The first time the rat saw the little ones, it was through the bars of a laboratory cage. The men in white coats had brought them in around his lunchtime. Was it any wonder the natural predator in him reared its hungry head as he observed them? Small, squeaking, squirming creatures much like the other experiments he had been fed—young mice, chicks hardly out of incubation, lizards and the like—when the tests to which they were subjected eventually proved unsuccessful.

He had never tasted turtles before. He could imagine they would taste something like the lizards but imaginary it would remain. Against all odds, to both his and the white coats’ surprise as they observed, these test subjects lasted longer than the others. Long enough to grow.

As they outgrew the confines of their cage, he watched intently. He listened to the others’ chirps of dismay, either too high or too low for the humans’ hearing, as the largest of them was pulled away, allocated to a cage of his own. He hadn’t known turtles—or reptiles of any kind—to be particularly emotional creatures, prone to getting attached to each other. Perhaps the tests had affected their temperaments.

That much had been changed in him as well. His testing had begun before he even opened his eyes as a pup. He did not wake in a nest with warm milk and other soft rat brethren as most would have. He awoke to find himself scraping at a cold metal floor and pried his infant eyes open to these bars. The leader of the white coats had wanted to observe him as he grew in isolation. Perhaps this was that moment for the turtles too.

Honestly, they should have been grateful they spent so long together in the first place. The biggest one and his individual cage were moved to sit alongside the rat on the other counter. He was hissing and grunting anxiously as the others got further and further away, while the rat pressed his snout through the slats of his cage to consider him more closely.

He alone would make a sizeable meal if the opportunity were presented to him but if they had lasted this long, he had a feeling the white coats intended them to stick around. With that in mind the rat scrabbled at the bars of his cage, lashed his tail and hissed back at him. They may not speak the same tongue but a hiss was a clear enough warning to keep the noise down for his sensitive ears. With that being his first realization of the rat’s presence, the baby turtle startled and hastily scuttled to the other side of his cage, curling into his shell, breathing heavily.

The rat watched.

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Breathing.

Although painfully laced with smoke and ash and a clogging fluid that spattered his snout, he was still breathing. If he thought the little turtles’ squalling day in and day out was painful, it was nothing compared to the world-shattering boom of the explosion that had rocked the laboratory.

But he was still breathing. As was the man in what used to be a white coat, now scorched gray to black, the miniscule, labored rise and fall of his chest still just visible through the haze of smoke. The turtles too had survived. Their trilling cries were nearly drowned out by alarms and staticky shouts over that crackling communication device hooked up near the ceiling. They were all flailing about on the floor in the same oozy fluid that seeped into the rat’s fur now. One of them was overturned on his shell, legs pedaling frantically as the biggest one nudged him with his beak, weakly, dazedly trying to help him roll over. The other two cowered in their bigger brother’s shadow.

The rat watched them in a daze of his own. Everything ached. Every breath was fire. His skin crawled under the damp of the unknown chemical that clung to him. His nose quivered, burning with it. His tail curled in tight and trembling against his body.

He wished he had others to help him up.

But that was not for him. His lot was to scrape at the floor just as he had the bottom of his cage, scrape himself together, claw his way onward.

He could not pull himself entirely upright on his hind legs yet. Instead he crawled. He crawled as the turtles crawled, on all fours, through the torn papers and shards of glass and puddles of this strange, cloying substance. And blood. The nearby human’s. The stench of burnt flesh and hair was overwhelming; the rat’s vision swam with it as he made his way slowly but surely across the lab.

The overturned turtle pedaled his legs all the faster when he eventually spotted him approaching. No doubt he sensed this was a natural predator, a creature with more power than he. The others squeaked in horror, torn between cringing back or clustering around their fallen brother.

The rat watched.

He considered.

They were all still so young, vulnerable. In this state he did not have the strength to attack but they could not know that. There was some satisfaction to be had in the fact that these little ones still saw him as powerful, that he was higher on the food chain, despite living in a cage even longer than they had. But the humans were more powerful still.

It was not the turtles’ fault that they were in this position. They were not meant to be here. The humans had done this to them, plucking them from their nest as they had the rat, to be probed and played with as they pleased.

This environment was not natural. Thus…natural rights of a predator over prey may not apply here.

This was not…right.

Right and wrong were concepts far loftier than the rat should be able to comprehend. That too was…not quite right. But he was always a clever creature. He must have picked up something along the way, observing the humans for so long just as they observed him.  

What would a human do?

If the burnt, bloody human in the white coat were awake and unharmed, he would probably continue to watch, clinically detached, to see what the animals would do.

The rat did not want to be like the humans.

He wanted to be better. He wanted to be more.

He wanted to take some vestige of power into his own paws and do whatever he pleased with it, natural or not.

