The past few weeks had been difficult, to say the least.

For starters, there was this whole business of David insisting on being called "Donatello". Emma just couldn't get that through her head. After fifteen years of yelling "David!" all over the apartment, it was just too automatic. She was certain it hadn't been this difficult to stop calling him "Greenie", but he'd only had that name for a few months.

Plus, she had to admit she wasn't trying that hard. It stung to have her son reject the name she had chosen for him, her great-uncle's name. She'd put great care into giving him a normal, human name. What kind of a name was "Donatello"?

But more importantly than what a moody teenager wanted to call himself, there was the worrying matter of how closed-off he had been about his illicit excursion with his brothers. He had come back safe and sound - better than safe and sound, Emma had to grudgingly admit - but he wouldn't say what they had been doing at that abandoned farmhouse for two months. She only got bits and pieces of the story, sometimes in the most alarming circumstances.

He'd come back announcing that he had discontinued all his meds, except the insulin for his diabetes. Despite his health becoming predictably unstable as a result, he refused to go back on them.

He was, at least, reasonably cooperative with his medical team as they worked to come up with a new plan of care for him.

"You're taking what?" Ron had said, after David threw Emma out of the exam room, and she crept back to eavesdrop from the hallway.

"Mikey's medicine," David said. "It's made out of heart strong, clean blood, and stomach calm."

"David," Ron said - so at least Emma wasn't the only one who couldn't, or wouldn't, use that ridiculous new name. "You know that is not FDA-approved."

"I don't care," David said. "It works."

"Then please explain why you had a massive blood sugar crash yesterday," Ron replied.

David didn't seem to have an answer to that.

The culprit turned out to be the weird exercise regimen Leonardo had put him on. ("Leonardo is not a licensed physical therapist," Ron pointed out. "I don't care," David replied.) David, who had always been skinny - and who was still not fully grown, his team thought - was finally putting on some muscle mass, and it changed the way his body processed sugars and insulin. It took some fiddling around with the dosing calculations to get his diabetes back under control.

And that was just the beginning of what Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo - those bad influences - had put David up to.

"Hey, mister," Emma said one evening, when she came upstairs from the clinic to find David sitting Indian-style on the living room floor, his hands on his knees and his eyes closed. "None of that. You know this is an atheist household."

"It's not religious, Mom," David said, without opening his eyes. "It just helps you clear your mind."

"Well, you're not doing it under my roof," Emma said.

"Fine," David said, unfolding himself from the floor. "Then I'll do it on your roof."

She circled around him, blocking the window that led to the fire escape. "That wouldn't be happening even if it were a reasonable temperature outside."

He had no argument against that and he knew it. It was barely above freezing, far too cold for him. But he shot her a dark glare anyway before storming off to his room.

"And don't do it in there either!" she shouted through the slammed door. "I will know! Moms always know!"

Sometimes, always knowing wasn't such a great thing. Another evening, when David had been quiet in the bathroom for way too long, Emma got up from reading the newspaper at the kitchen table and went to knock on the door. "David?" she called. "Is everything all right?"

There was no answer.

She knocked again, louder. "David? David, don't make me come in there." By some miracle, David had never passed out while he was alone in the bathroom, and she certainly did not want him to start now, when he was too old to be seen in a state of undress and too heavy to lift off the hard floor.

But when a third, even louder knock went unanswered, Emma barged in without hesitation, to find David inverted in the bathtub.

He was lying on his back under several inches of water, his legs stretched up along the wall, unmoving. Emma threw herself to her knees on the old bath mat and reached for her son, but before she made contact he exploded up out of the tub, hitting his head hard on the faucet and throwing a huge quantity of water all over the floor.

"Mom!" he spluttered, snatching a towel from the low hook on the wall and covering himself. "What's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with me?" she screamed. "Oh my god, David. If you're trying to kill yourself -"

"I'm not trying to kill myself," he snapped, yanking himself upright and swiping at the blood that was streaming down his face. "I'm taking a bath."

"Like hell you are." Emma grabbed the washcloth from the side of the tub and clamped it over the gushing head wound. "I knocked three times. Why didn't you answer?"

David winced; the wound had to sting. "I couldn't hear you. Sound doesn't carry underwater."

With her free hand, she checked his pulse, his eyes, his temperature. He'd absorbed the heat of the bath, but he was still in his safe range. "How long were you down there?" she demanded.

"I don't know," he said. "Ten minutes."

"What?" she shrieked.

"Mom." He took her wrist, the washcloth. The same gentleness he'd always had, but a strength she didn't recognize. "I can hold my breath." He held her gaze, too, searching. "Let me show you."

"You have a head wound," she said, not letting go of the washcloth.

He sighed. "Yeah, okay. Put a band-aid on it."

In the minutes it took for her to grab iodine and medical tape, he finally told her a little of what had happened in Massachusetts - how his brothers had taken him swimming in the lake, proving to him that he could hold his breath for twenty minutes or more.

"Let me show you," he repeated, when his scalp was taped up and he had told as much of the story as he felt inclined to. He wouldn't take no for an answer.

He held her hand in one of his own, and pinned his modesty towel in place with the other, and slipped back under the water. He watched her the entire time, through the flickering surface, and she could see that he was awake and alert and safe.

Still, after five minutes she pulled him up, unable to stand it anymore. He gave her a minute to process, and then said quietly, "It's practically the only thing that makes this body worth it."

The words didn't seem to mean anything. "Don't you ever do that again," Emma said, her voice shaking.

His face fell. "Mom -"

"No!" she shouted at him. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He made an emphatic one-handed gesture. "Because this!"

"Don't you even -" she started, but he pushed up out of the tub, wrapping the completely sodden towel around his waist and knotting the corners.

"Mom," he said. "This isn't negotiable." She opened her mouth, but he wouldn't let her say anything. "What are you going to do?" he asked, as he stepped over the edge of the tub. "Throw me out?"

"I will take away your internet," she threatened.

"You don't know how," he replied.

"Ground you from the clinic," she said.

"Only spiting yourself."

"Lock the windows so those juvenile delinquents can't get in."

He just looked at her sadly. "They are juvenile delinquents," he agreed. "But I love them. And I love you too. Now can you please stop freaking out?"

She didn't know how to stop freaking out. The child she'd never even wanted was growing away from her, and she was terrified.