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a tale of what could happen if the wrong person got retromutated.

Second Person

1.

When the burning stops and your bones stop breaking, you open your eyes. Slowly, at first, and then all at once – they hurt, as though they've both been pulled apart and then remade.

You don't know it yet, new as you are, but you were pulled apart and remade, and then pulled apart and remade all over again. You're a miracle, made of bone and flesh and mutagen twice over.

There are five people watching you. You don't recognise any of them.

2.

They call you Donnie.

One of them calls you my son.

Neither means a thing to you. Why should they? You're a turtle, and turtles do not have names meant for human voices. When you look up, monsters look down at you, and you know, though you can't remember how, that monsters are not kind, and are not safe. You're supposed to hide. Isn't that why you have the shell on your back? Why your stomach is so close to the floor?

You try to pull your head back into your shell when they come closer, still saying Donnie, and other words like are you okay as though you know what that means. You hiss at them, and–

And that–

That is not your voice.

These are the things you know: you were small, you were quiet, and you are afraid.

Your forelegs have lost their claws, and look, look at how wrong they are, how long and misshapen. You can't fight with those. Instead, you have claws in your mouth, blunt and strong; you have claws in your throat, and can make new sounds: loud sounds, and angry sounds.

They back away from you. More words come: Donnie, Donnie what's wrong?

Good question. The answer is in your too-long legs, and the arms that push you away from the floor, too far from the ground. You growl, deep in your new throat, and they back away. The human makes sounds this time, but you choose not to listen.

3.

These are your brothers, Donatello, though you don't remember them.

This is your father, tall and grieving.

And then there's the girl.

4.

Three weeks ago, you were one of the most brilliant minds on the planet. You fought off an invasion with spit and a city's trash and your brothers around you.

You were Donatello: hacker, engineer, physicist, chemist.

Three weeks ago, people should have feared you.

Now, you piss yourself when you walk, you can't even speak, and the others look at you and talk about you like you're a broken thing. They're expecting a miracle from you.

You never believed in miracles then, Donatello. Why should you believe in them now? You don't even know who it is they want from you, when this is who this you has always been, not a name you don't remember.

There are rooms in this place – the big room, the room with the warm water, the room with the food. You like that room the best. Hot air rattles through a vent, and nobody else has claimed it, so it is yours. The others even look happy when you go in there, so you mark it as your own.

"Aw, jeez, Donnie, no, not here," one says, when he catches you, squat and huddled in an empty corner. He hoists you to your back legs and tries to walk you out, snapping something to somebody else.

Bite him, Donatello. You have no claws, but now you have teeth. You should test them.

5.

You bite, you snarl, you hiss, but they still come to you. You know them by name, now: the strong one is Raph, the loud one is shut-up-Mikey, the quiet one who never looks at you is Leo.

You learn words: sensei, and here, and no.

You are told no a lot.

No is when you try to walk on your feet; no is when you try to eat with your mouth and not your hands; no is when you stare at the strange pieces of wood and metal they give you instead and knock them away. No is for when you try to be something that you are, rather than something that you're not.

The strong one – Raph – says no the most, tired and exhausted sometimes, angry and frustrated at others. If you had the words yet, you would ask him why he keeps trying, shoving things at you with barely-concealed hope in his face that crashes to the ground when you poke at the thing and then reject it (dammit, Donnie, no, c'mon, work with me here). Sometimes, you're sure he asks himself the same thing, and then at others, when he gently hooks his hands under your front legs and eases you to standing, when he waits for the dizziness to leave before he guides you across this lair (you can walk now, Donatello, and isn't that something?), you know that he doesn't have that option.

You're a burden, though nobody will consider telling you that yet.

The quiet one says no the least, and almost never to you. No, Raph, he says, across the room in a hushed voice. He thinks that you can't hear him, and that you don't understand.

He's half-right.

We can't. We have to wait.

No we don't, Raph says. We go in there, get whatever it is we need to fix Donnie, we come home.

And do you magically happen to know what we need? Because the only one of us who'd have any clue is sitting over there watching Sesame Street, and he can't even talk.

So we bust some stupid Kraang faces in until they tell us what we need. Look at him, Leo. You're telling me that's Donnie for the rest of his life?

You've learned that you are observant, never more so than when you're around your own kind. Leo is often quiet, often measured when he speaks. He has a habit of pressing his mouth into a tight line before he says something he dislikes. I think Donnie is gone, he says.

