This Is What Family Means To Me - Blog Posts

I love their duo sm😭😭🧡💙🧡💙

(Found a lil drabble I wrote a while back that I wasn't gonna share outside of my buddies but you know what? Cute Brand New Papatello be upon you.) *

It wasn’t until he was cradling his daughter to his plastron, fresh from the tube she’d been grown in, that it occurred to Donnie he had never once in his life held a baby before. The thought was equal parts terrifying and surreally fascinating.

Distantly, he knew his family was losing their collective minds over the infant turtle mutant. He vaguely recognized a coo from someone - Leo? - telling the others to look at Donnie’s expression right now (“He’s a goner already.” An affectionate laugh. “You good, Dee?” “Shhh let him have this.” “Her fingers are SO small!”). But the longer Donnie looked at the baby curled into his chest, the less his family’s voices made sense. 

Sound fell away. Hesitantly, Donnie brushed a hand - as big as she was - over the curve of her tiny shell. It was softer than his, the smooth leather surface still damp with incubator fluids. He could feel the ridge of her spine. The alien familiarity, the echo of his own shell, the smallness and fragility of her, the miracle that she was here and alive - a million thoughts and feelings simultaneously colliding - made Donnie’s breath hitch and a wave of warmth wash over him. 

Donnie had already decided he cared about this baby, and his dum dum brain had already sent out all the dum dum hormones that filled him up with more dum dum affection for her than he knew what to do with. All the researching and the planning and the prepping and the step-by-stepping so that everything would be fully assembled to help her thrive and grow had been rigorously completed. And yet. And yet and….and yet….Donnie had never been so prepared while also being so helplessly lost and overwhelmed. 

Words failed him. 

His fingers were touching lightly over her cheek, her brow, hands so small they made his heart squeeze. She was incredible. She was the scariest thing he had ever beheld. And also the most beautiful. His stomach flipped. Instinctively, she searched for something to latch on to, mouth as toothless as a koi fish on the tip of his finger. The sound she made was an unmistakeable, Donnie’s-world-altering, high, sweet chirp. Donnie didn’t realized he’d clicked back automatically until an especially shrill noise of delight erupted from his brothers. With it, the vacuum tight bubble around himself and the baby popped. 

Sound and smell and sight outside of himself and his miniature copy rushed back in. It was disorienting, but Donnie’s focus was resolute. He tried to ask for the bottle they’d prepared for her. She needed feeding and there was still some potential trial and error ahead in figuring out just what she would eat (baby formula? Turtle food? A Yokai recipe of some kind? Donnie had about a dozen different forms of nourishment prepped just in case. But he couldn’t manage to ask for a single one of them. The very thought of taking his attention off of her was absurd.  

“How you holding up, Dad Man?” Leo asked with a laugh, the sound softer than usual. All of his family had settled down after Donnie came back to himself, maybe recognizing he was toeing the line of overstimulated, maybe just genuinely soft and happy themselves over seeing whatever it was they saw on Donnie’s face. He could worry about the implications of that when he reviewed the footage for his archives later. Right now however…

Replying should have been easy. Just string together a few coherent words, Donatello. Speaking was something he was perfectly capable of. He inhaled to do so.  The rise of his chest for air, however, made the baby stir against him, peeping softly, and what little remaining rationale Donatello Hamato had flew out the window. Donnie was scooping her in closer, pressing his nose to the top of her head as he curled around his baby.

“Perfect.” He mumbled.

“Ha! Say again?”

“She’s perfect.”

Augustine Hamato, daughter of Donatello Hamato - his stomach flipped at the thought - was absolutely, two hundred percent…perfect.

🫢🤯🥹

This…this literally blew me away like…I have no words to express how beautiful this is…

I Want Something Just Like This

Collaboration with the lovely @tapakah0 thanks for working with me ｡(TヮT)ﾟ｡

@somerandomdudelmao hope you feel better soon Cass ( -_-)＼(0-0 )

Song: Something Just Like This by Coldplay and The Chainsmokers