The World as it is: 30 Years of Shredder

CH.2

Knock...Knock...Tap...Tap..Knock...Tap-Tap. Silence. Than 4 minutes later the most important part: Tap.Knock.Knock.Tap.tap.tap. ... Tap. The later half was changed daily to keep the false friends out. I return my twin katana to the sheaths as silently as I had drawn them and stepped back into the shadows as the old warehouse door was manually forced open. Screeching and groaning, both man and door until it had been lifted four feet from the ground. I listen, hearing the sounds of feet scraping the ground as men and women alike ducked under the door. Fifteen or so by the sound, and I fight a pain in my chest - 32 had left this morning for the work camps.

The wind shifts adding a whole new level of odor to the already muggy and gassy warehouse. We didn't need the smell of roses, at least we were alive. I hear the door groan its daily complaints as they force it back down. A few children who have managed to stay below the radar slip from the shadows to embrace their parents. Free born children were un heard of, never would I thought the sound of a child crying at the thought of death would be a pleasing sound. Yet in this time, it was. It offered some level of hope that the future of this world would not be tarnished and carried on the backs of children who take death as normal.

There is that sound I mention, Rika, a young girl who's parents worked in the camp was crying. The story fills the air as the surviving adults tell the story. It would seem a guard wanted Amara, Rika's mother. It wasn't uncommon and guards never asked they simply took. It would have over and done with in minutes but Amara was to proud she had fought for the very little she still called her own. They had slit her throat. Jakob her lover, and Rika's father, had tried to intervene for his troubles he was only permitted to watch the guard do as he wished with poor Amara, dead or other wise. Jakob had been killed after the guard finished. Thankfully they do not give such details to Rika, but the innuendo and double talk spell it clear enough to me.

The evening settles into its normal sway, what every food the free born children and I had been able to scavenge is spread around our little outpost. I am a wear of someone sitting beside me; her little shy gives her thoughts away, and no more tears from her small frame. I'm not ashamed to admit how terrifying it was she wasn't crying.

We have an odd little sub-society here. The adults go to the camp, so they are accounted for. The enforcers see a group of loyal people leave in the morning and come home 14 hours later, they never check for the children. Why the parents are in the camps and the streets are more or less empty the children and I go out. We meet here, eat food, mourn the dead and sleep.

As Mikey would say, lather, rinse, repeat.

I must have smiled because Rika spoke.

"Did you think of a joke, sir?"

Sir? Never had that term befallen me, and certainly not from a human child. Yet, this place was beyond color, or genetics. Loyalty was solidified by the moments of the day. You protect each other, you comfort each other, you love each other...Your a family.

Family.

"Sir?"

Oh, Rika. I tilt my head toward her and touch her face softly and smile just a bit when I feel her cheeks rise as she smile.

"Yes Rika, A little one."

"Can you tell me?"

"It wasn't funny."

"Please?"

For a second she sounds like a child and I smile. Perhaps there is hope.

"Please?"

"Please Leo, just one more game?"

I flinched at the sharpness of the memory, Mikey.

"Leave him alone Rika." Her uncle, or at least the closest thing to an uncle she had, spoke sharply and I could feel her jump beside me. "Quit bothering him."

"But-" She offered her defense.

"She is fine." I find my voice can still be strong when I need it to be.

"By the look of the shadow on your face -- it doesn't seem to be." He responded, though less harshly than he had been when speaking to her.

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Shadows.

It seemed shadows had been apart of my life for as long as I could remember. I can almost remember being a child, no more than 5. It had been the first night we slept apart. In the old days all five of us would curl up on a blanket in the main room to sleep. It seemed every shadow moved, and each veil held a monster ready to lurch out and claim my soul. I remember going down stairs fighting tears because I knew our master - than only our father - would be unhappy that I lacked the courage to sleep alone. The most vivid part of the memory has always been what I saw when I rounded the corner into the den. On the floor with his back against the couch was my father, his eyes held me at once. To his right was Raphael defiantly not in his lap but using his shin as a pillow. To his left was Donny clutching his blanket and using our father's lap as a grade A pillow. Mikey was sitting on his lap face pressed into his chest and a leg on either side, so that his right foot landed on Donny's shoulder. After looking between my brothers all sound asleep I looked back toward my father. While his left hand rubbed soothing circles on Mikey's back his right hand was extended to me while a knowing eye watched me in kindness. I was proud, but not so proud to turn down the invitation. I laid down on his left not touching him but laying in his shadow. The last thing I remember before falling to sleep was his fingers sliding across my head.

"Sleep my son, I am with you."

