I got the idea for this story after one of my coworkers was babbling about their soaps while I was trying to ignore her by daydreaming about the boys in green. Oops. Sorry Master Splinter!

It's a mix of the turtleverses, but I've tried to keep more of the 2003 and movie storylines since more people are familiar with those, except where it doesn't fit my needs. Most notably, Master Splinter is Hamato Yoshi like in the old series -you have been warned. The guys are also about nineteen, to give me a little flexibility for storylining. The first few chaps will be OC heavy, but I promise the guys will have plenty of screen time!

The T rating is for occasional swearing and innuendo, but nothing bad. If necessary I will move it to M, but I don't think it will be necessary.

This is my first fic on this site, so reviews are welcome, flames are not.

Disclaimer: I do not own the TMNT, for which they are probably very grateful.

His Father's Son

"Adam?"

"Out in a second, Jen."

Calmly rinsing the razor in the sink, Adam Matsuda quickly patted his face dry and opened the bathroom door. His wife smiled muzzily at him.

"Good morning." She greeted with a light kiss on the cheek, attempting to pass by him into the bathroom. He chuckled, and caught her deftly around the waist, pulling her to him.

"Hey!" Jenna protested sleepily as he nuzzled her neck. She squirmed in his arms, turning to face him. He let her, her brown hair tickling his nose as it went past, until she was sliding her arms around his neck in a silent request. He smiled, and kissed her again.

"Mmm." She mumbled, leaning her forehead against his as he let his hands drop, following the slight curve of her waist down to her hips. "You smell so good."

"So do you."

Jenna snorted lightly, pulling away from him. "I smell terrible. I haven't had a shower yet, Mr. Hog-the-Bathroom Matsuda."

"No." He said simply, ignoring the jibe in favor of watching her move around the bathroom, pulling out a towel and assorted paraphernalia in preparation for the day. He loved watching her in the mornings, seeing how she kind of stumbled and listed to one side until she finished waking up in the shower. She wasn't in the sexy white nightgown today, just his shirt from the day before that had missed the toss for the hamper. Somehow, the mis-buttoned length was almost more alluring than the lingerie he'd bought her for Christmas. His shirt was nicely oversized on her, but added to the sweet college girl look she tended to evoke and displayed nearly all her legs. "You smell like sex."

Jenna made a noise and threw the loofah at him. "Shut up."

"Never."

She shot a look at him, an amused sparkle in her rolling brown eyes. "Whatever. Going out while I'm at work?"

"Yep." Adam tossed the loofah back at her. She missed the catch and had to fish it out from behind the towel bar where it caught.

"You visiting your mom today?"

He paused, his good mood fading a little. "Maybe." He admitted finally.

Jenna watched him for a moment as he worried the fraying edge of the towel around his waist, her tired brown eyes sympathetic. "She's already told you everything she can, Adam. It's not like she can conjure him out of thin air or anything."

"I know." He admitted quietly. "I just… wonder."

Jenna sighed, moving forward to touch his arms. "It's been almost thirty years, Adam, and she only met him for one night. In Japan, for God's sake. You're lucky she even remembered his name."

"I know." He repeated, looking down at the floor. Her toenails were still painted, the pale rose color she favored starting to chip from too much time spent shoved into conservative heels.

"I know you miss your dad, Adam." Jenna said softly. "I miss him too. He was a great man. But do you really need to find this guy?"

Adam swallowed at the mention of his father. Akio Matsuda had died barely a year before, and it had been a terrible shock to Adam, who'd always seen his parents as ageless and immortal. He didn't think he'd have been able to survive without Jenna by his side, but the experience had prompted something completely unexpected in him –an almost overpowering need to find out more about himself. About his origins, his family history, and about the man who'd helped his mother conceive him almost thirty years ago.

"I have to, Jen." He said at last, lifting his eyes to her sleepy, worried face. "I know he's not really my dad. But biologically he is my father. He's a part of me and I don't know what that means. I need to know."

Jenna hugged him, sliding her arms under his and leaning her forehead against his. It was one of her favorite positions, since they were both the same height. It had prompted plenty of teasing at their wedding about the bride and groom being the tallest people there, but neither the Bentley or the Matsuda families had ever counted height in their blessings. Adam counted himself lucky that he'd hit somewhere close to average height at all.

"I know you do." She whispered. "I just worry, that's all. You don't know what this guy's like. He may not want to meet you. He may have married and had a family, or be in prison. He could even be dead. I just don't want to see you disappointed, that's all."

Adam kissed her gently, freeing one hand to move a strand of sleep-tousled brown hair that had fallen into her eyes. "I know." He said quietly. "I'm not getting my hopes up. I just… want to know what happened to him after he and mom… you know. And maybe… I don't know. Maybe I can find some answers."

