Pretty Random Turtle Thunks
Could you imagine having a bad day?
One where everything is too loud, your heart hurts, and the only version of safety you can find is by burying yourself in the dark underneath the weight of your softest blankets?
Your mind is racing, your heart mirroring it like a jackrabbits pace, and you’re struggling to breathe. Maybe it’s anxiety. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s depressive overwhelm that’s sinking in too deep. You’re curled on your side, blankets pulled tightly over your head, to the point the fabric is starting to get damp from all the tears that keep leaking down your cheeks. Sometimes they stream. Other times it’s merely a trickle. Just the mark of heart that’s too full. Maybe you’re hurt. Maybe you’re scared. Maybe you’re just too tired of it all to even care.
That’s where he finds you.
After sliding open the window, freezing for a moment at feeling the heavy weight in the air as he sees you cocooned away in the dark.
His brow creases under his mask, his hand unconscious clenching with a strength that creaks the window pane.
Pain.
He knows such pain. Or at least a version of it.
It’s not one that ever really leaves; something dark and twisted that coils and festers in your gut. No matter how hard you try, or how good you are, it doesn’t go away. A kind of heavy that makes it hard to lift your head to meet your reflection because you know the light just isn’t there. Yeah, he’s familiar with such shadows.
But it was never one he ever wanted to see mirrored in you.
So like the now unintentionally splintered wood of the window frame, digging into the calloused skin of his palm, his heart splinters for you at the knowledge of a bad day just gone wrong.
“Aw, Sweetheart…”
His voice comes low. A little hoarse. The kind of softness that almost hurts coming from someone more quick with fits and fury.
He takes a few tentative steps, the floor creaking beneath his weight, but there’s no edge in him now—just something quiet, sad, maybe even scared that you didn’t call for him.
“You’re not supposed to cry alone like this,” he mutters, a hint of pain coloring his words in the dark. “Not here. Not anymore.”
He swallows hard, jaw tight with restraint, before exhaling slow through his nose. You feel the mattress dip behind you a second later. Heavy, but careful. He settles beside you without a word, easing his broad frame into the smallest space possible, like he’s trying not to disturb the fragile gravity around your curled form.
If you don’t move, if you stay buried, he doesn’t force you out. His arm drapes carefully over your side, tentative at first, waiting to see if you flinch or retreat.
When you don’t, when your small breath hitches in your throat but you stay, he exhales like he’s been holding that breath for years. His head tips forward, the flat bridge of his beak pressing up against the curve of the back of your head and just stays there, breathing with you, slow and sure.
Matching your rhythm when it stutters. Quietly guiding it when it falters until his voice whispers against the folds of blanket.
“I know baby, I know…” he murmurs, voice thick and low, barely more than breath.
“I got you. You don’t gotta be scared of it. It can be heavy. It can hurt, but you’re not gonna drown. Not on my watch. Not while I’m here.”
He shifts again, closer now, his massive arm pulling with the fraction of his mutant strength to press your blanketed spine flush against the weathered keratin of his plastron. His body curling protectively behind yours in the gentlest imitation of a shell—surrounding, not smothering, forever protecting the fragile parts of a shattered heart.
“You remember when I said I’d hold the pieces?” he mumbles, cheek brushing the edge of the blanket near your ear.
“This is that part. You break, I hold. You hurt, I carry. You don’t gotta hold nothin’ right now but me.”
And then—so soft it’s almost missed—he hums.
Not a tune, exactly. Just a steady vibration in his chest. Something low and familiar and primal. The kind of sound you’d only hear if you were this close. Like a quiet rumble of thunder far off in the distance. Protective. Reassuring.
A promise of change coming.
There’s a tremble in your breath, and he feels it like it’s in his own chest.
“No one’s askin’ you to fix it,” he whispers. “Not tonight. Tonight, you get to rest. I’ll keep it quiet, Baby. I’ll make it go away. Far as I can.”
Then with the tenderness that only comes in the quiet of small moments hidden in such shadows, he tips his head forward a bit more to press a lingering kiss to the back of your head and soft kiss to fabric covering where he guesses is your shoulder. “Just stay right here with me, yeah? I ain’t leaving. Ain’t leaving you any time soon.”