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in this chapter: the beginning of the end. thank you guys, so much, for sticking with this story for so long. we're almost done.
Birth of Serpents
part 11
Donnie hesitates just outside the room, and Karai stops with him.
Tension ripples through his muscles, and the thin, barely-there slits on his face where his nose would be flare slightly. The church is eerily quiet, especially here, above the old sanctuary, where mice and birds don't dare to nest, and even Karai holds her breath. This is the Shredder's room, and nobody enters without his permission, or his summoning.
Nobody except Karai.
She presses her thumb into the nerve at Donnie's elbow, and urges him forwards.
Even the water is still as she walks down the aisle, Donnie at her side. The fires are out, and only cheap orange streetlight pours through the windows.
Here, it's hard not to think of what could have been if she'd never learned the truth. Karai has been raised for this; with the Shredder dead, the Foot would by all rights bow to her. Right here in the nexus of all that power, it almost overwhelms her: how easy it would be, to return to her place at the right hand of her—
My daughter. Why won't you understand me?
The Shredder is not her father.
(Had he loved her, once, as a man should love his daughter? The moments she remembers — being proud to be at his side, to have his trust and belief, to know that he relied on her as a soldier — these are tainted things now, like the memories of him bringing her trinkets, and him holding his large palm out as she punched it, and how only she was allowed to touch his scars, and how the words my daughter filled her with pride and loyalty and fierce affection, even when they came to New York and he was lost to a vendetta that he caused—
Had he looked at her every day and remembered the woman he murdered, as he lied about how she died?)
When Karai takes her seat in the throne, Donatello stands next to her, silent and still.
When he breathes, his teeth glimmer in the dark.
When the door to the throne room opens, light flooding in, Karai stretches languidly before draping her legs over the arm of the throne.
Everything is calculated. This room, this seat, this show of casual disrespect.
When Karai looks back at the years she spent at the Shredder's side, this was normal. She relished her position as the favourite, gently pushing at her boundaries, and what the Shredder would tolerate. Then, when it was time to go to work, she slipped skilfully into battle as the weapon she was made to be.
Oroku Saki does not always play the part of a mass murderer. Tonight, here, he is ever the businessman, no cape, no gauntlets, no Kuro Kabuto, just a tall, well-dressed man with an angrily-scarred face. The fabric of his shirt falls strangely on his arm — a bandage, maybe, over the wound left by her own blade
That doesn't make him any less dangerous. Just because his blades are no longer visible does not mean that they are no longer there. Hidden both in and out of plain sight, as all ninjas, and all weapons, should be.
"Karai."
The almost-softness in his voice repulses her.
The Shredder looks around the room, and in her mind's-eye, Karai can see how his guard rises and falls when he realises that Splinter is not with her, when he realises what is, and how she isn't spoiling for a fight.
"What is the meaning of this?" he asks.
Karai stretches out, the armrest of the throne digging into the backs of her thighs — this forced casualness, and cockiness, is no more than her behaving the way she's always behaved when being disobedient. As she stretches, she points her feet towards where Donnie is still standing, silent and still. "I brought you a friend."
Slowly, Donnie raises his head.
The Shredder's good eye widens — so slightly that Karai wonders if she is the only person who would have ever noticed it — and then narrows again as he takes stock of the situation.
If the Shredder takes this situation for what it is, he will reach for one of the many hidden blades he keeps, and this will be a fight, one which Karai knows will be difficult to escape from, never mind succeed.
But if he falls for it, even for a moment, then Karai has a shot.
It ends tonight.
The Shredder stays silent a moment longer. He has come into this room alone — no retainers, no Xever simpering behind him. Chris Bradford is with Stockman and the other two. Something catches in Karai's gut when she thinks about them, even briefly — they aren't stupid enough to come after her, not right now, when they could be curing the other three.
It was, after all, what she was counting on.
The Shredder takes in a slow lungful of air. "I see," he says. He takes another step forward, his dark eye analysing and re-analysing the situation, whether or not he's threatened here. Karai's heart speeds up, thumping rabbit-like in her chest.
Is he daring to hope? Karai has returned, with one of the turtles at her side, ready to fall into line and finish Hamato Yoshi off for good. It's almost so pathetic it has to be true.
"You two should get to know each-other," she says, swinging her legs back over the armrests until she's sitting upright. The Shredder's eye narrows through the gloom. Karai tilts her head to the left. "Hey Donnie," she says, pointing forward. "Aren't you hungry?"
"Karai—" the Shredder starts, as Donnie takes one step forward, and then another, his legs forming into long, snake-like tails.
What must we do with our enemies, Karai? the Shredder said to her, years and years ago.
Donnie rises and rises, his legs coiling beneath him and blurring into one heavy body, tumbling faster and faster down the steps with his hands now hungry, frothing mouths. Karai leans forward, her hand reaching for her own blade.
"Karai, enough!"
Donnie hisses, and throws his scarred bulk forwards, jaws unhinging. The Shredder pulls a hidden blade and dodges the first strike. Donnie's sharp teeth gnash together as they miss their mark. Each smaller head lunges forward, twisting and writhing, and the Shredder dodges those too.
