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Donatello was absolutely no stranger to overstimulation.
In fact, it practically came as a package deal of living with his dumb-dumb family. A free gift for being mutated as a baby, joy of all joys. Everything was almost always too loud, too close to him, too much. There had been more times than he could count of him getting far too overstimulated— which would, unfortunately, often lead to meltdowns and going nonverbal for hours. Sometimes even days.
Which is why it was particularly surprising that today, he found himself incredibly understimulated.
He had almost forgotten how unpleasant of a feeling it was. Or how similar it could feel to overstimulation, in a strange way. The itchy feeling beneath his skin, the struggle to get his brain working, et cetera.
He needed to do something, but… but what?
Nothing he usually did to regulated himself seemed to be working, either. His stim toys seemed to be utterly useless; including his favorite purple tangle. Music wasn’t helping, rocking wasn’t helping, layering on his heaviest weighted blanket on top of his heaviest and safest hoodie wasn’t helping… it all just made him prickly with annoyance and nothingness.
It didn’t make sense to him how both of those things could coexist at the same time.
Following his past spells of extreme understimulation, this was around the time he would just say fuck it and force himself into tinkering away mindlessly on one of his many, many (two ‘many’s) works-in-progess. That would at least set his mind onto something and allow him to do something with his hands, as well. It wasn’t ideal, seeing as it had about a sixty-six percent track record of shooting him right up onto the border of overstimulation, but it usually would do the trick, regardless.
…that is.
When he actually could force himself into working on anything.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been standing in his lab, aching for something to do, but lacking any and all motivation to even start on the simplest task. It was hard to even feel irritated— he wanted to be irritated by this!
Instead, all he felt was something he could only describe as a pull. A pull that dragged him out of his lab, forgoing both his goggles and his battleshell; something he hadn’t done since… well, since the Kraang, he supposed. Maybe even longer than that, although he couldn’t imagine it’d been any longer than before the Shredder. Vulnerability was something Donnie did not do, especially after stressful events such as those.
This wasn’t him being vulnerable, he told himself. Au contraire, it was quite the opposite. This was him being… bold? Adventurous…?
Ugh.
He was a terrible liar. Even to himself.
His feet move lazily, clumsily, just blindly following that pulling sensation. It drags him throughout the lair and all he can do is watch the floor to ensure that he doesn’t trip. Wherever this thing was taking him, he just hoped he got there soon. He needs to stop feeling this way ASAP, by whatever means necessary. If that meant following the pull all the way to Raph’s room, then so be it.
…
Wait.
Rewind.
Raph’s room?
Donnie shakes his head to refocus, and there he was. Standing directly outside of his eldest brother’s door. He shakes his head again, and then once more, and… yep, he’d completely managed to show up like a child who had just had a nightmare and needed to be comforted. Except that wasn’t quite the case for him. It finally, finally clicked in his head that what he needed the most right now was deep pressure stimulation.
Son of a bitch. That’s why the pull pulled him here. To the biggest sentient weighted blanket around.
Absolutely not. He refuses to embarrass himself like this.
Just as he turns on his heel to head back towards his lab, the door opens with a less-than-graceful creak and a very prolonged silence afterwards. Of course. Why would he be so foolish as to think, even for a moment, that their dearest eldest brother lacked sibling-related omnipotence? He sighs, completing the 360 and turning back around.
“...Raphael. Hello. What a surprise.”
“Uh. Hi, Dee,” Raph says, confusion seeping into his tone just as a puzzled smile made its way onto his face. as well. “Whatcha up to, big man?”
“Ah, just…” His eyes flicker around as he tries to think up any excuse at all. It felt hard to think. Like his brain was in slow-mode. “Just taking a normal walk. Around the lair. As I typically do.”
The snapper squints for half a second before crossing his arms. “Bull,” he all but states as a fact. “Y’gotta be the worst liar on Earth; even worse than me, ‘nd I literally stink at it. What’s really goin’ on?”
Donnie deflates. Fully deflates, lacking any and all energy to argue back, to attempt to brush him off again. His oldest brother saw straight through him, as always, and he knew that Raph would keep pushing until he got to the root of the issue. This family was stubborn like that.
“I am… understimulated, as it seems,” he admits in a long-suffering sigh.
He isn’t looking at Raph, but he can sense his demeanor softening. It’s hard to tell if that makes him feel better or worse. Regardless of that, he knows that the silence he’s met with is a sign to continue speaking. His hands fidget with the strings of his hoodie as he does so.
Or… attempts to, anyways.
He can’t seem to formulate the words in his head, much less express them out loud. His mouth opens and snaps shut and repeats that cycle several times over. Frustration builds in his stomach, traveling to his hands and, regrettably, his eyes, as well.
Raph seems to notice that, too.
“Don,” his brother starts, slowly. Incredibly slowly, almost afraid to say the wrong thing. “Do you… need a hug?”
A laugh wrenches itself from Donnie’s chest. Not because it’s funny, no; he’s really rather relieved. ‘Like a weight off of his chest’ would almost be the right metaphor, but that sort of went against the whole point, here. Which, he supposes, was why laughing just felt like the right thing to do in this situation.
“…something like that, he said, reluctantly,” he breathes, trying and failing to keep the fond appreciation out of his voice. “In my experience, deep pressure stimulation is ideal in bouts of understimulation, like this, and you… well, you—”
“…are a big, sentient weighted blanket?” Raph finishes, echoing Donnie’s own thoughts from a few minutes prior.
“Precisely,” he says, and gives his hoodie strings a final tug.
Raph laughs, at that, and shakes his head slightly. “You know you don’t hafta ask, Donnie,” he sighs. He sighs, but doesn’t push it, doesn’t try to make it into a lesson. Instead, he just opens his arms and waits.
Donnie doesn’t say anything in return, but he steps into his brother’s arms in a way that says ‘I know’. It hardly takes a second, he thinks, before he’s being squeezed in a way that he would normally despise more than anything. He doesn’t hug back. Not that that’s irregular for him, but he just allows himself to be squished.
He hears a concerned little intake of breath above him, and mumbles out, “This is fine,” because he knows that Raph was about to ask a torrent of questions on whether the pressure was too much or too little or or or… and that wouldn’t be good for either of them. That was a storm he didn’t have the capability of dealing with right now. Besides, Raph seemed to, albeit subconsciously, know what the exact right amount of compression was. He’d chalk that up as another biggest brother thing.
It was fine— more than that, even, if he was honest—, but the whole hugging thing was getting a little old. Not his preferred form of physical affection or touch, in general.
“Can we do literally anything else than stand here in your doorway,” he half asks, half outright states, as if there was really no other answer.
Donnie can feel the rumble of a laugh in Raph’s plastron, and that only serves to soothe the understimulation further.
“Yeah, Dee, I gotcha. You can come tell me everything I’m doin’ wrong on my Minecraft world. Or give me pointers, but that first thing is probably more likely, huh?”
“If you’re making another dirt house, then yes, I’ll be giving you shit,” Donnie groans.
“Ay. Language, little man.”
“Scoff. Whatever.”
Donatello’s go-to cure for understimulation most certainly wouldn’t have been his oldest brother laying on top of him like a mother hen on her eggs, all while very poorly playing Minecraft on the old Xbox that Vance had given them and he’d fixed up, but… there he was. And it was working. Double and, he was simply enjoying Raph’s company. It wasn’t something he got the chance to enjoy all too often.
So, all in all… he really couldn’t complain.