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Of Hearts and Shells: Turtle Doves	By : prplraven Category: +S through Z > Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Views: 1872 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012 series) is not mine and belongs to Nickelodeon and its original creators. I'm only using them for fan-work, and I make no profit from their use.

Chapter List
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Of Hearts and Shells: Turtle Doves
Prologue
Author's Note: It was my original intention to not post this work until it was fully completed, but I'm getting anxious holding back, so here you go... I'll start releasing this fic by chapter periodically. I've been keeping busy beta-reading for several folks, so progress on my own works has been slow... but I'll push ahead on! hummerhouse has recommended a cross-posting system; this fic will be posted in full form at AFF, Ao3, and Stealthy Stories, and the prologue and part of chapter 1 will be released on Deviant Art and FF.net.
The 'turtle' in the Shakespeare poem below is actually a turtle dove, not an actual turtle, but I drew some connections between "The Turtle and the Phoenix" and Don and April.
And now, the Prologue, with 60% recycled content! This is your 'previously on...' plus a little.
Hope you enjoy! Please leave me a review! I love hearing from you and hearing what I can improve to make this series the best it can be! <3 R/s
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"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around."
-David Lodge
So they lov'd, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none:

Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance, and no space was seen

'Twixt the turtle and his queen;

But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,

That the turtle saw his right

Flaming in the phoenix' sight:

Either was the other's mine.
-from “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” William Shakespeare
“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