Karai draws her own blade silently. Donnie, hungry, angry, fights like a storm — there's no logic to him, no foresight or thought; all Donnie wants to do is to eat.
And maybe, somewhere in the basest part of him, Donnie wants to kill. The Shredder is an enemy, forged in blood and vengeance. Any one of the turtles hate him, Raph would want Shredder dead anyway, but Karai would put money on Donnie and Leo having done the math, knowing exactly to the dollar how much better off the world would be if he no longer existed. In her darkest moments in the church's basement, with her hands and nails bloody and tired, Karai has done the math too.
Donnie swipes high, aiming one set of jaws at the Shredder's head, and feints — no matter where the Shredder tries to go, there are always more teeth, full of ivory and venom and—
Steel.
Karai slashes at the Shredder's injured arm. She misses, her hands tight and sweaty on the hilt of her blade, and rears back for a second attempt, heart behind her teeth, and suddenly, the world tilts in the wrong direction, her legs smashed out from underneath her by a large tail.
No logic. No foresight.
Karai was once Donnie's enemy too.
Karai breaks her fall on her elbows, slamming the impact down through the ground, but Donnie, every inch of him, comes swarming towards her, jaws and teeth and spit.
So, this is what Leo meant.
There isn't time to laugh at the irony, or at how blind she was. There isn't even time to be angry — or to wish for rescue as Donnie curls around her. Karai is tired of wishing.
"Karai!" the Shredder yells. Donnie's coils loosen and tighten, and it's that split-second that gives Karai what she needs. She flexes her wrist, letting a kunai drop from her sleeve, and shoves it deep into Donnie's side, the way she should have done to Mikey. Beneath the point, the skin cracks, then gives way, the kunai puncturing Donnie's flank and lodging there.
Donnie rears back, a sound like a rusted hinge shrieking from his throat, and then he jolts forwards, the scream stuttering, as the Shredder's blade finds its mark in his back.
Blood sprays across the floor.
April clues into the fact that Donnie's missing about a second after Casey does, and he watches her face twist into an ugly mix of shock, and horror, and fury.
Casey gets it.
Karai's played them. He'd always assumed that bringing Donnie here, they'd put him to work, doing his weird Breaking Bad impression with all the beakers and science and nerd-stuff that he always has going on. But instead, Donnie just stood guard, and did nothing.
Now, Casey gets why. Donnie wasn't here for Stockman, Donnie was here for—
"Can you find them?" Casey asks April urgently, tapping at his head. She nods, her hands already reaching for her temples, then stops.
"Casey—" She stops, then tries again.
Casey watches her, his heart thumping high in his throat. A cold sweat prickles the hair on his top lip. "You can do this, Red," he encourages, and that does it — April cuts him a look, all piss and vinegar and I know I can do this. He raises his hands in mock-surrender, offering her a tight smile because really, he gets it.
He wants to hope for the best with Karai — maybe she just took Donnie to the little psycho turtles' room — but his gut is already telling him what he doesn't want to know: Karai planned for this, and whatever she's taken Donnie to do, she needed a distraction first.
He really doesn't want to look at Chris Bradford's naked furry ass, but there it is, mooning the entire room. Stockman wasn't exactly giving him the four-star treatment when he chained him to a pipe.
"We need to cure the others," he says, more for himself than for her. "Then we go get Donnie. But we need to know where she took him."
He waits for April to argue. The way things are going, he almost surprised that April isn't throwing her hands in the air — I knew she'd do this, Casey, you never listened to me, she's bad news! I knew she'd betray us! Do you even care? — and he'd yell right back at her — Yeah, Red, I'm pissed off, is that what you want!?
But she doesn't, because this is serious business, make-or-break time, and he feels shitty for doubting her at a time like this.
"Alright." April lifts her hands to her temples. "Let's do this."
It's not as easy to find someone as Casey thinks; not here, in the middle of the city, where the church is hidden in plain sight. The streets are full of people, taxis honking, trucks snarling, so it's hard to find the silent voices that April needs to listen to.
It's not like the cold, dark sewers and tunnels, with metres of stone above her head and so few lives below.
And it's hard to do anything when all April can focus on now is the roar in her blood demanding that she find Karai, hunt her down, and bring Donnie back to where he is safe, with her, away from whatever plan it was Karai never told them about.
She curls her hands into fists and squeezes until her knuckles hurt, dragging up the memory of something Raph once said under his breath, when he had been told to sit and meditate on calmness after he tried to fit his fist into Mikey's mouth: like a river, over stone.
She imagines that Raph is supposed to be the stone, large and immovable, with the river of little irritations flowing over his shell. But April imagines herself to be the river, wearing down the porous rock until it either smoothes for her or shatters and is cast out to sea. The noise of the city likens to a river, voices chattering like rushing water, and here it's easy to see what she needs.
