AN: Woo! A promise made is a promise kept, even if only barely. *Falls over*

I must say, I was both surprised and touched by the responses I received for the last chapter. They were all overwhelmingly kind, and I'm so glad my scribblings still have the power to entertain. Thank you all so much!

This installment was unbetaed, so please feel free to point out any grammar errors or fiddly bits I might have missed. I need all the help I can get. :-)

Since it seems to give me the proper incentive, I'm going to make y'all another promise: I'll have the next chapter out by the end of February.

Without further ado, gentle readers, I hope y'all enjoy. Happy Holidays!

The cell phone had been wedged in the crook of my neck and shoulder long enough for my ear to go numb, and my mother still showed no signs of stopping. I risked holding the phone away long enough to stretch out my neck, poking experimentally at my ear in an attempt to regain some feeling.

My poor, abused extremity had barely begun to tingle when I heard the faint timbre of her voice change, taking on a questioning lilt. I hurriedly jammed the phone back into place just in time to hear her ask, "You still there, dear?"

"Yeah, mom. Just shifting position." I belatedly did just that, the wooden porch swing creaking as I stretched out my good leg. "You were saying about Aunt Julia?"

"Oh, it's not important. I've been prattling on for too long as it is. How have you been?"

My leg aches, Leo's still on a coffee break from reality, and Raph is off to possibly start a war. Oh, and we're all kinda homeless now. How about you?

"Not too bad," I said, injecting just the right amount of cheer. "I'm sort of… on vacation right now, actually. I thought it'd be good to have a change of scenery, so I drove out to Casey's farm on Friday."

It was mostly a lie, but a chance to enjoy the stillness of the farm had been a bright spot in this mess we'd gotten ourselves into. If I wasn't destined to spend most of this lovely Sunday worrying about Raph, gone for thirty-six hours now, it might have actually been relaxing.

She sighed in that long-suffering way only another mother could copy. "April, you know you shouldn't be driving for that long by yourself. What if you'd cramped up, or fallen asleep at the wheel? You know how-"

"Mom, relax. I didn't make the trip alone. I brought my friends with me."

There was a tense pause, and I knew then that I should've kept my mouth shut. "Your friends. The ones you don't talk about. The ones whose pictures I've never seen, whose names I don't know." She sighed again, and I felt a pang as I imagined her touching her temple with two fingers; a gesture of frustration older than even me. "I hate to be blunt, baby, but you've always had a knack for getting into trouble. It seems to have gotten ten times worse, though, right about the same moment you met those mysterious friends of yours."

"They haven't done anything wrong!" I snapped, my voice sharper than I'd intended. I took a deep breath and watched the morning light peeking through the tree branches, making an effort to settle my ruffled feathers. "Sorry to yell, but they really haven't. They would never do anything to hurt me."

"You say that, but how am I to know?" The aggravation in her voice was years old, but it was the love threaded through her words that made it hurt. "You're so secretive now, baby. There's this huge part of your life that I don't know anything about, and it's obvious your friends lie at the heart of it all. You try to hide it from me, but that doesn't mean I haven't noticed how stressed you are all the time, how sad you've been. It would make sense, but I can tell it's not only about your… injuries. Casey's murder doesn't quite cover it, either."

I sucked in a breath at the mention of Casey's name, fighting a fresh stab of grief and wallowing in frustration at my utter inability to explain. My mother was an intelligent, perceptive woman, and she'd always been able to tell when I was lying, even if it was just by omission. No matter how much it pained me to keep quiet, though, or how badly I needed her advice, I just couldn't confide in her about this. 'My friends' would be as close as she would ever come to knowing them.

The silence between us had begun to stretch to painful lengths, and to my shame, I was relieved that it was my mother who crumbled first.

"I'm sorry, my dear," she said quietly, tiredly. "I didn't mean to rub salt in the wound, I just… I don't understand, and it makes me worried. You've been through so much recently, and even now, I can tell you're suffering. I want to protect you so bad it makes me crazy, but how can I do that if you won't give me the whole picture?"

Even if it didn't directly violate the vow I'd made to Splinter, the 'whole picture' would take days to explain, and it would probably get me committed. And if not that, then one of my sins by omission might be enough to force my straight-laced, law-abiding mother to call the cops, since I knew a lot more about Casey's murder than I'd ever explained to the police.

