East New York apartments were small. Plain. They had walls shabby and grey with age, probably clogged with asbestos. Nothing in an East New York apartment was new. Furniture was all threadbare, probably hand-me-down from family or picked up abandoned on a sidewalk.
If people could've afforded better, they wouldn't be living in East New York.
But he liked the apartment. He always had. He liked the couch that sunk in a springy crater when he sat on it. He liked the water spots on the ceiling and the unnaturally yellow appliances that had to be forty years old. He liked the awkward lighting from white overhead fixtures that glared in a way that left shadows in strange areas.
He liked the pictures on the walls. Kate's family. Her boisterous African mother, whose voice Raph could still hear in his head though she'd been dead for years. Her father, with the long, overlarge nose Kate had inherited. The dark skin and black eyes and the smirk that said he didn't have a problem pulling one over on anyone who'd fall for it. Larger pictures full of broad-bodied, black-skinned people with the same shaped faces. The brothers who lived upstairs, and more relatives Raph didn't know.
In a lot of those pictures was Kate, when she was young and thin and rangy, with a mess of curls on her head that she had once told Raph she always cut herself, because her mother loved that she had her father's hair. Fewer from recent years, when she'd grown into herself and was…
Raph thought she was beautiful. She was nothing like what Mike's TV called beautiful, but damn. All smooth brown skin and black hair and dark eyes. A curving, lush body - she'd smacked him once for calling her skinny.
That nose. Hell, for some reason it was the nose, big and broad and Arabic, that stuck with him the most. The kids in the hood, the girls, called her names when she wasgrowing up, she said. Teased her for her nose.
He loved it.
Her hands. She had nice hands. Hell, she had hands that could work frigging magic.Those hands had touched him like he was a wonder. Spent long minutes trailing over the grooves in his carapace, over the bridge and across the plastron. She loved touching his arms, his legs. Everything. She hadn't been scared off by any part of him.
Five tiny little thin fingers. Holding them felt like delicate work - they looked fragile, small against his broad palm, his three thick green fingers.
He liked the apartment. He liked her. He liked the thin hand laying on his palm.
"Raph?"
He could almost pretend she was all right. Asleep, maybe, after one of their more interestingly-spent evenings. Her hands were limp then, too.
"Raph?"
But when she was asleep she was still warm. Not like now.
"Hey."
Movement in front of him was jarring - he wasn't prone to reflective states, but he was kind of stuck in one, and he didn't want to get kicked out of it yet.
But there was Leo, and when Raph breathed in he could smell the tang of the blood, and when he looked down her hand was still limp. Her skin was still cool.
Leo met his eyes. "We've been here for a while, Raph. They have to call the cops soon."
He looked down again. Cops. What good were the fucking cops? If the cops in New York were worth a shit he and his brothers would have nothing to do. Kate would be alive.
He'd known she was dead. He had. As much as he denied it, and searched, and refused to acknowledge it to Mikey, he'd known.
She wouldn't have run off without a word. Never. He wanted to think she was alive, but he never believed she'd just left. She was honest to a fault. Blunt, especially when it was an ugly truth. It was one of the things he first liked about her.
He'd known for days, maybe weeks, that she was dead. If she hadn't run, and she hadn't, then she'd been taken. Nobody who snatched women kept them for that long just to return them alive.
Maybe it was good he'd been sure. It made this easier. It kept him from erupting in front of his brothers, Splinter. Shug, standing in the doorway keeping people out, letting Raph have his time with Kate without interruption.
It kept him sitting there, dumb, on the floor, holding a cold hand. Leo said they'd been there for a while, but he might've just sat down. Or he might've been there months.
He kind of wanted to get up, to walk the small apartment. See the pictures again. The bedroom…
…she had slept beside him at night before he left, and sometimes her hand would trail up and down his arm until she dozed off, and she was usually smiling. Smiling, like she was just happy, and he had made her that way.
Once he'd mentioned to her how his brothers used to gossip about women and sex and what it all might be like. It was a lot like their talks about what it would be like if they were human and could go anywhere and be anything. It was a dream, an illusion. Something they'd never have, because they couldn't change what they were.
The frigging miracle of a lifetime, that Raph had felt his first real attraction for the one woman in the world who would look past the green and the shell and only judge for what she saw beyond.
She'd laughed and called him deep and reminded him of Shug's open admiration of his muscles. Said she was using him for his body, not in spite of it.
Happy and laughing and she made him laugh too because it was a joke, and she really did see more, and out of all his brothers it was him who…
"Raph?" Mike took Leo's place, crouching in front of him. His eyes were wet, the orange under them a bit darker than the rest of his band. "We've got to go."
Raph spoke for the first time since entering the apartment. "So go."
They expected him to erupt, he figured. To throw things and scream and rage and threaten. He hadn't. He'd seen the blood, seen the robe. When Don had lifted the robe he'd seen what was under it. Her. Naked and torn in half, splayed like she'd been dropped there. Eyes open.
Facing death down, he thought suddenly. Eyes wide open, facing it like the stubborn bitch she insisted she was.
A hand touched his arm, the one that held Kate's, and his free hand shot out and struck it away reflexively. His gaze lifted.
