Another amazing screencap edit by  oscarvanderhof featuring some well dressed (and plump) turtle bros, that I wrote up a short story for!

Enjoy!

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It had all started as a joke. Leo, with his classic mischievous smile, thought it’d be funny to dress to the nines before the turtles all went on their usual pizza run. While Raph complained that he was starving now and didn’t want to wait and Donnie merely rubbed his eyebrows in dismissive disgust, Mikey was instantly on board.

“We could ALL use a little more class in our lives,” Mikey had said to the audible groans from his red and purple banded bros.

“We’d look fire!” Leo said, leaning into the scheme both metaphorically and physically as he wrapped an arm around Mikey’s shoulders.

“Y’all do whatever you want, I’m getting some za!” Donnie proclaimed, tapping half-interested on his phone, prompting Mikey and Leo to shift their attention to Raph: two vs one and they knew that their big bro was a sucker for peer pressure.

An hour later, Mikey and Leo emerged top side, striking a pose in the flickering streetlamp above, showing off their high thread count suit jackets, the refined pleats along the front of their pants, and the shine of their silver belts. Mikey adjusted his orange bow tie with a look of approachable seriousness sprawled across his face while Leo struck a “casual” pose, highlighting his blue pocket square, tie, and mask which blew gently in the late-night breeze. They both knew that despite the suits being a size or so too large for them, they looked good.

Raph emerged behind them, nervously adjusting his cuffs while Don shuffled out, back hunched and sulking. He loudly groaned and immediately choked, feeling the tight purple tie around his neck that Raph had forcibly put on him as part of this mandatory brother-bonding activity. In a fit, he tore the tie off and tossed it on the ground before crossing his arms in a huff.

“Hey, that’s vintage Italian!” Mikey cried.

“It was tacky just like the rest of all…. This!” Don said, pointing to their contrasting outfits as they stood next to an overfilled alleyway dumpster.

“HUGHG!!” Mikey gasped.

“Watch yourself, Don,” Raph warned.

“Hmmph,” Don pouted. “This is stupid...”

“Well, my friend,” Leo said, swooping in with a smarmy, persuasive tone. “While what you’re saying is stupid, that suit, that FIT on you is anything but! You’re dressed up smart, distinguished even!” Leo brushed off Don’s shoulder piece. “Donatello, the distinguished professor of danger.”

“You should have said DEAN of danger to fit the alliteration…” Don muttered before Leo grabbed his collar and pulled him up into a more proper posture. Leo then undid the top buttons of Donnie’s undershirt, adding a level of sophisticated leisure to his appearance.

“Or how about Double Agent Don?” Leo floated.

“Well,” Donnie said, glancing down and oddly likely the alterations to his getup. With a growing smirk, he adjusted the suit jacket and flared his sleeves before striking a pose himself. “With looks this suave, who was I to say no to both the Department of Defense and the World Health Organization…”

“Hggrm,” Raph grumbled, still messing with his cuffs before Mikey pulled his hands apart.

“Stop messing with them, you look good!” Mikey assured. “We ALL look good!” The four turtles struck a group pose, an action shot for a nonexistent vogue photographer before jumping aside just as a truck roared by, nearly splashing them with a puddle of stagnant city water.

“Hey, watch where you’re going!” Leo shouted.

“Yeah, there’s fashion going on here!” Mikey chimed before his stomach rumbled. “Oh yeah, the pizza…”

The turtles slowly strutted their way across town, posing in front of mailboxes, food carts, and even an old stray dog asleep on a park bench. It was a night of fun. A night of looking and feeling good. The pizza was almost an afterthought though still quite delicious after working up even more of an appetite treating the city like their own personal runway.

The turtles spent the next few days giddily reliving that night through the dozens of photos they took of themselves, longing for another night just like that, only for Mikey to have an epiphany: they could dress up and go out on the town any time they wanted!

The next week, they dressed up again for their usual pizza run, then a few days later for a trip to the gelato shop on Main Street and 5^th. What had started as a fun joke was quickly turning into a legitimate hobby, a group bonding activity that got all the turtle bros excited. Perhaps a little too excited, as when they dressed up, they still always felt the need to give their fashionable walks a purpose and that purpose was almost exclusively to grab food.

Their usual weekly trips topside quickly turned into nightly occurrences, a daily special occasion which meant a daily special occasion treat. You couldn’t just eat a salad when dressed that well, you needed to treat yourself, and treat themselves the turtles did! They treated themselves to dinners at fancy steak houses, local seafood bistros, French patisseries, and exotic tasting menus.

“The marbling on this wagyu was positively stunning,” Mikey chirped with a faux air of arrogance.

“Are these speckled quail eggs organic?” Donnie asked.

“Mmmm yes,” Raph mused, “this chocolate is clearly from…uh… chocolateville…”

They were living the highlife, that was until that first credit card declined, snapping the turtles back to reality: while they liked to pretend it didn’t, money still mattered for a quartet of unemployed mutants. While Donnie was able to secure some funding from automating a call center position, they couldn’t keep going out to the Michelin-star restaurants their favorite edition of Suits & Style magazine may espouse.

