Finally had an idea… I realize now that the ending of this chapter is much more awful in the telling than the outline. But meh. Whatever.
Don went back for his bo. Felt like he'd left his arm behind in the lab. But it was a false step that sealed his doom. He felt a warm baby pressed into his arms. It wiggled and bucked against him for freedom from its captor. "Hey, watch this for me," Leo as he rushed past like a green gazelle, katanas drawn.
Raph's sleepy eyes made him look like a raging bull, his eyes wild with fear and somewhat delirious to his surroundings, probably still trapped in the residue of his dream. Hands on his sais. A passing glance at his daughter as he lurched towards the tunnels.
Mikey stuck his tongue out at Don and tweaked Eowyn's beak.
"Don't leave me alone with this thing!" Don shouted into the mess of noise, his voice was lost in a swirl of sirens, scuffling and yells.
She squirmed as she cried, her plump green cheeks purpled and wet. Her papas little temper showing. Well, not really, he thought as he held her at arm's length and steered awkwardly to the lab to turn off the alarm. Blasting sirens and raging daddies upset any baby, no matter how sweet a temper.
Raph is a daddy. It was like saying the moon was made out of Styrofoam.
Don sat at the computer. Eowyn thrashed in his hands and he flexed his fingers, desperate to escape into the computer. Where to put it. Work bench? No. It might roll off.
Ugh. Baby smell. Like rotten milk. And Raph… Babies shouldn't smell like Raph.
A toy. She needed a toy. Something to jam into her mouth to make her shut up. He scanned the room for the least fatal object. An old sparkplug. He pulled it out from under a pile of old Wired magazines and held it in front of her tear covered face.
"TELL US YOUR NAME!" Leo bellowed. Using his epic voice. Not good.
Don resisted the urge to put Eowyn in her bassinet and join the fun. A fight without him… Maybe he could bring her along in the car seat and leave her a safe distance away. No. Bad idea.
She hiccupped in distress and he watched with fascination as her face slid suddenly from distress to mollified interest. Eowyn banged the sparkplug on his knee and then put it in her mouth. Was it clean? Oh, well. She lived in a sewer and shared a room with Mikey and Raph. She must put dirty things in her mouth all the time.
Baby sat comfortably in his lap as he looked at fail blog videos.
"…MY FUCKING BODY! YOU HAD NO RIGHT TO…"
He nearly watched a video called Metermaid Fail when his brain prompted him to reconsider Raph's outburst. His body? The person who… violated him was somewhere in the tunnels.
Violated… Maybe Raph had been raped. Acid shifted in his stomach. What kind of a being could overpower Raph sexually? And what if Raph had been raped? His brain buzzed. Empty. Too gruesome to imagine. No possibility.
He held Eowyn out at arm's length again and her diaper drooped off her bottom. Probably full. Daddy could take care of that when he got back. Don would feign ignorance. He hadn't had to change a diaper yet and he wasn't about to. He had an intricate plan where he would never change a diaper. He couldn't wait for his niece to grow up so he could talk to her. Teach her things. Show her how to weld and switch out a PSU.
"…I'M GOING TO KILL YOU! YOU TOUCHED…" Touched what? Speak up, Raph! He turned down the computer speakers and craned his neck to eavesdrop.
But the eavesdropping wasn't necessary. A chorus of inarticulate male shouting came closer and in about thirty seconds Don found himself bandaging a stranger wearing a blue blindfold. Don blinked at Leo's naked face as he insistently held his katana point at the stranger's neck. A line of blood ran down the man's neck and into his collar.
"So, Larry Miller," Mikey said, all business and narrowed eyes. "How do we know you're telling the truth about this and…"
"IT DOESN'T MATTER!" Raph said as he elegantly punctuated his point by kicking a trash can.
Eowyn thrashed in fright and leaned backwards. Don nearly dropped her and then felt her peeled out of his arms. Her daddy bounced her in his arms and rubbed her shell in circles, tucking her face into his neck, glaring lasers of death at the intruder. How dichotomous.
"I only know what I was told!" the stranger said, his voice and body shuddering as if submerged in ice water. "They said they needed semen taken from a big turtle. I thought they wanted to break into the zoo! And then I saw that it… you…" he gestured politely at Raph, who growled in response, "…were sentient, but I couldn't do anything. They threatened my family! I had to."
Leo leaned in and said, "Not good enough." The soft whisper of death. "You would blindly hurt someone else to save your own hide? Without knowing the consequences of your actions?"
What?
"Leo," Don said mildly. Poor Leo. So quick to think everyone was against them. "How was he supposed to know that taking semen from a giant turtle was going to hurt somebody? I mean, at most it was… tampering with city property or… molesting an endangered species or something. You make it sound like they wanted him to kill somebody."
Leo's cool glare hardened with brief annoyance. "The foot aren't known for keeping their word."
Don sat down and checked his email notifications out of the corner of his eye, resisting the urge to grab the mouse as he talked. "You said he was saving his own hide. Was he supposed to let them string up his family because he wouldn't jack off a zoo animal? That's pretty harsh."
