Misbegotten

By: Serendipity

Author's Note: We see a few stories in which the turtles have children, but I don't think I've ever seen one that explores the potential for mistakes that this could have. The turtles are unnatural, with mutated DNA. Any children they have, if they could have children naturally, might just come out a little funny. That said, there is nothing remotely humorous about the story. I think the dark muse has come for me at last, and I will never see the light of comedy ever again. Alas.

Warning: Kind of depressing themes here relating to problems with mutant children.

Heart problems, maybe.

Or a weak immune system.

Really, it could have been anything. It wasn't like he had access to any equipment he could make a final diagnosis with.

Whatever it was, he didn't need to be a doctor to know that something was wrong.

Procreation wasn't supposed to be possible for them. He hadn't even considered it could happen- hadn't thought of it as an option until it had actually begun.

After all, it was miracle enough that they even managed to exist, with the mutation (that could have gone horribly wrong in many ways,) ending up with the best possible result and no visible related health problems or deficiencies. They were all perfectly in shape and perfectly healthy, for violations against the strict code of nature. And he'd forgotten that Nature could fight back. It was an oversight he never should have made.

Under his hands, the small figure shook, shivered as if cold. It blinked its tiny, unseeing eyes at him- frosted over in glazed white so they appeared to be a pale, milky yellow. Its drooling mouth gaped open soundlessly, its stubby three-fingered hand reached out in a search for comfort. His tiny shell was rippled and deformed, like it was made of fabric soaked in glue and left to dry. Donatello sat him upright in the grass, watching him search through the leaves like it was all a great puzzle. Perhaps it was, to him.

Rembrandt had been the last of their hatchlings to leave his shell. (The last of those that had lived through the hatching process.) Birthing had left its mark on all but two of his children, abusing their bodies, touching their minds, leaving them weak and mutilated, but this weakest of the clutch had barely escaped his egg under his own power. Too many had died- he couldn't stand another. Donatello had ripped the remaining shell from him and forced him into life, the breath in his lungs, the pulse in his veins. He wondered now if he should regret that decision.

He wondered if his son would regret it-if he could regret it, if he was even capable of comprehending what he could have had. What should have been the birthright of every living thing. Not him, his son's vacant eyes seemed to say in the voice of something much older than himself. Not this child, this aberration, this mistake. This child who hadn't the mind to understand even the concept of his life, nor the eyes to see what normalcy looked like.

Perhaps it was a greater mercy than what his siblings could hope for.

Rembrandt looked small and mortal and fragile. "Mercy," he said softly. His son took his finger in an absent way- perhaps registering only that his father had spoken, and not what the words themselves meant. His sightless eyes turned toward the five stone markers in the corner of the yard, and Donatello's breath hitched in his chest.

"I'm sorry," he said in the barest hint of a whisper, his throat dry and closed with emotion. The words seemed woefully inadequate. What did you say to a child who could never…should never have been born? What did you say when an act done out of love looked like a prolongation of suffering?

Rembrandt made a thin, gurgling noise in the back of his throat, and was still. His breathing was always as soft, as silent as the faintest summer breeze. He was like a slowly-wilting plant.

"You're dying," Donatello said quietly. "You're dying."

(Don't let it be true, his less-rational heart cried out, broken strains on orchestral strings, but it was true before he could even bear to say the words.)

She became gravid in the early spring- the season for hatchlings, she'd said with a note of cheer in her voice. She woke too early in the morning for the faintest gold brushstrokes of sunlight to have touched the sky, and walked out to their garden in the cool night air, dew heavy and slick on her feet. He found her out there with her eyes closed, humming some sweet and wordless song that sounded too primal to be learned.

"I can feel it stirring," she said quietly as he drew nearer, "Inside me- I can feel new life inside me. I have our children." That seemed almost a formal way of saying it, a phrase to be repeated by new mothers, a prayer. The tree branches shuddered in a sudden wind, and he touched her head quite gently, as if he was afraid of breaking a subtle kind of spell. After a moment, she leaned into his touch and sighed.

Later, he thought about how she looked then. How she seemed as isolated as a pillar in a field, her feet firmly planted on the earth, the strange hum in her throat and the distant expression on her face.

When he thought about it at night, with his children asleep, his mind keeping him restless, it was her eyes that haunted him. The tension around them as she squeezed them shut, the slight sharp twist of her mouth.

Donatello wondered about mothers, about the body's awareness of itself. About the body's maternal awareness of the alien creatures that were its children.

Had she known, so early? And, like Cassandra's warnings, had the signs gone unnoticed?

Recollection was a funny thing: no end, no beginning, no coherent flow. He remembered- he was eighteen, nineteen…still young when he came to Usagi's world on a visit. Dragged there by Leonardo, just as it was some trip to Casey's family house or someplace still on their Earth.

He remembered how striking it looked- the colors of this world were brighter, more vivid. The sky was clearer, the air fresher, lacking the dirt and pollution of the city. And in a land that had never felt the overpopulation, the construction of skyscrapers, the constant intrusions of technology and society that came with a modern city- the place seemed so spacious. (Still not quite like the late Cretaceous, filled with jungle and trees and dinosaur herds.) So wide someone could get lost in it, caught up and caught hold of- so, he did.

It was spring then, too, with cherry blossoms showing pale pink in the branches of their trees and drifting down like a soft, warm snow. And rain, too, random showers that drenched everything and were wiped away almost abruptly. So, in spring, in a village on the outskirts of all this untilled, wild space, he met his future wife.

