Disclaimer: The TMNT are the property of Mirage Comics, and created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

Author's Note: For the purposes of this story, only the elements of the Mirage Comics are cannon. I will draw from elements of the Image comics and the movies only as allusions which hopefully some will find entertaining. The story takes lace approximately three years after TMNT Vol. 4, issue 29. I will be updating it periodically, as I feel this story has a long way to go. Feedback and criticism is much appreciated.

My master once told me that meditation was a greater teacher than he could ever be. He said when I meditated I would find answers from the source, rather than relying on him as intermediary. I asked him how I would be able to tell the lies from the truth if I was alone in my head. My sensei, my father, smiled, and left the room. No matter how far in my wake I leave that farmhouse in Northampton and its incense-stuffed attic, every time I sit to meditate I am returned to that question. Every time I find myself feeling desolated and wishing my father would come back and explain the lesson to me. But as I sit here in my private meditation chamber and hear the restless tapping of footsteps from a man who does not want to be heard, I know that being alone in a room is sometimes the greatest gift anyone could ask for.

The man outside my chamber is wearing jika-tiba, which helps conceal the sound of his footsteps on the stone tiled floor of my kitchen. Centuries ago, an architect of ninjitsu discovered the split-toe design of these shoes would help him climb with greater ease. Not so suited for the tasks as having a two-toed foot, but an undeniable improvement. Now this genin, intruding in my home, carries on their tradition.

So do I.

He moves with fortitude: considering each step, breathing in time with his movement. Our targets sometimes believe we move with almost unnatural speed, our footsteps muted by sheer will. But the way of invisibility requires the patience and focus to move slowly, to conserve movement. His teachers have trained him well. But I hear him.

I tie my eye patch into place, and cross the twenty feet of the room to open the mahogany door before he can reach it. He is taken aback, but not off guard, and remains crouched. He wears a modern shinobi shozoku, using dark reds and blues as camouflage. He is on a mission of communication. Were he coming for my life, he would have disguised himself more appropriately, concealing his abilities rather than flaunting them. Tragically, I can never enjoy that luxury. I cannot hide what I am.

"I come with a task," He says.

"Then deliver it," I respond.

I became an assassin for the Foot Clan two years ago. William Harrigan had spoken to me about the possibility in my teens, ever since I started training with him. Bill was a genin at the time, and I was the black sheep of a family of outcasts. The Leo's face when he found out that I had started to do extra training with tour former enemies is one of those jewels of memory: absolutely priceless. Bill brought up the prospect of my becoming a more involved member of the Foot on several occasions after a humiliating upset for my hosts. But it was not until I was in my late thirties that I finally accepted.

I have not looked back since.

The New York branch of the Foot has changed substantially since our first contact with them. Under Oroku Saki, they had been involved in everything from robbery to kidnapping, drugs pushing, and even prostitution rings. After Karai arrived to settle matters in the wake of the Shredder's death, she returned the Foot to its more traditionally works of espionage, political interference, and, of course, assassination. It was after we had forged a truce with Karai that I began to go the Foot dojo and train with their soldiers. There was something about their style of fighting that appealed to me. Of course, it was at root the same technique I had been taught all my life. My father learned from Hamato Yoshi, a Foot ninja himself. But Master Splinter raised us specifically to defeat the Foot, teaching to exploit their weaknesses, allowing us to stand up to an ambush of ten single-handedly.

I always wondered if my father guessed what I was doing for so long outside the lair that I would come back looking so drained. Upon my return he always fixed me with a look which unsettled me. I was used to the look of disapproval, the look that called for patience, the look that said I needed to shut up immediately. For those times when I returned early in the evening with the air a well worn rag, however, his was a look of anxiety. It made me sick to look at. A man like him looking anxious was just…wrong. If I tried to meet his gaze, it changed. He never spoke what his anxieties were, so I'll never know what he guessed. Still, when every line on his face became deeper, when his eyebrows raised and his jaws clenched, I thought he was he was saying, "Do you know what you are doing?" And I would look away.