"I hope you do, babe." Jenna kissed him again, squeezing him slightly. "But if you don't, I'll always be here for you, okay? I love you."

He tightened his arms around her, molding her body to his and feeling the buttons from the shirt dig into his chest. "I love you too."

She smiled warmly before kissing him one last time, this time lightly on the nose. "I know. But if you don't let go of me soon, I'm going to be late for work."

Adam laughed softly, and let her go.

The small corner deli by her work was bustling with the lunch rush as Jenna Matsuda scanned the glass case for the day's specials. Her mind was only half on food however, since she was talking to her mother on her cell phone.

"…have had him do the shopping. It isn't natural. You know men can't pass up their little luxuries."

"Mom, Adam is better at bargain shopping than I am. It's his penny pinching that got us enough in savings to afford the new apartment in the first place." She reminded her mother patiently.

There was a sniff on the other end. "That doesn't make it right. Shopping is a woman's profession."

"Whatever, mom." Jenna rolled her eyes. She loved her mother, but Katherine Bentley had some odd ideas about the appropriate roles of men and women. In some respects she was a lot like her rather traditional mother-in-law, but Tomomi Matsuda was far more flexible in her ideas and attitude than her mother would ever be. "That wasn't the problem. He got everything on the list, I just forgot that I didn't add the produce and overreacted. I guess freaked might be a better word. I can't believe I yelled at him over lettuce."

"He's a man, dear. He'll mark it down to an unsolvable mystery of women and get over it."

"I doubt it. Adam's smarter than that. It I don't tell him something soon it'll start bugging him and he'll drive us both nuts. But I did make it up to him last night, so he might just forget about it."

"Then why does it bother you?"

Jenna sighed. "I dunno. It just does. Maybe I'm just getting my PMS a little early this time."

"I'm sure that's all it is." Her mother said soothingly. "Living in that city with millions of other people in your hair all the time would be enough to drive anyone's Aunt Flo wacko."

"Mom!" Jenna squealed in mild dismay, laughing a little as her abrupt outburst caught the attention of the man behind her. She waved his curiosity away.

"Don't 'mom' me Jenna. I know about these things. And if you are comfortable enough to tell me how you 'made it up' to you husband last night, then you can survive a little commentary on your PMS."

"Mom…" She groaned, grateful that the speakerphone on her cellphone was broken. If she'd hit the wrong button right before her mom said that… probably no one would notice since this was New York City, but Jenna probably would have been truly mortified anyway. It was one thing when she said it. It was another when her parents did.

"Order?" The vaguely ethnic guy behind the counter had to bark to catch her attention over the noise in the deli, and it only succeeded because his heavy accent made it sound more like "udder."

Jenna started pointing at her usual selection, nodding and watching absently as he quickly made up her sandwich. "He seemed okay this morning, so I guess my apology worked. But I dunno… I wish I could read his mind sometimes. Or at least his mom's. They've both got that inscrutable thing down pat, and I can never tell if they're actually thinking the opposite of what they're saying…"

"Jenna, what's really bothering you?"

She blinked. "Huh?"

"You never worry about patching things up with Adam unless something's bothering you. The man adores you, and you know it. So what's really bothering you?"

She bit her lip for a moment, watching the meat going onto the sandwich and swallowing when her stomach churned a little. She probably shouldn't have had that egg for breakfast.

"He got a call from the archives after breakfast. The woman who's been helping him with the records there finally found something."

"This is a bad thing?"

"No!" She protested quickly. "No, it's what he's been hoping for."

"But…?"

"I just don't know, mom. Something feels… wrong." She struggled with her words for a moment, watching the lettuce and cheese be covered with the second slice of bread. "It's like… I think he's trying to find out about this guy because he misses his dad. Akio was everything to him. His best friend, his idol, everything. And I'm afraid that he's trying to use this guy as… a replacement I guess. Someone to fill the hole, instead of actually having to admit he'd dead and not coming back."

There was silence while her mother mulled that over, and Jenna transferred the cell phone to her shoulder, pining it there with her head while she dug around in her purse for the deli's frequent customer discount card. Her sandwich had been wrapped in paper and handed to her by the time her mother answered.

"Have you talked to him about it?" She asked gently.

Jenna blew out a sigh as she accepted her change. "Yeah. But he says that isn't why he wants to know about the guy. He says it's because he wants to know more about where he came from."

"And you think he's fooling himself." Her mother stated.

"Well, yeah… I guess… I dunno." She took the receipt and waved a friendly farewell to the cashier before starting the process of squeezing through the crowd to get back onto the nearly as crowded street. "I've just got a bad feeling about the whole thing, mom. I don't know what to think anymore. I'm trying to be supportive and all, but I just don't see any other reason why he would be so determined to find a guy that he never cared existed before now."

