There were times when Kimiko didn't understand what her daddies were talking about. Their conversations tended to be full of words that never particularly seemed to make sense, or even seemed to be necessary - especially Daddy, the softer father who sometimes talked like he was just trying to fill the air with words rather than get to the point.
Unfortunately for her, this wasn't one of them.
"What do you mean, I can't?"
Daddy looked at her, in that quiet patient way of his, those gray eyes betraying little if anything. He never really seemed to get mad at her. (Kimiko sometimes wished he would just so she'd have a reason to do something other than wither under that wise look.)
"It is... a danger to your health," he said, in that reasonable way of his. Completely logical and completely infuriating.
"Well, I wanna go!" Kimiko crossed her little arms across her plastron in the way her uncle Raph apparently did. "I don't care if it's too cold!"
"Your father does... and I do. I would rather not need to... worry about you more than I... already do, Kimiko." Daddy looked up from the work he was doing (when wasn't he doing work?) and gave her a look somewhere between stern and pleading. "... We will... finish the thermal suit soon, and then... it will not be an issue for you."
Kimiko tried her best to pout with a beak. "Well, Sophie doesn't need to wear a thermal suit to go outside."
"Sophie is not an ectotherm," Daddy pointed out.
"I hate it when you use big words, daddy." Pouting still. Kimiko, like her Turtle father, wanted to be free. Even here in this world, so much different from her father's (he couldn't even go outside sometimes, he said), she was still trapped sometimes. Just because of what she was.
"... Please try to be... patient with us, Kimiko..." Daddy said, and there was a sadness in his eyes that hurt. "... S-Sometimes... sometimes people are different, and need... different things to help them..."
Kimiko trained her eyes on the floor, before flicking them back up to the window.
"What if I don't wanna be different?"
"... Then... I s-suppose I have... failed in instilling any sense of... self-confidence in you." Daddy said softly, and looked away.
Kimiko got the feeling that maybe she said something she shouldn't have... so she turned her attention back to the window.
Tou-san had eyes in the back of his head, and ears in the walls, and pretty much knew everything that she did ever.
"Kimiko."
And also had a way of sneaking up on people (which he promised she would be able to do herself one day, if she stopped giggling in ninja lessons and applied herself, which was a phrase she hated.)
"Mm?"
She was pretty sure she wasn't in trouble, partly because she hadn't done anything bad lately, and partly because she had to be pretty seriously bad before either of her fathers would really punish her.
"Kimiko, I heard what you said to Daddy."
Of course. Ears in the walls. No lie.
She carefully applied to herself her "I am not certain what you are speaking of" expression.
He sat on the bed and beckoned her to join him. She clambered up on his knee and leaned against his broad plastron.
He took a slow, thoughtful breath before beginning. "I know it's hard for you here. I'm sorry you had to come to a world where you're different. But... I don't want different to be bad."
She turned this over in her mind, and asked: "Tell me a story from your world?"
Don crawls into bed at 3 in the morning. That didn't used to be unusual for him, but he had mostly curtailed the habit since taking on the responsibilities of parenthood.
Robert's eyes flutter open. "Don...?"
Don nudges him out of the warm spot, taking it over for himself and pulling up the blankets. "Go back to sleep. You have three and a half hours."
This kind of cryptic comment from his partner is still frustrating to the scientist, but he's learned that unquestioning obedience almost always leads to a pleasant outcome. He rolls over and closes his eyes.
At 6:30 almost exactly he's woken by a shriek.
Kimiko had just found the completed thermal suit draped over her chair.
"Daddy, daddy, look! Look! Me and Tou-san made a snow-Turtle!"
Robert shakes his head, fond exasperation flickering over his features as he steps out the door. Just as he expected - there's Don, beak strewn with flakes of powdery snow as he puts the finishing touches on the faint "stripes" of food colouring-stained water near the coal eyes of the snow statue on their front lawn.
"Tou-san and I," he corrects Kimiko almost reflexively, before turning to Don.
"... I thought you were going to be in thirty-six minutes and seventeen seconds ago.
... Eighteen seconds ago."
Don gives him that disarming, dazzling smile of his, and gathers the dimunitive turtle, swaddled in bright yellow, closer with one arm. (Disapprovingly, Robert notes that said arm is bare.) "C'mon, Robert, we were just having fun. Lighten up a bit."
Robert, to his own credit, manages not to be entirely swayed by this. "Don. Both of your thermal suits are... in need of a recharge, and the temperature is dropping again... please come inside, Kimiko. I have mochi for you..."
Kimiko whines a little, as is usual for her, but Robert gently ushers her inside, pausing only to wipe some stray snow from her hood. (He'll need to wash the floor again, won't he?) However, it's Don who looks truly disappointed.
"Wasn't it you who said that you can't rush scientific perfection?"
"It is not a matter of rushing anything..." Robert replies, helping Kimiko out of the bulky suit despite her quiet protests that she's "a big girl" and can "do it herself". "It is simply a matter of your... safety. Sometimes both of you are prone to... less-than-coherent behaviour in the winter..."
