Hanami – Chapter 40
"Shit." They all knew where she was headed, but Donatello arrived first. Shima'd come directly to her children's grave and begun to dig. Her pupils dilated and her breathing labored, she snapped and growled at any who approached her. Her sisters ventured as close as they dared, trying to reason with her.
+"Shima, it's us, please stop!"+
"Oneechan, please! Leave them alone!"
Sterling tried to move closer, only to have her sister take a wild swing at her face.
Leo turned to his brothers, "Where's Master Splinter?"
"Uh…"
"Then let's go find him. Donnie, you stay here, make sure she doesn't hurt anyone." Leonardo headed back towards his sensei's favorite meditation spot. Mike went inside to check upstairs. Raphael headed out along the workout trail.
By the time they returned with Master Splinter, her frantic digging and her sister's pleas had subsided. Shima had dug a shallow hole over the grave and tucked herself into it facing outward. She'd pulled her entire body into her shell and packed the dirt as tightly as possible around herself.
"I tried to move her, but she wouldn't budge." Donatello held up his hands. His forearms were a mass of cuts and bites. "It's not just that she won't let you get a good grip, she must be digging in with her back feet, too."
Pipes spoke up, +"She doesn't even recognize us."+
Master Splinter sighed deeply. "This will take some time. Please go back to the house. I will help her."
"But—Sensei, she—"
"Do not fear Leonardo. If you wish to help bring out three blankets."
Sitting on one and wrapped in another, Splinter draped the third blanket over his daughter. He settled in, willing his mind to still itself. Traveling inward, he gently untied his consciousness from his body. Mentally playing out the slack that would allow him to return to himself, Splinter launched himself outward, seeking his child.
A great stone statue lay buried at the foot of the apple tree. Rough granite and impossibly bulky, the turtle's features were sharp, feral, and angry. The tree was bare and the night was dark. Cold froze the ground, causing it to clutch the statue-Shima's shell in a stony vice. Still and silent, the granite turtle remained low, half in the earth and half out. Splinter saw that his daughter stood in the doorway – denying entry – guarding that which rested below her: a stone dragon on her horde.
Even as Splinter watched, a growing crowd of humans surrounded the statue. They pointed at her, laughing. That same laughter continued as they marked her body with pick-axes. They pissed on her, insulted her, gouged bits of stone from her shell. They splashed her with blood. They cracked her foundation. She did nothing, but bore it all without any outward emotion.
It was only when they began digging that panic and rage registered in her eyes. But she was stone, and stone could not move, so there was no one to stop them as they tunneled beneath her.
Splinter heard the birthing cries of her children, felt the earth grind as she tried to pull free. Too late, the humans had the children, small shells still too soft to protect themselves. The human crowd screamed and murmured as it pressed around the tiny forms, and the tiny lights of their souls flickered and faded like fireflies in September.
The humans were gone. The statue remained, crying silent tears, guarding an empty hole.
Splinter approached the statue and, resting a spectral hand upon it, once again sought Shima's mind.
A crowded room with four lofted beds and four desks lay bathed in fluorescent light. There were no windows and only one closet. Each desk had a bookshelf beside it and its owner's bed above it. The floor was tile and there was a sink and toilet in one corner. There were angled mirrors along the edge of the ceiling and mirrors mounted on the walls over the desks. Splinter felt as though a thousand eyes were staring at him.
Four little girl turtles were curled up together on the bed furthest from the door. Two were asleep, exhaustion evident on their faces.
One had burns and scrapes on her fingers and an air of permanent ground-in dirt. Her fingernails were blackened, her beak was sooty, her feet were gray with calluses, and her knees were the ashy brown of a miner's child.
The other that lay sleeping on her sister's shoulder possessed a pair of puffy eyes and a runny nose. She'd clearly cried herself to sleep. Her hands were wrapped up to her wrists in medical tape and there were hot packs on the mattress where they must have slipped out of her swollen hands. Splinter's psyche cringed, as a weapons master, he recognized the signs of physically abusive training. Her knuckles were inflamed and engorged, as were her wrists. If her training, whatever it was, continued without regard to her health, she would suffer permanent damage. He did not know what would cause her to have bloody fingertips, but he could guess that the long-term goal was the formation of calluses.
Shima sat upright, cradling her little sister in her arms. Splinter hovered nearby, watching the memory unfold.