Poor Raph had tried to make Casey's death look like an accident, both to save his family unnecessary pain and to keep him from being implicated in the explosion that had leveled a building and destroyed our world. He was partially successful, since the 'terrorist bombing' and the fire at Casey's apartment were treated as unrelated incidents. It was difficult to hide the fact that the valve on his antiquated gas stove had been jammed open, however, and when his on-again, off-again girlfriend was found at a hospital a few hours later, burned and broken and three-quarters dead, it hadn't taken long for the police to put two and two together and make five.

I'd initially been labeled 'a person of interest' in the burgeoning criminal investigation, but to my immense relief, a background check and a few hellish interviews at my hospital bed had convinced them otherwise. They now believed I had no memory of being hurt or of arriving at the hospital, and ever since then, they had treated me with a kindness and compassion I wasn't sure I deserved. As best as they were able, they had kept me abreast of the investigation, and I'd had little choice but to appear intrigued by every one of their increasingly inaccurate theories.

Their latest one involved Casey's history of taking matters into his own hands when it came to injustice; a personality trait that had gotten him arrested on more than one occasion. Drawing from that, they theorized that he had tried to play vigilante with a particularly nasty new gang; one that had decided to enact a very final form of revenge. How I had wound up on the hospital's doorstep was still a mystery, but the current notion was that, as unintended collateral damage, I'd been rescued by a sympathetic member of the group.

My sweet, crazy Casey, picked off by a couple of street punks. He would've been insulted at the very idea.

"I'm sorry," I said finally. "I really am. I want to tell you everything, but I made a promise a long time ago. We're each only as good as our word, after all. You're the one who taught me that."

My mom snorted; an inelegant sound that surprised a grin out of me. "I never thought I'd regret raising you right."

"Just trust me, mamma," I said affectionately. "My friends have done nothing wrong, and my life is so much better with them in it."

"You become more like your father every day, my dear. Okay, then. We'll leave it lie for now." The 'for now' didn't exactly inspire confidence, but true to her word, she changed the subject immediately. "So how's Northampton? Are the leaves still clinging to the trees?"

I relaxed gratefully and shifted the phone to my other ear, preparing for round two of our latest gab session, which seemed destined not to end in tears this time. I had missed the easy way we used to talk to each other, each of us soothed by the sound of the other's voice.

"Some of them are, yeah," I replied. "A good portion has started to decorate the clearing behind the house, though. The grass is starting to look like a patchwork quilt…"

Mom had said her goodbyes at about ten, and the day was sliding gently into the afternoon by the time I took a break from worrying in a furrow into the carpet. Determined to stop obsessing over the Raph-shaped hole in my life (gone for nearly two days now. Call me, damn it!), I fed Leo, poked listlessly at the Franken-computer still taking up most of the table, and did a little light cleaning. Afterward, I gathered up Leo, and we sat together in the den room, listening to a slightly fuzzy marathon of Elvis songs on the radio.

Knowing that it needed to be done, I rolled up the sleeves on my sweater, stripped off the glove that protected my left hand, and grabbed a small bottle of lotion from the physical therapy kit in my backpack. Humming tunelessly to 'Blue Suede Shoes,' I pulled Leo's arm into my lap and began massaging the lotion into the burn scars on his arm, which began above his wrist and laddered all the way up to his shoulder. It was hard going, since the scars were thick and his arm was a sculpture of corded muscle even now, but this wasn't something that could wait. Raph was usually the one to do it, twice a day, without fail, but since he wasn't here-

Not thinking about that, remember?

I was insulting hound dogs with Elvis and kneading my tired fingers into the tangle of scars at the base of Leo's throat when my phone began to ring. Grumbling to myself, I fished the cell out of my pocket with two fingers, dropped it into my lap, and clumsily knuckled it open. I hit the speaker button, leaving behind a greasy print, and got back to work on the skin just above Leo's plastron. "Hello?" I grunted.

"April."

The familiar timbre of my name sent a shock through me, and I grinned like an idiot down at my lap. "Raph! It's good to hear your voice. I was starting to get worried."

Raph must have been smoking a cigarette, because he let out a loud, lazy exhale before saying, "'Starting?' I thought that was your default setting."

"Ha, ha. Funny turtle," I replied, tense muscles I'd barely been aware of loosening in my shoulders. The sarcasm in his voice had been heavy enough to use as a paperweight, and by the sound of it alone I knew that he was just fine. "So tell me what happened. Did you find Stockman's place? Which company was it?"

