A Sense of Family

Disclaimer: I deny any monoply on the TMNT. Though I think a TMNT monoply game would be fun to play.

Chapter Two – Problems, problems.

Donatello:

I sat in my lab thinking of the family I had lost, Stacey my wife and our three children, two girls and a boy. They had been my pride and joy, they meant so much to me and I had loved them all dearly.

It hurt to think about them- yet not a day went by that they didn't cross my mind, in some small way. I often found myself thinking of them at night, or even when I was in the midst of some project during the day.

While I missed them, I now found I could think of them without it hurting as much as it had at one time, when their death and my grief had been so new and fresh.

At times though, even now, after months of being without them I would still find tears coming unbidden to my eyes. I could only hope that when the Elite had invaded our home that they had offered quick and painless death to those that I loved.

I reached up and wiped a stray tear from my cheek; laboring a heavy sigh.

For your benefit, I could recite all the stages of the grieving process, giving you the numerous reasons for the necessity of death and grief, yet even with all I knew, I couldn't change the past. I was also aware that wallowing in pain and sorrow wouldn't get me anywhere; I had to move on.

Neither could I hold Ramiela to blame for her actions towards our family, for I knew she had really been no more than a slave to Yukio Sekora. He'd used and abused her, marking her with patrician dominance, the numerous, pinkish scars lasting as reprimanding memories of her disobedience.

Yukio had taught her to obey his every command to the letter; failure to do so would mean she would suffer the consequences. Yet his sadistic treatment towards her had given Ramiela a very valuable lesson; the want, and means, to survive. Ramiela had a very strong survival sense- she acted quickly in dangerous, life threatening situations, and it was rare to catch her with her guard down. Though if you did manage to get her at that point, it would be wise to be ready to defend yourself as quickly as possible. I'd learned that the hard way.

In fact it was her will to survive that drove her to save us, and I had a feeling that she would never be able to commit seppuku, despite her previous attempts to do so. Somehow something held her back from taking that last little step off her cliff.

While she had often gone after Leo and Raph, she'd only gone after me twice in major attacks, and minor attacks were usually set off during sparring when she'd gotten carried away.

The first time she had gone after me, I had said something negative of Yukio; this when she was still new to us and not keen on derogatory remarks towards the man she called father. It was then we realized that we had to watch our tongues on certain subjects, namely Yukio.

The second time was about the time Heiwa had been born. I had lightly touched Rama on the shoulder as I came into the dojo for practice. She had me down and pinned in a fraction of a second, her sai out and the tip of the blade to my throat.

Mike managed to calm Rama down and to back off, but Leo had been less than impressed by her unwarranted attack, and was quick to chastise her. Coming to Rama's defense, I hastened to tell him that it had been my fault, and I knew I was fully to blame. I figured it had been my fault, as I had forgotten that only Mike was allowed to touch her. I had wrongly assumed that by then she had known me well enough to allow me that same privelidge.

I knew Rama was trying to accept us as her family, but her long years of Foot training made it incredibly difficult for her to see us as anything but enemies. Her rages and impromptu attacks during sparring had to be nipped in the bud, before her training could fully take over. Her many veiled, and blatant, threats and insults were also connected to her longstanding view of us as her opponents.

'Course all of that was then compounded by her other problems and difficulties, but I knew that unleashing my anger at her, as Raphael was habitual of doing, wouldn't help her feel at home or comfortable with us any quicker. Either way, Rama, with her sense of survival, didn't have a great deal of choice in the matter. Living in a safe haven, with former enemies, was a much more competent survival pick, than risking it alone as one of the Foot clan's top targets.

Glancing up at the lab clock, I realized Ramiela would be arriving soon. I had invited her over for lessons about ancient Foot poisons and remedies she had learned under Yukio's tutelage. I decided that meeting her at the door got rid of the more annoying interference that followed her about. Raph, temperamental as he is, often seemed to provoke spats, adding to Karena and the twins' uneasiness around her.

I left the lab and headed down the pipe, passing the kitchen and over to the front entrance to find out that either I was late or Rama had been early for our meeting. Whatever the case was, it was Aiden who answered the door.

Leo's son, Aiden, was very much like him in looks, but in attitude he was Leo's horror child, stubborn and impulsive. He didn't spend a great deal of time in his ninja studies, and Leo often had to give talks to the boy.

Aiden opened the door and glowered outward " No Foot allowed!" he declared sharply to our recovered family member, and tried to swing the door shut.

Rama, sidled out of the shadows, greeting me with a coldly respectful nod as she pushed a foot into the door and with a bit of weight pushed her way in. " Very cute Ryu. Back off." she hissed at him.