Don sobers a little at this, but he still retains enough of that childlike glimmer to smile when Robert wipes the snow off his snout. (It doesn't melt there, like it would melt on Robert's own skin.)
"You worry too much, Robert."
"Someone has to worry about you two... you hardly do it enough yourselves, and your... brother has a hard enough time of it as it is..."
Don undoes the thick layers, taking them off in the specific order and meandering his way into the living room to fetch the matching, labelled adapters. As he does, Robert turns his attention to Kimiko again, bright-eyed and excited despite the weather. Maybe it's the fact she's younger, but Robert wonders where her seemingly-boundless energy comes from sometimes.
"You liked our snow-Turtle, right, daddy?" Her bright eyes search his face, the darker streaks through the sclera seeming to draw Robert's gaze toward her curiously-tilted beak.
Robert smiles, despite himself. "Of course. I... always enjoy your creative efforts..." There's a beat of silence, and he adds, "... Even if I sometimes... object to your methods."
Next time, he's going to go with them. And he'll bring a timer, for all the good that will do him.
"It's dangerous," Tou-san replied. "I don't want you to get hurt."
"I wish to go with you," Daddy said. "I know that I am a poor swimmer, but..."
"I'm sorry. I've almost gotten the dive helmet to work. You can come with us next time."
"I hate not being a Turtle..."
Kimiko knew the entire coversation was staged for her benefit, but she also understood the point her fathers were trying to make.
She wondered if, when her friends were playing in the snow, they were sad for her absence as much as she was sorry that Daddy couldn't go diving with her and Tou-san.
Okay, so all those years Tou-san was right about ninja training paying off.
Kimiko thinks she's home free. All she has to do is jimmy open her window and slide back into bed before --
"I don't remember your curfew being this late."
Shell. Uncles.
Kimiko's dazzling smile is of greatly reduced effectiveness in the dark, but she tries it anyway. "Night run. Training. Special exception to curfew rules."
Uncle Leo drops down from his perch on the roof. "That never worked for my brothers, and while I know people of your age have a hard time believing it, getting older does in fact make you wiser." A pause. "Back then I only knew they were gone, but now I'm so ancient I even know where you went."
Kimiko seizes Leo's hand. "Don't tell my fathers?"
A sigh. Leo could be strict, but he also consented to be a partner-in-crime surprisingly often. "I trust you Kimiko, and so do they. As long as you're responsible I won't say anything. But -"
Before he can give her the "but", she throws her arms around his neck. "Arigatou, oji-sama."
"Shh." He shuts her beak and opens the window. "To bed."
She goes, without another word.
Uncle Leo only covers for her when he secretly approves of what she's doing, and that makes her heart lift in even more ways than the reason for her sneaking out.
It had, in fact, happened before; apparently, before the attack on Region Two that had doomed Kimiko's colony to begin with, and which had resulted in her being transferred to Luceti.
As long as Kimiko could remember, she had heard about the drafts - the wars, waging outside of Luceti. Save for Tou-san's diligent training (of both herself, and her daddy), though, she rarely came into contact with the concept in practise.
But still, Kimiko had hopes, that it would never be her family - never her uncle, or her fathers, or anyone she truly cared about - and that hope was shattered.
She watches as her daddy holds his journal in shaking fingers, hitting the "play" button over and over with a repetitive touch. Her ears strain for something that might contradict the message that he has already played a dozen times, but all there is to listen to is the words of the Commander.
"... Robert Hastings..."
Tou-san's eyes are hollow. He's murmuring something lowly into Daddy's ear, and Kimiko is scared at how her daddy's gray eyes are so dull and lifeless, like the eyes of the snake she found once, trapped in the cold during a sudden natural temperature Shift. That was frightening, to see another being like her cold and still.
What's happening?
"Tou-san? Why are they calling Daddy?"
"He has to go to war." Tou-san's voice is flat. He isn't angry, he isn't sad, he isn't scared; he's nothing at all. "They picked him for the drafts."
It takes her awhile to wrap her mind around this, foreign as the concept sounds. She knows that Daddy doesn't fight as well as Tou-san, and he has told her stories about his home - a place called Terra - where wars never happened at all, and where even holding their play-pretend wood bokken would've gotten him in a lot of trouble, much less hitting someone with it.
And now he is going to fight.
"They can't send him!" she cries frantically, clinging fiercely to the human's shaking arm. Daddy doesn't even turn at first, but when he does his face is pale.
She looks him in the eyes, green boring into gray.
He looks away.
"I... I h-have to..." he whispers; Kimiko can't remember him ever sounding so defeated before.
The next two days are a blur of preparation. In-between sleepless nights and grim days, Kimiko watches as her fathers convene over strong coffee, listens in the doorways as Tou-san works Daddy through all those movements in the katas that Daddy was never as good at, and tries to block out the sound of Daddy crying quietly one moment when he thinks he's alone and she doesn't hear. But she's a ninja, and she's learning the quiet ways of listening that Tou-san and her uncle Leo have, and even if Daddy understands that better now he still doesn't get it past her.