"I don't care!" Raph said. "It's not important why!"
Don blinked. The power of Raph's statements were really diminished when he changed a naughty and giggling baby's dirty diaper and wiped her backside during his threatening speeches. He wouldn't say anything because it was too funny and he hoped to see it in the future. Don't make him aware of the failure.
Then he noticed that the poop covered baby was lying on the workbench without a blanket. "Raph! Get that stinky thing off the workbench!"
"Fuck you," he muttered as baby kicked and giggled with glee at her grumpy and dangerous daddy.
Larry the hostage said, "You have a very pretty little girl. I have three daughters myself. Mary, Elizabeth and Annabel."
Leo dropped his katana suddenly and Don raised a hand, ready to catch his killing blow. Leo was a machine. His blows came swift and without notice, all but to the trained…
"Elizabeth… I wanted to name Eowyn that…" The sword fell to his side. "But Raph said it was like an old lady name."
"Eowyn. That's… different."
"Hey!" Raph tossed the rolled up dirty diaper like a projectile at the hostage and Don deflected it with his elbow.
Don wasn't very impressed by flying diapers. He saw every object of every variety, shape and size fly out of Raph's hands.
"Who is this guy?" Don asked the room.
Mikey picked up the sparkplug and wiped off the baby slobber, giving him a crooked and knowing smile. "He says he's the one who helped make Eowyn. They took Raph's… uh… baby juice and…"
Leo made a choking noise.
"…and they did it by shooting a tranquilizer at him and then they put this big ass clamp on his junk and pried out his testicles through his…"
"Holy fuck!" Don cried. No other words for it. His 'nads hurt just hearing it. Unlike his brothers, he knew exactly where their testicles were and they weren't near the surface.
And someone had done that to Raph.
"You had better not have known what you were doing," Don said, stepping closer to Larry the hostage.
He held his arms up in surrender and took the katana free moment to bolt to the other side of the room. Don smirked, knowing that they could kill him from anywhere he stood. A trapped lab rat.
"I swear! I'm a veterinarian! I've never seen anything like him!"
He gestured to the remarkable beast, who held his naked baby like a sack of potatoes under his arm and searched around the workbench for a misplaced clean diaper.
"I had to do what they wanted."
Leo stepped up to him, his brown eyes glistening with deathly intent. Leo very badly wanted to cut this guy up. And understandably so. The idea of Raph helpless and sexually violated. Raph was a physical monster. But he was also a frightened little child underneath all the muscle and mouth. And they all knew it. He must have been so scared and alone and ashamed.
Don shook his head, clearing it for more excuses from the hostage. "…they said they wanted me to make a baby. I didn't know what to do. I mean, they didn't give me any instruction. I was told that you are a red eared slider. So I got a sample from a pet store, sorted out the females and extracted DNA samples. I looked at your DNA too. Really fascinating stuff. You're a miracle of science, Raphael."
The miracle of science diapered his wiggling baby with one arm and sat down heavily on the work bench, full of evil intent. Grunted mildly and pulled a screwdriver out from under his butt cheek. Don wondered if Raph would ever attack someone with his baby in his arms. Probably. "Why'd they do this?" Don asked.
"I don't know. They wouldn't tell me." Leo stepped closer still and Larry trembled like a leaf in a fall breeze.
Don bit his tongue and clamped down on the five hundred questions ready to burst forth.
"I tried to extract the mutagen as they requested, but I couldn't find a way. I think there may be a way, but I'm not scientist. But I did find that if I used the semen untreated that it could produce a viable embryo using one of the red eared slider eggs. That was pretty amazing. I wasn't sure I would get a little red eared slider or a mutant."
Don's heart ached. He knew what this meant. "How many specimens did you produce?"
"Oh, who cares!" Mikey cried, suddenly distressed. Probably because he didn't like the idea of Eowyn, his beloved little niece coming out of foot headquarters. "She's ours now. It doesn't matter where she came from."
"I took twenty specimens." Larry said it cautiously. Didn't want them to figure this out. Didn't want Raph to know.
Don sat down again and sighed heavily. "What happened to them all?"
Raph still didn't understand. "You had not right… You made this thing… And I have to take care of it!" He held Eowyn at him and then whipped her back against his chest. That was an odd gesture. Seemed to keep her face hidden against him. That was new. Shielding her from the stranger as he declared that he didn't want her? Only Raph.
Larry ignored Raph. "Only four were viable. Several others survived past the embryonic stage, but… were found undesirable."
And Leo's katana dug into Larry's neck, his face was blank with impending agony. Preparing himself for Raph's pain.
"Where are the other three?" Don asked softly. "It's okay. It wasn't your fault."
Mikey scoffed a little. It didn't matter whose fault it was at this moment. They needed the information. Fault came later.
Larry rallied himself and took a risky deep breath that cost him another cut.
Raph snapped a sleeper on his little daughter and didn't listen or else didn't understand. Don looked for any sharp objects within his reach. "Raph?" he asked. "Can I hold her?"
He wrinkled his face with annoyance at his interruption and tossed the baby into his arms. "Yeah, she needs more clothes. Growing like we're feeding her Miracle Grow."