She was the daughter of an apothecary and a practitioner of that profession in her own right; she'd been delivering ground ginger and peony root in a wide wicker basket on the first day he saw her. She had wide, dark eyes, and a mouth too wide for her face, even for a turtle.

Michelangelo's injury (wound gone infected from lack of treatment,) had been taken care of by her own cool, competent hands. When she was done, she looked at him and gave him instructions for care and salve, and he was caught up in the smooth lines of her throat and the fact that she was the first female he'd seen who looked like him- who looked right.

"If you're not going to be useful," she'd said sharply, "Go and find me someone with an attention span."

She was so quietly, compactly efficient that it seemed like she was mechanical by nature. Her hands sped over her work with the elegant swiftness of a secretary at a keyboard- her voice was unhurried, a distinct contrast. He first kissed her in the shadow of a sprawling tree and its low-slung branches, and she caught hold of the nape of his neck in her hands, stroked the edge of his shell, and pressed against him- slick-hard plastron and soft, warm skin.

Her name was Kaoru, she told him. He didn't know she was going to be the reason he would leave one world for another at that point. He hadn't known anything then but how she felt in his arms and the way her too-wide mouth smiled at him when she taught him herb-lore, edges quirking slightly and her gold-spattered eyes crinkling up at the corners. She tasted dry, almost spicy and almost sweet. That first time he left her, he didn't think he'd return. The second time, he didn't think he'd ever stop coming back.

Still, that was what he thought the nature of their relationship would be: a constant flow of greetings and farewells. He couldn't stay and abandon his family. He couldn't take her to live a life of quiet fear and bloodshed on the edges of a city that didn't know they existed. They met each other like Altair and Vega, Orihime and Hikoboshi: two people crossing a distance greater than just countries. It was off-and-on for the most part.

Until he found her dew-wet in the garden with the knowledge of life just sparking in her body, and he had to make the choice of family for family.

It was his choice, and he stayed with Kaoru.

It wasn't that he held no guilt over leaving. (He had. How could he not, with the specters of his brothers in a war-torn future still hanging over his head?) But there were obligations, and his family had set him free of those that tied him to them. And they weren't gone forever, and it wasn't like there was no way to contact them.

The family hadn't held his decision against him. Not that he'd expected them to, but this was new to any of them. After growing up with the idea that they were the only ones of their kind in a world of humans, they hadn't expected something like this to be someday possible. But here it was nonetheless- he was going to be a father, and there would be children. Small, turtle children of his own blood.

Strange thought, that he had once been a normal pet shop turtle, and the DNA that had once been of a creature the size of a small plate would go into the creation of a sentient, bipedal being. Strange, and something disconcerting and off tugged at his mind, even as he made the preparations to expand their home. But he was busy, and left it be. No time for idle speculation.

They visited frequently at first; checking out the small house that everyone had already seen before, Michelangelo running around and making loud comments about tiny feet and building rope swings. They filled the rooms with conversation and helpful noises- hammering and the sounds of rooms being added to a small house, shoji doors being installed, and pictures being hung.

Still, even when they were visiting weekly, he could feel them keeping their distance. It wasn't much of one. In ways, it wasn't even physical. There was more of the suggestion of separation there, in body language and language cues and they way they'd sometimes fall silent while he and Kaoru were talking. Like they would become part of the architecture for that moment, standing purposelessly around and waiting for something. He didn't know exactly what it was, but the sense of anticipation was there; like they were expecting some kind of cue to drop so they could resume normal behavior again.

Or perhaps so they could leave.

He guessed that it was strange to them, (still strange to him,) after a lifetime of being told they were separate and apart from normal society, after living a subsistence childhood in the sewers, that seeing one of their brothers living what appeared to be a perfectly normal life (in a feudal Japanese way, really,) was disturbing. Or he supposed they were cutting the ties themselves, separating him from a life that would drag him into danger and away from this newborn family he was making. Whatever the reason, the visits became less frequent. They never stopped coming, but sometimes he thought that they backed away a good distance and set down a line for themselves.

Donatello felt it just between them whenever they came over; smiling, familial, and just that little bit farther away.

The other townspeople were used to infant fatalities and even the occasional deformity. The trouble came when there were so many in one brood, when the majority of their children came out looking not-quite-right. They whispered about curses, or evil spirits.

Or bad blood, they whispered, maybe it's just bad blood. They watched Donatello with narrowed eyes.

"Weird sandbox," Michelangelo said, peering at the wide hollow set above the floor, at the space below it meant for heated stones to warm up the sand. "That for the kids to play in when it gets cold?"

"It's an egg-bed," Kaoru explained, giving it a critical look and brushing the wooden frame with a finger.

The speculative look she gave it made Donatello a little concerned; she'd spent a good week examining their home for the perfect spot for the incubator, (egg-bed, they called it,) sometimes wandering outside and rearranging potted plants, sometimes overturning their furniture in relentless pursuit of the perfect location. "The mother always knows the best place for the little ones," she'd said quietly, her restless energy driving her on endless roads through the house, even in the little hours of the morning.

He didn't really want to disassemble the thing and set it up in an entirely different place, maternal instincts or no.

Michelangelo looked at the thing strangely. Donatello couldn't really blame him for it: filled with tan-gold sand and at the depth of a good bathtub, it didn't look like something to put an infant to rest in. Not a human infant, in any case. "Oh, uh, I guess sand is nice and soft," he said, going for something complimentary, "Very, uh, cushioning."

Donatello cleared his throat and Kaoru continued blithely, "We'll add the moss later, of course, once the birth nest has been dug. And then, we cover them up."

