"Oh God, it's happening!"

Donatello's heart leapt into his mouth and he dropped his wrench. It clattered on the workbench as he stumbled out into the living area, half-finished projects and notes scattering in his wake.

"What's wrong?" he asked, his eyes roving around the room for the reason for the anguished cry. He saw nothing of concern, and his chest tightened further. "What's happened? Is Mona okay? Are the eggs?"

"CRUD!"

Raphael punctuated his second yell by throwing the game console controller he had been holding to the floor. It clunked and the plastic split in two, revealing its technical insides. As Don's brain was hurrying to make sense of the situation, Mike jumped up from the couch and punched the air, his face a picture of triumph.

"Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I am the champion once again!"

He preformed his patented videogame victory dance around the couch. Raphael crossed his arms tightly and pretended he couldn't see. Donatello's mouth fell into a tight, perfectly straight line and his eyes narrowed. Raphael turned away as Mike got right in his face to brag. Raph's disgusted expression fell into confusion as he caught sight of Don's 'we are not amused' look.

"What, bro?" he asked. "You look like someone just told you they squashed your cat."

Mike stopped trying to get Raph's attention and turned to Don.

"Yeah, dude. What's up?"

Don raised his arms as if imploring some higher power before letting them drop to his sides.

"You people have got to stop yelling like that!" he hissed.

He turned on his heel and marched away, completely ignoring how childish he knew he was being. He growled as he heard Mike ask, "What crawled up his shell and died?"

With every stomping footfall he cooled off and regretted his harshness. By the time he had exited the lair and put plenty of distance between himself and his brothers, he was on the verge of turning around and apologising.

They simply didn't understand the pressure he was under. Why would they? Leo and Mei's eggs were due to hatch in the next few weeks, as far as Don could tell. All the research in the world couldn't predict how their mutated genes would affect the gestation period. And what when the children were born? They could be deformed, live only a short time, or be born just plain dead. It wasn't the jovial Mike or the hot-headed Raph that Leo and Mei looked to for guidance and reassurance. It was Don, who was set up on a pedestal and supposed to know everything, when in truth he knew nothing. He hung his head. He felt like a complete fraud.

On top of that was Mona and her developing pregnancy. She was around six months gone by now, and both she and Raph were depending on him for all their knowledge. In reality, what did Don know about pregnancy? Nothing. Indeed, what did he know about a fluke mutant pregnancy? Less than nothing. Yet they still looked to him for guidance. Don felt like a sinking island in a sea of troubles. Could he cope with it? Did he really have a choice? He had come across a quote while trawling the internet one day for inspiration: 'The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.' He couldn't remember who said it; some playwright. But it spoke to him, or at least he pretended it did.

Though, he supposed, he wasn't really alone. The family always banded together. It just felt like they depended on him for a lot of things he couldn't really be depended on for. Don stopped in his errant ramblings, both physical and mental, and leaned his shell against damp sewer wall. He had to break out of this funk.

He stood up again as a sharp clicking grabbed his attention. Curious, he crouched down and slunk along the curve of the sewer tunnel, cursing the fact he had neglected to take his bo. The click-click continued, and was joined by a soft muttering. Don rounded the corner. What he saw made him shake his head.

"I thought you were quitting," he said.

A pair of yellow eyes flicked up at him, narrowed in annoyance. The crouched figure stood up to her full height, towering over even Don in her ridiculously high heels.

"I am," Desdemona said flatly.

"It doesn't look like it," Don said, one eye-ridge raised.

Des held a battered, half-smoked cigarette in one hand and an old lighter in the other. She sighed and crumpled the cigarette in her palm.

"It's hard," she said.

Don nodded and tucked his thumbs into his belt. Des tossed the lighter into the rushing sewer water and put her hands on her hips.

"So you know why I'm here. Why are you here?" she asked.

Don went to talk, but his mouth went dry. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes at his own reaction. Since they had returned to their own dimension weeks before with their new friends in tow, Desdemona had shed her over-muscular image. She was shapely and toned, if still a bit on the muscular side. She still wore her high leather boots, but the garter had been abandoned, replaced by strips of dark grey material tied around the top of fishnet holdups. Matching material was tied around her biceps.

