TMNT don't belong to me.
I'm also not an expert on medicine or science, so if something doesn't feel scientifically correct, that's probably my ignorance talking.
Winnychan asked me which turtle would abuse their powers for a plot that was floating around in my head. This is not it. My original idea featured an accident with their powers, not actual misuse. But the question got me thinking about deliberate misuse on a turtle's part. Also, Don is always portrayed as a know it all who fixes everyone's problems, able to fix his brothers' health problems with ease or track them down whenever they get kidnapped. But there is a limit to a person's knowledge, so suppose Don got it from somewhere else. The result is somewhat bizarre.
Sometimes, I tell lies.
Not big, grandiose lies like Mikey, but they're far more important than his will ever be.
It's not in my nature to fabricate false truths. My love of science and logic strictly forbids it. But I know with certainty, that I lost my way along time ago. Time…it gets messed up in my head now, so many different perspectives…so that may have been an exaggeration. It might have been a week ago, might have been today when life decided to do a one eighty.
The trouble with being a genius is that everyone expects not to understand you and will believe everything you say at face value. They accept that your supposed superior intelligence means that you have all the answers floating around inside your brain and if you don't, a quick search through the internet will quickly find that lacking bit of knowledge.
My brothers can be so wrong sometimes.
Blind faith is dangerous.
Master Splinter teaches us to control ourselves, control over our bodies, control over our minds. Ever since the whole drama with the demon Shredder, years, months, whenever it was ago, our chi energy has grown and with it our talents under Master Splinter's guidance. When we meditate, we catch glimpses of a world hidden away from mortal eyes. We can traverse the immensity of the astral plane; see things happening half way across the planet.
Perhaps the most useful, Master Splinter began to teach us how to manipulate our energy to heal ourselves. It's not an easy skill to master, requiring an innate knowledge of our bodies' workings and precision concentration.
And that's when things went wrong.
I think. Or at least, I'm pretty certain.
I'm a master at both of those two requirements.
My understanding of how the body works surpasses my brothers. With it, I cut down my body's healing time, by accelerating cell replication to fix wounds. While my brothers were learning how to cure headaches, I could fix broken bones.
I don't know why I kept it to myself. Maybe I didn't want to be seen as a show-off, risk attracting Raphael's ire that was always reserved for Leo. It's hard to remember, the way I thought then compared to now…well, a lot of things have changed. Nonetheless, my family was kept in the dark about my abilities.
That's when the first lies started.
"You're a miracle worker Don," Leo breathes in relief, staring at Mikey's unconscious body. "We were so far away, I was sure Mikey was going to bleed out before we got home."
I smile weakly, "Thank the miracles of modern science and medicine," I reply. "If you research hard enough, there will always be an answer somewhere."
That might have been the first time. It might have not. We get injured a lot; it's part of the life from of a ninja. Sparring, fighting the Foot and the Purple Dragons, it's bound to happen. I digress, that isn't important, my mind wanders a lot these days.
What is important is that Mikey should have died.
When Raph and Leo dragged his battered body home, Mikey was on death's threshold; his body had lost too much blood and was in the process of shutting down. I sent my brothers out of the lab as I bandaged Mikey's wounds and set up an IV, both were actions I knew to be futile.
So, in the privacy of my lab, I carefully fused our energies together. I sent my chi deep into his bone marrow, kick-starting a massive production of red blood cells at rates that were biologically impossible. I flooded each of his dying cells with energy to keep them operating while his blood levels stabilised themselves.
I saved his life, when by all scientific reasoning, he should have died.
It wasn't without a price, I was exhausted for weeks-months?-years?- after that. But that wasn't the end of it. There were other incidents after that, of course. So, I got better at control, both reducing the amount of energy I was expending on keeping my patient alive and at manipulating body processes.
And all that time, I left my brothers to believe it was my vast medical knowledge that was creating these miracles.
But the thing that everyone likes to forget is that I'm an engineer.
Not a doctor.
If I was a doctor, things wouldn't have turned out this way.
If there's one thing I can say with certainty, I know how and where the next turning point came. When it happened is another matter. Aiko Hiroshi doesn't remember either but he's been stuck with me the longest now, it's not a surprise.
It was on one of my junkyard runs that I was ambushed by a lone Foot soldier. Aiko was a new initiate, overconfident and brash. It didn't take much to take him down. As fights go, it was rather unimpressive.
I should have left him alone, gone home without a second thought.