"Ecio's Stockpile and Trade. I can't know for sure until we crack the place open, but the whole building screamed of Stockman. Motherfucker was always too flashy for his own good."

My hands paused at Leo's jawline, and I felt my heart quicken a half measure. "'We?' I take it you made your decision regarding Karai."

Another long exhale. "Yeah. We're best buddies now."

I snorted and continued working on Leo, gently massaging the delicate tissue around his mouth, in the hopes that these ministrations would someday ease the involuntary, lopsided frown that marred his face. I paused briefly to study him, just in case his brother's voice had managed to coax him closer to the surface of his own mind. His expression remained blank, however, with his eyes locked at some point beyond my left shoulder. It was an effort not to let my disappointment show.

"So you trust her?" I asked.

"Heh. Never. But she's got the manpower and a plan that's just stupid enough to work. So we'll see." He paused tensely, and I was struck by a mental image of him crouched in the shadow of an overhanging roof, the red glow of his cigarette highlighting one bony knuckle; the only visible part of him. "The party starts at midnight."

Letting my hands drop to my lap, I closed my eyes and attempted to rub some life back into my aching fingers. "Be careful, Raph," I breathed. "Be so damn careful."

"I'll do what I can, but no promises." Something in his voice changed then, taking on a grimmer edge, and he said, "I do need one from you, though. I'm banking on coming out of this with just a few new and exciting scars, but we both know things don't always turn out the way we plan." He hesitated, and what he said next left me cold and fumbling for the phone. "I want you to promise me you'll stay at the farmhouse and keep Leo safe, in case I get myself killed."

Too late, I grabbed my cell and hit the speaker button. Pressing the phone to my ear, I levered myself to my feet and limped away from the couch, attempting to shield Leo from his brother's words.

"Raph, what the hell?" I hissed. "How can you ask that?"

"I'm not asking," he replied, his voice as implacable as stone, "and beating around the bush was never my style. I need your word."

I bit absently at a knuckle on my damaged hand, fighting for calm. As much as I didn't want to acknowledge that he might not come back, how could I deny him this?

"I- God, Raph. You have it. Of course you do. If something happens, I swear I'll take care of him for the rest of our lives. He's my family, too."

"I know. I just needed to hear you say it." There was a pause, and I heard the tinny sound of a siren's wail from several hundred miles away. "You've… been good to us, you know. To me. You don't get-"

Somehow, this attempt at emotional sincerity scared me more than anything else he'd said so far. God help us, he must really be worried.

"Don't start with the sap, or I'll start thinking you're a pod person," I cut in quickly, ignoring the way my gut was twisting up in knots. "Just come back alive. That's all any of us needs, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said with an edge of laughter. The lightness ended quickly, though, and when he spoke next, he was once again solemn. "I'm turning off my cell now. The next twelve hours are going to be busy, and I can't afford distractions. See you later, April."

It wasn't exactly a promise, but I knew it was the best I was going to get.

"See you," I said, an instant before the line went dead.

I swallowed around the lump in my throat and dropped the phone back into my pocket. Taking a seat at Leo's side again, I squeezed a dot of lotion onto my trembling hand and began to work on my own scars. Gentle circular motions first, then up and down, and finally side and side, just like my therapist had taught me.

"He'll be okay, Leo," I murmured, keeping my eyes down. "He'll be okay."

There was no way I'd be able to sleep by the time midnight rolled around, so I put Leo to bed a little before six, hoping we could both catch a few hours sleep before it became time to drive myself crazy with worry. It took more effort than usual to coax him into slumber, but he eventually drifted off to the sound of fallen leaves whispering over the grass beneath his window. The afternoon was a little cool, but I threw an extra blanket over his feet and left the window open a crack, anyway. Leo had always enjoyed the feel of wind on his face.

In better times, my room had been the most coveted in the entire house, since it had a small television positioned at the foot of the bed, connected to an oversized DVD player. I was feeling a little restless still, despite the tiredness pulling at the edges of my mind, so I threw in a movie before I wrestled out of my leg brace and slipped under the covers. The familiar opening strains of 'It's a Wonderful Life" quickly filled the room, and I smiled as I propped myself up with several pillows wedged under my back. My mind might never settle enough to let me sleep, but with a beloved story to keep me company, it was almost guaranteed that I would rest.