Without straightening up, the messenger retrieves a manila folder from someplace hidden in his shozoku. This he places on the floor between us. He retreats, and slips around the corner. I briefly wonder how he entered. Did he go through the trouble of trying to reach my apartment by scaling the building? Did he try to navigate his way through ducts? Genin these days have an odd obsession with ducts. I turned my attention back to the folder on the floor, hoping my guest didn't get too destructive in the process. Cleaning up after senselessly destructive messengers is tedious. I've told them countless times I leave the front door open. I don't trust my security to the walls around me.

I know better.

I leave the folder on the floor. It can wait, and I am not yet finished in my meditation chamber. The room is well proportioned for my purposes; the ceiling is low, the floor wide and empty of furniture, aside from a low, narrow table along far wall. The ceiling and walls I have painted dark green, the floor solid oak, covered in places with oriental throw rugs. I kneel before the table and gaze into the flames of the many candles set upon it. They are the only source of light, but are bright enough for me to see the other assembled items on the table, among them a banzai tree and a miniature Zen garden. It is this garden that I now focus on. I remove the stones and pebbles from the current design. I feel the muscles in the back of my neck begin to relax. I take hold of a miniature rake, the length of my forearm, from beside the sands and sweep over the last design. At the same time I visualize my shell lengthening and widening, supporting me, imagining my muscles being totally supported by my frame. A new design begins to take shape in the sands. Before I complete it, I place the rocks back in the garden, and then continue raking until I feel the cultivation has become complete.

Finally I turn my attention to the last three items on the bench. The first is a cybernetic eye, contained in a beaker of sterilizer. The second is a metal clasp, long and fine. The third is a mask. I remove the patch from my empty left socket, and with the clasp remove the eye from the beaker, I gently shake it dry and insert the glassy, pearl-colored prosthetic. As it fits into place, I feel the neuro-port at the back of the socket hum momentarily, and vision commences. The ultra-violet images meld with the natural vision of my right eye, creating the field of depth I will need. I raise the mask to my face. My brothers and I once wore similar bandanas, but has noticeable distinctions. This bandana is much longer than we would have ever worn before. And it's black.

I tie the bandana to my brow, and prepare to exit the chamber. At the door, I pause. On the back of its polished surface are racks upon which are assembled various weapons; one katana, four hanbos, two tonfas, grappling rope, several shuriken, smoke pellets, a long naginata, and my most valuable possessions, twin sharpened sais. I retrieve shuriken, the rope, and the sais.

I am ready to go to work.

On the rooftop now. I keep moving. I have already warmed up by sprinting lengths of the roof. To stretch, I run through tai chi chuan katas, allowing my muscles to extend with each new stance. Once, I thought that my sensei would only practice tai chi because it was the least intense on his aging bones. I thought the whole school of discipline was useless, as its primary use was not for combat. It never occurred to me these katas would provide such clear focus. I meditate to cool my mind. I train to discipline my body. I practice katas to become one.

I finish with my stretches. I speak allowed the address of my target. A moment's pause, and with a whir from somewhere in my prosthetic eye green lights appear, scatter, and settle as a grid of the rooftops. An arrow in the sky highlights my destination. Southwest, maybe 6 miles straight. I'll have to go about seven to get there without being noticed.

I breathe, and I am gone.

"I call it the 'AYE!'"

"Funny thing, that's what I called my last one." By this time, after sitting there for nearly forty minutes, watching him getting ready to splice open my skull, I was having second and third thoughts about the whole thing. I was not in the mood to listen to his goddamn I-know-how-it-feels-to-be-God, mad scientist bravado. I must have been out of my mind to out of my mind to put up with this. It was the shock. It took over. I mean, how many times does a guy lose an eye? And before I could even start to consider how I was going to move on, he starts telling me that he can fix it, not replace, but fix my vision, and the next thing I knew I was in the lab, and…

"It stands for Artificial Yttric Eye, see? Yttric refers to the core of the visual retrieval surface, what used to be your retina. It's a titanium-yttrium alloy, which, I must say, displays the most innovation about the AYE. See, I could have gone with more standard Utrom Technology for a sort of virtual effect…"

"Hey about this whole thing, we gotta talk…"

"But that route is better for people who have true blindness, providing some replacement of sight, but the natural and virtual combined, well that would be quite the adjustment to make…"

"Yo! Listen up! I don't know…"

"And I mean, come on, yttrium? Sure, for sound waves, it's a great transmitter, and it can filter…

"I'm talking here!"

