Rating: K+

Word Count: 728

I don't own TMNT.


08. Blood

The hospital room has a sterile feel to it. It is devoid of all decor, barren and cold, much like its occupant. There is a table by the bedside, a table that in other hospital rooms is full of flowers and cards, photographs and candies. For this patient, the table is empty. Nobody has come to comfort this particular resident.

Even now, standing in the frame of the door, Karai isn't here to offer him any condolences. She slips silently into the room, adjusting her baseball cap lower over her face. She approaches, pulls up a chair, and sits down. The man on the bed turns towards her and appraises her through heavy lidded eyes.

"Karai," he croaks out. Karai observes him with disgust. It's only the two of them - she's ensured that nobody will be in this room for another four hours.

"Saki," Karai acknowledges.

"Would it be so hard...to call a dying man...father?" Saki wheezes out. His words are barely a whisper in the air.

"I have a father. It isn't you."

Saki laughs at that, a rattling sound in his chest like an old radiator. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back against the pillow, his laughing morphing to coughs. "That's right," he agrees. "That sad excuse of a man. He couldn't even manage to kill me right."

Karai clenches her teeth and in a fit of passion, grabs Saki's face, digging her nails into the scarred flesh of his cheeks. Saki's dead stare meets her eyes, unflinching.

"You tried so hard to separate me from my family," Karai proclaims. She releases his face from her vice-like grip. "You tried everything you could to keep me. But it was pointless. I have the truth now Saki, and the truth has let me see you for what you are. A lying, murdering, monster. Not a father, nor a sensei. I was never your daughter."

She wants the words to burrow into his skull, to torment him until his last breath. She is going to rip away everything she has given to him. Saki will know, with crippling certainty, that he has lost her respect, her love, her loyalty - he has lost everything. Karai desperately needs him to understand the extent of her hatred.

"Do you think you've found the truth?" Saki exhales in pain. "That because your blood is tainted with Hamato lineage you must honor it? I am the one who raised you, not that rat."

"Shut up," Karai hisses, leaning in towards him. "I didn't come here to hear you spit on Hamato Yoshi." Her breath warms up his cold, pale face. For a moment she wonders if she should just do it now, give Saki a quick and ungraceful ending.

Saki's eyes glaze over, and he blinks slowly. He shifts in his hospital bed, lolling his head to look at her. "No, of course not," he mutters, a ghost of a smile on his face. "You've come to fulfill the family legacy. Like your father before you, you'll destroy your heritage."

"You are not my father!" Karai shouts, jerkily standing up to tower above the frail figure on the bed. "And the Foot is not my heritage!"

Saki stares at her for a long moment, cracked lips upturned in a smile. "You really are…" he pauses to take in a shallow breath of air. "...my daughter."

Karai's face hardens into an expression of resolution. She goes over to the monitors and machines at his bedside and begins to disconnect them with trembling hands. The humming and sputtering dies out and leaves the room as silent as a graveyard.

"How did I not see it before?" Saki murmurs, more to himself than an attempt at conversation. "History always repeats…"

"You are utterly alone Saki," Karai states in cold countenance. "Now your stain is wiped from my family's life forever."

Saki laughs.

Within a few minutes, his body has stilled and the room is noiseless. Heavy with the presence of death, Karai takes her leave, creeping out through the window and into a warm summer evening. When she reaches the roof, she finds Leonardo waiting for her. He shifts uncomfortably as she approaches.

"He's dead," Karai says. She wishes she could derive pleasure from the statement. A sense of relief spreads across Leonardo's face.

"It's over," Leonardo breathes out.

"It's over," Karai repeats. The words ring surprisingly hollow.