"Cover as in bury?" Michelangelo almost squeaked, "Burying in the sand, bury? Like…pirate treasure chests?" It came out with the mix of humor and panic he used when trying to cover up the fact that he was completely disturbed.

It wasn't much of a surprise: they'd been almost conditioned to expect babies to be small, squalling pink things. Not…larger versions of the eggs they ate for breakfast. His brothers were, like him, probably thinking of the abstract joys of early fatherhood as a montage of mincing around with a tiny, fragile infant while the worried mother drifted in his wake, muttering "Mind his head." Instead, they were being presented with the entirely alien concept of laying eggs, sticking them in holes, and waiting for the babies to break out by themselves. It was jarring.

Kaoru made a clucking noise and sailed off to her herb garden. She'd grown accustomed to the strange traits of his brothers and their lack of common, everyday knowledge of their culture and traditions, but that didn't mean she had the patience to walk them through every aspect of it. Donatello rather understood that that she viewed them as having a very lacking upbringing when it came to things like that, (and of course the whole study of ninjitsu didn't help matters.)

"Look," Donatello said as he watched her pluck the watering can off the wall and head outside, "This is a perfectly natural process. When normal turtles in our world breed, they lay eggs. We are an egg-laying species."

"Well, yeah," Michelangelo said weakly, "I mean, I knew that, but…"

"You were expecting live birth?"

"Well, yes, actually. That's what's normal! Well, I guess what's normal for humans," Michelangelo said, backtracking. "I mean, I know turtles lay eggs, I thought with evolution and all that stuff, we'd get to live birth. But I guess no, huh? Okay. Well, eggs are cool, too. And, um, burying them in sand, huh? Okay."

"Some people prefer earth," Kaoru said, coming up behind them with an armful of miscellaneous plants, "But I find it unclean."

In response to that, Michelangelo made a noise that suggested that he'd given up on everything that made sense to him about the care of babies.

Preparation for the eggs mainly consisted of just that: locating the place for the incubator and setting it up properly. There were a few minor ceremonies that went with that, of course. Certain colors, charms donated by helpful neighbors, and something in an older version of the Japanese used here that Donatello didn't quite understand, low and chanting and liquid. When it was done, his wife and her miscellaneous friends stood proudly around the 'egg-bed' with a note of ceremonial finality, and he found himself wondering about the birthing processes of all the other animal 'clans' here on the dimension.

In addition to tradition, they, (his brothers and he,) had added another section on to the small house: two rooms that should serve as nurseries and rooms for the children as they got older. One for boys, one for girls. That was viewed as thoughtful but not actually necessary. Since no one knew how many eggs would be born to a clutch, Kaoru explained, people typically didn't make those preparations until after they were delivered.

"Don't count your chickens until they're hatched?" Michelangelo joked, earning himself a friendly smack to the back of the head and a quizzical look from Kaoru, who didn't understand what the niwatori clan had to do with their children's room arrangements.

"It isn't even as if they raise the eggs in the same manner," Kaoru said in tones of calm level-headedness that managed to still convey how confused she was, "For one thing, they must sit on theirs constantly while ours are much more self-maintaining. No insult is meant to the niwatori clan, but there really isn't much of a comparison…"

Raphael leaned back from where he was sitting, playing around with his sai and spinning them like playthings, and grinned in the slightly lazy way he did before coming up with a dig at Mike. "Don't pay no attention to him," he said, "Dropped on his head when he was little. Knocked his brains out."

"Sad, really," Leonardo agreed with a solemn nod that looked just a little too staged.

That was how they spent the time waiting for the birth of the impossible: sitting around whistling in the dark. Kaoru continued her tireless pace around the house and the gardens behind it, the wooded areas near their home, spending as much time moving as possible. Leonardo served the tea and made the occasional soothing speeches, Michelangelo brought in action figures and baby things from April and Casey, and Raphael stood out all angles, awkward and ready to be put to some kind of physical labor to keep his mind off things. They all sifted through the boxes of baby supplies, the soft knitted blankets in pastels, the fluffy stuffed animals, the tiny hats and socks with their patterns of rocket ships, butterflies and rabbits. He set aside the baby formula and bottles: their children would be born ready for solid food.

When his family (his other family) wasn't there, the house seemed silent: filled only with the restless sounds of Kaoru as she moved from room to room, and the sense of time ticking away: an hourglass filling with sand, or a final countdown before an explosive detonation.

One night he fell asleep and when he woke up he found that he'd missed the egg-laying process altogether. Which was fine in some ways because he wasn't quite sure how well he'd have handled that, but not so fine in others in that he felt like an enormous heel for sleeping during, well, the delivery. Still, he felt that it was supposed to be required for the father to be there in some way.

"Males generally prefer not to," Kaoru said calmly, "It's a long, boring process, really. And you were sleeping so peacefully. I wouldn't want to disturb you."

"Well," he said awkwardly, "Well, uh, are you okay? Do you need anything?" He had the vague feeling that he should be boiling things in hot water and fetching blankets and generally being more useful, instead of standing there. Stupidly. Like a lump. While his wife, who had just given birth, made two perfect, shallow holes in the sand of their egg-bed. Typically his response to a problem was to find solutions in the most efficient method possible. Confronted with Kaoru, who clearly had everything covered, he felt a little superfluous.

As he watched, Kaoru smoothed the sand out meticulously and began coating the holes with thick, damp moss. Her hands, so deft when she ground herbs and applied poultices, shook slightly, as if from nervousness. It was the only sign she showed of fatigue. "Not at the moment. Perhaps you could brew some tea? I left the herb packet to be steeped along with the typical brew, please. It aids the soreness."