Screw you, Raph snarls. Donnie's not gone. He's right here. He just needs a little more time.

"Hey D," the loud one says, flopping next to you in a rush of sound and air. "Wanna watch cartoons?" he asks, slinging a warm arm around your shoulders.

"No," you say, the words thick on your tongue. "Shut up, Mikey."

6.

Things get easier. You remember the new things you learned. You can't stop learning. You learn to walk on two legs, without Raph. You gain control over these strange new feet with long toes and no claws. You learn to read, and the TV teaches you hundreds and thousands of new words, and the computer teaches you more. You learn to click your tongue like the newsreader does, and that it's a feature almost unique to African languages – do the others know that?

The others leave most nights.

You should be with them, you think – and then stop. Is that right? Should you be with them? Were you ever? They come back hours later, flush from the night, flush from a fight – you can smell adrenaline and sweat on them, and sometimes blood. They laugh and talk and falter when they see you.

They are a three, and when you sit poking at the little computer that they told you was yours, telling you how you built it with your own two hands, you wonder if they were ever a four.

They are allowed to the surface, where there is air and sunlight. You want that too. So, you wake up one morning, while the others train in the dojo, and you quietly slip through the tunnels.

You're not stupid. You know, though there are two humans that visit, that you are not normal. You're a mutant; you can't be seen. You don't want to be seen. You slip into an alley, and wonder why shadows seem so familiar, but push it aside so that you can climb higher. There's light up there, you tell yourself. The sun is waiting for you.

Up above the city, the air isn't tinged with damp, doesn't smell of dust and old sweat. It doesn't coat the back of your throat and your tongue, and the noises of the city aren't muffled through yards of concrete and tunnelling. There's heat on your shoulders, wind in the well between shoulders and shell, and asphalt under your feet.

Your legs are clumsy at first, and when you make that first jump you scuff your knees and hands to ragged, bleeding scrapes. But you learn. You've always learned better by doing – like every good scientist, theory can only take you so far, and it's the practical experiments that are the best lessons. Let the city teach you, Donatello. It has so much to give you, the small creature that has to hide away, the one among four who stand to defend it.

7.

You run until you reach a fire escape overlooking a busy street.

You know this place. Somewhere, in everything you have never been, there's something – a hook, a pull, that ties you to this place. It's comfortable and it's awkward all at once. "Hello," you say when a man opens the window, testing the word in your mouth and finding it heavy. You fidget, too – the sunlight only highlights how different you are; this man is pale and you are green, he is human and you are not.

This was not a good idea.

The man tugs you inside before you can run ("April told me what happened," he says, as you wiggle your feet against the rug and try to place the name), and settles you in a seat. It's warm here, with sunlight pouring through the windows, and it smells like the girl. It's safe, too – you know this much. This place will always be safe for you.

But there's something else, isn't there? It's a shame you can't remember what it is, this strange little snag at your heart.

The man offers you a drink, which you refuse, and while you soak in the light, he shuffles around in the background, making calls. Within an hour, Leo is here, ashen-faced and wide-eyed. He thanks the man profusely, apologising for you, and leads you back to the roof.

"Donnie, what were you thinking!?" Leo asks, when you dig your heels in and say no.

"I wanted to come up here."

Leo presses his mouth into a line. "You're not ready," he says. "What if someone had seen you?"

"We're on the roof," you snap back; you are not a child, you are not an invalid, you are not broken. "I was careful, and I'm tired of down there. You always leave me behind, so I brought myself."

"That's different. We come here to fight, not go sightseeing." He's wearing his swords, and they clatter against his shell. Leo only ever wears his swords in the dojo, or when he and his brothers come home. It's not fair, and you don't care anyway. He gets to come topside. You don't. "You're not ready," he says again.

"Then make me ready!"

"It doesn't work that way!" Leo sniffs once. "You're our brother," he says, his voice quiet and steady, and he doesn't even look at you. "You will always be our brother, but you're not Donnie. You can't be. There's– you can't. And it's going to take some time before you can come with us. You're not ready."

What he means is, he's not ready. You can see it more in Leo than you ever could in Raph, or Mikey – how much he doesn't want this. You're not his brother, you're a shade that took his place. But you are a Donnie, if a little mixed-up, if different from the one he's lost. You're not useless. You might have been, a few weeks ago, but you're learning. You can learn other things.

And, ultimately, Leo does not have a choice.

8.

You start training in the morning.