"Never even been considered…"

"Donatello!" I bellowed. That got his attention. Even as I'd said it, I noticed how odd it felt in my mouth. Short of mocking Leo, I couldn't remember the last time I'd said one of my brothers' full names.

"What's up, Raph?" he stammered, "Are you…"

"Look," I interrupted "I just don't know if I really want to do this, all right?"

He considered this, and said "Okay, if you think you need more time to think about it, we can do Friday, if you want."

"Friday?! You're giving me two days to think about whether or not I want you poking my brain around?"

"If we wait much longer, the scarring will be permanent and seriously decrease the odds of success," he said, in his infuriating reasonable tone, "If you're worried about the surgery…"

"Dammit, Donnie, it's not the surgery!" I interrupted again. Man, was he ever pushing my buttons. Did he really think I, of all people, who be scared of a little knife work? "It just doesn't feel right, ya' know? I mean, people lose eyes, and they go on! People lose limbs, people go deaf, but they adjust! Heck, there are people out there who can't stand, but that's life! I'm just not comfortable with having some piece of robotic glass attached directly to my brain. I don't want to be a cyborg." I noticed that I had been absentmindedly running my finger across the black patch on my otherwise naked face, and put my arm back down at my side. I knew exactly how ridiculous I sounded, and a small part of me dared Donnie to try and point it out to me so I could give him some pointers of my own.

I doubted he would though. What I thought more likely from him was a lecture about how there was no such thing as robotic glass and list for me, again, the gilded properties of yttrium. He didn't. He stood silent for a few seconds, and then took off his white coat and goggles to reveal his bandana. It was the old ragged one he always used for lab work. This had larger eyeholes then most of ours, due to years of fraying. Scorch marks decorated it in over a dozen places, and most of it had been stained as a testament to some failed project, leaving it oddly violet instead of our standard red. He strode across the sewer to where I was sitting and settled down on a folding chair.

"You know who you remind me of right now?" he asked. I scowled. I hate rhetorical questions. Not to be deterred, he answered himself, "Master Splinter."

It was the first thing he had done that day to genuinely surprise me. Very seldom was I compared to our father in any sense.

"Whada'ya talking about?" I asked testily.

"He had the same concerns," Donatello said, smiling at the floor, "Didn't like the idea of relying on machines to help him out, even when I told him how important it was. Do remember after we had come back from feudal Japan after defeating Savanti Romero? Right before the Foot Civil War?"

I nodded, having no idea where he was going with this.

"Well, when we got back, he mentioned to me that he had been having some chest pains, and asked if I could do a quick check up. Now, that threw me. Ever since I had found an interest in medical science, I'd insisted that he let me give him physical just like the rest of you. He consented, but only to humor me. And I knew it. I would suggest that he change his diet, or dress more warmly, or to ease up on the exercise, but he never listened to me. Especially about his diet, he really loved his cake."

He was rambling now. I cleared my throat to remind him who we were really talking about. He looked up, and kept eye contact as he continued, "So I knew this was serious. He must have been really concerned to actually seek out my advice. Turned out he had heart murmurs. Bad ones. He should have died sometime later that year..."

"Wait a sec," I interrupted. "You're trying to tell me our Father was on the verge of having a stroke, and you didn't tell us?"

"Well, it probably wouldn't have been a stroke, not…" he faltered upon seeing my expression, and resumed, "Look, I didn't really have a choice. He forbade me to mention it to you guys, and pretty soon after that, the Foot Elite where dropping ninjas left and right! We didn't even see Splinter for weeks when that went down!"

I considered pushing the issue, but realized that we were, yet again, losing the point. "So what did you do for him?" I asked.