The worry eats her up inside. She doesn't want to play - when Ms. Grune calls, she can only say "I'm sorry, but I don't want to play", and when Mr. Helios comes over with hugs and cookies and promises to watch over Tou-san and Kimiko, she can't watch when her daddy presses himself to the other man's chest and weeps into his shoulder brokenly.
Not enough time. There's never enough time.
A few hours before the draft is scheduled to begin, Kimiko shuffles to Tou-san and Daddy's room, and knocks on the door.
"Daddy? Tou-san...?" Her voice feels small today, and she keeps looking down at her pebbled fingers. "Can I come in...?"
It's Tou-san who opens the door, frown tempered somewhat by the soft look he always has for Kimiko. He nods and gestures her in, where Daddy is sitting on their bed, hands folded in his lap. He's thinking again... Kimiko has learned to recognize that look on his face when Daddy's mind is calculating, running fast like the computer Tou-san and he built for her.
"... Daddy," Kimiko begins, "will you... come home...?" She's heard the tales the other children tell; she's seen what happens when someone doesn't come back.
He stiffens, threads his fingers in his lab coat sleeves. His shoulders shake.
"... I... I d-do not know."
"Daddy - why did it have to be you? It isn't fair..."
"Life is... n-not fair, sometimes," Daddy says. The exhaustion in his voice sounds like cobwebs and mildew on an old book.
"I'll be good," Kimiko whispers, curling into the warmth of her daddy's thin chest. So thin, too thin; he sometimes feels like he will break, even now. "Please come back. Tou-san and I need you..."
"I will t-try," he says, and they don't say any more.
When Daddy has to go, he goes quietly and obediently, as he always has. He doesn't make a fuss. He just picks up his things, kisses Tou-san once, holds Kimiko for several moments too long, and then turns away.
Kimiko stands with Tou-san, leaning into his plastron, and starts to count the minutes just like Daddy does.
One... two... three...
Please come back.
Minutes have become hours, and hours have become days.
Tou-san doesn't sleep. Kimiko knows he doesn't sleep, because she can always smell the coffee even when it's on the other side of the house. She does her katas in the morning with him and Uncle Leo, but he's distracted; he makes mistakes. He doesn't smile.
Every evening he turns to the journals to read what people are saying. They listen for anything about a "Robert Hastings" - sometimes Tou-san sends notes to some of Daddy's friends on the draft, asking if he's okay.
Nothing yet. It's scary and hard and when Daddy gets a chance to speak his voice is always far-away, but he always tells Tou-san and Kimiko that he loves them, and that they shouldn't worry, he'll be okay -
They get the report on the fourth day.
"Don, Don, can you hear me? Oh my god, Don, please, if you're there -"
Kimiko answers the journal. It's Mr. Mulder, one of Daddy's friends; he sounds really scared and Kimiko's gut twists at the fear in his eyes.
"Kimiko, honey, is that you? Listen, please, you have to get your dad - this is really important, okay? Just... just get him. Now." There's an explosion in the background. "Now! Please!"
Kimiko runs faster than she can even remember running and pushes the journal into Tou-san's hands. He doesn't even look up, just turns the journal on and starts to listen.
"Don, they've - they've started blowing the place apart, and one of the Third Party members trapped Robert and I - I don't remember what happened but there was an explosion; shrapnel went everywhere, and when I woke up he was bleeding -"
Kimiko doesn't need to hear any more. She runs, fleeing from her own pain... but there's nowhere to go.
She curls up on her bed as best as a Turtle can, and cries herself to sleep.
You said you'd come home. Why didn't you come home?
Kimiko and Tou-san count the days together. Five, six, seven...
Finally, Mr. Helios arrives at the house, with an exhausted Daddy leaning against him, looking pale and frightened. When Tou-san looks into his eyes, Daddy cries.
"I... I c-cannot distinguish..." he manages to murmur, before Tou-san gently silences him, gathers him into his arms, and carries him into his room.
Kimiko is left alone to think...
Daddy is home. But he isn't in one piece.
When will everything be alright again? she finds herself wondering, and realizes that she doesn't really know the answer. Maybe it never will.
The screams of a small child echo through the house, and Don presses his face further into Robert's shoulder.
"Robert, what are we doing?"
"As I recall," Robert says, not in a should-have-been-more-careful-what-you-said way, but in a soothing tone, reminding Don of what's important to him, "your words were: If a girl Turtle should come into being in Luceti, she is ours."
"Why did I say that?" Don groans.
This is concerning. "Presumably because you... felt strongly about it..."
"I would say I feel strongly," Don replies. "I saw my childhood home get eaten by an army of robots, watched my brother come within an inch of being vivisected, and had my mind probed by aliens, but I've never been so scared in my life."
It isn't often that the ninja is more terrified of something than the scientist, and Robert doesn't know quite how to respond.
He holds his partner close, and tells him everything will be fine.
She has known this since she first came to Luceti, in some ways, but it really only becomes obvious when her parents begin to struggle to explain her own body to her.
As Daddy tells her, Tou-san and he never got any real opportunities to understand what Turtle bodies were like. Tou-san's only references are himself and his brothers; Daddy never even met a Turtle like Tou-san until Luceti.