- A.A. Milne
Two months prior:
Raphael crouched behind a decorative hedge in Central Park, Donatello at his side, the two of them watching several Kraang construct what appeared to be a petting zoo and a carousel. A number of standard farm animals arrived in front of them, as well as an large iguana, an ostrich, and a camel, as the Kraang seemed to have a poor grasp of what belonged in a petting zoo.
For good measure, one of the Kraang droids added a container labeled "Hand Sanitizer" to a post of the little menagerie, and opening the top, poured in the contents of a flask of mutagen.
Disgust graced Raph's featured. "That is just deranged..."
Then Leo had called everyone’s attention to the eight canisters of mutagen bound to the outer struts of the carousel’s canopy. In their efforts to retrieve the mutagen from the carousel, despite the pouring rainstorm, they were spotted. A mass of Kraang robots attacked. April, who had just been catching and stashing the canisters as Donnie and Raph unscrewed and pried them loose, suddenly became the focus of the Kraang’s attention. In an attempt to draw the army of androids away from the turtles on the carousel, she led them into a spiral, then let off a mind-blast, deadening a number of them, yet she was pursued by a dozen outside the range of her blast.
Still carrying one of the containers of mutagen, she sought refuge by climbing up the rigging of the carousel. The Kraang followed, climbing up after her. One reached for her as she felt her hair start to stand on end despite the rain. “Catch!” she yelled at the Kraang as she threw the mutagen in the air. She leapt away, letting the fabric of the canopy break her fall as the Kraang, container, and carousel were struck by a blinding, deafening bolt of lightning. The mutagen itself turned the pinkish-white of the lightning bolt, and as it fell, was pierced by laser-fire from the ongoing battle, splashing April with it despite Leo’s attempt to push her out of the way. As the turtles mopped up the rest of the Kraang, she reemerged, transformed into…
"What am I?" she asked agonizingly as she wobbled on unfamiliar feet. She had her eyes clenched closed, refusing to look at herself in fear.
"You're a t—" Donnie started, and his voice died as he took in the vision before him. "You're a turtle..." She let out a sobbing breath that was partly mournful but mostly relief as she fell into his arms. Still stunned, he pulled her to him, patting her shell. "It's all right... I'll look after you..."
Sirens sounded, nearing their location. "Let's grab the mutagen and get underground," Leo commanded in a subdued tone.
Donnie paused, picking up the remains of the container of pinkish mutagen—he would need to analyze it to figure out why April had transformed despite her immunity, and from there, produce a retro-mutagen for her. She clung to him, wobbly, shocked, and upset. He led her to a nearby grating that the others were jumping down into and caught her by the carapace as she lost her balance on the leap down.
She sniffled as they walked the long distance back toward the lair. “Does it… look bad?”
Don beamed down at her. “No, Sweetheart…” he tried to assure her, finding himself at a loss for words. Their recent breakup made their close contact now feel rather awkward, so he fell back on his old standby, babbling about science. “I don’t know how this could have happened… somehow this mutagen bypassed your immunity. It must have some special properties that the regular mutagen doesn’t… but I’ll have to thoroughly analyze it when we get back to the lair. Good thing the rain didn’t ruin it.” He looked down to her, noticing that all his science talk wasn’t helping; she still had tears in her eyes. “Don’t worry… I’ll find a way to get you back to normal,” he comforted. The distraught, tearful look didn’t leave her face, but she nestled her head against his shoulder as he continued to aid her balance.
A few yards behind them, Mikey was in near-rapture. “Look at them! They’re so cute! Oh my god! Raph, don’t you think so?”
“Mmmh…” Raph grumbled, looking away.
“Come on… I know you want to see Donny and April happy, right?”
“Mikey, shut up! I’m trying to think of something…”
“Is it about Donnie and April? ‘cause that’s all I can think about! Eeee!—whoops!” He dropped one of the mutagen canisters he’d been carrying.
“Goddammit, Mikey!” Raphael stuck a foot out, catching the falling vessel on his ankle. “Focus, wouldja, idiot?! The last thing we need is more mutagen spilled all over the place!”
“Sorry…” the younger turtle apologized, reclaiming the container from his brother’s ankle.
Raph growled, wrinkling his brow and shaking his head, trying to make the fleeting thought he’d had come back to him. It probably didn’t help that his gaze kept being drawn to April’s shell, and the odd way it sculpted to her feminine form. He traced the figure-8 outline of it down to her tail as it swayed slightly with each step she took, then shook himself. No, April’s ass was not what he was trying to remember… It was… something else, he knew, but what? The harder he tried to grasp at it, the more it eluded him, and the more it eluded him, the more it pissed him off. He sighed in annoyance, turning to Mikey. “You ever get the feeling you forgot something really important?” Mikey took a breath, about to answer when Raph interrupted. “Nevermind, of course you have…”
Officer Terrance Boyd stepped out of his patrol car at the northwest corner of Central Park. He and his partner, Matt Young, had responded to a call about an out-of-control unauthorized fireworks show in the park. What he found instead was a broken-down and abandoned carousel and a very strange collection of animals in a pen bordered by one of the park’s ornamental hedges. A pair of piglets and some pygmy goats nibbled at a mangled sack of potatoes. An ostrich approached him from the side and attempted a peck at his badge. “Whoa there, champ. That’s not for you!” Giving up on the badge and taking interest in one of the officer’s shirt buttons instead, the ostrich pecked at him twice more. Boyd smacked it lightly in the head. “Get off, or I’m fining you for attempted theft and assault on an officer!” He told it mockingly and shoved it away. “Dumb animal… Matt!”
“Yeah, Terr?” Matt, examining the burnt-out carousel, called in response.