It amused me somewhat to know that she continually called Aiden by his childhood nickname. " Dragon", a name Aiden had more than earned, came about when he was in his terrible twos, just before Rama had disappeared.

Aiden crossed his arms over his plastron, reluctantly giving ground to his older cousin.

" Aiden, I invited her here. She is my guest," I informed him gently.

He shot me a strange look, as if to say it was my funeral and he didn't want to be a part of it. He gave an indifferent shrug and headed for the living room.

I smiled and gestured for Rama to come to the back with me. I noted her stiff posture, wary uneasy looks, and grim countenance, as we walked back to my lab. Yet she relaxed, if not minutely, once we were in the homey confines of my laboratory/workshop/bedroom.

Ramiela was familiar with where I kept my chemicals and other compounds for mixing up explosives or poisons, and she began to pull out an array of items to be used for our session. She had never expressed any interest in my inventions, or my workshop area with all the scrap metal, gizmos, gadgets and tools.

She began to work on a poison that she said wasn't very popular but the Foot found extremely useful in certain circumstances.

" This has to be ingested and that is why the Foot do not use it that often, however for a poison it is very effective because it has no scent or taste to betray it." She informed me, her brow was furrowed in concentration. She gave a light laugh, " At least I have heard it is tasteless, I have never tried it, as it is said one can not build immunity to it."

I knew what she meant the traditional way of building immunity was to take a tiny amount of it so that the body could fight off the poison, then later a bit larger dose, until your system could fight off the effects of the poison.

" Why is that Ramiela?" I wondered, " I know some poisons can't be used because a small dose alone is deadly, is that the case?"

" No, it affects the heart. You might live from a small dose but your heart grows weak, and sooner or later you'll die before you can build up the antibodies to fight it." she replied as she turned to look at me.

I was sitting on the chair by the computer "Is there an antidote for this poison?"

" Yes. It is a slow acting poison, and takes time to go through the stages before death, but the antidote must be made fresh and it is rather sickening stuff to stomach. It's one where the cure is worse than the disease." She sounded almost amused.

I leaned forward " Have you seen it used before?" I stated it, more than asked. I had my suspicions that she had seen it used at some time.

" At least twice" she answered quickly " Once on a Foot soldier who needed a lesson."

I silently gritted my teeth at the word lesson. With Yukio, the word lesson had a whole different meaning; one associated with torture, pain, and sometimes death- and over time Ramiela had picked up the strange code word from Yukio. Funny, as things were, I had yet to find out what Yukio called regular instructional lessons. Or if he used the word for both, so that his soldiers and underlings were constantly on guard, unknowing if a lesson was to be good or bad.

I took a deep breath and pushed these thoughts away. " What about the other person Rama?"

I had to wonder if I really wanted to know the answer to this question. A part of me didn't want to know, assuming it would be dark and twisted, a warped and rapturous evil that lingered like a cloying aftertaste in your mouth. Yet to understand and help Rama, I had to go into those dark areas for the memories that helped shape her into who she was now.

I knew Yukio had killed numerous people over the years, and had always been extremely careful to hide his involvement, of course, yet one could not deny how suspicious it was that those who got to close to Yukio or wished to inform on him died in accidents; disappeared entirely, and were never to be seen or heard from again.

With his ninja to care for such details, assassinations were easy to plan, execute, and fade away from human knowledge.

Ramiela had most likely done more then her share of such missions for him.

"An undercover cop, masquerading as a big businessman who was feeling the crunch of other business trying to take him over, sought father's protection." Rama began simply, " A sting operation that father learned of after becoming acquainted with the fellow- so in turn, father set a trap for him." she smirked, " Father invited him to a traditional Japanese dinner in Japan, knowing the cop could not afford to refuse without offending him." Rama gave a low, nasty chuckle. "I got to play the serving girl, or perhaps Geisha, for the evening supplying them with food, drink, and music- as they talked business. I was young, innocent in his eyes, so he did not suspect anything but indulgent smiles, musical laughter, and sweet nothings from me." Rama mused, darkly arching an eye ridge, "He died in his sleep supposedly of heart failure."

Her tone was icy and remorseless, as if she was as hard and unfeeling as Yukio himself. I didn't bother calling her on it. I figured Rama had been forced to suppress many of her emotions over the years, if only to comply with Yukio's many demands. Inside she might have been repulsed or disgusted at the very thought, and yet she could not say no. Instead it was easier to distance herself from her emotions, to the point where now it might be almost impossible for her to even know what it was she was feeling.

