an AU in which Karai did not fall into the mutagen back in Vengeance is Mine. standard disclaimer applies, TMNT is Viacom's and I get nothing from this.
Birth of Serpents
part 1
The last Hamato Yoshi saw of his sons is not how he would choose to remember them.
His boys, looming over him like a group of hydra, hissing and snapping before, one by one, they broke off and fled into the night. Perhaps he should be grateful for that, that they did not set upon him with fangs and venom, that they still understood the base concept of filial respect.
Perhaps they were simply afraid.
He remembers too much of his own mutation: his anger, his fury, at being warped into something so obscene. Most of all, he remembers being afraid — this was not his body, these were not his children. And while his sons are already mutants, he cannot accept the idea that they would lend themselves so easily to this — to a forced mutation, their bodies stolen from them and twisted to another man's purpose.
It is a sick sort of duality that this is the second time in his life he has lost a child, that his brother ruined his life to the soundtrack of fire, that his brother's laughter has risen above the flames.
Worse, there is now a thick weight in his stomach that there is something greater at work when it comes to his children: that he can have one, or the other, but never both. He will always be forced to choose — between the daughter who was stolen from him, and the sons who were forced upon him. Of course he sees his sons now for the gifts they are, but back then they had been four angry little mouths to feed, in a world that would hunt them down rather than look at them as marvels.
And though he loves his daughter, for all that she was as a baby and all that she is now as a young woman, he can already see things that need to be stamped out of her, to erase any trace of the Foot in her soul.
He loves them all equally, as a father should, and yet…
And yet.
And yet it does not become him to give up so easily. No, there needs to be a plan, he needs to try, before he gives himself over to grief.
He senses Miwa before he hears her, an awkward presence just beyond the doorway to the dojo, but he does not summon her. This is something she needs to learn as part of this family — he will never demand her presence, but accept it when freely offered. "Father," she says, a few minutes later, her feet padding gently onto the old rugs. The word sounds hesitant in her voice, as though she is unsure of her right to claim it. "What do we do? We can't just let them—"
"You should rest, my daughter," he says, interrupting, though he knows full well that Miwa will not. "Tomorrow, we will find them."
He hears her begin to form a protest, and the silence of it dying in her throat. Quietly, Miwa turns away and leaves, closing the shoji behind her.
It is to be a long night.
"Hey," Leo said, lopsided and wry as he prised the cage open with a dagger he slipped from the pommel of his daito. "You okay?"
Karai was breathless, winded from the fall, but she managed a "yeah" as he eased her to her feet.
Above, the Shredder watched them. She bared her teeth. "Give me a sword," she demanded.
For a heartbeat, Leo watched her, his gaze calculating and hard, before he nodded and unsheathed his short sword. Karai weighed it in her hand — it was heavier than her own blade, and wider; the craftsmanship was good, but not that good. Then Leo jerked his head, and Karai slipped into battle at his side.
Across the room, Leo's brothers were fighting next to their father, freed from their tiny cages as they took on Footbots, as Tiger Claw snarled and hissed and spat and shot.
Karai faced the tank, and leapt upwards.
Leo had shown off to her enough in the past that she knew his style: the intent in the tightening of his muscles before he struck, the sly finesse, the times when arrogance gave way to skill. As they fought their way towards the Shredder, together, Leo made room for her, so keen to make sure that she felt like she belonged in his weird little family — in her weird little family.
A few weeks ago, she'd have found it pathetic — sad, needy Leo, letting his heart get away from him, determined to be the good son while defending a murderer, defending a monster. He could have been great; instead, he chose to stay with those freaks he called brothers, protecting a city that didn't want him and a man who had killed a woman in cold blood.
"On my left," Leo said, twisting away from a Footbot, and Karai beheaded it.
The kitchen in the lair is small, smelling faintly of industrial bleach, mildew, and the too-sweet, too-damp stink of compost.
Karai throws the cup of tea she'd made for Splinter down the drain, and slams the chipped old mug down on the counter. Small pieces of leaves spatter the sink like mud, and for a long moment, Karai curls a hand over the edge, squeezing until her fingers and knuckles hurt.
It's too quiet.
The lair feels like a living thing, breath baited, waiting for the brothers to come trooping home, too loud and too noisy, high on the thrill of victory.
They are not coming home.
They did not win.
Mikey started the fire.