“Head back to the car and call a couple of animal control guys down here. Tell ‘em they’re gonna need a horse trailer for the camel and the ostrich and… hell, I dunno… We’ve got about fifteen medium-sized animals here. And we’re gonna have to have this hunk of junk taken apart and impounded…”
“You know we have phones for that these days, right?”
“I know, but I want you to grab my coffee for me while you’re over there.”
The other officer rolled his eyes and walked back to where they’d parked on an access road, exiting through the convenient burnt gap in the hedge. “What a mess,” he commented. “Why do people always have to destroy nice things?”
Boyd nodded knowingly, but was then distracted by a tug on his pant leg. He glanced down to see a pygmy goat kid nibbling at his ankle. He bent down and picked it up. “Hey there, little guy!”
“Meeh!” the goat bleated at him.
“ ’Meeh!’ ” Boyd echoed back at it with a chuckle. “Don’t you worry… we’ll take you somewhere they can take care of you.” He put the little goat down and gazed at the assortment of animals in the little pen, shaking his head. “Hooligans…” His eye touched on the container labeled as hand sanitizer. “Eh, can’t be too careful…” he muttered, dispensing a few pumps of the liquid into his hands and rubbing it on thoroughly. It burned, and not just on the skin—it felt like it was going right through to the bone. He expected it to stop any second, but it quickly worsened, the sensation not confining itself to his hands but running up his arms and then all across his body. He let out a panicked yelp, then a series of agonized screams as his body wrenched around, reforming itself, tearing out of his clothing at the legs and chest. His face and ears elongated, and long spiraling horns erupted from his head, twisting upward. His feet split in half, busting through his shoes and forming into hard hooves, and coarse brown and white hair covered his body, forming a thicker mane behind his head.
Among all the other piercing agony, he didn’t feel his mind alter, but as the pain withdrew, the first thing he knew was rage. He kicked the animal pen apart with his cloven hooves, wrenched the “hand sanitizer” loose with his horns, and flung it away. It crashed down on the mud path, the mutagen spilling out of the broken plastic container and soaking ineffectually into the dirt.
The massive goat mutant leapt agilely over the hedgerow with a bellow, scaring a pair of joggers, who fled back the way they came with terrified screams. He tore a topiaried tree apart, and was about to continue to destroy the landscaping when a voice caught his attention.
“Boyd? Terry? Where’d you get to?”
Boyd leapt back over the hedge. Young dropped the cup of coffee in his hand as he backed away from the eight-foot tall mutant goat. Boyd’s eyes fell on the paper cup as it splashed its contents on the ground. He growled, glowering at the other officer. “Litterers,” he said in a voice much deeper and more gravelly than his own, “…will be prosecuted!”
Young continued to stare at the mutant, shaking as he drew his piece and took aim at the giant goat creature. Boyd spotted the weapon, spun, and deftly kicked the gun out of his partner’s hand. Matt yelped and grasped his wrist as it was bent in a direction it wasn’t supposed to bend. “Assault with a deadly weapon,” the mutant rumbled, “carries a stiff penalty.” He reached up and tore a bough off an overhanging willow, stripping the limbs off with his other hand.
As the mutant raised the branch above its head, a glint of gold on the creature’s chest caught Young’s eye. He focused on the shape on the torn dark blue material… a shield. “Boyd?” he said in realization, then had to roll to his right to avoid the creature’s improvised whip. “Boyd! Terry!” he shouted.
The goat mutant froze, responding to his name. “Young…” he identified with a growl.
Matt nodded. “Terr, what happened to you?!” he all but whispered.
A moment of lucidity touched Boyd’s mind. This was his partner; you didn’t attack your partner. But he had, and part of him still wanted to. He stomped a foot into the earth in frustration. He had to remove himself before he tried to attack Young again. Glancing around desperately, his eyes fell on the burnt gap in the hedge, and beyond it… a sewer grating! He sprang toward it with a great leap, hooves clopping on the concrete as he landed. Dropping to all-fours, he hooked the grate with his horns and threw it, not caring where it landed. It crashed down the access road as Boyd slipped down the gap and disappeared into the sewers.
Matt scrambled toward the grating after him. “Boyd! Boyd! Terry!” he shouted down into the tunnels, receiving no answer other than the rapidly diminishing clip-clop of hooves.
Three weeks ago:
Donnie scrambled backward from the chained turtle before him, then nearly passed out as his brain screamed in agony. It had been risky, and downright stupid to try to synergize with her in her crazed state, and he had nearly paid the price for trying for one last mental contact as her drives had nearly taken him over and attempted to use his body to rape hers. He’d managed to tear away, and through the burning fire behind his eyes, he grabbed up the syringe of retro-mutagen and plunged it into April’s shoulder. She began to shriek in pain as her very cells tore apart to reconfigure themselves and her body rearranged itself back to her human form.
He slipped out of Master Splinter’s study as the rat mutant entered to drape his red kimono around the naked girl, but he didn’t make it far before she came running after him, intercepting his path.
“Donnie… I’m so sorry, I never wanted to hurt you… I didn’t have control over it, I couldn’t help it… I couldn’t stop!” she blurted out all at once. “I’m sorry, Donnie! I love you!” The turtle stood motionless, not even seeming to take in her words. “Say something!” she pleaded.
He turned away, refusing to meet her gaze and show her the pain in his heart. “April… please go.” She choked off a sob, but did as he asked and fled.
Donatello himself tried to make his way to his bedroom, but his feet felt like lead. He had striven so hard to get her back to normal, to give her back her freedom with the vague hope that somehow he could still be a part of her life, to find some way of stopping the nymphomania that had such a grip on her… and to fulfill her wish to remain a turtle. Now, at this moment, he never wanted to see her again. For two months, they had known such dazzling pleasure, and a closeness that other couples could only dream of achieving… But in the last week, it had all fallen apart so disastrously… and the wounds she left on Donnie’s heart were the deepest.