"The first two viable fetuses survived a month after their so-called births. Two girls. Both lighter colored than the fourth here. And identical twins. What are the odds of that? They hatched out of the same egg." Larry's smiled. An experiment gone much better than planned.
Raph's head cocked to the side, understanding settling in.
"And the third was a boy. I don't know what happened to it. The third and fourth specimens thrived. I was so surprised."
Raph blinked. No real reaction. Didn't hit him yet. He'd had three daughters and a son and two daughters were dead now. The son was… who knows. Dead too.
"They wanted to use them for experiments. To learn how to demutate them. I was given plans… um…" He glanced up at Leo's wet eyes.
"You have more babies," Mikey said his hands limp at his sides. Not fidgeting for a change.
Don's brain spun at breakneck speed, "Wait! Twenty specimens! What happened to the other seventeen and why is Eowyn here and the boy isn't? What happened to the twins? Why didn't they live?"
Leo's sword slipped to his side and his eyes fluttered distractedly to Raph, gauging him.
Larry's eyes opened wider with the newfound hope that Leo wouldn't kill the messenger. "They were only red eared sliders with no mutation, so they were given back to the pet shop. Well, two didn't mature."
"That's astoundingly good odds!" Don said. He couldn't help himself. The fact that any of them lasted to birth was remarkable.
"But…" Larry fidgeted and took a step away from Leo, his eyes on the katanas again. "They did show me the plans for the two surviving mutants and… I think the other is probably a loss now. I could only get to one in time. I knew they were going to start experiments the day I left. They showed me some diagrams…"
Don leaned over closer, hungrily devouring all his words.
But he felt a heavy object collide into his arm as it blew past and then Raph was on top of Larry, punching him in the face and screaming wild nonsense. Leo put his arms around Raph's body and pulled him away.
Eowyn squealed with fright.
"I'll find Splinter," Mikey said with a weak voice, choking with tears. Dead babies. Dead nieces and nephew and other little babies of Raph in random pet stores. Don filed it for later. Comfort Mikey. "He's in the tunnels looking for other intruders." He sounded like a soulless robot as he wandered blindly out of the room, oblivious to Raph's primal bellows of rage.
Leo pushed Raph out the door.
The foot cut up Raph's baby. Maybe more than one. Don blinked back his own tears of shock and disgust. Then he backhanded a slap across Larry's face. Don's slap made Larry's nose bleed and sent him into a pile of paint cans.
"We're going to be alone for a while," he said, looking down into Larry's face as he struggled to move away from him, tripping over rolling paint cans. "I expect to hear everything you did in the tiniest detail and don't worry about wasting my time. I have endless patience and no life."
Don grabbed Larry under the arms and shoved him heavily into a seat.
He heard fists on flesh as Raph lashed out blindly at the nearest warm body, pummeling Leo. Didn't need to look out the door to know what was going on. Leo was sitting on him, pinning him down as he roared nonsense at him.
Eowyn cried helplessly on the work bench.
And the grunts and scuffles of aggression stopped. Leo's soft words echoed into the lab and both Don and Larry listened for a few minutes. Then Splinter's words joined the chorus of appeasement.
And Don opened the door, fully knowing what he would see. He shouldn't have.
Raph lay on the floor, crushed with tears and Leo's weight, half lying over him as an impediment, but his arm gripping him in a wishful hug.
And Splinter gripped his walking stick. There was vengeance in their father's heart and Don knew it. This assault on their family couldn't go unpaid.
Raph's drenched face melted into wild confusion, "Baby…" he choked out. He looked around the room.
Leo muttered, "Lab…" His voice was about to break.
Mikey was nowhere to be seen. Probably collapsed in the tunnels somewhere. Dead babies…
He came back in the lab and grabbed his surviving child clumsily and kissed her greedily, blind to the onlookers witnessing his affection. "This… is mine. I'm going away… We're going to leave…"
Don reached out to stop him. It was too late. Too cold. Too dangerous.
"NOBODY FUCKING TOUCHES US!" Pushed her to his chest, almost enough force to smother her with his protection.
And he left the lab, tripping over an extension chord. Leo followed numbly and Don heard the door close behind them.
Splinter entered the room and filled it with his rage. "This will not go unanswered," he said to Larry. "You allowed my grandchildren to die. How did they live? Did they ever know any love at all?"
He shrank under Splinter's power and paced. "I didn't know it at the time. I thought it was a genetic experiment…"
"I don't buy that," Don said, drowning his rage in the softness of his voice. No outburst. This was too important. Make a plan. Vengeance that lasts lifetimes. The calculations formed as he spoke, and he addressed Larry with deceitfully docile eyes. "You rescued Eowyn. Why not the boy? What happened? Did they cut him up? Torture him?"
No answer. Shrank a little. Swallowing his shame to save his skin. "Probably. They had plans… They were… disgusting. Prying off the shell while they were alive. Injecting them with chemicals. Exploring physical weaknesses."
And Don punched him. Knocked him out. Couldn't listen anymore.