When Kimiko asked where babies came from, Tou-san and Daddy had to tell her three different stories - one about humans (and Daddy kept using complicated terms, like "cisgendered", which he had to explain every time - at least he was patient about it), one about the animal turtles, the kind that weren't special like her and Tou-san - and a halting, unsure explanation about how Turtles probably couldn't have babies at all.
"We're... sterile," Tou-san had said, looking uncomfortable. "At least, I am. That means we, uh... can't have babies anymore."
"But what about me?" Kimiko asked. It was a question that made her normally-smart fathers seem at a loss.
"... Your world... is probably a very different one from his," Daddy explained, in his usual way. "It is possible that... Turtles are capable of standard reproduction there..."
There were other things too. Puberty - Kimiko soon learned that what the other little cisgendered girls in Luceti learned was very different from what she had to learn. Tou-san seemed especially nervous about this topic, and usually got Daddy to talk to her about it instead.
It was kind of funny. Daddy, despite not being a Turtle at all, usually seemed to know what to say. He would sit and talk to her and try his best to explain about her body, even when he admitted he didn't really know all the details.
"You are... very new to us, Kimiko," Daddy said one day, after they'd finished looking through the pictures in a book about pet turtles. (Kimiko wasn't sure to think about that. She knew that Tou-san and his brothers had been small turtles just like this once, when they were hatchlings, but it was strange to consider, so she didn't usually.) "Your body is... one of the first of its kind, to our knowledge, and... sometimes we are uncertain how to approach it.
But that is not... a problematic thing. We only want you to feel... as though you can understand yourself. As though your body is not... a shameful, or frightening thing."
Daddy's voice turned serious, in that way it often did when he was explaining something big and important. "Kimiko... I cannot always speak for you, but I know that... many people, when they do not understand something, they... become afraid. And fear prompts one to... feel all sorts of things about one's self that are... not true. Education is the... only way to combat these things."
He offered his soft, pale, human hand to Kimiko, and she took it with her own.
"... Just know that... you are beautiful. You are my daughter, and your Tou-san's daughter, and we would not wish for you to be... anything else."
Sometimes Kimiko needed to talk to Tou-san, though, because her body did things she didn't know how to talk to Daddy about.
One day, after not bathing in awhile and playing with Sophie outside in the rain, she finds a lesion with white mold on the rim of her carapace, and it scares her; it makes her shell all soft and it hurts when she touches it.
Her first instinct is to go to Tou-san, eyes full of anxiety as she tugs at his arm. When she shows him the spot, he frowns, pushes away the remote control he was tinkering with, and takes her to their bathroom with a scrub brush and antibiotic ointment.
"Shell rot," he explains, as he slowly cleans the offending fungus off of Kimiko's striped shell. "My brothers and I used to get it all the time back at the Lair. It's dark and there's a lot of mold down there... when you're dirty, and you don't get your basking time, it's easier for this to happen." Tou-san looks up then, giving Kimiko a slight smile. "So you're gonna have to bathe more, missy."
For the next week, Kimiko bathes diligently, and after some careful debriding, the shell grows back just like new. Tou-san is a good doctor.
Tou-san is also a good listener. Kimiko goes to him after school one day, angry and embarrassed.
"Tou-san, the teacher doesn't know anything about Turtles! When we had a class today, she was talking about the differences about girls and boys, but she only talked about human girls and boys and then only the cisgendered ones!" The fancy word, with the meaning that Daddy taught her since she was very young, makes her feel grown-up to say, and she crosses her arms defiantly across her plastron again as she rants to Tou-san, who has now taken on an expression comprised of an interesting blend of thoughtfulness and slight amusement.
"The girls in that class don't know anything about me. Some of them think I'm weird because my body doesn't have the same parts, and one asked me if I was going to have a flat chest forever." She sticks out her tongue irritably, like the memory itself tastes bad. "And they laughed at me and said it was gross to talk about, and the teacher didn't know what to say."
Her expression softens, and saddens, and suddenly she wants to bring her hands together and stare at the stripes.
"Humans can be really dumb sometimes, Tou-san."
Tou-san gives her a kind of uncertain smile. "Kimiko, remember - your daddy is a human, and he doesn't do that. But that's what makes him special." That smile brightens internally, and Tou-san seems to look inside himself for a moment before turning back to her.
"Not all humans are like this. Just give them time, okay? They'll usually come around, and the ones who won't aren't really your friends anyway.
I had human friends back home, and sometimes they didn't understand me either. April didn't know what to do with us sometimes, and I never told Casey what it was like to have shell rot. He wouldn't have understood either - not like he understood much in the first place, sometimes." A fond smile, as a memory of a life long-past flits over Don's features.
"They're not always going to understand. But they still care about you. That's what a friend's for. You have Sophie, right? Sophie doesn't care what you look like."
"Just like Daddy didn't care about how you looked, right, Tou-san?"
He laughs, and his brown eyes are bright. "Yes, Kimiko. Exactly like that."
Sometimes it's hard to be different.
But even when it's hard, Kimiko knows that her fathers will always love her. After all, they're all different, too. And differences might set people apart, but they also make them special.