Thus decided, he painstakingly licked his forepaws clean of the human’s tainted blood, fur prickling as he suppressed a shudder. He would never develop a taste for human bloodshed, of that much he was certain. It was disgusting. They were disgusting. Then he picked up this power, willpower—and the turtle with it.

The baby squealed in even greater terror as he was pried free of the ooze, no doubt expecting the rat to start gnawing at him, peeling the still-soft platelets of his underdeveloped plastron and shell at any moment. When he was instead deposited onto a cleaner portion of the floor, he froze.

The rat cocked his head, flicking an ear as globs of this irritating, tingly goo dripped to clog his hearing.

The turtle blinked, then again.

No one had ever looked at him like that before, as if truly seeing the rat for the first time, not just observing. Perhaps it was just an effect of his sockets’ wide, round structure, perhaps it was because he was just an infant, so much smaller and so much more innocent, but there was a sense of something in his eyes as he gazed up, up, up at him. The rat would later come to know it as awe.

He did not have a name for it yet but it felt right. Through lending a benevolent paw to this little creature, he had…achieved something. Won something. Become something. More. More than the humans and their cages had allowed him to be thus far. Though he teetered momentarily, the rat finally managed to push onto his hind legs, rising to meet whatever it was the turtle saw.

When he moved to further inspect the human, he was taken aback to find the turtles coming along—cautious, clumsy, dribbling ooze as they trailed in his wake.

When the other white coats burst onto the scene to take the human away—to eat or to treat, the rat did not know—he was even more startled when the turtles shied behind him. It didn’t do them much good in the end, as the humans simply scruffed the rat to get him out of the way.

The rat hated being scruffed, he always had, but the ferocity of his thrashing, snarling struggle now was spurred on by More. He deserved better than this easy, careless manhandling, he deserved More—and so did the turtles, for seeing something in him. Something powerful when they were helpless. That was More than the humans ever saw. They were squalling again, calling out for it as the humans scooped them up to be cleaned and re-caged. For all his struggling in gloved hands, the rat could not intervene.

The crying did not stop and they did not calm until their new cage was placed next to the rat’s in an unfamiliar, undamaged laboratory. The rat perked up. He watched as the little ones clamored over each other, stepping on their biggest brother’s shell to swarm the side of their cage closest to his. When he used the bars to pull himself up, to stand over them, they chirruped and sighed.

There was something More. Not just in him but in them for him now. They saw it. They wanted it. They wanted him.

This was not natural, prey seeking out a predator as if he were their protection. Their…power.

But it was More than he’d ever had, More than he’d ever been before. The rat decided—decided, made a choice of his own volition!—that he liked this feeling. However strange, it felt right. Which thereby meant he must want them too—or at least need them around to maintain this sense of More.

He must seek them too, reaching out through the bars across the divide. They had no extremities (yet) to reach back but a couple of them chirped an emotion of some sort (longing), butting their tiny beaks against the bars.

Over the days that followed, it was like an experiment of his own. He reached, they responded. He flicked his ears or tail, they reacted. He pushed on the confines of his own cage, they pushed back against theirs. It was interesting to take any sort of action and get a reaction from them in return. It was…gratifying. Give and be given. They hung on his every move and in any way the different compositions of their minds and bodies allowed, they imitated. They wanted whatever he had, they wanted to be what he was, and he preened under the attention, the attachment he had never been afforded by anyone else.

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It wasn’t long before they all outgrew their cages entirely. That was new. He was a mature rat already; he hadn’t expected to ever get any bigger but when he did, the turtles were close behind.

They imitated as they had since that day. Somehow they grew forepaws with individual digits of their own with which to reach for him. They tried to stand on their hind legs like he did—and often failed when the weight of their shells tipped them over but the effort was what counted. It amused the rat, watching them strive for what he had, and then the belated realization that he recognized the concept of amusement, could identify and feel it, pleased him even More. He tittered and chittered with it. The turtles mimicked him.

Their development seemed to fascinate the humans too; they took each of them in turn, subjecting them to tests as they always had, and the rat also came to realize that he was no longer complacent about this part of their life.

It irritated him. The turtles’ growth was not for the humans, it was for him. He led, they followed. They squalled, he soothed with his mere presence. They were weak that day in the aftermath of the explosion and he showed them strength. He showed them More, they became More by his example. They were not for the humans to do with as they pleased; the rat did as he pleased and the turtles imprinted and imitated to please him. They were for him.

They were his.

Until now he had never had something for himself without the humans being the ones to so graciously offer it. The more he thought on this, laying claim to something of his own accord, the more right it felt. Natural. Rats were naturally territorial creatures.