It was accidental — Tiger Claw seized his kusarigama in one massive paw and yanked hard, swinging him out of the fight and into the oil drums. Then, Raph mashed a Footbot, and the sparks caught on debris. The church, derelict and old, lit up.
Karai didn't care. She and Leo had fought their way to the Shredder, and the ghost of her mother was shrieking for blood. Karai had only been told fragments of a warped story, but these she knew, and still knows now: that Shredder murdered her mother, that he stole her away, and that he left her father to burn. Tang Shen lay buried halfway across the world, and Karai had sworn on her grave for the past fifteen years that she would give her mother the revenge she deserved.
It would end tonight.
Leo feinted, and Karai surged in his wake. Leo's sword was heavy in her hands; it made her strikes slower, but when she slashed at the man who killed her mother, he did not fight back with the viciousness he raised her with. The Shredder was not trying to kill her — and because he was not trying to kill her, he could not try to kill Leo. And Oroku Saki did not speak, except with his eyes. Angry, as he always was, and reproachful, as he had only been these past two weeks: My daughter, why don't you understand me?
He made Karai sick.
Karai had been a weapon in his hands. Karai had been the poison in his garden, carefully tended, carefully grown, ready to harvest, and distill, and use.
Karai was still a poison, but on the edge of her own blade. She was silent and slim, a dagger in a sleeve; whatever Oroku Saki said to her, she didn't want to hear it. This would end tonight. She feinted, this time, swift and to the bottom-right, to the side where his ruined eye couldn't see. Leo used his weight and speed to throw himself forward; the Shredder barely staggered before he threw Leo aside, but that gave Karai time to slash upwards, steel glancing off his armour and into scar tissue.
The Shredder let out a shout of pain. He lifted his arm in disbelief. The slice was not nearly as deep as Karai had hoped for. "Karai," he said once, voice low. His one good eye narrowed.
She wondered if her mother screamed, or if her mother had begged.
She tightened her sword. The man who used to be her father stared her down. Cloaked in the green glow of the tank, and red light from the flames, he looked like the monster Karai now knew he always was.
Leo was at her side again. He glanced at her once, and she nodded, and both of their blades ready, they lunged for the Shredder's throat.
Below, Splinter shouted "NO!", and Leo stopped. Everybody stopped.
Donnie was screaming.
His hands covered his eyes, but it was too late.
"No," Karai heard Leo say, over the clamour of his brothers. Donnie's voice rose to a howl, hollow and alone, his hands clapped to his face as the glow burst through his fingers. Leo dropped his sword and ran. "No, Donnie!"
The tank had taken damage in the fight, great cracks running up the glass. A broken Footbot lay at the base, mutagen spurted out of the tank in ugly, pressurised gushes, and as the turtles ran for their brother, he fell to his knees.
"Stay back!" Splinter ordered. His three remaining sons hesitated, and even Karai felt obedience jolt down her spine.
But Karai could tell, from the way they fought together, from the easy affection, from the way they looked at each-other, that the turtles had never been apart from each-other for more than an hour in their whole lives. They were not four brothers, they were one family — one whole.
This was an order they couldn't even understand.
The three of them surrounded their brother while Tiger Claw kept their father away, their hands caught between grabbing for Donatello and fending him off. His shrieking came in great whooping gasps as he tried to force his way through the burning, to tell his brothers how to fix this, and tried to tell them to get away from him. Karai expected some sort of flash of light — something instant, something quick; that Donatello would blink out of existence and reappear reformed.
Mutation is not quick.
Donatello's shell cracked and melted at the same time, reforming into a long, rippling spine. His face caved in on itself and reshaped to something more serpentine, fangs forced their way out of his mouth, and what used to be his hands broke at the wrists and bent backwards as eyes rose from his palms.
In the eerie silence that followed, this new mutant threw back its heads and hissed, and Splinter said, very quietly, "My boy".
At Karai's side, a foot away, the Shredder was laughing.
What used to be Donatello hurled itself at Leo and his brothers, heads snapping, mouths shrieking, and it wound around them all. All four of them together.
Karai knew, then, what was going to happen next.
The Shredder raised his foot, and slammed it down on the edge of the tank.
The glass made a sound like calving ice, and then Leo and his brothers were washed away.
