A/N: It occurred to me that there must be many off screen mutants in TMNT, those whose stories will never be told. I wanted to write something about some of them, and what their lives and cultures might be like. Therefore, there are no Turtles or Turtle friends in this story (yet).
OoOoOo
The smell of food wafted through the air and woke the small group of escapees. The bear's stomach rumbled audibly, followed quickly by Phoebe. The cat mewed, bringing Phoebe fully awake. "Shhh," she rubbed its head. "I know you're hungry." How was she supposed to feed them? Her purse was gone, along with all of her money, her identification, her credit card. Plus, she looked like she had just come out of a fire or a car wreck.
She looked around, peeking her head around the alcove. No one was there, so she stood up, and ignoring the ache in her hip, limped out into the alley. The three mutants followed her, the snake still on her arm, and the bird still held close to her chest. Weaving their way in and out behind buildings, the smell of Italian food became stronger and stronger. Around a corner, she saw the back of an Italian eatery. Outside the back door where heaps of half-eaten sandwiches, plates of unfinished pasta, piles of salad. She stopped, and felt the bear hit her legs. It looked up at her, about to make a sound, when she bent down and put her hand over its muzzle. "Shhhh," she said gently. "I will get us some food," she explained. "Stay here."
She went to make her way toward the door, and the three little ones followed her. "No," she shook her head, "you stay here." But when she moved again, they followed her.
She sighed, and looked at the discarded food behind the restaurant. "We have to run," she said quietly. Is this how homeless people got food? They ran behind Italian eateries and grabbed leftovers? She began to ran, and then remembered her hip with a stab of pain, so her running was more like hopping. She grabbed a bowlful of the discarded food, and fled around the other corner of the building. Looking behind her, the three little mutants were gone.
She let out an cry, and saw they were at the refuse, gobbling up anything they could find. If someone saw them, they'd call the police. She put down the bird, and ran to the other three. She nabbed up the cat and the lamb, and ran back behind the corner. She dropped them, and turned to go back for the bear, but he was already behind her. She sighed, and picked up the bird again. "Come on," she walked farther down this little alley, we'll eat."
She dropped the food, and the three mutants fell on it. She felt the pressure release on her forearm, giving her pins and needles, as the snake let go of her and fell in the large Styrofoam bowl. Phoebe stuffed her own hand in the bowl, grabbed a handful of slimy something, an stuffed it into her mouth. It tasted like a combination of spaghetti and olives. She put her hand in again, and sat down, putting the bird in her lap.
She took some small pieces and placed them in its beak, but it didn't seem to know what to do with them. It knew it was food, it opened his beak wide and let out a weak "Awwk." When she put a piece of noodle in its mouth, it just held its beak open.
She glanced up at the others, and they all seemed to be find stuffing their faces hand over fist. She looked back at the bird, and thought, Why won't you eat? She finished chewing the last of the food in her mouth and swallowed. "Oh!" She reached through the other four and grabbed another handful of food. She stuffed it into her own mouth and chewed it, and spit it into the birds beak.
The bird swallowed.
As she continued with the procedure, occasionally getting up to stealthily, or as stealthily as she could in a ruined party dress and barefoot, grab some more food before disappearing again behind the corner, it occurred to her that might be in some sort of twisted cartoon or comic book. Taking care of five human-animal children, running away from spaceship riding and body wearing brains, digging out the garbage for food, none of this could be real. She spit some more food into the bird's mouth.
A plastic cup was nearby, so she gently put down the bird, retrieved it, and filled it with water out of an outdoor spigot. She gulped it down, ignoring the awful taste. She did it again, and again, and then she was surrounded by mews, and baws, and brrws, and a pressure coiling against her leg. The other four had figured out what she was doing, and come for their share.
She filled the cup, and held it for each of them as they drank. They tried to take it from her, and each other, but she had plenty of practice with that kind of behavior. Her own two children, only two years apart in age, had gone through a stage where they did this with everything. Mediating through sharing was something she was very good at.
She took a cup back to the bird, picked it up again, and tried to get it to drink. Again, it did the same as it did with the food, only opened its beak, and tried to swallow.
Now that she had a moment to think, she could get a good look at each of the creatures that was with her.
The bird in her arms was white, with feathers sticking out in a sickly fashion. It looked much more bird than it did human, its eyes were wide and held no expression. Its wings were thin and at the ends of them fingers protruded, with out a hand. Its legs were scaly like a bird's, but the knees looked human, and the feet were malformed, with seven long toes on each them, ending with small, white talons. Its heart was beating very fast, and it was blinking quickly with its expressionless eyes.
