His eyes landed on you the moment you walked in. And just for a second, his jaw tightened, like he wasn’t ready to see you again. But then he looked away, already reaching for a set of tools like you were just another part of the job. While Leo spoke, Donnie didn’t say a word. He just worked.

Donnie had refused this pairing from the start. He didn’t need help. Especially not yours. He was the brains behind half the Resistance’s tech—he worked faster alone, smarter alone. But Leo had insisted.

“You two are the only ones who can build this in time,” he’d said. “I don’t care about your history. You’re not civilians anymore. You’re soldiers.”

History. That was putting it lightly.

Now the door had sealed behind Leo, and the air between you and Donnie was thick with everything unspoken. The dim underground lab buzzed with dying electricity, scraps of failed prototypes, and too many memories.

The prototype for the portable cloaking device lay in pieces across the table—unstable, fragile, nearly impossible to finish. One mistake and it could backfire, exposing every signal inside a ten-mile radius. It wasn’t just tech. It was a lifeline.

Neither of you spoke. You worked in tense silence, calibrating components, scanning Krang data, doing your best not to look at each other.

Until finally, he broke it. No eye contact. Just the words, sharp and gritted: “I needed the phase modulator two minutes ago. You took too long.” The tone? Ice cold. Dismissive. Like none of it had ever happened.