KrissyKat91: Happy Mother's Day! Here we have a bit more of my personal Disney Duck headcannon.

Donald jolted awake with a snort, squinting in the dim moonlight. He'd slipped in through the lift in his wardrobe somewhere around two thirty, after a few hours spent chasing down petty crooks for stress release, and a glance at his clock showed it was now three fifteen. Forty five minutes was nowhere near enough sleep! Still, something had disturbed him.

A careful look around the room revealed nothing unusual. Part of him was tempted to just roll over and go back to sleep, but a feeling in his gut was insisting that something was amiss, and he hadn't survived his life as a masked crimefighter (or his life in general, really) by ignoring his gut feelings. So, sliding out of bed, the duck slipped out his bedroom door, senses straining to pick up anything out of the ordinary.

There was a light was on downstairs. Donald headed down the hall, pausing only long enough to pick up one of the baseball bats he distinctly remembered telling the boys to put away earlier. Improvised weapon in hand, he sidled down the stairs, then peaked into the kitchen.

"…Louie?"

The youngest of his nephews jumped, looking up at from his cup of milk. "Unca Donald? Did I wake you?"

"Uh, no," the duck fibbed, surreptitiously hiding the bat behind the stair railings. "I was on my way to the bathroom and saw the light. But never mind that. What are you doing up so early? It's three in the morning!"

"I couldn't sleep," Louie replied, staring back down at his milk.

"Bad dreams?" Donald asked, pulling up a chair beside the duckling.

"No."

"Bad thoughts?" Louie was the most emotionally sensitive of his boys; it wouldn't have been the first time he'd dwelt on something to the point of sleep loss.

"…Kinda?" Louie worried at the lower part of his bill for a moment, then looked up at his uncle. "Unca Donald, do we have a mom?"

Of all the questions Donald had expected from his youngest, that had been the very last one. And honestly, it was also the last question he wanted to answer.

"What brought this on?" he asked instead, stalling for time.

"Well," the duckling said slowly, twisting the hem of his green nightshirt, "our teacher said Mother's Day is this Sunday, and normally we make something for Aun—for Daisy, but…"

"But I broke up with her… well, yesterday, now. Go on."

"And later I heard some of the other kids saying it was too bad we didn't have a mom to spend the day with, and then I started wondering what had happened to our mom, and why we don't live with her. Not that I don't want to live with you! I just…"

"Are Huey and Dewey curious, too?"

"I don't think they've really thought about it."

"Well," he sighed, "if you really want to know, then we need to wake them up. I don't want to explain this more than once."

"We're right here, Unca Donald," two nearly identical voices piped up from behind them. Turning around in his chair, the duck found his other two nephews standing in the doorway.

"We woke up…"

"…and Louie wasn't there…"

"…so we started looking for him…"

"…and saw you sneaking down the stairs with a baseball bat."

"What were you gonna do with it, Unca Donald?" they chorused.

"I didn't know who was down here, okay?! For all I knew it was a burglar!" He shook his head. "How long were you two standing there?"

"The whole time, Unca Donald!" Dewey replied.

"We wanna know about our mom, too!" Huey added.

Groaning, the duck dragged a hand down his face. "Alright, but let's take this to the living room. We're gonna want to be comfortable for this."

"So," Dewey cried, bouncing excitedly, "tell us! What was Mom like?"

From his perch on the left side of the couch, Louie frowned. His brothers—Huey on the right and Dewey in the middle—may have been happy to hear about their mom, but he'd seen the look on Unca Donald's face as they crossed into the living room, and he had the nasty feeling they weren't going to like what they were about to hear.

"Well, boys," the older duck said, "to tell you the truth, I… I actually don't know your mom very well."

"What?!" all three squawked at once.

"But she's…"

"…your…"

"…sister!"

Unca Donald nodded. "Yes, she is. My twin, actually. But that doesn't mean much when we didn't grow up together. You know how bad my temper is?"

It wasn't really a question that needed answering, but the triplets nodded anyway.

"I got that temper from both my mother and my father. We set each other off a lot when I was a hatchling. From what Grandma told me, they were afraid they'd end up hurting me if they kept me. That's why Grandma did most of my raising herself; it was to protect all three of us from each other. I haven't seen 'em in years, and I'm honestly not sure I even know where they live."

"But they visited you, didn't they?" Huey half pleaded.

Unca Donald shrugged. "Not really. I mean for the first few years, yeah, but that had pretty much stopped by the time I turned five. I guess they had better things to do." There was hurt in their uncle's voice, but it was old hurt, like he'd accepted his lack of relationship with his parents a long time ago. That didn't make it right.

"Then who raised Mom?" Louie asked, trying to wrap his head around the idea that Grandpa Quackmore and Grandma Hortense would do something like that. He'd never met his maternal grandparents, but surely they couldn't have been that bad!

"They kept her. Grandma told me her temper didn't really show up until she grew up."

"But why didn't she keep us?" Dewey asked pointedly.

Donald clenched his jaw, fighting a grimace. This was not going to be easy. Thank goodness he'd already explained where eggs came from earlier in the year, so that awkward conversation was out of the way.

"Della, your mother," he started slowly, "left you on my doorstep when you were very young, young enough to still have most of those fluffy yellow hatchling feathers. There was a folder in the basket with you, and in that folder were your birth certificates… and a note. According to the note, Della went to a party after getting kicked out of the Air Force and got… well, she had too much to drink. She woke up the next morning in bed with a duck she didn't know, and found out you three were coming a few weeks later."

All three ducklings stared at him, eyes wide. "Sh-she didn't want us?" Louie stuttered. "W-we were a-a mistake?"

Donald never really remembered moving. All he knew was that one second he was sitting in the easy chair, and the next he was across the room, on his knees and wrapping his arms around his boys.

"Never," he growled, "call yourselves that again. You were not a mistake. Unplanned, maybe, but never a mistake. Della was never the most responsible person on the planet, but she loved you from the moment she found out about you, loved you enough to put your wellbeing first no matter how much she wanted to keep you, loved you enough to leave you with someone she knew would also love you. And I know I haven't always been a good parent, but I do love you. I love you more than you will ever know, more than I know how to say. You three are my whole world."

The boys were crying into his shirt by that point. "C-can we s-stay with you tonight, Unca Donald?" Huey hiccuped.

"Of course."

Later, at a more sane hour, he'd climb up to the attic and dig out Della's note (for a certain definition of note; the thing was almost four pages long) so the triplets could read it. What mattered right now was that his boys—his sons in every way that counted—knew that no matter the circumstances of their birth, they were loved far beyond anything Donald could ever express.

They were why he still wore that mask, after all.