The snake was tiny, it couldn't have been more than a foot long. It was a dark green, with amber eyes. The only real thing that reminded Phoebe of a human were the little neck, shoulders, and arms They were perfectly formed, and the same dark green as the rest of it. It slithered with its head up, to what Phoebe might have said as its waist, but she couldn't be sure, as under the arms it was all the same.
The bear seemed to blend beautifully with its combination of animal and human. On all fours, it looked like a bear cub. But when it stood up on two legs, its arms fell to its sides like a human beings, and it moved its front paws like a hand. Standing up on two legs also made it quite clear that it was a he.
Same with the lamb. She thought it was a sheep and not a goat at least, but she could have been wrong. It was obviously a boy, and covered with white wool. His eyes were brown, with hourglass shaped pupils. He did not look as lamb-like on all fours as the bear did a bear, but when he stood up, he stood like a human. His feet were a human foot shaped hoof with two toes on the end. His hands were like a human's, with thick fingers, and covered in the same white wool as the rest of him.
The cat was the most human-like of all of them. One could almost trick oneself into thinking it was a child in a cat suit. Phoebe couldn't tell the gender of it by looking. Its body was covered in sleek gray fur, with the darker markings of a tabby. Its tummy were white. So were its paws, which had elongated digits it could use as fingers. Its eyes were green, its pupils slits in the daylight. Its tail swished back and forth in a rhythmic motion, and she could hear a faint purr coming from her.
"Can any of you talk?" she asked.
They all looked at her and said nothing.
"I am going to guess that is a no," she sighed. "Well, I can't be calling you the bear, the lamb, the snake, and the cat, so we better come with names. Unless you all have names already."
She waited a moment for an answer, but didn't get one.
"OK, then," Phoebe looked at each of them. "You," she pointed to the bear, "are Arcos." She pointed to the lamb, "You are Aries." She took a deep breath. "You other three aren't so easy." After a moment, she said, "I will assume you're girls until I know otherwise." She looked to the snake, "You are Medusa." To the cat she said, "You are Ailurosa." She looked down at the bird, "And you are..." she searched her brain for her Greek Mythology, , and unable to find a girl's name, she decided, "you are Aetos." She pointed to herself, "I am Phoebe." She stood up, "and we have to get out of here before someone sees us."
She and the little mutants behind her wandered around the back ways of the buildings for hours. Medusa ended up on her forearm again, and she carried the other three with her free arm at intervals, the other arm kept Aetos close to her chest. In the time walking, she had plenty of time to think. She had to contact Stephane. He must be worried sick, the kids must be terrified. She would have to find a payphone and call him collect. What would she do with these little people, for she was quite sure now they were in fact people. Would she hide them in her basement forever? Or the attic? She imagined what she would say when Stephane picked up. "Allo? Stephane? C'est Phoebe. Je suis a New York et je ne peux pas aller a la maison, parsque je ne portais sauf ma robe." Hello? Stephane? It's Phoebe. I am in New York and I can't come home because I am not wearing anything but my dress. Looking down at her dress, she saw it was filthy, and so were her legs. Her bare feet were black, and crusted with gook. The dress was torn at the hem around her knees, The blisters on her arms, legs, and temples had burst, scabbing over and leaving puss on the dark blue velvet. She chuckled and shook her head at the absurdity of it.
She noticed as they walked that the garbage bins were less full of garbage, and the ground less full of refuse. There were more needles and razors and condoms on the ground. When she heard no human sounds for half an hour, she ventured to take a look at the street.
It was empty. It looked like they were in a warehouse district, abandoned for more modern facilities. The sun was low in the sky, so Phoebe picked a warehouse to stay the night.
The first floor was obviously occasionally occupied, having a metal bin the middle for a fire in the winter, and strewn clothes, wrappers, and human waste decomposing spread about. The second and third floors looked occupied too, drug paraphernalia and other things she didn't even recognize littered the floor. She decided the top floor would probably be the safest, and trekked up the stairs, her little brood of mutants following her. As the sun set over the horizon, slowly blanketing everything in black, Phoebe leaned up against a wall once more, and with the little ones around her fell asleep.
OoOoOo
Phoebe awoke feeling a cold, hard thing against her chest. She opened her eyes, knowing what it was before she saw it. Aetos' fluttering heartbeat had become intimately familiar to her in the past two days, and now it had stopped.
The bird's eyes were still open, and its body was rigid, its white, sparsely feathered head beginning to crane back with rigor mortise. "Oh," she cooed, and her voice woke the others up. They each sniffed Aetos' body, as if in a goodbye, and then ignored it.
She got up, and laid the bird down. She wished she had some other way to dispose of him, but she had to find a payphone, she had to do it stealthily, and she couldn't waste time here. Leading the other four down the stairs, they began their trek through the empty streets in search of a phone.