Despite my doubts, I must have managed to drift off, because the squeaking of a marker against whiteboard was the next sound I remembered hearing. I straightened in the bed and stretched, blinking in defense against the bright fluorescents that whitewashed the familiar walls of the laboratory. The scutes of Don's shell had turned a flat, pale brown under this light, bisected by ridges of deep shadow, which shifted in time with his busy movements. The marker clutched in his hand left bright red trails of his looping script across the whiteboard.

There was something strange here, something deeply wrong, but my thoughts were still muzzy and slow from sleep, and the sense of not-right soon faded away. Unable to figure out a use for the large, unwieldy brace taking up space by the bed, I swung my legs over and kicked the thing away with a clatter of metal rods. I stood easily and walked over to Don's side, coming to a halt just beyond his shoulder, close enough to hear the gentle cadence of his voice.

"Most of the universe is missing," he murmured, tracing out a series of nines with the marker. "All visible matter in the universe -every one of half a trillion galaxies, with every star and planet that dances within them- only accounts for about two percent of its total mass. The rest is what we call dark matter, which resists all our attempts to see or properly define. Typical, really. So much of what makes us whole is hidden away."

"Atoms are much the same," he continued, tapping at the number scrawled across the whiteboard. He hadn't turned to face me yet, and his voice remained low, as if he was the only one in the room. "Over ninty-nine point nine nine percent of an atom is composed of empty space. For example, if my fist is as big as its nucleus, then the atom itself would be as large as St. Paul's Cathedral, with maybe an electron the size of a moth flitting around the alter. Can you imagine it?"

"Yes," I said to the back of his head. For a reason I couldn't understand, since he was here and had always been, I wrapped my arms around him and rested my cheek against the rough upper ridge of his shell. I whispered, "I miss you."

He still didn't seem to be aware of me, but he reached up and casually rested a hand against his plastron, covering my fingers in a familiar, callused warmth. "If you were to take every atom from every person in the world and force them together, removing the empty space within them, then all those cathedrals would collapse inward, leaving behind a mass about the size of a sugar cube."

The feel of his hand disappeared, and I looked up to see him write out the beginnings of a complex equation. My breath caught as the red numbers quickly turned watery, ran together and pattered against the floor. The marker was gone, and he was finger-painting the equation with a dripping, blood-soaked hand.

"Imagine it," he said obliviously, as I jerked away from him in cold horror. "If the circumstances were just right, I could literally hold the human race in the palm of my hand."

"You're bleeding," I choked out stupidly, wanting to reach out to him but unable to, my fingers tacky and weighted down with blood.

Don finally turned his head to look at me, and he grinned with a mouthful of glistening, red-rimmed teeth.

"Don't worry," he said gently. "Where I went, no one ever runs out."

As I watched blood drip slowly off his chin, I felt something deep within my soul curl in on itself and die. I let out a whimper, and the bright brickwork around me began to crack and crumble like badly fired clay. I turned on my heel and ran, and I was able to burst through one wall as easily as breaking the surface tension of water, fragments of mortar catching briefly in my hair before falling away. Suddenly I was in the den room of my childhood home, watching Raph thread fishing line through a large bone needle.

The horror I had felt during Don's lecture fragmented and fell away like snow, and it didn't return even when Raph drove the needle through the fleshy pad of his right eye ridge. I sat in my father's ratty lounge chair and idly twirled a cigarette pack resting on the nearby end table, watching with mild interest as Raph's needle traveled down to pierce his lower lid.

He began to sew his right eye shut with a series of neat, criss-cross stitches, and I asked, for some reason still unafraid, "Why are you doing that?"

"Don't need it anymore." He shrugged and snipped off the end of the line with a pair of scissors. "And if you break that, I won't need the other one, either."

I was confused for a second; until I looked down to see the glass turtle spinning beneath my lazy fingers, its tiny shell and delicate feet blackened, warped and pitted by some disaster I should have been able to remember. Terror surfaced then, enveloping me like quicksand, and I fumbled badly as I tried to cup the whirling glass figurine in my hand. It skittered off the table and hit the floor with a sound like dying, shattering to diamond dust and scattering new constellations across the dark blue tiles.

"Well, fuck," Raph muttered. With a sigh, he began to thread another needle.