As the memory fades I close my eyes to fight away the tears threaten to show themselves.

As I got older the shadows became something to use, as my father became my sensei he trained us to harness the darkness. I used it many times to avoid capture, to protect my brothers, and to help those I could. I completely engrossed myself in my training more in later days than the early ones. I adored the praise for a job well done. As a teenager it was one of the few places I felt I excelled at. Donny knew more about mechanics than most Harvard graduates - and this was at 15. Raph was the strongest...not that I would have ever admitted it and then there was Mikey, he could win one of the master's smiles faster than any of us.

A shadow came over New York as the Shredder came into our lives, but we still had each other and we still won. Now that isn't the case, when Donny left it pushed a thorn into each of our hearts. He left with out reason and with out a goodbye. We all searched for him, thinking maybe he had been captured. In the end it became apparent he was gone, left us to die...It was so unlike him… but war changes people.

The shadow that touched my heart when Donny left us completely covered it when we lost our Sensei. They had us, hook line and sinker and we would have all died but as it had in the past. The father in our Sensi over ruled the master. Leaving him that day was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. I remember, Mikey was hurt and unconscious and Raph and I were to wounded to win. I argued desperately with the master when he ordered us to go. There is was no arguing with him, never was - not when he had set himself to task. Raph tried to stay and he nearly broke my jaw when I tried to pull him away from the fight. It took the mention of Mikey to get him to join us. I know I had been harsh as I yelled at him "Killing your self is one thing Raph but can you really kill Mikey too?" It wasn't completely untrue as badly hurt as I was, I may not have been able to get Mikey out alone. True or other wise, it had appealed to the big brother in him and we fled together.

Mikey had been unconscious for 3 days by the time he awoke, it was over. Raph and I had the knock down- drag out fight that had been stewing for more than 30 years...and he had won. We were both wounded badly, my Katana took his eye and left at least one scar on him, but his twin sai to my chest. Game, set, match...Raph won.

I lost.

I lost everything. When I came to nearly a month later I found out that Mikey was healthy or had been when he left, more than 3 weeks prior. It took years to get back to speaking terms with Mikey. We had faced the Shredder one last time. Casey had been killed, Mikey lost his arm and I lost what ever hints of a kinship I had with my baby brother.

I am sure Raph and I have crossed paths since the fight, April has said he is still in city. We haven't spoken since he left me for dead, but I have felt him close by. We are both skilled as Ninja and we know the shadows - all of NY is a shadow now, so hiding isn't hard. Neither of us would let the other know they were there unless we wanted to ... and we haven't'.

Though there was one time I thought I may have seen him. I had been cornered by 10 to many enforcers, I had already been fighting and was hurt...and more than a little tired. They got in close and I made a mistake. They threw some orange powder in my face, to this day I don't know what it was. What I do know is it stung my eyes and I went down in more pain than I had known in years.

I heard the wind part as a sword blade came toward me, disarmed and blind I just waited for the strike. It never did. The sound of steel on steel that I had heard over the years and in my dizziest daydreams echoed around me. I was on the verge of blacking out, but the soundtrack around me played in my mind to one of the many sparing matches of my youth, Katana Vs Sai, friendly Banter and all. The last coherent thought I had was someone's arms coming around me and pulling me off the ground. I woke up here in this place a few hours later, no one could name who had brought me here they had been in the work camps. Only a small child around 2 years old could give me a clue hearing it now I shutter "He looked like you."

Shadows have always been my world and now I walk among that world more apart of it than ever before. That powder took my sight and even my vision is a shadow.

While the world around me descends into darkness, only the shadows of memories comfort me.

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"By the look of the shadow on your face -- it doesn't seem to be." He responded, though less harshly than he had been when speaking to her.

"She is fine." I repeated shaking off the wave of intense memories that I thought years of mediation had locked away. I could hear the shuffling of his feet as he moved away.

"What were ya thinking about?" Dear sweet Rika, she could read me better than anyone, but she was one of the younger children so she stayed closest to me when we ventured out.

"Family."

The word sounded foreign as I said it, she sat down her empty plate and what was left of mine. I had offered it to her silently; she was far too kindhearted to simply have taken it. I felt her shift and rest her head on my knee her fingers absently sliding along my shin the way a child does when they are so tired they can't sleep.

"I miss my family." Her voice was quiet and the moister on my knee tells me she is crying. Perhaps there is hope.

I find my self letting my fingers slide thru her hair, as my master - no, my father, had done for me when monsters lurcked in every shadow.

"So do I."

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-GLEE-
Yay! Ch.2 is done, hope you like it, I am in love with in my self!