Xever is still lazing in his water feature. The ashigaru-sha have gone out, for either pizza or Neosporin. Rahzar lies in the corner of the laboratory, in a miserable, dead sleep. Casey waits impatiently while Stockman flits around.
In the heart of the old church, she finds Karai, and the hot, vicious confusion of Donnie's thoughts, and something else, something familiar.
Fire.
"Casey," April says, so pale that he can see each one of her freckles. "Casey, Shredder's in the building. Donnie, he's—"
Her voice breaks.
"He's hurting."
Casey presses his mouth together into a thin line until he can feel his lips tingle. "I'll call Splinter," he says.
Before he goes, Splinter looks to his wife and daughter.
Tang Shen still stares out of the photograph on the shrine, formal, stern, unforgiving. It is not just their daughter that Splinter has failed to save, but his — their — sons. Instead, by being what he has become, he has been forced to sit back, and let their daughter, their Miwa, take charge.
He is not proud of her. Not yet. There are things that she has done that are not acceptable in this clan, there are things that afterwards, when she has folded herself back into her rightful place alongside her brothers, she will learn, and what's left of the Foot will fade into nothing more than a distant memory for her.
He hopes.
Tang Shen had shown that the Hamato clan was where she wanted her daughter to be raised. Betrayal, false plans, false promises — these are all things that Miwa will learn to forget, at least when it comes to her own family.
He does not ask his wife to wish him luck. Luck is not something that this family is blessed with. Instead, it has its honour to fight for, and its legacy to protect, even in the shadows. Everything it has gotten, it has gotten though bloodied, scraped knuckles and hungry bellies and sheer force of will.
The wound in his foot is healing, albeit not as fast as he would like — the venom is almost purged, an ugly acid-yellow weeping from the crusting scab each time he lays his hands on it — but it is enough to serve this last purpose, leading his sons to their salvation.
And if there is no salvation, at least there will be rest for them.
This is not how he wanted his sons to die. This is not how any man would want their sons to die, minds lost, and lives lost at the hands of their father. But if the cure does not work, then perhaps this would be kinder, and then he would avenge them the way he should have avenged Tang Shen all those years ago, instead of hiding in a new land.
No.
He as a father will not bury his sons.
He as a father will save them, as much as he can.
He blows the candle out, and turns towards the dojo shoji. His foot still hurts, stinging with each heavy step, stinging more whenever the scab cracks, and the closer he gets to his destination the more his gut gets heavy. Falling into line does not sit well with him after all these years, falling into line at his daughter's command sits worse, knowing what Karai's plan is, knowing what she is willing to say and do, to achieve her goals—
At the end of it, Karai's plan is to use her own father as bait to save her brothers.
He is willing to be that bait, if it means that his sons will start tomorrow back in themselves, as the four lights that led him from darkness over sixteen years ago.
Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello's bedrooms are empty. He does not go into them, but waits a second outside, listening to all that is not there. No sleeping sons, no videos, no reading, no brothers together. The quiet is unbearably loud.
And then, there is Raphael. Trapped in the snake form, and trapped in his own room.
Splinter has always tried not to take favourites; though some of his sons are better students than others, though some of his sons are impenetrable when it comes to understanding them, Raphael is the son Splinter has always worried about, the son who is too much like himself, from his temper to his fierce, loyal heart.
The sword hidden in his staff comes into use so rarely, but the blade is well-oiled and slips out of its hollow with no sound. There is no drama; a ninja is and always will be made for subtlety and silence. Splinter wraps his hand tightly around the blade and pulls up shortly. The steel slides through his skin, whisper-sharp and like a bitter, scalding ice as blood begins to bead into the wound.
Inside Raphael's room, he can hear his son moving, and imagines it in his mind's eye — the three heads lifting to the air, catching the scent of blood, their jaws unhinging and their stomachs roiling.
He moves before Raphael slams into his unlocked bedroom door, the blade unclean but safe in his staff. The bleeding is heavier now, blood flooding to the wound and oozing through it, out of his closed fist and down his wrist. It mats into the fur, beading into thick, fat drops that spatter across the concrete underfoot.
Raphael slams against his door. The scent of blood is in his nose now, and it will not be long before he breaks out and into the lair. Splinter picks up his pace, not stopping until he reaches the thick chain at the door to the laboratory.
He uses his staff, leveraging it into the heavy old padlock, and snaps the metal with a sharp jerk.
The door is open. His sons are free.
There is no laughter from Leonardo this time. Just hungry sounds as two bodies hurl themselves at the door, echoed by Raphael behind.
On the platform above the disused tracks, Splinter waits for a long moment, letting his blood plip gently to the floor. Raphael slams himself against his door, and in the laboratory, either Leonardo or Michelangelo start to pull at the door, the chain slipping loose with the force.
Then, almost perfectly timed, Raphael falls out of his room, lithe and long and full of bloodlust, and Michelangelo shoves his way past Leonardo, rising up and up, his long forked tongue snaking out of his mouth as he looks upon his father.
Splinter turns, drops to all fours, and runs. Out into the sewers, with the rest of the rats, and towards what could be the end of his sons.
tbc.