"Well, at first nothing. I told him if he had a pacemaker, it could rectify the murmurs, but he flatly refused. Talked about how much it would throw him out of balance. Said he would go where life took him to, finish where death waited for him, and walk the path he was on. I tried to explain to him that there was nothing really different about having a pace maker than taking his vitamins with green tea, that it was just a remedy to a problem, but he would have none of it. He told me sometimes I got too close to technology to see where its limits should be, and so far as he was concerned that limit was his own skin.

"Right after that, the whole city seemed to be at war with itself, and I had to put my concerns about that to the back of mind. But I never let go of it completely. I resigned myself to convince him to see reason as soon as everything was resolved. That's why I went to Northampton with him afterwards. I mean, sure, while I was there, we worked on the whole spirituality thing, but I thought it would take a real stakeout to get him to budge. If worse came to worse, I decided I would tell the rest of you. But, as you pointed out, I never did. As soon as we were on the road to Northampton, he said he wanted the Pacemaker, and asked how hard it would be for me to do the procedure by myself."

"What changed his mind?" I asked.

"No idea," he shrugged, "But it was nothing I said. But for the whole time we were in Northampton, he was more…buoyant, if that doesn't sound too ridiculous. More alive than I've ever seen him. He hardly spent anytime in the house, he was always outside, hiking, swimming in the river, even started fishing. The day of the operation, he spent a couple hours meditating, and then gave me a hand through all the pre-op. Once he had the pacemaker in, the activity dropped, on my strict orders, but nothing could keep him resting, really. He could barely contain himself. It was almost like living with Mikey sometimes.

"Well, no, that's not quite true. Few things are as tiring as living alone with Mikey.

"But anyway, that's not the point," he said, "All I wanted to say was that what you are feeling is not uncommon. But the truth is that if you so decide to go through with this, I can guarantee an improvement in the quality of your life." He sat up and gave me a look that said he was done talking. The ball now in my court, I admit, I fidgeted.

"So I got until Friday, that right?"

"Friday."

"Alright," I said, closing my good eye, "Alright. I'll let you know by the end of the day tomorrow. Just, could you do me one extra favor?"

"Sure! Anything."

I stood up and said, "Get a new bandana. I mean, seriously. You look like a clown."

He laughed the sudden, loud laugh of surprise, saying, "Oh, come on. I kinda like it! I was actually thinking about having it purple all the time," he teased.

I stood and glared "Two things would happen if you did that; Leo and I would disown you, and Mikey would get want one in tye-dye," I tried keeping a straight face, but couldn't hold it as Donnie doubled-up with laughter. "Hey! I mean it! Don't try me!"

"Oh, God, don't even say that around Mikey!" he laughed "I bet he's already got one tye-dyed just incase we would ever let him wear it someday! Okay, bro, deal on. But you have to start wearing yours again soon! Red or dead!"

He raised his fist to me, and I pounded mine against it, and affirmed, "Red or dead!"

One year later, I would be wearing black, and Donnie would be dead.

The first few rooftops are easy, level or lower than my own. I glide past the ruined furniture; scale up the maintenance sheds to get increased height for long jumps; fling myself into the night air and land silently on all four without stopping my momentum for a moment. The Manhattan grid interface points out little suggestions here and there, most of which I ignore for now. The grid can give me locations, but it's my other eye that points out the broken glass, the rusted metal, the shattered antennas and all other forms of garbage the roofs have become the havens for. A drawback to going barefoot is the risk of receiving even a tiny cut. The blood would become a trial spanning the city to my home. If I twist enough, I can find a footprint's worth of safe ground amidst glass. I cut around swathes of garbage by running along railings. I jump to the next building. It looks as though street gangs fought here using old car parts. I suppose stranger things have happened. I recall fighting a gang up here that got around by driving snow mobiles; we did do such odd things back in the day.

I vault the gaps over the alleys easily. Those over roads initially are difficult, but, given a little imagination, not impossible. At times I feel reckless, jumping over streets with so many people below who might look up and see me atop a dilapidated billboard, or over the dead traffic lights. At those times I remind myself that these odds are tragically small. People don't look up at the sky much anymore.