They found one on a corner not far from the warehouse. Don't call, came the unbidden thought. Don't call. She picked up the receiver, and heard nothing from the earpiece. It was dead. The second one they found, however, wasn't. Don't call, said the unbidden thought, you ought not to call. You shouldn't call, don't call. She pressed 0 for the operator, all four mutants clinging to her legs. She fervently hoped not to be seen.
"Hello," came a nasally, female voice onto the phone, "how may I help you?"
"I would like to make a collect call, please," Phoebe told her.
"What number, please?"
Phoebe gave it to her and the phone on the other end rang. "Oh, please be home, Stephane, please be home."
She heard a click, and then expecting the answering machine to come, she looked frantically around the phone looking for a phone number for Stephane to call her back.
"We appreciate you calling," said a voice that Phoebe didn't recognize, "but the Laferrier family is not making any comments at this time. This has been a harrowing time for this family, the loss of this beloved wife and mother has devastated not only one community but two. The funeral is taking place in Mr. Laferrier's homeland in Haiti in an undisclosed location. Donations can be made to the Missing Person's Fund in lieu of flowers. All calls will be screened, and those that are deemed relevant will be passed along to the Laferrier family. They ask that their privacy be respected at this time as they mourn this loss."
As Phoebe listened to the message coming from her own answering machine, her mind raced. Harrowing time? How long had she been gone? Funeral? They were having a funeral for her after three days? Haiti? He was going back to Haiti!? With the kids? With her kids?! She looked down at creatures clinging to her legs, and saw four pairs of pleading, frightened eyes looking up at her. They were different colors, and different shape, with different shaped pupils, but they were eyes, and they were full of expression. They were full consciousness. In Haiti, the unbidden thought said, in Haiti. In Haiti the Stephane at the kids had their grandmother, their many aunts, and uncles, and cousins of all types within a five mile radius of each other. Stephane could live like a king in Haiti with his education. Her children would be well loved, Stephane would be well loved. The four being clinging to her had no one. You, the unbidden thought said from the place that the poetry came. She took the phone away from her ear, and heard the beep of the machine. She hung up.
It was like something had fallen away from her, a crust from her eyes that made the world look different. As if she'd been looking at it all of her life with glasses and now they were off and she could see the colors were not the same shades she thought. The lack of sound made her feel removed from her body, the warmth of the mutants on her legs felt faraway. She began walking, shaking them off gently, except for Medusa, who wound around her leg and clung tightly.
She returned to the alleys behind the buildings until she found a restaurant, and repeated yesterday's episode, her mind blank. She saw a newspaper on the ground and picked it up. The date read August 30, 1993. August? If this was today's newspaper, it meant that Phoebe had been gone for four months. How could that be, she'd only been gone a few days, at most. Why would they have her funeral after only 4 months? She remembered then reading a newspaper article once that after three days the probability of finding a missing person dropped 75%. How much did it drop after 4 months? Was it almost nothing, enough to have a funeral?
After eating, they walked back to the warehouse and climbed once more to the top floor. Aetos was still there, flies now crawling on his open eyes and open beak. She shooed them away and picked up the little bird.
This morning she had noticed a fenced in vacant lot next to the building. It was small, perhaps 8 feet by 10 feet, but it was overgrown with weeds. She carried the little body down the stairs, and next door, she squeezed through the gate, which was rusted into position barely open. It had been covered with concrete at one time, but the plants were slowly taking it back. Chunks of concrete were cracking up, and she saw in the back left corner, a large, green weed was growing. She carried Aetos over to it, and put him down.
She pulled the weed up, it was resistant, but she was determined. It left a bare space of earth, and the concrete loose. She began prying the concrete chunks, the four little ones following suit. Medusa looked especially silly, with her tiny arms and hands being able to only pick up a pebble and move it to the side. Once there was a space wide enough, Phoebe found a broken glass bottle and started to dig with it.
The four mutants watched her for a while, as if they were examining her, waiting for something to happen. Then Arcos began to dig with his hands, his claws removing great clods of dirt as the bear dug. Soon they had shallow hole large enough to place Aetos' body in. She laid him in the hole, and began to move the dirt over his body with her hands. All of the others joined to help her. "I'm sorry, little fellow," she said. "I wish I could have done better."
With those words, the world snapped back into place, and her thoughts came back to her. She had to figure out what she was going to do, how she was going to do it, and what she was going to do it with. She was not going to loose another one of these little ones, and she hadn't the foggiest idea of how to take care of them. Or herself. She looked up at the warehouse, a window on the top floor slightly ajar overlooking the lot. She had to start somewhere, so she'd start with the top floor of the warehouse, and with this vacant lot which was now a graveyard.
