donatello says, and it's hard to imagine a more sincere tone of voice.

"It's okay, we get by. But believe me when I say that the promise of someday having video games where the game play actually looks like the box art? Makes me more hopeful about the future than just about anything else."

"After I fix the consoles," Don promises, "I will get you some of those video games."

"And then a jetpack?"

A guy can dream!

"Absolutely not."

A guy can dream, but lines must be drawn.

"All right," he huffs. "But I'm totally holding you to that video game thing. And by that I mean: No burn out. A promise is a promise."

"It's on my list," Don says, by which he means the ten-thousand-item-long list in his head, but Donatello does not ditch on his promises.

He pushes his scraped-clean plate towards the middle of the table. "Thanks for breakfast."

"Third behind fixing the consoles and napping occasionally, right?" Mike offers a smiling, expectant look.

He slides Don's plate under the one he's still using.

"Anytime, my good man. Anytime."

"Allow six to eight weeks for delivery," Don replies, in a tone suggesting the actual date of delivery will be somewhere between tomorrow and any time after that. "Can I get back to work now?"

Mike snaps his jaw closed and then proceeds to bite the inside of his lips. All in an effort, a very concerted effort, to not ask the smart-ass question:

I don't know, can you?

Instead he simply nods.

Don offers a small but sincere smile, snags the coffee mug, and heads out of the kitchen. It might be another twenty-four hours before he surfaces from his work, but his body and soul are recharged and ready to withstand the effort.

You did good, Mike.