As Tou-san's own father might have said, jūnin toiro.
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What felt less good was being seized by the rim of her shell and hauled off him.
"What are you doing?"
She immediately turned, attached herself to her turtle-father's leg, and activated the tears.
"He says you and Daddy are freaks!"
Sigh. "So you beat him up?"
Nod.
"Ninjutsu is not for beating people up, Kimiko. Apologize."
"But Tou-san!"
"Sonna koto wa shinaide hoshii. Apologize."
In the most insolent tone that wouldn't get her smacked: "I'm sorry I beat you up."
the most terrible writing
Unfortunately for her, this wasn't one of them.
"What do you mean, I can't?"
Daddy looked at her, in that quiet patient way of his, those gray eyes betraying little if anything. He never really seemed to get mad at her. (Kimiko sometimes wished he would just so she'd have a reason to do something other than wither under that wise look.)
"It is... a danger to your health," he said, in that reasonable way of his. Completely logical and completely infuriating.
"Well, I wanna go!" Kimiko crossed her little arms across her plastron in the way her uncle Raph apparently did. "I don't care if it's too cold!"
"Your father does... and I do. I would rather not need to... worry about you more than I... already do, Kimiko." Daddy looked up from the work he was doing (when wasn't he doing work?) and gave her a look somewhere between stern and pleading. "... We will... finish the thermal suit soon, and then... it will not be an issue for you."
Kimiko tried her best to pout with a beak. "Well, Sophie doesn't need to wear a thermal suit to go outside."
"Sophie is not an ectotherm," Daddy pointed out.
"I hate it when you use big words, daddy." Pouting still. Kimiko, like her Turtle father, wanted to be free. Even here in this world, so much different from her father's (he couldn't even go outside sometimes, he said), she was still trapped sometimes. Just because of what she was.
"... Please try to be... patient with us, Kimiko..." Daddy said, and there was a sadness in his eyes that hurt. "... S-Sometimes... sometimes people are different, and need... different things to help them..."
Kimiko trained her eyes on the floor, before flicking them back up to the window.
"What if I don't wanna be different?"
"... Then... I s-suppose I have... failed in instilling any sense of... self-confidence in you." Daddy said softly, and looked away.
Kimiko got the feeling that maybe she said something she shouldn't have... so she turned her attention back to the window.
Someday...
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"Kimiko."
And also had a way of sneaking up on people (which he promised she would be able to do herself one day, if she stopped giggling in ninja lessons and applied herself, which was a phrase she hated.)
"Mm?"
She was pretty sure she wasn't in trouble, partly because she hadn't done anything bad lately, and partly because she had to be pretty seriously bad before either of her fathers would really punish her.
"Kimiko, I heard what you said to Daddy."
Of course. Ears in the walls. No lie.
She carefully applied to herself her "I am not certain what you are speaking of" expression.
He sat on the bed and beckoned her to join him. She clambered up on his knee and leaned against his broad plastron.
He took a slow, thoughtful breath before beginning. "I know it's hard for you here. I'm sorry you had to come to a world where you're different. But... I don't want different to be bad."
She turned this over in her mind, and asked: "Tell me a story from your world?"
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Robert's eyes flutter open. "Don...?"
Don nudges him out of the warm spot, taking it over for himself and pulling up the blankets. "Go back to sleep. You have three and a half hours."
This kind of cryptic comment from his partner is still frustrating to the scientist, but he's learned that unquestioning obedience almost always leads to a pleasant outcome. He rolls over and closes his eyes.
At 6:30 almost exactly he's woken by a shriek.
Kimiko had just found the completed thermal suit draped over her chair.
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Robert shakes his head, fond exasperation flickering over his features as he steps out the door. Just as he expected - there's Don, beak strewn with flakes of powdery snow as he puts the finishing touches on the faint "stripes" of food colouring-stained water near the coal eyes of the snow statue on their front lawn.
"Tou-san and I," he corrects Kimiko almost reflexively, before turning to Don.
"... I thought you were going to be in thirty-six minutes and seventeen seconds ago.
... Eighteen seconds ago."
Don gives him that disarming, dazzling smile of his, and gathers the dimunitive turtle, swaddled in bright yellow, closer with one arm. (Disapprovingly, Robert notes that said arm is bare.) "C'mon, Robert, we were just having fun. Lighten up a bit."
Robert, to his own credit, manages not to be entirely swayed by this. "Don. Both of your thermal suits are... in need of a recharge, and the temperature is dropping again... please come inside, Kimiko. I have mochi for you..."
Kimiko whines a little, as is usual for her, but Robert gently ushers her inside, pausing only to wipe some stray snow from her hood. (He'll need to wash the floor again, won't he?) However, it's Don who looks truly disappointed.
"Wasn't it you who said that you can't rush scientific perfection?"
"It is not a matter of rushing anything..." Robert replies, helping Kimiko out of the bulky suit despite her quiet protests that she's "a big girl" and can "do it herself". "It is simply a matter of your... safety. Sometimes both of you are prone to... less-than-coherent behaviour in the winter..."