The first challenge presents itself in the form of a road gap and a ten floor increase in height. If Mike was here with me, it would be nothing. As is, I have to first toss a bo-shuriken to give myself better footing on a telephone pole, from which I less than gracefully bound to a fire escape. A soft "bonk" escapes from the metal frame after I cross open space. Damn it. I continue moving, slightly slower now. I will not make another noise. I make a mental note to pick up the shuriken on the way back, and a green light flickers above me to make the mental note virtual.

Next building, same height. Clear. I run straight across.

Drop of about thirty feet to next roof. Old newspapers and rags scattered across it. I lean into my swerve to avoid these. No telling what might be underneath. Again, I am soaring in the dark. As I land, my legs recoil under me to spring myself forward.

Straight ahead is an empty lot. I go east, sacrificing a direct route for concealment.

Soon I am no longer consciously directing myself, but rather moving by instinct, allowing my consciousness to focus on the specifics of my task.

John Tuccio is a man who won in the Withdrawal, a boast few could make. The world, which had tried so hard to adjust to our introduction to the Interplanetary System not four years previous, struggled again to try to adjust to the world without it. Four years of prosperity, of harmony, and the true consolidation of humankind was all it took for Earthlings to be addicted to the idea that they were not alone. While opinions varied as to what to do with about the new comers, a consensus was formed that we would face whatever came at us as one people, regardless of nationality, race, gender, or even species. Within a year after being included in the galactic community, all "defense" concerns stopped being spoken about. Questions of aide to other countries, now spoken of as neighbor, were treated as problems of how, not why. Humanity, and those "freaks" who emerged to stand alongside it, began operating inexplicably, bizarrely, civilly.

But even in times like these, there are always those who are not satisfied. A group called the Xihad took it upon themselves to make humanity the masters of System. At first, they were dismissed as harmless ecentrics. Then they killed 10,000 people, human, Utrom, and others, in one night. In stunned silence that followed, it was decided Earth was not ready for neighbors. Our saviors from the stars retreated, and we, waking from our dream of peace on earth, returned to hating each other.

The Withdrawal was hasty and sloppy by Utrom standards. While all who arrived with them had departed, not everything went with them. Energy suppliers, sub-atmospheric transporters, medical equipment, and weapons were left in damaged or grounded spaceships, or in remote areas, the new Universal Terminals, even in downtown Manhattan's massive re-made factories overseen by brilliant alien engineers and artists. Within days after the Withdrawal, the new "entrepreneurs" cashed in. One of these pioneers was John Tuccio.

I was vaguely familiar with the man before being assigned to kill him. He was a market man, one of the first to begin mining the alien's abandoned armories, raiding a block here, a neighborhood there, and eventually hiring a crew of his own to secure his monopoly. He traded to the highest bidder, quietly at first but with growing confidence. Quickly, his chief customer became the Foot Clan, and not long after that the Foot controlled almost all of the New York black market. Tuccio became an asset of the Foot, and enjoyed all the protections and resources the status brought. That was the last I heard.

But apparently Tuccio felt there was still more to gain. He began pressing the Council of Thirteen to allow him to sell products that did not go to the Foot without having to conform to their trade regulations or pay levies for their distribution. Things such as hologram projectors, clumsy anti-gravity belts, or the odd alcohol-like drinks for which the Foot had no practical use, he said, should be traded without their constant supervision, that it was a waste of resources. If he could make more profit off these other goods, he argued, he would be able to devote half the gains to increasing his direct trades with the Foot.

The Council granted his request. With the profits from his new sales he began forming a larger crew that replaced the Foot as his means of protection, and secured his base of operation with the very technologies he was peddling. The Foot observed this, but was not concerned until rivals, such as the Macy Boysand the Dragons ambushed a Foot safe house with Triceraton weaponry. Tuccio claimed, convincingly for a time, that these gangs were able to acquire these arms the same way he did, directly from hidden caches. And because of our trust in him, we investigated the matter under that very mindset. Now, however, it is clear the Dragons and the Mob were using an intermediary. The Council has marked John Tuccio for death.

And I am now the messenger.