And that seemed to be it as far as requests went. Donatello went quietly to the kitchen and brewed the tea and watched his own hands shake out of anxiety, and got back just in time to help cart the baskets of damp moss over to line the holes with.

It was strange stuff, stringy, with the slightly rubbery texture he usually associated with seaweed. He wasn't sure if their Earth had that variety of plant: like quite a few of the herbs Kaoru grew, it seemed specific to this place. It added just the right touch of displacement, like he didn't quite belong in this setting.

Kaoru placed the eggs in the holes, made another layer of moss atop them, and gently smoothed sand over the moss layer with hands that were just that touch wider and flatter than his. "There," she said in the sing-sing, back-of-the-throat voice she used when talking about their children, "Six boys. Six girls." She tiredly set her hands atop each hole, touching the small openings she'd left for breathing space, "The heat decides, you know. "

Donatello knew. In regular turtles back on his Earth, sex of the infants was determined by the temperature of incubation. It seemed like the trend continued here, with mothers keeping their egg beds split into two heat categories: a boy chamber and a girl chamber. Since turtles weren't very sexually dimorphic, the gender roles weren't quite as disparate as they were between humans, so preference towards boys or girls was pretty much based on personal choice. It seemed strange at first and a little off-putting, choosing the sex of a child. It seemed like it could be too easily manipulated, but he'd gotten used to it by now. It helped that the culture among the kame clan wasn't as deeply patriarchal as humans; they weren't inclined to favor one sex over the other.

Kaoru lifted her hand from the sand and sighed. "Most people choose more of one or the other, but I think it's better this way," she said, as if reading his thoughts. "Nice and neat. You never told me which you wanted, and I wanted both." Her words ran together like syrup, the slow drawl of exhaustion or drunkenness, and he carefully reached out to take her to the futon before she slipped down to the floor by herself.

"The young ones need heat," she breathed as he lay her down, "Mind the stones, and don't let the temperatures change or it will wreck everything. Too cool, all boys. Too hot, all girls. You don't want that- nice and balanced like I made it. Each sister has a brother, like that." Another intake of breath. "I'm the last of my clutch. The rest are in the mountains. But yours-"

"In New York," he finished for her quietly, smiling. "You should sleep."

She did, sinking into the softness, and it was a peaceful moment on the edge of the afternoon, no noise but what nature provided. He touched her hand, looked at the grains of sand between her fingers, and then went to watch the fire that kept the stones warm, trying to keep it warm enough for the purpose it was serving and not to let it scorch the incubator frame.

Donatello thought quiet things, of children in dark tunnels playing young games. Of rough calluses on child hands, and the sounds of sewer pipes at night. Of scavenging from pieces of tarnished metal, broken wood, soggy rags and paper. Making his own boats and cars and watching them rust in the damp. And how his children wouldn't live that life.

They'd have the sun.

When they were first introduced to the day and the brightness of the morning, Tomiko and Galileo, pale, milky-white lumps next to their siblings, clutched each other with weak infant arms and turned their eyes away from the light. Rembrandt gasped in his wheezy way, breathing with an effort, but didn't turn away from the sunlight. He was blind. Akito shivered and turned his own blind face around, trying to discern the source of the heat.

Donatello closed his arms around them and felt the hard ball of misery slowly sink from his throat to lie, burning, in his chest.

Hatchings usually occurred at night, both in his world and this one, so when the time came for it, when Kaoru assured him that their eggs would soon be ready, they kept a vigil over the egg-bed.

They took turns, of course, each of them spending their shift by candlelight doing small, quiet things. Kaoru prepared tonics and salves, Donatello read books sent to him by his brothers. Sometimes, between quantum theory and mechanics and some really odd comics that Michelangelo assumed he'd enjoy, he'd go over and lay a hand over the sand as if by doing so, he could invite them out of their shells.

It was warm to the touch, soft and shifting under his skin, and he felt like this was the equivalent of what human fathers did when they pressed their hands over their pregnant wives' bellies to feel the baby kick. Not that he could feel anything beyond the surface of the sand. Eggs couldn't respond the way a human baby could, nor had he ever heard of hatchlings inside the shells kicking out before they were due. There was no sign of a disturbance in the sand at all. Not until the fourth week of waiting. And when that came, neither of them were bothering to touch for life.

He remembered it vividly; they had been about to separate for the nightly duty of watching the 'nest', Kaoru lighting candles, Donatello looking through the small collection of books he'd received from Leonardo in order to pass the time. And then, the sand cracked, shifted slightly. It moved.

At first, he thought he was seeing things, an effect brought on by the flickering candlelight. And then he saw what was undoubtedly the tip of an infant snout, complete with egg tooth, protrude from the surface of the incubator sand. It pushed its way free with tiny hands, scrabbling for freedom, beak opening in its first, plaintive infant wail.

Kaoru rushed to the egg bed, candle in hand, wax flying in tiny droplets across the floor in a pattern that suddenly and strangely reminded him of (what? blood flying from a wound?) rain, and he followed close behind.

By the time they got there, the newest hatchling had fully emerged from the torn remnants of the shell and was lying on the sand, wet and gasping. Kaoru quickly snatched it up, (girl), and muttered something under her breath in a chanting rhythm. The hatchling wailed again, feet paddling at the air, until Kaoru turned to the bucket of water beside the bed and dunked her into it.