Don sobers a little at this, but he still retains enough of that childlike glimmer to smile when Robert wipes the snow off his snout. (It doesn't melt there, like it would melt on Robert's own skin.)
"You worry too much, Robert."
"Someone has to worry about you two... you hardly do it enough yourselves, and your... brother has a hard enough time of it as it is..."
Don undoes the thick layers, taking them off in the specific order and meandering his way into the living room to fetch the matching, labelled adapters. As he does, Robert turns his attention to Kimiko again, bright-eyed and excited despite the weather. Maybe it's the fact she's younger, but Robert wonders where her seemingly-boundless energy comes from sometimes.
"You liked our snow-Turtle, right, daddy?" Her bright eyes search his face, the darker streaks through the sclera seeming to draw Robert's gaze toward her curiously-tilted beak.
Robert smiles, despite himself. "Of course. I... always enjoy your creative efforts..." There's a beat of silence, and he adds, "... Even if I sometimes... object to your methods."
Next time, he's going to go with them. And he'll bring a timer, for all the good that will do him.
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Kimiko paused and listened.
"It's dangerous," Tou-san replied. "I don't want you to get hurt."
"I wish to go with you," Daddy said. "I know that I am a poor swimmer, but..."
"I'm sorry. I've almost gotten the dive helmet to work. You can come with us next time."
"I hate not being a Turtle..."
Kimiko knew the entire coversation was staged for her benefit, but she also understood the point her fathers were trying to make.
She wondered if, when her friends were playing in the snow, they were sad for her absence as much as she was sorry that Daddy couldn't go diving with her and Tou-san.
no subject
Kimiko thinks she's home free. All she has to do is jimmy open her window and slide back into bed before --
"I don't remember your curfew being this late."
Shell. Uncles.
Kimiko's dazzling smile is of greatly reduced effectiveness in the dark, but she tries it anyway. "Night run. Training. Special exception to curfew rules."
Uncle Leo drops down from his perch on the roof. "That never worked for my brothers, and while I know people of your age have a hard time believing it, getting older does in fact make you wiser." A pause. "Back then I only knew they were gone, but now I'm so ancient I even know where you went."
Kimiko seizes Leo's hand. "Don't tell my fathers?"
A sigh. Leo could be strict, but he also consented to be a partner-in-crime surprisingly often. "I trust you Kimiko, and so do they. As long as you're responsible I won't say anything. But -"
Before he can give her the "but", she throws her arms around his neck. "Arigatou, oji-sama."
"Shh." He shuts her beak and opens the window. "To bed."
She goes, without another word.
Uncle Leo only covers for her when he secretly approves of what she's doing, and that makes her heart lift in even more ways than the reason for her sneaking out.
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It had, in fact, happened before; apparently, before the attack on Region Two that had doomed Kimiko's colony to begin with, and which had resulted in her being transferred to Luceti.
As long as Kimiko could remember, she had heard about the drafts - the wars, waging outside of Luceti. Save for Tou-san's diligent training (of both herself, and her daddy), though, she rarely came into contact with the concept in practise.
But still, Kimiko had hopes, that it would never be her family - never her uncle, or her fathers, or anyone she truly cared about - and that hope was shattered.
She watches as her daddy holds his journal in shaking fingers, hitting the "play" button over and over with a repetitive touch. Her ears strain for something that might contradict the message that he has already played a dozen times, but all there is to listen to is the words of the Commander.
"... Robert Hastings..."
Tou-san's eyes are hollow. He's murmuring something lowly into Daddy's ear, and Kimiko is scared at how her daddy's gray eyes are so dull and lifeless, like the eyes of the snake she found once, trapped in the cold during a sudden natural temperature Shift. That was frightening, to see another being like her cold and still.
What's happening?
"Tou-san? Why are they calling Daddy?"
"He has to go to war." Tou-san's voice is flat. He isn't angry, he isn't sad, he isn't scared; he's nothing at all. "They picked him for the drafts."
It takes her awhile to wrap her mind around this, foreign as the concept sounds. She knows that Daddy doesn't fight as well as Tou-san, and he has told her stories about his home - a place called Terra - where wars never happened at all, and where even holding their play-pretend wood bokken would've gotten him in a lot of trouble, much less hitting someone with it.
And now he is going to fight.
"They can't send him!" she cries frantically, clinging fiercely to the human's shaking arm. Daddy doesn't even turn at first, but when he does his face is pale.
She looks him in the eyes, green boring into gray.
He looks away.
"I... I h-have to..." he whispers; Kimiko can't remember him ever sounding so defeated before.
The next two days are a blur of preparation. In-between sleepless nights and grim days, Kimiko watches as her fathers convene over strong coffee, listens in the doorways as Tou-san works Daddy through all those movements in the katas that Daddy was never as good at, and tries to block out the sound of Daddy crying quietly one moment when he thinks he's alone and she doesn't hear. But she's a ninja, and she's learning the quiet ways of listening that Tou-san and her uncle Leo have, and even if Daddy understands that better now he still doesn't get it past her.