There had been several sets of raised eye-ridges and brows at Desdemona's overtly sexual outfit and the gun slung on her hips. Don had resisted the urge to laugh at the adjustment of Mona and Mei as another female – such a sexualised female - invaded their space. If the ladies had hackles, they would most certainly have been up. What made it worse was that Des practically ignored them. Now that Des and her brothers were set up in their own sewer home, however, the ladies rarely interacted.

Don shook himself from his musings and swallowed.

"I had to get out of the lair," he said. "Mona's pregnancy is causing a lot of fighting between herself and Raph. And between that and Mei's eggs being due to hatch any time now, the tension's racking up in there."

Des nodded and said nothing, crossing her arms across her plastron. Don sighed and shook his head. He wanted to tell her all about it. He wanted to share his worries and to spill out all the crushing pressure that was pressing down on his brain. He couldn't quite manage it, however. Her face was passive and her yellow eyes flat. Sometimes he wondered what she actually thought of him; it was hard to tell.

At that moment Desdemona uncrossed her arms and slid them around Don's waist to meet behind his shell. The warmth of her skin against his seemed to sap the stress right out of his pores, and his hesitation to return the hug disappeared as he melted into the hug. The hugged in silence for a short while before Des began to cough harshly and turned away, putting her hands on her knees, bent double. Don frowned.

"That's why you need to quit smoking," he said.

Des thumped her fist on her plastron and nodded, her face flushed.

"I know. Either that or smoke so much I don't have the chance to cough, like before."

"You'll get there," Don said. "I'm sure we can get you some nicotine patches."

"No, no patches," Des said. "I'll kick it on my own."

Des regained her composure and sucked in a deep breath. She pinned him with a steady gaze.

"Would you like to escape later this evening and have dinner with me?" she asked. "Cass and Othello are going to be at yours for some movie marathon thing with Michelangelo."

"Yeah," Don said, grinning. "Mike's showing all four of the Night of the Red Dead Destruction movies. I was supposed to be going as well…but I guess I could make an exception."

"Indeed you will," Des said, tipping her chin up and narrowing her eyes.

Don chuckled and nodded.

"Mike might call this 'being whipped'," he said.

"That, my dear," Des said, walking past him and trailing a long-nailed finger over the lip of his shell, "can easily be arranged."

Don lost his words again.

In the slowly dimming evening the New York City streets were humming with the comings and goings of every type of person. People hurried home from their jobs. High-powered businessmen in their long woollen coats stepped into their shiny cars with blacked out windows, and the roads were choked with yellow cabs and weaving motorcyclists. The air was warm; many of the businessmen regretted their choice of coat.

In any other city, the deeply hooded figure walking close to the buildings may have cut a strange figure. Her long black cloak swept the dry ground, and her face was completely obscured by shadow. It was a blessing that she had found herself in such a place; she thanked God for it in her prayers every day. A small, straight-backed nun shielding herself from the outside world barely registered on the radar of the average New Yorker. She smiled and folded her arms inside her deep sleeves. If only they knew the truth, the secret she kept closely hidden beneath the black of her nun's habit. She kept walking, her bare feet obscured from view, but as the sun dipped down further and the street lights came on she willed herself to head back to the convent.

Her heels almost dragged as she forced herself back in the direction of East 68th Street. She walked carefully through Central Park, past a bright cherry blossom tree. She paused as she reached the Carousel House and sighed wistfully. She had been cloistered in the convent for all of her life, and at eighteen she desperately wanted to explore every nook and cranny of NYC, to taste all the vendor food, to ride the carousel and to stare into the windows of the myriad of stores. She was bound, however, by her promise to Sister Mary Urban, and as the sun went down, she had to return home. It had taken years to convince the abbess to let her out; it would not do to ruin all that hard work by being late. She escaped from the park and crossed Madison Avenue, her dark-clothed body silhouetted against the orange glow of the setting sun reflecting off the tall buildings, and disappeared into the crowd.