"They're born searching for water," she said quietly, in response to his glance at her, "And so water calms them." She handed him the child and turned to look as even more tiny snouts burst forth from the sand of the egg bed, and he wrapped his arms around the baby. Suddenly clumsy, he turned to find the playpen he'd set up to hold the children as their parents took care of their more slowly-hatching sisters and brothers. It was yet another thing given to them by his family back home, and the bright colored plastic and metal frame looked conspicuously out of place here, in a home made of wood and paper.

The baby crawled in bored circles around the playpen, occasionally nudging at the sides of the thing in tentative exploration. Donatello hurriedly turned to help Kaoru with the rest of them, and noticed that, despite the cries that signified more children had already reached the surface, Kaoru was simply standing there, motionless.

No, not motionless. Trembling.

Lying on top of the sand was one more child like the first: normal, perfect, mouth gaping in a wail. He couldn't see what was wrong with it at first until it turned its face his way as if it was intuiting a new gaze in his direction.

Which was impossible, because where the child's eyes should have been, there were two, smooth expanses of skin. The child was blind, eyeless, like a creature in one of Michelangelo's horror films, and despite the fact he fathered it he felt an instinctive wave of revulsion. Guilt and shame came in a rush soon afterward, and he took the few shaky steps forward until he was at Kaoru's side. With careful hands, he reached out for the infant and dunked him, (for it was a boy), in the water bucket to silence his crying.

Kaoru stiffened, pushing her shock and horror away, and took the child from him, wiping water from his face. She whispered the soft, chanting prayer to the child, and handed him back to be placed in the playpen. Her eyes held the focused, objective look she gave to her patients and not the fondness she'd displayed before. He didn't have time to worry about that.

More tunneled out, two of them perfectly white with milky, grey-blue eyes, one of them with a shell that looked like it had been grabbed and twisted by an angry hand. They cried out, twisted-shell dragging one foot that seemed like it had been broken inside the egg, and pushed at their hands searchingly. Each of them were lifted, dunked in water, and placed in the pen with their siblings to wait. Two more tunneled out, only to gasp out their last on the birthing sands, dead within minutes of their own hatching. They tried not to look at them, tried to focus on the living babies that needed their care. The sand became wet with hatching fluids and mucus.

Three eggs were stillborn, silent and almost condemning.

One last shook from within, the egg tooth protruding and ripping weakly at the shell, tiny hands pawing at the leathery eggshell that trapped it. The snout protruded, and the hands struggled and fought and fought until Donatello took the shell and tore it open himself, sending the last baby tumbling from his egg onto the sand, wet and milky-white. It opened its mouth soundlessly, too weak to cry.

"I couldn't let him die," he realized he was saying, "He would have- I didn't want him to," and then Kaoru had him by the shoulder and he noticed she was crying. The last of his children curled up in his arms, breathing with an effort, and his chest burned like he had just run through a fire, breathing in smoke and ashes.

Bad blood. He knew what the trouble was, and it wasn't what the people there in this village assumed. Not a curse by some angry god, not even anything as common as two too closely connected in the gene pool procreating. The problem was the alien substance that grabbed hold of his DNA and twisted it into what he is now, and the same thing that practically gave him life was a death sentence on his offspring.

Out of a clutch of twelve, they had lost five. Three eggs that never hatched and two children, too unfinished to live, had died shortly after leaving their shells.

Kaoru took each of their living children out from the playpen one-by-one, checking them over with all the thorough efficiency of a doctor and none of the maternal affection one would expect from a mother examining a possibly sick child. With a coolness that he thought must have been hard to maintain, she ran gentle fingers over the smooth skin where her baby's eyes should be, and the rippled shell and twisted foot of another. She lifted the albino children into her arms and took note of their too-pale eyes and milky-white skin. The babies, under scrutiny, squirmed in her hands, crying out and making burbling sounds. A quiet, absent part of his mind thought, maybe, that meant they were hungry.

"They should eat," Kaoru said, confirming his theory. Her voice was quiet and dry.

Once they'd fed them the mixture of baked fish mashed together with rice porridge, he dared a glance backwards at the egg bed- at the unlucky sons and daughters. The babies lying still and quiet, the eggs as unmoving as stones.

"What should- what are we going to do about them?" he asked, his voice sounding strange and almost intrusive after what had happened. It felt jarring, like conversation was something too casual to take place in after this. "I mean, is there anything we should do? Are there any prayers or…" he trailed off, feeling lost in the unfamiliar territory of his wife's spirituality.

Kaoru settled the baby she was holding back into the playpen, and turned to look at him, her expression devoid of anything that might suggest that this was an unusual conversation. It looked as though she wasn't touched by any of this at all- not the birthing, the deaths, or the deformities of their surviving children. She looked as though this was as casual and everyday as handing him a glass of water, or commenting on the problems of the people she sold remedies to. At her feet, the babies clawed at the playpen wall, some of them batting playfully at each other.

"They'll be cremated, of course," she said flatly. He made a sound between a choke and a gasp, and she continued as she usually did when she had to explain some tradition or cultural detail. Her voice was strained, and the snatches of suppressed emotion in it made her sound hoarse. "Our dead are given to the fire and purified. Even the bodies of our children are given the same consideration in the funeral rites."

He'd seen bodies burning before, and thought sickly of the curling flesh, blackening skin. He thought, horrifically, of the tiny hands of infants in the flames. It was such a vivid image in his mind he felt he could feel the heat of the flames, taste the scorched air on his tongue.

"Couldn't we, well, bury them?" he asked. The thought of laying them to rest in the cold ground was at least better than the alternative. Still, it was almost like he was hearing someone else talking about all of this, like he wasn't fully connected to reality. Disassociation, his mind labeled. A way of managing stress. "Some people where I'm from take care of the dead that way- burying them and putting markers where they lay."

