A Martyr Tonight
Chapter 1
Demetri Abe.
It wasn't often that Foot Clan soldiers were mourned. Their bodies usually disappeared, if they weren't burned they were shipped off to group burials. After all, Oroku Saki had little concern for how many peons he lost in whatever endeavor he'd taken that cost the lives of his lackeys.
Many of them were born into the Clan, Demetri had been. Others were recruited as children - orphans usually - and promised a future. Promised with lies which led to servitude that bound them to a 'father' figure who they offered their loyalty. Unto their death.
It wasn't loyalty that had taken Demetri, at least not loyalty to the Clan. It was the wish to abandon the Clan which had cost his life.
No one else stood in the small back room of the funeral home, she was alone. She was the reason he'd been killed. That much she was sure of. There were none of his Clan mates present, no one to pay their respects - only her. She had asked him to leave, begged him to abandon that life. The things he saw, the life he led...it was too much. There were monsters and aliens and all sorts of things that people weren't supposed see in normal lives.
She'd found him, his body, with two other Clan members, moving him - no doubt to dispose of him. That night, it was supposed to be the one he handed over the black suit and single katana he'd been issued.
"Mutants."
It was the only word one of the two issued to her. She knew what that meant. She'd been told about them, those...turtles. Demetri mentioned them sometimes. It was when they'd continued to try and drag his body off that she went ballistic. Screaming and crying, threats of murder if they moved his body an inch further and much more. She'd hit her breaking point and the future Mrs. Demetri Abe, Daphne Denning, experienced the emotion of loss.
She'd cried over his fallen body for hours before having him moved to be laid to rest appropriately. It was frowned upon for them to date, to marry, and so on, but some made that choice. When Clan members did, they were expected to continue in their service of the Foot and not question their loyalty. She knew she divided his attention and she assumed that had been his undoing.
Whatever the case may be, she didn't question why two others had survived when he hadn't. She didn't ask about the mutants. She didn't bother with the details. She didn't even consider it the feat that it was to procure his body from his fellow brethren.
Demetri's father, a Japanese born man who'd come from a long line of Foot Soldiers, had died when he was a child. His mother, the American woman, who'd loved him when he relocated to the American headquarters on his master's wish, dismissed him when he took on the full uniform of his lineage. It was, at the time, Demetri's way of honoring his father's memory.
Daphne wondered, as she'd been told the story before, if he would be considered an honor now. She leaned into the coffin and placed a flower on the dead body of her former fiancé; now just a cold and empty husk. She leaned back and never would hear the order given by one of Shredder's elite guard.
"Kill her...too."
A/N: Yes, this is a shameless romance. Or will be. There will be other things as well - action and adventure, the whole nine yards. Thank you for reading. Reviews would be greatly appreciated. Title from a Billy Joel song, I do not own it or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (who, for purposes of this story, will not be teenagers). ((Queen Jay))