"It's ok OneSee, tell Oneechan all about it." OneSee had finally calmed down enough to speak. Splinter felt Shima's mind projecting calm at her little sister, at little Cabbage. 'Was she an empath?' Splinter held the ability himself, but none of his sons had demonstrated that tendency, except for Michelangelo, but he too often lacked the discipline to focus it. Turning his attention back to his daughter, Splinter found himself listening to Cabbage's troubles.
"…study medicine, I said ok. I wanna help. I don't wanna watch people be sick any more. They made us do dissections. Pull apart the animals that were dead to see how they worked, so that we could fix the ones that weren't dead, right?" Shima nodded, letting Cabbage tell her story in her own time. Cabbage burst out all at once, "They said I was ready for the next big step! They took me to the storage vaults. They said it was important. We have to know how mutants work in case they get sick. OH FOURSEE, they made me dissect mutant turtle cadavers today!" Cabbage was almost hysterical, "I don't wanna! I don't wanna be a DOCTOR! FourSee, I know how they DIED. I got to see everything the humans did to them. They made me record it on an autopsy tape. I can't sleep. I keep seeing the bodies in my mind. FourSee make it stop!" Cabbage choked, unable to speak.
FourSee looked past her sobbing sister, watching the other two breathing peacefully. Her expression was sad, but it hardened as she lifted Cabbage's face towards her own. She whispered words that Splinter knew she would regret for the rest of her life. "They are already dead. We are still alive. Tomorrow and the day after and the day after you will go where the humans tell you and take apart anything the humans ask of you. Do you understand? Because if you are weak, then you have killed us all."
Cabbage nodded. Oneechan was right.
Splinter's psyche drifted from the room, pulling itself through layer upon layer of Shima's memories. He would remember some until the day he died, others he forgot in an instant. Time drifted wide here, and through a cracked window, he perceived his goal.
"Hello Nezumi-Sama."
Splinter smiled, "Sir Rat? No child, call me Splinter, please."
"Tea, Splinter?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"You must have traveled a great distance to find me. I did not know where I was headed when I fled, and not even I am sure where I am now."
Splinter sipped his tea. "You are where you always are, inside yourself. The yarn may become tangled, but if you follow it from one end to the other, there is still the same distance to go."
"Very insightful, but regardless, I'm still here and so are you." She pulled at her tea. "The problem is this, I think, some one has broken into my house and I'm too scared to go back inside. I've been living out here in the backyard, so to speak, and it's been so long since the break in, that I now have no idea what to expect."
Splinter sat, holding the warm tea, and contemplated her words. "You've been uncomfortable in your own mind since the rape. Horrified over the loss of your children. Guilty and angry at the indignities the humans have made you swallow. The choices you have made and hated yourself for blocked you into a path whose end results hardly justify the pain you have exposed your family to. Since you felt things going so badly you've pulled back further and further. Now you are at a loss as to how to go forward."
"I should have spoken to you from the beginning." Shima gave him a sad smile. "Are you familiar with Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass?" She swirled the dregs around in the bottom of her teacup. "I despised it. It gave me nightmares, not because of the Jabberwocky or the Queen of Hearts, or even the duchess with her baby that turned out to be a pig. Rather, I had night terrors about the Mock-turtle."
Splinter gestured for her to explain. "Alice meets this depressed creature on her journey through Wonderland that is neither turtle nor anything else. It's half turtle, with the head of a calf and it cries constantly. It also sings though, sings beautifully. If you paid no attention to it's words the whole scene is quite jolly: Alice, the gryphon, and the mock-turtle all dancing round in a circle, talking of tossing lobsters out to sea. But the words haunted me, 'Will you, won't you, will you, won't you join the dance…Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance…"
"In my dreams the words changed, 'Cannot, Could not, Will Not, Would not, Shall not, Should not join the dance…' That was the story with my sisters and I. I tried to protect us all from the humans, and now I wonder if I'd only done more damage by prolonging the inevitable."
"Inevitable, my child?"
"They'll kill us in the end. They're coming for us even as we speak."
Splinter's cup of tea needed refilling. "Thank you." Shima nodded. "Are you sure that these new humans mean you harm? After all, you and your sisters have survived many things to surrender to suicidal thoughts now."
Shima's silence answered him.
"Let me tell you of our friend April O'Neil…"