Kaoru looked as horrified as if he had just suggested mounting them on the wall.

"Bury the dead?" she asked, looking almost nauseated. "Of course not! That's just…well, it isn't right." Her mouth twitched downward as she spoke. "Burying a stillborn egg," she continued, a shudder running through the words. "Well, some of the more primitive people do bury their dead- but we certainly don't. Our eggs are buried only when they need to grow and hatch; it means we wait for the life that is going to come. But burying it when it's dead- it's almost like a violation."

"But, burning them…" he trailed off.

Donatello didn't even want to think of touching them, lifting them up and feeling their weight in his arms. Didn't want to think of the limpness of the muscle, the babies' heads lolling bonelessly. He'd seen violence before, and blood, and death, but never in the shape of tiny and innocent infants, not with the faintest curves of his own face and Kaoru's too-wide mouth. "Isn't there something else we can do?"

Kaoru's expression was lost in the dying candlelight. None of them had bothered to light new ones. "It's our tradition," she snapped. "What do you want? Would you prefer the tokage dig up their bodies and eat them?"

When he blanched, stomach turning at the thought, she turned her head away. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I know you're not used to it. And it's…I don't want to think about this, either. So I understand. I'll take care of the cremation if you don't think you can stand it. Just-we need to wash them, wrap them in white cloth. The eggs are to be left as they are."

"Now?" he asked. Usually there was a period of preparation before any funeral, but she seemed so rushed, even under the composure. "I'll help you with everything, you know I won't have you do this alone. But so soon?"

The last of the light went out, and he heard her get to her feet. "As soon as possible," she said. It sounded like she wasn't even speaking to him.

He didn't think he could learn to forget how it felt to wash them and wrap them up in white cloth, watching their faces disappear under layers of fabric. They placed all five of them in a large basket of woven bamboo and as the flames licked at the wood, he found himself unable to watch. After a while, he didn't think he could breathe.

When it was done, Kaoru sent him back to watch over the children, and she gathered the ashes. There was no family grave for her here, as they were both newcomers to this place, so she set the boxes (no urns) in the garden, on the stones by a stream that wound from the forest and cut through their land. They burned incense there in the morning, their babies crawling after them, the weakest one in his arms.

They named their children between them; she chose names with the careful delicacy of a jeweler selecting gems, and he chose them with whimsy and in the same pattern of his father naming them after renaissance masters. April, for the second perfect child born, Galileo, for one of the pale albino boys, and Rembrandt, the child who was too weak to leave the egg on his own. She named their first child Ichiko, (first child), the boy with the battered shell and crippled foot was named Jun, (obedient), Tomiko for the girl albino, (treasured beauty child), and Akito, (autumn child) for the boy born with no eyes.

The evening after the naming was done, Kaoru brought him and the children to a large pond in the forest. They traveled at night, by lantern-light, the children following her like a line of ducklings and with him keeping up watch in the back to ensure that none wandered off. Rembrandt, he carried in his arms.

"This is a sacred place," she said quietly, when they arrived. "The kame clan here have given generations of children to the water."

The surface of the pond shimmered with hints of fluorescence, tracing the lines of ripples. Patches of dimly-glowing light traveled under the surface of the water, presumably where fish traveled. None of the patches were very large, nor were they too deep below the surface. Every now and then, something would jump, and ripples of light would spread out and illuminate the water.

From his estimation, the entire pond was as shallow as hip-height for an adult- a wading pool.

Kaoru picked a wide, round stone from the ground that was as large as her hand, and made a marking on it with the ink and brush she had brought along with her. Along the stone, she wrote the names of all the children- neat little marks, tiny and delicate in calligraphy that was curved and foreign and not entirely the Japanese that he learned. She handed it to him and he hefted the thing in his hands.

It reminded him a little too much of a grave marker.

"Throw it in," she told him, "It's an offering. The water god will keep our children safe."

At their heels, the children seemed restless, with Jun trying to creep towards the water and the others straining at an invisible tether- the presence of their parents. The toss of the stone lit up the water in a brilliant flash that illuminated everything in the area of the splash, and wide and lazy ripples of luminescence spread out in a gentle glow. Kaoru pushed the children gently toward the water, and they followed as she made her way in, paddling around her and occasionally diving beneath the water to explore the quiet lake bottom. Haloes of light floated around them, clearly marking each one's path underwater.

Rembrandt, though, quietly sat in the puddles near the shore, his milky-pale eyes staring blankly out before him, and no matter how much they coaxed him, he wouldn't go in. Donatello picked him up and felt his breath coming fast and shaky, and thought of his name on the stone, too small for such an important thing.

That was their first swim.

The portal-summoning took longer than it should have, with his thoughts running in too many different directions for him to focus. It didn't help that he wasn't looking forward to this meeting. Bad enough that five of his children were dead, but to tell his family about the problems of the others- he didn't want to face their pain, because he knew it would make him confront his own.

Getting up his resolve to face them was harder and heavier than anything should ever have been, and those walls of calmness he'd built up over the days spent with his family in this world were beginning to crumble at the mention of his brothers and his father.

He stepped through the gateway already shaken, and feeling still too raw, too newly wounded to have to explain anything. And it had been days, and he had time to compose himself, but he didn't think he could forget the bodies in his hands and Rembrandt, pale and weak, tumbling from his shell. And the words: 'all your fault, you should have known', rushing through his mind.