The worry eats her up inside. She doesn't want to play - when Ms. Grune calls, she can only say "I'm sorry, but I don't want to play", and when Mr. Helios comes over with hugs and cookies and promises to watch over Tou-san and Kimiko, she can't watch when her daddy presses himself to the other man's chest and weeps into his shoulder brokenly.
Not enough time. There's never enough time.
A few hours before the draft is scheduled to begin, Kimiko shuffles to Tou-san and Daddy's room, and knocks on the door.
"Daddy? Tou-san...?" Her voice feels small today, and she keeps looking down at her pebbled fingers. "Can I come in...?"
It's Tou-san who opens the door, frown tempered somewhat by the soft look he always has for Kimiko. He nods and gestures her in, where Daddy is sitting on their bed, hands folded in his lap. He's thinking again... Kimiko has learned to recognize that look on his face when Daddy's mind is calculating, running fast like the computer Tou-san and he built for her.
"... Daddy," Kimiko begins, "will you... come home...?" She's heard the tales the other children tell; she's seen what happens when someone doesn't come back.
He stiffens, threads his fingers in his lab coat sleeves. His shoulders shake.
"... I... I d-do not know."
"Daddy - why did it have to be you? It isn't fair..."
"Life is... n-not fair, sometimes," Daddy says. The exhaustion in his voice sounds like cobwebs and mildew on an old book.
"I'll be good," Kimiko whispers, curling into the warmth of her daddy's thin chest. So thin, too thin; he sometimes feels like he will break, even now. "Please come back. Tou-san and I need you..."
"I will t-try," he says, and they don't say any more.
When Daddy has to go, he goes quietly and obediently, as he always has. He doesn't make a fuss. He just picks up his things, kisses Tou-san once, holds Kimiko for several moments too long, and then turns away.
Kimiko stands with Tou-san, leaning into his plastron, and starts to count the minutes just like Daddy does.
One... two... three...
Please come back.
Minutes have become hours, and hours have become days.
Tou-san doesn't sleep. Kimiko knows he doesn't sleep, because she can always smell the coffee even when it's on the other side of the house. She does her katas in the morning with him and Uncle Leo, but he's distracted; he makes mistakes. He doesn't smile.
Every evening he turns to the journals to read what people are saying. They listen for anything about a "Robert Hastings" - sometimes Tou-san sends notes to some of Daddy's friends on the draft, asking if he's okay.
Nothing yet. It's scary and hard and when Daddy gets a chance to speak his voice is always far-away, but he always tells Tou-san and Kimiko that he loves them, and that they shouldn't worry, he'll be okay -
They get the report on the fourth day.
"Don, Don, can you hear me? Oh my god, Don, please, if you're there -"
Kimiko answers the journal. It's Mr. Mulder, one of Daddy's friends; he sounds really scared and Kimiko's gut twists at the fear in his eyes.
"Kimiko, honey, is that you? Listen, please, you have to get your dad - this is really important, okay? Just... just get him. Now." There's an explosion in the background. "Now! Please!"
Kimiko runs faster than she can even remember running and pushes the journal into Tou-san's hands. He doesn't even look up, just turns the journal on and starts to listen.
"Don, they've - they've started blowing the place apart, and one of the Third Party members trapped Robert and I - I don't remember what happened but there was an explosion; shrapnel went everywhere, and when I woke up he was bleeding -"
Kimiko doesn't need to hear any more. She runs, fleeing from her own pain... but there's nowhere to go.
She curls up on her bed as best as a Turtle can, and cries herself to sleep.
You said you'd come home.
Why didn't you come home?
Kimiko and Tou-san count the days together. Five, six, seven...
Finally, Mr. Helios arrives at the house, with an exhausted Daddy leaning against him, looking pale and frightened. When Tou-san looks into his eyes, Daddy cries.
"I... I c-cannot distinguish..." he manages to murmur, before Tou-san gently silences him, gathers him into his arms, and carries him into his room.
Kimiko is left alone to think...
Daddy is home. But he isn't in one piece.
When will everything be alright again? she finds herself wondering, and realizes that she doesn't really know the answer. Maybe it never will.
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"Robert, what are we doing?"
"As I recall," Robert says, not in a should-have-been-more-careful-what-you-said way, but in a soothing tone, reminding Don of what's important to him, "your words were: If a girl Turtle should come into being in Luceti, she is ours."
"Why did I say that?" Don groans.
This is concerning. "Presumably because you... felt strongly about it..."
"I would say I feel strongly," Don replies. "I saw my childhood home get eaten by an army of robots, watched my brother come within an inch of being vivisected, and had my mind probed by aliens, but I've never been so scared in my life."
It isn't often that the ninja is more terrified of something than the scientist, and Robert doesn't know quite how to respond.
He holds his partner close, and tells him everything will be fine.
In time, he's right.
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She has known this since she first came to Luceti, in some ways, but it really only becomes obvious when her parents begin to struggle to explain her own body to her.
As Daddy tells her, Tou-san and he never got any real opportunities to understand what Turtle bodies were like. Tou-san's only references are himself and his brothers; Daddy never even met a Turtle like Tou-san until Luceti.
