Superstitious

by KC

Disclaimer: I do not own the turtles.

Carefully pulling his lab door open, Donatello peeked out to see if anyone else was awake. Living in a family of ninja meant living in a family of light sleepers with restless dreams. All of them woke at the slightest sound, and it took all his skill to head into the kitchen, pull open the freezer and resist the ice cream cake. Like Raphael said, if it was in there, it was fair game, and there was an uneasy truce between all of them as they waited to devour it piece by piece at dinner and not steal each other's share at night.

He lifted the box, wincing as the cellophane crinkled, and slid out the long black laptop underneath it. His siblings had given him a shared strange look when he put his old computer in the freezer, but none of them had asked, afraid he might launch into a technical explanation.

The truth was so un-technical, however, that it made him blush to think of it. With the laptop under one arm, he slipped back to the lab and locked the door again.

The long days in the freezer had left the laptop ice cold and strangely light in his hands. He set it down gently in front of his current computer, The black screen cast a sickly pallor over everything, with the cursor blinking maddeningly after a string of "error" responses, the evidence of at least an hour of fighting with the programming. It felt so wrong to give into superstition like this, but the hammer felt satisfying in his hand, and as he opened up the old laptop, he was overwhelmed by a sense of rightness, of the satisfaction of fulfilling a promise to himself from years of frustration on the old laptop and the one solution to his current problem.

"You see this?" he asked his new computer. "This is my old laptop. I left it in the freezer. I did this because it gave me so many problems that I swore I would pay it back one day."

And with that warning, he brought the hammer down on the old laptop with full force.

Keys exploded into the air. Circuitry was laid bare before him, then smashed. Three, four blows of the hammer. Shards of plastic sprayed across the floor. The hammer fell again. The screen cracked down the middle and slid off the table like a broken skull.

Breathing hard, Donatello lay the hammer aside and viewed the carnage. The delete key had stuck against his plastron, and he flicked it off like a piece of bone. He wiped the decimated remains of his old laptop onto the floor, then shot a look at his new computer.

The screen flickered and the familiar start up crackle followed as his computer whirred back to life properly.

Donatello sat down, intending to clean up later. He felt dirty. Computers didn't have feelings and of course he'd just happened to destroy the old laptop as the new one resolved its programming error, giving the illusion of the superstition working-

The screen flickered.

He put his hand on the hammer.

The screen went back to normal. With a growing headache, he set the hammer aside and resolved to eventually stick this computer in the freezer, too.

end