So he told them. Everything, from the hatching, to the death, the burning and the boxes, the children who couldn't live a normal life after all.

And he hated how they looked at him in pity, in sympathetic horror, in loss. It twisted something in his stomach, tight and hard and painful, and he wanted nothing more but to cry out his misery. But he couldn't, so he stood there and answered their questions in a bare, dry voice. Gave them facts and tried not to spill the emotions.

Donatello wanted them to see he was emotionally stable. He wouldn't fall apart, and at least some of his children had lived- but each moment here stripped the self control from him.

"But- can't we do something?" Michelangelo asked, "I mean, Don, there's gotta be some medicine or something! Or a, like a healing machine thingie, right? For the- you know, Rem at least should get something-"

"You can't cure albinism, Mike," he snapped, "You can't cure deformities like they have, you can't cure Akito's eyes. And Rembrandt- his heart's the problem. Heart surgery is dangerous enough on a human baby, but in case you haven't noticed, it's going to be impossible for us. There is no level of modern medical technology that could help him- the only people who could have are long gone. There's nothing I can do," and he could have screamed those last words for the helplessness, the anger at his own inability to save his children.

Raphael had punched a wall with such force it cracked open, his knuckles bleeding,. "It ain't fair!' he yelled, his voice gone hoarse with sorrow, "It ain't fucking fair that this is going on- what did Don do? What did the kids do? Why can't anything ever go right?" He acted like he'd taken all the tragedy upon himself, and for a moment Donatello was lost in his anger at his brother: angry at him for being able to scream and pound at the walls and demonstrate his own rage. Ridiculous. Pathetic.

"Well, sometimes it doesn't, Raph," he thought quite coldly, "And for us, the percentage of possibility is that much higher."

Master Splinter took Raphael away, holding his arm soothingly, and Donatello sat frozen on the couch, numb from the strain of keeping everything in.

"Will you be all right?" Leonardo asked, quiet and steady. He wanted to grab on and share some of that constant composure, ask what it was the Ancient One taught him those years ago.

Instead, he just sighed. "I can't not be."

Their home wasn't close to the rest of the village. As an herbalist, Kaoru chose to live close to the edges of civilization, near the forest, with enough room for her garden to grow freely. That isolation served them well enough for the days after the hatching, when his grief was raw and new, and Kaoru walked through their house like a doll given life. He mourned quietly enough, but Kaoru was like a closed shell- nothing but silence and the safety of routine to keep her company. When he tried to talk to her, she smiled at him and asked him small, everyday things- what should she do for dinner, and whether he wanted to hold this child or feed this one, and then she would flee.

She went through the motions of caring for the children, but the distance in her eyes told him that her mind was elsewhere. She spoke to him in measured, careful sentences about flowers and herbs, and rooms for the children, but the lack of warmth and feeling in her words chilled him. Kaoru, like her ancestors, had responded to her pain by drawing herself away and closing up. Emotionally, she had become a stone.

It was his inevitable conclusion that this left him with the responsibility of taking care of the children. Not their physical needs- Kaoru saw to those with the same unerring efficiency that she always had, feeding them, arranging sleep schedules, and setting them out to play. Still, she couldn't bring herself to hold them gently, or speak to them, or play with them. When they touched her, she drew away from them. Not out of disgust, it seemed, but of lack of interest. Turtle babies were born ready to crawl and play, and though their intelligence was somewhat greater than human babies, their need for parental affection was the same.

Donatello tried to give them some of what they needed. He wasn't naturally good with children, as he suspected Michelangelo was, and he suspected himself of being too careful with them. It was a fear of his, that touching newborns as fragile as these would break them, and he held them carefully when he needed to, like they were each made of something brittle and precious as crystal.

And he learned. He learned that Jun was their active child, the adventurous one who crawled over every space in their nursery room and gravitated towards every bit of trouble he could find. Ichiko was bossy, loud and exuberant- but also protective of the two, April and Galileo who clung to her like she was a miniature version of their mother. The three of them were the closest, never separated for more than minutes at a time. Akito was silent and so withdrawn he seemed to have closed into himself, and Rembrandt- Rembrandt was sickly and weak and worrying.

Tomiko was his mirror-child, a nearly perfect reflection of himself as when he was that young. She was more observant than the others, more careful when she played. He caught her once with a butterfly that had found its way indoors. She touched the wings and watched her fingers for the grey smudges of scale-powder from them. When the butterfly finally gave its last flutters and lay still in her hands, she plucked them off and held them to the light, staring in childish fascination at the webbed veinwork in them.

Through games and care he took glimpses of each child and what they might be, (he hoped Rembrandt could be, he hoped so much,) but Kaoru stayed absent. She would hold them only when they needed fed, and watched them just on the fringes of their lives. And so it was for the first month.

There was supposed to be something innately spiritual about children: something about them being able to sense things more keenly than adults, either because they were too young to understand the adult world of what reality could and couldn't contain, or the child's mind and imagination and empathetic abilities being so much wider and stronger. There was supposed to be a strong link between mother and child, born of the closeness in the womb.

Either way, he didn't know one way or the other if it was true. He supposed he never believed it, if he'd have thought about it enough to come to a decision.

But one day, Akito turned his unseeing face toward the door that led to the room Kaoru used to store herbs. Akito, his quiet child, the one with a thumb always tucked thoughtfully in the corner of his mouth most of times, head tilted slightly as if listening to sounds only he could hear. His tiny body stiffened as he jolted in shock at some unseen cue, mouth opening.