I didn't.
What happens next…well, I remember it clearly.
The other trouble with being a genius is that you come to accept certain truths a lot sooner than everyone else.
When the war between the Foot clan and our clan started, I quickly came to a conclusion.
There are hundreds of Foot ninjas in New York alone.
There could be thousands of Foot ninjas in the world, given that New York is just one branch of the clan.
There are only five of us.
A lot of strange things have happened in our lives, things that, statistically, shouldn't happen. But we could only defy the odds for so long.
One day, we were going to lose the war, as simple as that.
Oh, I know there was-is a truce between our clans. But it would only last for as long as Karai ruled the New York branch and her position has always been precarious. The truce wasn't going to last.
I'm digressing again, when I was in that junkyard with Aiko at my feet, something inside me spoke. I think it was the part of me that kept me quiet at the discovery of my healing abilities. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been planning this, half baked ideas floating around that all of a sudden came together with resonant clarity.
Instead of leaving Aiko alone, I crouched over his body and touched the back of his neck.
Then, like I had done it with my brothers so many times before, I fused our energies together.
But my intention was not to heal him.
Like I said, I'm an engineer, not a doctor.
My job is to create things to overcome problems.
And our problem was a matter of numbers.
I carefully grafted some of my energy onto his spine, programmed instructions into it. It would continuously replenish itself with Aiko's energy, a parasite made of chi.
Then I went home and was violently sick in the privacy of the bathroom.
I can't remember how long it took me to gather the nerve to follow through with my experiment. Time blurs inside my head, I couldn't stand myself then. Still can't now, but I'm learning to deal with it.
Late one night, I sat on my bed and finally reached out in meditation. I found the threads of energy bound to Aiko's soul, the time I had given my parasite had allowed it to fully integrate itself inside him.
It could not be removed.
It was far too easy, painfully easy, to overtake the ninja's conscience. It took a thought and his body was mine to command. His memories poured into me, I knew every facet of his life, every deed he committed, his regrets, his triumphs.
I've never moved so fast in the astral plane, I threw myself out of his head as quickly as possible.
And he didn't even notice.
The parasite had done its job well, he was a slave in his own body and he wasn't even aware of it.
Master Splinter would kill me if he knew what I had done with his teachings.
I learnt a lot from that experience. Instead of entering Aiko's mind, I would send suggestions through the parasite, controlling him like I would a remote control car. Simple directives that would not arouse suspicion from his fellow clan members, I had the perfect spy.
I remember reading somewhere, that a good parasite is one that doesn't kill its host.
Aiko may have been a success but he was only one man, in a clan made of thousands.
I also remembered viruses.
Viruses, from a biological point of view, are not living things. They're bits of nucleic acid that hacks into the nucleus of a cell, high jacking it to produce more viruses.
What I created wasn't a parasite for long.
It took ridiculously little; all I had to do was send some commands to my virus and it increased the amount of energy it was taking in from Aiko slightly, allowing it to create strands of altered energy.
They were spread through the skin, the slightest physical contact with another human and they were infected.
I started telling my brothers more lies around that time.
"Have you managed to locate the Foot's new headquarters?" Leo asks, as we prepare ourselves for a patrol.
I shake my head, "I've been working on it," I reply, "Give me a couple of minutes and I'll have narrowed it down."
I retreat to my lab, pull up a bunch of news stories on my computer, skim over them and jot down notes. After about half an hour, I activate my drones, scouring their minds for the location.
When I find it, I circle the position and another random one on a map on my wall, and then return to my brothers. I cover my tracks even though my brothers do not have the slightest clue what I'm up to.
"There are two places that have had a lot of activity recently," I say. "There's a high probability we'll find them there."
My brothers nod, trusting my word without question.
And why wouldn't they?
After all, to them, I am a genius therefore I have all the answers.
It's getting hard to think now. Even though I never enter their minds, I can feel their life pulses across the city. Their thoughts crowd my own and it's so hard to push them out sometimes. My brain is slowing down, simple mathematics take me forever to calculate and my sense of time is fractured. Sometimes my dreams are filled with memories of a life that I've never lived.
I can't remember the last time my head was my own.
But it's worth it, it will be worth it.
The Foot can't hide their plans from me; they are trying to rebuild their numbers. And one day, the truce will end and we will go to war again.
But this time, we will have the advantage of numbers.
And in the meantime, I will continue to tell lies to my brothers.