"Maybe he's curious. I've heard that it's not unusual for adopted kids to go looking for their birth parents."

Jenna shook her head, forgetting for a second that her mother couldn't see it as she popped out the crowded door of the deli. "Maybe, but I don't think so."

"Why not?" Her mother argued. "Anything's possible."

"Then why didn't he go looking earlier?"

Her mother sighed. "Jenna, I know what it looks like, but try to think about this a little. I went through the same thing when your grandmother died. He's always had his parents, and now suddenly he's half orphan. One of the most important things in the world is suddenly gone and it seems like he doesn't know anything about him or himself."

"Yeah…" Jenna said slowly. "But Akio's not the one he's trying to find."

"Because he already found everything he can. I think you mentioned a few months ago that wherever Akio was from got destroyed?"

"Uh huh. A little fishing village. It got wiped out by a tsunami and a bunch of typhoons years ago. Adam said that the government there said that all the paperwork was destroyed and there were only a few survivors, and when he tried to follow up none of them were related to the Matsudas."

"So no brothers or sisters to lean on, and no aunts or uncles or grandparents to ask. You also said that he tried talking to his father's friends. The ones at your wedding?"

Jenna wondered where her mother was going with this. "Yeah, but none of them…" She trailed off for a second, realization finally hitting her. "…They refused to talk much about 'the old country.' They just said that they were Americans now. And I know he doesn't want to ask his mom about Akio much because it hurts her as much as it does him."

"Exactly." Katherine Bentley sounded relieved that her daughter had finally clicked onto her train of reasoning. "Now unlike me and your grandmother, instead of giving up Adam has another option. Add the fact that he probably is curious about the man and he knows time is running out, and you get one determined Matsuda."

"But…" Jenna felt horribly guilty poking at her mother's theory. It sounded so much more benign and reassuring than hers. "That doesn't mean he isn't avoiding it. It just means he has even more reason to latch onto this guy."

"Maybe." Her mother admitted. "But Adam's a good boy, Jenna, or your father and I would never have let you near him. I don't think that's what's going on. It doesn't sound to me like he's avoiding anything. I think he's just working through his feelings in his own way, that's all. You're just borrowing trouble."

Jenna dodged a small gaggle of businessmen in identical navy suits and ducked around the corner of the building that contained her office with a sigh. "I hope you're right mom."

"Of course I'm right. I'm your mother."

Jenna rolled her eyes, but couldn't resist a smile.

The New York City branch of the National Archives was surprisingly busy today, but Adam didn't really notice as he sorted through the small pile of documents the clerk had brought him. It had taken months to locate the information in the back files of the archives, especially since it had turned out that most of the information was missing or misfiled. He was determined to memorize every scrap that the clerks had finally been able to dig up.

He shuffled past a petition for naturalization from over twenty years before, a declaration of intent, a certificate of marriage abroad…

Adam paused, and flipped back a page in the small stack of photocopies the kindly clerk had made for him. There, behind the marriage license, was an expired immigration record for a Mr. Yoshi Hamato.

With a photo.

He stared at the grainy little picture before him, shifting the paper a little to get more light on the face.

This is him. He told himself, drinking in the indecipherable expression of the man in the tiny photo. This is the man who fathered me.

The stranger stared back at him from the paper, but even in the black and white Adam could recognize a few things. The line of his eyebrows, the shape of his eyes. The line of his jaw. Things he saw in the mirror every morning and evening. Things that he'd never really thought about before, until the day his dad had died and he'd stared at the cold, waxy face lying in the coffin and realized that isn't me.

People had always commented on how much like his parents Adam was, on how he had his mother's nose and mouth, his father's bearing. His mother had been proud of how much he took after his father, and only after his death had Adam realized just how much of Akio Matsuda's mannerisms he'd taken for himself. But when all the life had been drained from his father, when there was nothing left of the proud and vibrant spirit that had imbued him, Adam realized for the first time that he wasn't really there. He'd inherited his father's manners, his values and thought processes, but there was nothing in the lines of that cold face that was reflected in his own.

Adam set the other papers carefully on the table before him and leaned back in his chair, staring blankly at the man in the picture.

He'd been about seven or so when he first found out Akio wasn't really his father. He'd come home from school bouncing and talking animatedly about all the projects his class had been presenting –the typical who-are-your-family assignment every kid got in elementary school. But it wasn't until he'd gotten home to their apartment that he'd thought to ask his mother the suddenly burningly important question.

"Mommy? Why don't I have any brothers or sisters like the other kids?"

His mother smiled gently at him, but instead of avoiding the question like she sometimes did when she got that expression, she answered him in a loving tone.

"Because your father cannot have children. You will never have any brothers or sisters. But you will always have us."

He'd been too young at the time to understand all the implications of that confession, but eventually he'd hit the age where he'd learned where babies actually came from and at the time he was pretty much too smart for his own good. So he'd confronted his mother again.