The mutagen flooded the room, howls twisting into hisses and the slither of scales on tile. The turtles rose up as one, twelve heads hissing and snapping before lunging at Splinter. Tiger Claw threw himself back, ready to watch the turtles do the job Shredder had assigned them — to tear Splinter apart, piece by piece, until their father's blood was in their mouths.
Karai couldn't tell them apart. There were no warm smiles or shared looks, and if one of them looked a little longer, a little sleeker, a little thicker, it only lasted a second, before they slithered away, their bodies roiling and their eyes green and vicious.
They were hungry, Karai thought. Hungry, and angry.
Karai grabbed for the nearest piece of wood — Donatello's abandoned bo, and held it into the flames until it caught fire. She swung it, the flames trailing around her, and as she jabbed it towards each snake, it flinched, slinking back with its smaller heads snapping. "Back. Get back!" she snapped, and they slowly inched away, one of them swirling up around a roof support and watching from on high.
Behind her, Splinter wheezed, a hand covering his nose from the smoke, and the snakes watched, tongues flickering. Karai could hear it over the clatter of roof tiles and crackling wood. She held the bo staff still, in warning. One by one, they turned, throwing themselves towards the nearest exits — one to the left, two to the right, one throwing himself past them and out through a window.
"Miwa," Splinter said. "We must leave."
"But—"
"They are gone," he said. Grief made his voice weak, and Karai forced herself not to look away.
Dropping the bo, she drew Leo's sword again and landed in front of her father. Splinter's muzzle curled up in a snarl as he looked up to where Shredder stood on high, his armour glinting in the firelight and his cape fluttering in the unnatural wind.
The man she had called father, once — the man who had commended her on her first kill, who had taught her how to walk and how to throw knives, who had worshipped the memory of her mother almost as much as he revered the honour and history of their clan — the man who had murdered her mother and destroyed those who could have been her brothers.
He raised an arm in the direction two snakes had fled.
"That's right, rat. Leave your sons just as you left your daughter! And when they come for you — and they will come for you — remember who it was who finally put an end to you, and your wretched clan."
The lair is too quiet with only two people living in it.
As the night passes, it becomes beyond clear that Karai will not find any sleep here. Not while Splinter still meditates in the dojo, not while the turtles roam the streets, not while the peace she had expected to feel at Oroku Saki's death is swallowed up by the rage that he is still alive.
She decides, eventually, that one of the turtles won't mind if she borrows a bed for the night, instead of the small, uncomfortable futon she had abandoned the night before. The other side of that — they wouldn't even notice — is a thought she throws away the second it rises. They would notice, because they are ninja. They would notice, because they are going to come home, and Karai will smile and say thanks, something she's getting better at. They'll come home, and she'll ask, so, where's my room?
When they come home.
When Karai fixes them.
Karai is not used to feeling guilt. The Shredder did not raise Karai to feel it, and she has never had time for it. So, in the quiet, where there are no brothers arguing, no yelling for someone to go to sleep, no snoring, no quiet pride in her father's voice, it takes her a long moment to understand that the weight around her heart is not just regret, or sorrow, or loss.
Karai knows all three, but this is not the same.
What the Shredder taught her, though, was revenge. He taught her retribution. He taught her how to take a situation and fix it, through whatever means necessary. The Shredder taught her determination, above all other things.
So Karai will fix her brothers, no matter the cost.
She wonders when, and how quickly, it was that she started to refer to them as her brothers, rather than the turtles.
Leo's room is the only one not half-way towards teenage boy hell — his bookshelves are neat to the point of neurosis, and there's a little shelf full of sword-care stuff, like wraps of spare leather, and powder for the blades. But his towel is dumped on the floor along with a sweat-stained bandana, there's half a set of Guitar Hero in one corner, and there's a pizza box shoved haphazardly under the neatly-made bed.
Karai sits on it, patting the covers once before flopping down onto it, her legs hanging over the sides.
The strategist in her tells her that Leo sleeps on his back; the indent in the mattress beneath the blankets can only be from his shell. He probably lay here while planning, deciding how to come up against Tiger Claw, and what if Bradford had been there? Would Mikey go up against Xever, or Donnie?
When Leo and his family arrived to save her, they had a plan.
Topside, New York will wake up to a new day. The newspapers will talk about the President, the TV about that fire across town, and Karai's brothers will be lost, twisted, alone and mindless, mutated far beyond their forms to a place beyond her reach.
She turns, burying her face into Leo's pillow.
Leo would make a plan.
Leo would get them back.
tbc.