The next time a human in a white coat came to take one of his turtles away, the rat bristled, gnashed his teeth and positioned his now much larger body between them. Large enough now to do More and suddenly, strangely growing even larger, looming over the human, who like the turtles looked on with wide-eyed fascination. Unlike the turtles, however, it was also tinged with fear.

Good. Looking down on the humans who had always made him feel small, while his little turtles looked up at him with that awe. That felt right. Powerful.

When the human called in reinforcements, the biggest of the turtles latched his forepaws—no, his fingers—deep into the rat’s fur, tugged fiercely to pull himself up onto his hind legs, and followed his lead up, up, up as much as he was able. His scales stretched and shuddered like shifting tectonic plates under the strain of this new power, new cracks carved like a grid into his skin, but ultimately there he was—much smaller still but standing with him, echoing the rat’s every growl, baring his new baby teeth.

The human who had started it all, who had brought in the ooze and triggered the explosion, looked on from the doorway behind the safety of the other humans’ bodies. The rat’s warning growl dropped to a warier hiss, the phantom metal tang of the man’s blood thick on his tongue. However accidental the explosion may or may not have been, something like satisfaction sparked in scarred eyes to see its result.

One of the smaller turtles narrowed his bright eyes in return, growing brighter, chiming in with an oddly croaky, crackling hiss of his own—and then the lights went out.

The rat would have hoped to be out the door with his turtles by the time the humans managed to reroute their power and bring everything back online but collecting all of the little ones at once proved harder than he anticipated. When he led they were meant to follow but while the big one clung to him with painful strength, the others devolved into chaos.

The one who had taken down the power couldn’t be touched without a stinging shock, much less picked up. The rat promptly learned that the hard way. Another had inconceivably ended up in the air, flailing and crying as he drifted against his will toward the ceiling fan. Only then did the big one let go of the rat to lunge after his brother but he couldn’t make himself anywhere near tall enough to reach. He tripped right into the humans’ waiting arms, although he flattened a couple of them underneath him along the way.

And as soon as one of the humans managed to dodge past them, the last little turtle fell even flatter and even more alarming: he simply melted into a decidedly un-turtle-like puddle on the floor, like the very ooze that had touched them. As soon as the others registered that puddle where their brother was meant to be, object permanence abandoned their infant senses and they screamed at the top of their lungs. Admittedly, for the first time in his life, the rat froze. That was his turtle. What had they done to his turtle?

What was happening to them?

The scorched, scarred, shredded human knew; the rat had seen it in his eyes. He knew More than the rat did and oh, that was so much more than irritating. That was infuriating. That was a power greater than his. More than him. That couldn’t stand.

He needed it. But for that…he would need to stand down, however temporarily. He needed to stay. They all did. If the humans were as fascinated with his and the turtles’ development as they seemed, perhaps their tests would prove insightful for the rat too. He needed the answers just as much as they did.

He would take the answers or he would find a way to demand them. He would observe the humans as they observed him and his turtles, learn More of their ways, learn to play the game of life on their level. They were not the humans’ possessions. They were his. They deserved to be treated as humans were and better. But reaching a place where they could stand on the same level—and then higher—would take more time. Growth. Understanding. Knowledge was power.

When he stood down (for now), his turtles followed. They pulled themselves together. The blob of turtle goo bubbled and snapped back into itself—himself, his. As soon as he was stable, the rat gathered him up for safekeeping, then stretched even further to snatch the other out of the air. The big one shrank to slip free of the humans holding him down, crawling as the rat had crawled to them that fateful day of the fire, albeit with far more desperation. The last of them dimmed, swayed, chuffed exhaustedly and clung to the rat’s leg for support.

They knew beyond a shadow of doubt where and with whom they belonged. That knowledge was power too.

He had not realized until it was a little too late that by making them his, he made the reverse true in the same stroke: the turtles saw him as theirs. Rats were naturally territorial but babies were naturally selfish. If he was theirs, they saw him as their only source of anything and everything. Claiming them saddled him with an unanticipated share of responsibility. Every need of theirs was his to put up with and solve and right now all they had to offer in return was more neediness under the name of affection. Ever clinging, ever pushing themselves at him for his care. His…love.

Could a rat feel such a thing for reptiles? He wasn’t sure yet. He was amused by them, he appreciated them, he was certainly interested, but love? Letting them claim so much of his heart and time and effort and resources? It was just another form of possession, wasn’t it? No one was allowed to own him.

Ah, but they had no loftier aspirations now than to eat whatever he gave them, nuzzle his nose or hold his paw or share his warmth. Conveniently the latter serviced him too, sharing the warmth of a nest he never had. They didn’t even know what they had or how good they had it. He knew better. If the burden of caring was the price to pay for keeping, he could forgive them that. For now. Give and be given. Eventually they would pay him back, of that much he was certain.