"Mom, where did I come from?"

His mother hesitated, raising an elegant eyebrow in confusion. He felt himself blushing and plowed forward in a rush.

"Remember when I was little and you told me that dad couldn't have kids? That includes me, right? So where did I come from?"

She paused, a strange look on her face that Adam had never seen before. But before he could ask she sighed, and faced him with a solemn expression.

"You were conceived before I met your father, and when I found out I was pregnant with you I went to the elders. At the time your father was in America, and he had requested a wife be found for him. Since he had just discovered that he could not have children and I had no husband but a child on the way, the elders decided we should marry. You were born a few months later, and we have never regretted it."

That had been the end of the conversation. When he'd gotten older and occasionally wondered about the man whose sperm had created him, his mother had simply refused to talk about him. His father had refused to acknowledge the issue at all. It wasn't until a few months after his father's death and Adam's revival of interest in his biological father that his mother had finally relented and told him a name. When pressed, she admitted only that she had not seen Hamato Yoshi since that night, and that about twenty years earlier she'd heard a rumor that he might have immigrated to New York City.

It was all he'd had to go on, but it had been enough to make a start. And now after almost a year of searching, he had something more substantial than just a name.

He traced a finger around the edges of the photocopied picture, wondering just how much distortion the process had added to the original photograph. Was it the blurring of the ink that made the man look vaguely uncomfortable, as if his clothes didn't fit right or he didn't really want to have his picture taken? Was it the loss of clarity that made the jaw line so similar to the one he'd shaved that morning, the eyes and ears to the ones Jenna had kissed the night before? Or was he imagining something that wasn't really there, in his desperation to have something? Adam couldn't tell.

But it was him, and not some other Yoshi Hamato. He knew that much. The village listed as point of origin was the same as on his mother's records, and after months of staring at old records his gut told him the picture was truth.

Carefully, holding his breath as if the picture would vanish if he breathed too hard, he picked up the pile of photocopies again. Page after page, he carefully thumbed through the information and laid the ones that seemed most important out on the table. The immigration record with the photograph. The petition for naturalization with an address that he might be able to follow up on, since the date was more recent than the other records. Another form listing an immigrant assistance organization that might have more recent information. And the certificate of marriage abroad.

Adam swallowed. There was no reason for him to be so… cold at the sight of that second name, he chided himself. His mother had told him that Mr. Hamato had no idea he existed. The man would have had no reason not to marry this Ms. Shen Tang, and his parents had enjoyed over twenty-eight years of marriage before his father's unexpected death last March. They had loved each other despite their unusual meeting, and he had never doubted for a microsecond that both of them loved him. There was no reason for this news to affect him at all.

Once all the papers were laid out carefully on the table he'd commandeered, he breathed a disappointed sigh.

None of the information was more recent than about twenty years ago, and he knew from previous courthouse and Municipal Archive searches that there was no local death certificate on file. Either Mr. Hamato had moved from the city long ago, or he'd completely vanished into thin air.

He was fit, the woman noted, eyeing the man covertly as she wandered by with an armful of papers, but not overly so. He had a long musculature to him that suggested a swimmer, but there had been some obvious weight-training in the upper body area. His tone suggested the kind of man who had been extremely athletic in school but had started to train less vigorously as the real world set in. So while he was definitely in shape, the man in front of her was almost certainly not a trained ninja.

She stayed away from him, carefully only filing papers that would let her maintain line of sight as she worked. Ever since she'd overheard Kath talking about the man, she'd become exceptionally helpful with his case. Kath thought she was crushing on him, since he was sort of cute in a very Asian kind of way and the other woman had nastily pointed out the wedding ring on his hand. She had shrugged, and continued with her work. His looks weren't what interested her, or her master.

It was the name he was searching for that had caught her attention a few weeks ago, and his claim to be a relative that kept her watching. The Foot Clan had combed through the courthouse and archives years ago looking for the same information this man had asked for, and every item meticulously photocopied for the clan records and then hidden or destroyed. None of the items had information that the Foot had been able to use to find the hated freaks or their master, but after yet another disastrous encounter with them her master had ordered that the information be "found" for the man in the hopes that his search might produce something they had missed.

After weeks of nagging, she'd finally succeeded in weaseling the young man's name out of Kath, and she'd passed it on her master the week before. She had no doubt Adam Matsuda's entire life history was being scrutinized this very moment. Photo surveillance had already been matched with the old records well enough to suggest some truth to the man's claim. If he really was a relative of the hated Hamato Yoshi and managed to find him, then the clan either had a new way to track them, or had discovered a whole new bargaining chip in their never-ending war against the freaks.

He didn't seem to notice her hovering at all, and she felt her lips curve in disdain.

Definitely not a ninja.