Ignoring my pleas to stop, he began to stitch the remaining eye, and I eventually fell sobbing to my knees atop an endless, midnight sky. I reached down into the heavens, desperately trying to gather up the stars, to force those bright shards back together and recreate a whole. They slipped through my grasping fingers and cut my hands to pieces.

With a jerk that I felt in my entire body, I forcibly tore myself out of the dream. Closing my eyes again almost immediately, I covered my face with my hands and curled in on myself, choking down a moan. A dream, that's all. Just a dream.

I'd managed to mostly convince myself of that by the time I pulled my hands away. I blinked blearily at the television and watched as George Bailey ran down the dark, forbidding street, away from Clarence and a world gone suddenly mad. The music was swelling ominously as he collapsed against the decaying door of his former home, and an exaggerated pang of empathy prompted me to turn off the television and settle back against the pillows. An hour had passed since I'd fallen asleep, maybe even less, and it didn't take long to realize that would be all I'd get for a while. Damn my subconscious for turning sleep into the enemy.

After a few more fruitless minutes of lying still with my eyes screwed shut, I finally gave up and threw back the covers with a sigh. There was enough late afternoon light seeping through the curtains to allow me to move about freely, so I buckled up my leg brace in the gloom and set out down the hall.

The quiet of the house was broken as I let out a jaw-cracking yawn, visions of coffee dancing in my head. As I took a step, one of the old floorboards unexpectedly shifted under my weight, and I threw out one arm to keep my balance. My fingers brushed against Leo's door, and I was surprised when it pushed fractionally inward with a mournful squeak of rusting hinges.

The sound brought me up short, and I gave the door a speculative glance. I was certain I'd closed it, but everything about this house was old, so it's possible that the latch had slipped. Shrugging mentally, I closed my fingers around the knob to give it a proper tug… and felt a breeze slip through the crack and twine itself around my fingers, bringing with it the scent of late autumn.

Something cold passed through me then, a feeling that made a dark place in my heart prick up its ears and sniff the air. My hand moved of its own accord and shoved the door hard enough for the squeak of the hinges to turn into a scream. The wood impacted the far wall with a hollow bang, revealing an empty room and a wide open window, the plastic blinds bent, broken, and swaying gently in the breeze.

"Leo?" I called, my voice quavering and soft with disbelief.

With adrenalin arrowing beneath my skin like a shockwave, I turned sharply and limped as quickly as I could into the den room, hoping desperately, foolishly, that Leo had simply awoken and sought out the familiar comfort of the rocking chair. But the chair was empty, the seat long gone cold, and an agonizing trip up the stairs to the second floor confirmed what I'd known since I first felt the breeze shiver across my skin.

Empty, empty, gone... God, have you no pity left for me?

I made one last effort and took my search outside, starting at Leo's window and heading outward. It was a beautiful evening, despite the chill, and the sweet trill of birdsong seemed to mock me as I struggled through the undergrowth. I doggedly blazed my own trail, fighting through a tangle of overgrown weeds and calling Leo's name through a throat clenched so tight it hurt. I received no answer and found no sign of him, except for a small tear of brown cloth that matched his sweater, impaled on a dagger-sharp bramble branch.

A lone mutant out in daylight, mentally unhinged and emotionally devastated, but at least he'd remembered to dress warmly.

There was nothing funny about that notion, but I giggled anyway, gripping the bit of cloth tightly as the world suddenly blurred. It was only when I felt warmth track down my face that I realized I'd started to cry.

Knowing that the search was worse than pointless, since I would've had no hope of catching him even when my body was whole, I turned around and went back to the house. I found myself in Leo's room with no clear memory of how I'd gotten there, the scrap of cloth still clutched tightly in my hand. I looked down at it for a long moment, uncomprehending, before intuition gave me a weak nudge, urging me onward.

I limped over to the open window and the chest that rested beneath it, where I'd placed all of Leo's things for safekeeping. He had taken his clothes when he left, which meant…

I jerked open the chest and stared bleakly down at the empty interior, before letting the lid fall with a sound I swore I could feel in my bones. Sitting down heavily on the paisley-draped bed, I turned the frayed strip of brown over and over again in my hands. I felt blasted and old, my heart cored out like an apple, deafened by the phantom sound of glass shattering against tile.

Leo was gone, and he'd taken his swords with him.