The turtles could, however, keep going to Hank’s Franks and Taco Town. Did they stick out like sore thumbs wearing full suits to grab burgers and fries at the local Burger Palace, yes, but at this point, they didn’t care; it was still fun to go out in style. With their now nightly jaunts on the town involving more and more cheap fast food, the turtles quickly found that their projected status of extravagance and excess was being matched by a very real excess: that of calories.

Despite the pompous way that Mikey ate his fries, that didn’t stop those fried golden delights from materializing on his hips, widening his trim frame as his shell began to protrude forward. While Donnie only put a delicate swirl of sauce on his chicken nuggets, that didn’t stop those fried calories-incarnate from going straight to his thighs, thickening them up from spindly sticks into thick, burly masses of turtle meat that stretched the confines of his once slightly baggy suit pants and making them, effectively, slim fit.

Leo may not deign to drink his XL cups of Dr. Pepper without a straw, but those sugary slurps and gulps bloated his torso both inside and out, the latter of which could not be relieved by a politely stifled belch; that flab was permanent. Raph may daintily wipe his lips clear of grease and crumbs, but that didn’t take away from the thousands of calories of burgers he stuffed down his gullet that said grease and crumbs originated from, making his already large arms even larger as a layer of adipose smoothed over his vascular musculature.

The turtles quickly packed on weight, their limbs swelling with lard, their chests protruding forward into soft moobish masses, and their blissful smiles accented by deepening dimples in their bulging cheeks. At first, they simply ignored their increasing “scores” on the bathroom scale, especially as their broadening frames soon filled in their slightly oversized clothing.

Now that their suits fit properly, the turtles were only emboldened to continue with their escapades: to continue with the consumption. Though, as would be expected by an outside observer, that window of “perfect fit” was brief. Milkshakes turned into love handles and donut holes turned into stretches of cellulite-riddled padding on their widening rumps.

Buttons began to stretch as the fabric in between splayed open, revealing their growing paunches that had completely buried their once hard-earned abs, yet they continued to eat. Even as their gains became more apparent, as it became harder to bend down to put on their dress socks or the increasing struggles of tugging their pants up and over their thickening haunches, they continued their ritual, their hobby, their obsession: they loved what they did and, seemingly, they weren’t going to let a few extra pounds hanging off their frames ruin that!

Despite their belts disappearing beneath their growing, dangling guts, tucked up into newfound flabby crevices, they didn’t panic, instead, they seemed to passively, almost accidentally, fall in love with their fattening frames.

They loved dressing up to go for a meal, loving how their premium suits looked and felt on their bodies, thus as they packed on weight, they almost collectively had to agree that their high thread-count pride and joys’ still looked as tailor fitted as when they started. They had to accept their softening figures first through denial, pretending as though the bulging nature of their new, and ever-tightening fits were still “perfect,” but after a while, those faux compliments began to take real root in their psyches, like speaking daily affirmations to oneself in the mirror.

When Mikey said Leo looked good when his gut half hanging out the bottom of his straining undershirt, Leo’s conscious mind knew the comment was meant to be cheeky and playful, part of the spectacle and show, but his subconscious took the compliment at face value, slowly filtering from the bottom up: his subconscious passively retraining his conscious mind.

“Yo, big guy, looks like you’ve grown too… awesome for that belt, maybe try one of Raph’s…?”

Oh god, his suit felt tight…

“Low key, you look WAY better in that belt than that other one. Looks like it can handle ALL of that Leo awesomeness, ha…!”

…but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing?

“Ha, looks like you won’t have to iron the seams of your suit jacket, they looked stretched pretty tight over ya, big guy!”

Gosh, his chest felt both so bloated yet constricted beneath his lapels.

“Have you been working out…?”

But he did feel kind of powerful almost hulking out of his shirt…

“…Looking beefy tonight, bro…!”

He looked good with a bit of heft to his torso, didn’t he?

“They say dad bods are in right now…”

He did look good with some extra curves, didn’t he?

“Now give me that trademark smirk for the Large and In Charge portfolio album!”

A second chin just meant that he had more chins to accent his award-winning dapper smile!

All the turtles grew to love their growing curves outwardly and explicitly, viewing the extra poundage as a defining “accessory” to their increasingly avant-garde look. Donnie loved his widening hips and thickening haunches that were stretching his suit pants at the seams. Raph loved seeing his former pecs now moobs bulging out of his chest. Mikey took great pleasure in seeing just how far he could stretch that final button of his undershirt over his thickening potbelly. Leo enjoyed the jiggle of his silver belt as it hung loosely off his hips to make room for his meaty, drooping gut.

They seemed to take a page out of the aristocratic origins of their suave and sophisticated attitudes, taking pride in their size as a sign of success and status. They viewed their thickening dump truck rumps and the sense of weight and mass hanging off their frames as a display of their projected rank and prestige; of opulence incarnate.

While they may have fully and completely ruined their figures, they were doughy, and they were dapper, and that’s all that mattered…

…Well that and a functional steam iron…