Leo, his brothers, and the humans fight together, and even to your untrained eye you can tell that they are good. The girl especially; she's so small and fragile-looking compared to her opponents, but there's an edge to her that's vicious, and angry. She's a good foil to Raph, you think, who wears his anger like a shield.

Splinter stands you in the corner, working your weak arms and unsure feet through slow motions that come a little too easily. When he dismisses you all for the morning, the others clap your shell, tell you you did a good job, and leave, expecting you to follow.

You don't.

Instead, you linger. This room is the quietest in the lair. Dust hangs like tiny lights in the air, and the weapons on the wall demand your attention.

The others have firmly-defined roles. Leonardo is the middle-ground, stamina and strength enough to go the distance against the enemy and push them away. Raphael is built for strength, brute force and muscle. Michelangelo, you think, is strength too, but also speed – for shock and awe and evasion. They're missing something. There's nobody to keep the enemy back, to keep them out of reach.

Your arms are awfully long, aren't they, Donatello?

Imagine what you could do with a long weapon.

A man will never forget how to ride a bike. Your body will never forget how to fight, Donatello.

The wood of the staff is well-worn, smooth and dented in turn from battle, and when you hold it, your wrists ache until you twist them, spinning the staff in the air. It whistles, low and whooping; you can roll it around your neck, along your shell, and everything is fluent because you've done this before. You know how and when to lock your arms, and how to compensate for your carapace, and you know that there is a catch beneath the linen, and when you press it a blade slams out, sharp and wicked.

You know all of this.

It's a memory that isn't yours. It shouldn't be yours, it can't be yours.

The scream that comes out of your mouth is yours, but the voice is not.

9.

Your father finds you.

He picks up the thrown staff and sets it back on the wall, and while you clutch your knees like a child, frightened of memory, he lets you breathe before he approaches. He lays things out in front of you. one by one: a broken bowl, a broken canister, small photographs that you recognise as Polaroids, a worn purple bandana.

You're smart, Donatello. Figure it out.

Splinter stands and leaves for a moment, to make the tea that you hate. The glass pieces mean nothing to you – there's a story there you haven't been told yet, but the pictures – small, faded as they are – they interest you.

And there's something there, isn't there? You can feel it.

Oh, they are your kind, and they say that they are your brothers, but you've never really believed that. But wouldn't it be nice if there were deeper bonds there, Donatello? Something more than nothing at all?

Wouldn't it be nice if they looked at you as family, instead of a ghost?

When Splinter comes back, he holds two cups – one of tea, one of something acrid and warm: coffee, you think, though nobody else in the family drinks it. He pushes the mug into your hands and now, when you are ready to hear it, he tells you the story, of how you were an ordinary little turtle, and became extraordinary twice over.

"I don't," you say, the words coming like acorns dug from soil. You don't remember being small, growing like a weed underground. You don't remember the photographs being taken, when Leo lost his front teeth, when Mikey found his first skateboard, when your father brought all four of you onto his lap to take a family portrait. You don't remember that warmth, a tangle of arms and legs and shells and love.

You don't remember what it felt like when your father comforted you, his warm hand on the back of your neck, thumb easing at the knots that form there like great roots while you choke on words that taste of rot and bile and grief – because you can't help but grieve, not just for what you don't have, but for what was stolen from who you used to be, and the ones who loved him.

There are parts that make up a man, no matter the circumstances into which he is born. Donatello, you will always be kind, you will always be selfless, you will always look to evidence, and logic.

Look at the evidence. Look at what you have lost.

That face in the photographs was yours, once. You're smiling – you were happy – with your long arms slung around a brother either side, and you don't know why.

"Sore wa wakaranai," your father says, and this, you do understand.

10.

You don't know why there is a cheese-shaped phone in the dojo, but when you hear it ringing, you come running. "Uh, hello?" you ask, and then jolt as Raphael snarls down the phone: Donnie? Okay, Donnie, listen to me: where's Master Splinter?

You don't know.

Forget it, Raphael says, before he hangs up. Just go find Splinter. Tell him we're down by the docks. We got company.

You don't know where Splinter has gone. All you know is, he is not here, and your brothers need you.

The bo staff is still bracketed against the wall. Nobody has touched it since you did, when you threw it away because it wasn't yours, it belonged to the other you.

You no longer have a choice. Pick it up, Donatello. Remember this weight, this extension of self, this piece of your puzzle.

Your brothers need you.

Go.

11.

Good morning, sleepyhead.

You've been asleep for so long.

It's time to wake up now.

the end