When Kimiko asked where babies came from, Tou-san and Daddy had to tell her three different stories - one about humans (and Daddy kept using complicated terms, like "cisgendered", which he had to explain every time - at least he was patient about it), one about the animal turtles, the kind that weren't special like her and Tou-san - and a halting, unsure explanation about how Turtles probably couldn't have babies at all.
"We're... sterile," Tou-san had said, looking uncomfortable. "At least, I am. That means we, uh... can't have babies anymore."
"But what about me?" Kimiko asked. It was a question that made her normally-smart fathers seem at a loss.
"... Your world... is probably a very different one from his," Daddy explained, in his usual way. "It is possible that... Turtles are capable of standard reproduction there..."
There were other things too. Puberty - Kimiko soon learned that what the other little cisgendered girls in Luceti learned was very different from what she had to learn. Tou-san seemed especially nervous about this topic, and usually got Daddy to talk to her about it instead.
It was kind of funny. Daddy, despite not being a Turtle at all, usually seemed to know what to say. He would sit and talk to her and try his best to explain about her body, even when he admitted he didn't really know all the details.
"You are... very new to us, Kimiko," Daddy said one day, after they'd finished looking through the pictures in a book about pet turtles. (Kimiko wasn't sure to think about that. She knew that Tou-san and his brothers had been small turtles just like this once, when they were hatchlings, but it was strange to consider, so she didn't usually.) "Your body is... one of the first of its kind, to our knowledge, and... sometimes we are uncertain how to approach it.
But that is not... a problematic thing. We only want you to feel... as though you can understand yourself. As though your body is not... a shameful, or frightening thing."
Daddy's voice turned serious, in that way it often did when he was explaining something big and important. "Kimiko... I cannot always speak for you, but I know that... many people, when they do not understand something, they... become afraid. And fear prompts one to... feel all sorts of things about one's self that are... not true. Education is the... only way to combat these things."
He offered his soft, pale, human hand to Kimiko, and she took it with her own.
"... Just know that... you are beautiful. You are my daughter, and your Tou-san's daughter, and we would not wish for you to be... anything else."
Sometimes Kimiko needed to talk to Tou-san, though, because her body did things she didn't know how to talk to Daddy about.
One day, after not bathing in awhile and playing with Sophie outside in the rain, she finds a lesion with white mold on the rim of her carapace, and it scares her; it makes her shell all soft and it hurts when she touches it.
Her first instinct is to go to Tou-san, eyes full of anxiety as she tugs at his arm. When she shows him the spot, he frowns, pushes away the remote control he was tinkering with, and takes her to their bathroom with a scrub brush and antibiotic ointment.
"Shell rot," he explains, as he slowly cleans the offending fungus off of Kimiko's striped shell. "My brothers and I used to get it all the time back at the Lair. It's dark and there's a lot of mold down there... when you're dirty, and you don't get your basking time, it's easier for this to happen." Tou-san looks up then, giving Kimiko a slight smile. "So you're gonna have to bathe more, missy."
For the next week, Kimiko bathes diligently, and after some careful debriding, the shell grows back just like new. Tou-san is a good doctor.
Tou-san is also a good listener. Kimiko goes to him after school one day, angry and embarrassed.
"Tou-san, the teacher doesn't know anything about Turtles! When we had a class today, she was talking about the differences about girls and boys, but she only talked about human girls and boys and then only the cisgendered ones!" The fancy word, with the meaning that Daddy taught her since she was very young, makes her feel grown-up to say, and she crosses her arms defiantly across her plastron again as she rants to Tou-san, who has now taken on an expression comprised of an interesting blend of thoughtfulness and slight amusement.
"The girls in that class don't know anything about me. Some of them think I'm weird because my body doesn't have the same parts, and one asked me if I was going to have a flat chest forever." She sticks out her tongue irritably, like the memory itself tastes bad. "And they laughed at me and said it was gross to talk about, and the teacher didn't know what to say."
Her expression softens, and saddens, and suddenly she wants to bring her hands together and stare at the stripes.
"Humans can be really dumb sometimes, Tou-san."
Tou-san gives her a kind of uncertain smile. "Kimiko, remember - your daddy is a human, and he doesn't do that. But that's what makes him special." That smile brightens internally, and Tou-san seems to look inside himself for a moment before turning back to her.
"Not all humans are like this. Just give them time, okay? They'll usually come around, and the ones who won't aren't really your friends anyway.
I had human friends back home, and sometimes they didn't understand me either. April didn't know what to do with us sometimes, and I never told Casey what it was like to have shell rot. He wouldn't have understood either - not like he understood much in the first place, sometimes." A fond smile, as a memory of a life long-past flits over Don's features.
"They're not always going to understand. But they still care about you. That's what a friend's for. You have Sophie, right? Sophie doesn't care what you look like."
"Just like Daddy didn't care about how you looked, right, Tou-san?"
He laughs, and his brown eyes are bright. "Yes, Kimiko. Exactly like that."
Sometimes it's hard to be different.
But even when it's hard, Kimiko knows that her fathers will always love her. After all, they're all different, too. And differences might set people apart, but they also make them special.
As Tou-san's own father might have said, jūnin toiro.