If Rama was as unfeeling as she sounded, we really had a problem. To gain back any semblance of her own life and break from her brainwashing, she would have to identify her emotions and accept that she was angry or enraged. Also, if she could not show empathy for others, she might remain cold, hard, and cruel, as Yukio had been.

This was a minor problem though, compared to the many other problems that Ramiela may have at the present moment, but I knew it was something else I had to add to my ever-growing mental list of things that had to be addressed where Ramiela was concerned- if she was ever to be healthy.

Psychiatric problems weren't my forte, but I knew it would be up to me (and to some extent to Rama herself) to get better. I had done all I could do, reading up and researching on such things, but while it increased my knowledge of what she might have, trying to figure out just how to help her was another thing entirely. I was totally out of my depth, but perhaps together, the two of us could figure out a way to restore a semblance of sanity to her.

My mental list included PTSD, or posttraumatic stress disorder, ASPD or anti-social personality disorder. Another suspect disorder was bipolar disorder.

All of those were highly possible; Ramiela had been through extreme abuse. Stress, pain, trauma are the causes of one or the others or all. I suggest Bipolar, as she seemed to switch from docile to all-out attack in an instance, and sometimes made me wonder if she did have more then one mind living inside of her.

Then there were the trust issues, anger issues, memory recall, deprogramming, and trying to find ways to get her to accept us as her friends and move on with her life.

She was also hyper vigilant and that could be a symptom of her PTSD, as those who had suffered traumatic events often became very aware of everything around them, every sound, smell whatever ready to trigger the fight or flight instinct.

However hyper vigilance was also a skill that ninja needed to use, it helped alert a ninja to sneak attacks or danger in the area.

Of course she was at a very extreme end of the scale whereas a ninja would use just enough to be alert without allowing the tense state of readiness to drive him over the edge, rather the ninja stayed relaxed and calm. Rama was in the odd situation where she felt she had to rely on her enemies for her very livelihood and of course, that probably didn't help matters in keeping calm or relaxed.

My problem was I didn't know enough about all of this to treat her properly. All I could do was merely hit or miss, so I didn't know if I would help her or make things worse. So it didn't help matters when Mike came to me telling me of what he saw or knew and hoping for some quick fix.

Mike saw more of Rama so it was natural for him to see these things, and he wanted her to settle down and be accepted by the family, feeling the quicker it was done the better. This was not a situation where I could say in so many months she'll be better. This was not a broken bone or concussion or anything that I was used to dealing with.

I felt more then inadequate of handling the task of turning Rama back to someone resembling normal, not that I think any of us are truly normal, but some form of normalcy would be beneficial.

So I offered advice or suggestions, tried different approaches. Some seemed to help, others didn't. It was a case of one step forward and so many backwards. Still, Mike couldn't deal with these problems on his own.

So it was up to me to befriend her, knowing that I had to gain her trust if I was going help her, and knowing it wouldn't be easy to do. Though at that time I had no idea that by befriending her I would be finding someone I could talk a certain amount of shop with.

I felt sympathetic for the life she had been forced to lead, and her story now brought to mind how much she must have suffered to get this far. I stood up and without thinking reached out my hand, to rest on her shoulder in a reassuring way. I did that simply because for me, it was natural for me to do so.

Instantly I felt her stiffen and she did a quick sliding two-step away from my hand, she turned to glare at me and I saw a sneer cross her face and her free hand clench and unclench at her side.

" Sorry." I apologized immediately. I was rather surprised she hadn't tossed me across the room.

She gave a hard swallow " S'okay…" she slurred the words slightly as she continued to eye me warily.

" Would you rather I didn't?" I asked softly.

Rama shrugged " I'm not really used to being touched that much," she confessed, " I know I let Mike but he's different."

" A lot of times when you were touched you were hurt weren't you?" I inquired kindly.

She didn't answer just gave a slow nod of her head as if to agree "Father, once in a while would rest his hand on my shoulder and give it a squeeze when I did a good job for him" she said quickly and defensively "He just didn't go into hugging or holding all that much." she explained.

"But it makes you uneasy now because you really don't know what to expect." I stated, casually offering a word for her feelings so hopefully she would associate that word with what she was feeling.

"Sort of." She admitted.

I nodded inside I was secretly elated that I had touched her and suffered no repercussions for it.

A part of me marveled at how she had possibly managed to survive in Yukio's world of torture and pain. She was a remarkable embodiment of how much one person could live through and survive.

If I could help her to not only survive, but also function- it would be worth all the hassles I was going through now. Besides, she deserved a life of happiness and freedom.

TBC