Akito wailed like he was being wounded. He screamed like someone was tearing his heart away and clawed his way across the room, reaching out with his hands to guide the way, and nothing Donatello could do would soothe him until he left, child in his arms, to find his wife. In his arms, Akito squirmed impatiently, infant hands grabbing at his shoulders, and the sudden silence in the house was almost unbearable.

The room was dark, (it always was, the herbs she kept lost their potency in bright light,) and musty, and he took a moment for his eyes to adjust before he took notice of the slumped shape in the chair of the worktable.

And the pottery mug next to a pestle and mortar that had quite clearly been used.

Often times, people referred to intense fear and worry by saying their 'heart leaped to their throat'- well, that was how it felt. Like a hand had constricted suddenly around his heart and tore it through his throat, like a shockwave had just run through him and froze him in place for five seconds too long. Even though he knew, well, Kaoru knew her herbalism well, any poison she made would be sufficient to kill without hope of interference. He ran anyway, rushed the few steps and grabbed her shoulders-

And stared into her clear, conscious, living gaze.

She raised a hand and touched Akito's face very gently, as if reassuring herself of something. "I didn't drink it," she said quietly. "I meant to. But in the end I couldn't. But our children, our poor children. And there isn't anything in all my abilities as a healer to save them. It was something inside me, inside the both of us, and I wanted…"

Donatello felt shaken, like all the strength had been drained from him; blown out by a cold burst of wind, and Kaoru's grip tightened on him.

"I've felt like my spirit has been taken from me," she said in such a still, cool voice it was frightening, "And the world is full of grey fog. And I felt- for long enough, that I'd like to leave it. It wasn't my fault, was it? It wasn't something inside me that poisoned them?"

"No," he told her, hating himself, hating the science that forced this on them for the first time, "No, it wasn't you." Kaoru choked on her tears and he sunk to his knees next to her as she sobbed for the first time since their babies had left their shells. There were no answers here, nothing he could give her to hold on to.

Donatello knew completely what it felt to be a fixer of things and have that ability out of reach- how it was to be helpless in the face of suffering. How was it that he didn't see it in his own wife? How was it that he was only blind to whatever was truly important? He thought, stupidly, holding onto Kaoru and feeling the breath in her as if it was sacred, that he didn't know enough about the person he loved to know about her suicide, and that frightened him. And did he know anything of use at all?

He didn't think parenthood was meant to feel like stumbling in the dark.

When they left, he knocked the mug on its side and the poison spilled out in a rush, dripping on the floor, and Akito let out a sigh from his comfortable position in his mother's arms.

She was their only apothecary, so they held their tongue. They couldn't afford to drive her away. The family had that security, at least.

There had been others like the children, of course. The pale ones, who were said to be haunted by spirits, and the eyeless ones, who always had a touch of the mystical about them. But to have so many in one family was unheard of. It made them wonder what they had done to be troubled so.

But they held their tongues, and after a while they settled into something like a comfortable distance.

Rembrandt was fading like a watercolor painting in the rain, and there was nothing to be done about it but grieve for the death soon to come.

Donatello wasn't a doctor. He knew more about medicine than his brothers, but with their anatomy there were some thing he had to guess at, and some things that remained a mystery. Whatever Rembrandt's condition was, it affected him internally. His hypothesis was some kind of heart condition: possibly he'd been born incomplete, unable to function fully. No kind of medicine, no herb could aid that.

He slept so much, he thought. Too much even for babies, and definitely too much for a child of their kind. Sometimes it seemed like he was already three quarters out of the world of the living, only passing though for brief moments of wakefulness- and then he cried about some mysterious agony, calling for comfort and safety when there was none to be found. In the end, they kept him asleep in those times, waking him when he needed to eat and leaving him in the most peace they could give him.

They felt grief when he awoke, near the end. He'd wake screaming, and they'd feel nothing but sadness. Sadness that he was still alive and suffering, sadness that they had to wait for another time when he wouldn't awake and the string that had been winding tighter and tighter around their hearts would finally break.

Donatello could cry, sometimes, at the thought of feeling pain at the fact that his child was alive and not dead. At feeling that his son was nothing but a ghost tied to flesh, and the most he could do for him was cut him free.

Sometimes, he thought too much than was good for him. It was a flaw he'd carried since he could remember, the need to overanalyze and over-think. Even what had been done in the past was dissected and placed in front of him and he agonized over these decisions, because a part of him always thought he was doomed to make nothing but mistakes. It was like the wheel of karma: spin and fail each time.

Donatello didn't think he'd turn back, but he often felt like he didn't know himself (or anyone) half as much as he always thought he did. He was a brother, a scientist and a ninja and now he lived as an apothecary's husband in a world far away from his brothers, a world with no science and a hatred for ninjitsu. He'd been a child and now he was a father, and the responsibilities, fears, and miseries clung to him. He felt it was something unchangeable- steel couldn't return to iron.

"Was it right?" he wanted to ask Kaoru, "Did anything good come from this that outweighs the misery?" Because he was about balance and calculations, about the end equation coming out worth all the work and energy that went into the problem, and he couldn't see it past his pain and what he'd done, albeit unsuspecting, to his offspring. "Did we do what was right? Would you do it all again if you had known the outcome? Would you choose to keep our children, or is the price too much to pay?"

But he didn't ask, because he also believed that people shouldn't ask questions they don't want the answers to.

"I love you," he tells Rembrandt. He tells him that often, as if he can make up for a lost lifetime of care with the repetition of the phrase. He speaks it like it's a prayer, a litany, a blessing.

He thinks maybe he says it so much because he wishes it could only be enough.

~Fin~