For three weeks, he managed to avoid her, always managing to be out when she came for training or patrols, or when she came to cook dinner on Thursdays. His brothers were supportive when Donnie explained what had happened between them. Leonardo had more or less sensed that Don needed time away from April, and always granted his requests to bow out of patrols or hold practice earlier in the day while she was still in school. Raph and Mikey grasped the severity of the situation when Don had explained his last encounter with her. While Raph still thought that Donnie should stop being a coward and tell April to buzz off and Mikey remained optimistic that the two would reconcile, neither pushed the issue, and Donnie was thankful for that. Maybe he could start to forget her….
Today:
Donnie was leaving the abandoned asylum building, having just checked up on their friends in the Mutant Alliance, when he received a text from April. She had texted several times daily since her reversion and return to the surface, and while Donnie read them all, he refused to answer… until this one: Urgent: NEED to talk to u. Pls see me.
He’d agreed to meet her, but part of him still wanted to back out. Raph was right, though… he needed to confront her, or he’d always be living in fear….
And the next thing he knew, she was crying in his arms; instead of confronting her, he was comforting her. Somehow, he couldn’t help it. His fear of her dissolved as he consoled her remorse. It hadn’t been her fault that she couldn’t stop herself with her inhibitions put on hold by the flaw in her mutation, and Donnie expressed his own guilt at not seeing the problem soon enough, and denying there was one when Leo pointed it out to him… His love for her had entirely blinded him, and he’d gone willingly.
Fear seized him in a sudden realization. “Jesus, April… Did I… Was I raping you every time we…?!”
April’s jaw dropped. “No!” she breathed, her voice nearly deserting her. “No! My poor, sweet Donnie! Don’t you ever think that!” she told him, nearly in tears herself. “I wanted you! Every time… I wanted you to! Just… some of them would have been against my better judgment and humility, is all… ”
Donnie felt awkward asking, but the question needed to be aired. “So, Raph…”
“Raph was… convenient. I needed someone right there and then, and since you were being difficult…” she trailed off, turning mournful eyes back to him, guilt evident in her face. “I didn’t do it to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you…”
But she had. The fact that she had seduced Raph with false tears when Donnie had denied her insatiable lust ached like an reopened wound, but it wasn’t one he was going to allow to fester. The past was the past; he could let it go.
“I really did want to stay with you as a turtle,” she continued.
Sighing, he turned his head away from her. “I wish I hadn’t had to break my promise to you. If things were normal, I’d’ve fought to let you stay… but things are never normal, are they?”
“Not around you guys, they’re not.”
Donnie grimaced. “…which is why I want you to go back to your life up top. I don’t want to be the millstone around your neck. I want you to be—“
“—free, you’ve said. You’ve got a very limited definition of freedom, you know.”
He’d been taken aback at this, but she’d explained her choice to stay with him, and she’d been adamant. “I’m not leaving my soul-mate. Period.”
Donnie’s heart soared, but he could only think about how difficult their relationship would be, given their circumstances. “This is going to make things really complicated… Our lives couldn’t possibly get crazier, could they?” She only answered with fidgety silence, so he teased her, prodding her with an elbow. “You missed your cue… This is the part where you say you’re pregnant.” She gave him an open-mouthed look as her words caught in her throat, and realization dawned that he’d hit the nail on the head. “You’re pregnant?”
“I’ve decided to keep it,” she confirmed quietly.
Joy exploded through every part of Donnie’s being. He and April were going to have a child together! The girl, nay, the young woman he loved was going to bear his son or daughter, and something about that made him inordinately happy. Perhaps it was that this was the product of their love, despite how brief their period of compatibility had been… made that much more precious by its singularity, as they would never be able to reproduce by normal means again; perhaps because of the miracle that he and April had been granted to be together at all, despite the drawbacks, and that that, in turn, had produced this second little miracle. And maybe because part of him looked forward to the great adventure of parenthood. He hauled her to her feet and grabbled her around the waist, spinning her around wildly on the platform. “I’m gonna be a father!!” he hollered. She shrieked with laughter as he gave her a toss in the air and caught her again, planting beaky turtle kisses across her face. “When? How far along are you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Could be a few weeks, could be near three months… I haven’t gone to the doctor’s yet…” Her face grew somber for a moment. “There’s a chance… that… it’s Raph’s…”
He hid a scowl, instead giving a dismissive shake of the head. She must have been with Raphael longer than he’d thought… but even if the baby was Raph’s, did it make a difference? Donnie would love it all the same. It would probably give Raph no joy to learn if the child was his by his and April’s chance encounter. The very thought of fatherhood would probably give Donnie’s more volatile brother an ulcer. He decided Raph didn’t need to know. “Doesn’t matter. I’m claiming it as mine,” he told April.
She beamed, and they stared into each other’s eyes as their mental connection fired up, familiar as ever, strong, beautiful emotions singing back and forth between them. Huh, it still works, he noticed.
Sure it does, April thought back. Our souls still know each other.
The two professed their love for one another aloud, then Donnie captured one of her hands in his and dragged her excitedly along behind him. “Come on!”
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Of Hearts and Shells: Turtle Doves