Mike held up his hands. "Sorry. Look, Raph, I know…"
Raph shook his head. Mike didn't know. She'd called him Doodlebug the last few weeks she was around, because of some dumb movie he'd watched. He'd loved it, beaming at the name every time she said it. So Mike had that to remember. He was Doodlebug, but he still didn't know.
Raph didn't know if he loved Kate. He'd asked Leo once how he was supposed to know something like that. Which version of what human fantasy description of fireworks and sparks would apply to a cynical jackass like him?
He didn't know, which maybe meant he didn't love her. But maybe he could have. He was on his way to finding out. He was happy.
She was happy.
They deserved to be able to find out. Damn it.
Another touch on his hand, and he grabbed, caught a wrist and bent it back. When he looked at who it was attached to, it was Splinter's fur-rimmed black eyes he saw.
He released Splinter's hand, but he didn't apologize.
Splinter simply drew his hand back. "Come, Raphael. There is nothing more to do here, and grief will find you back in our own home."
Grief. Was that what he felt?
He didn't think so. He felt like someone had opened his head and scooped out everything but a few scattered thoughts and some dark undercurrents of feeling. Like there were just random memories rattling around in his mind.
He should have felt grief. He should have been screaming. He was the hot head, right? The rash, over-emotional, kick-first-questions-later nutcase of the four of them. He was all explosion and fury and…
"Raphael. My son. I understand this pain, but you must not forget who we are. We have been here among humans for too long already. We must go."
When he breathed in he could almost taste particles of blood in the air. Before that day he could taste dust and stale air. East New York apartments.
Maybe if he screamed they'd leave him be. They never knew how to handle him in his angriest moods.
He looked up. "Father," he said, his voice strange. "I'd like time. These humans know me. I'll be alright."
Splinter's face shifted. Sometimes it was hard to read his expressions, but the softening of his eyes was obvious. "Time will change nothing."
"Please."
Splinter regarded him, and looked up towards the door, where Shug's brightly-dressed bulk blocked them from interfering eyes. "Leonardo will remain with you."
A rumble in his gut - thunder that warned of possible lightning. Leo because Leo would make sure he left soon. Leo wouldn't be talked into staying until the sun was threatening.
But he nodded.
Splinter clasped his arm. "Come to see me when you return home."
Meditation, solemn words. Candles and silence and Raph nodded, though he knew it wouldn't help.
Splinter motioned behind them, and Raph's eyes left him, and his thoughts left his brothers. Maybe they left, maybe they didn't.
He didn't think it was denial keeping him so hushed. She was right there. She was cold in his hand and her eyes stared - Don said something about time of death when he couldn't shut her eyes. Bodies that stiffened in rigor mortis eventually relaxed, and since she hadn't yet she hadn't been dead long.
What was he…oh. Denial. She was there, her blood was all around. Her wounds were covered by that robe, but he couldn't forget them. So he wasn't in denial.
Shock, maybe? He did feel cold - was that physical shock or mental?
Hell, Donnie would know. Maybe he'd ask him one day.
Strange how different their hands were, considering that she held his hand a lot. Her thumb brushed his, her fingers locked two by two between his. If it felt awkward for her she never said so. She seemed to like it.
He looked up suddenly. "Leo."
Leo was sitting on that lumpy couch. His eyes were already on Raph.
Raph cleared his throat. "Wait outside."
Leo frowned.
"These people know me.You'll be safe. And you shouldn't be in here."
Leo's head tilted in question.
Raph swallowed. "You called her a whore once."
Leo blinked.
And yeah. She was a whore. That was one of those things she was brutally honest about. But she said it, and Raph saw it, as an unfortunate but legitimate job in the place she lived.
Leo had spoken it like an insult. Disgusting. Like he was calling her a rapist, or a killer. Criminal, he'd said.
He shouldn't be there.
Leo was thick about things like that, but somehow he understood. He stood. "I'll wait out in the hall."
Unusually docile, Raph thought as Leo went. Maybe grief was good for something.
Even with Leo gone he could feel a clock ticking. Splinter's urgency wasn't without cause, of course. She did deserve doctors and police and rest.
He hadn't intended to leave her side but he found himself looking at those pictures on the wall, opening the fridge randomly, seeing her usual stock of soda and beer, a plastic container full of food that had probably gone bad. Leftovers from some family meal or one of the hood's barbeques.
Back in the bedroom she had a few pictures. Her mother and father together. Mismatched, those two. The large, midnight-black Nigerian woman, the lanky conman from Lebanon. There was one of her and her parents, from years ago.
And a newspaper clipping.
Old article. A photograph, grainy and blurred, of a dark, broad figure on a motorcycle. Headline wondering if this was the first picture of a mysterious figure reporters were calling the Nightwatcher.
So, a photo of him, beside her family.
Not fair.
He took that clipping when he walked out of the room. She wouldn't've minded, and he could look at it now and then and remember that he'd meant something to someone.
He took a picture off her wall. One of the more recent shots, her alone but with people milling in the background. She was laughing.
Beautiful.
He could look at that now and then, too.
When he came by to see her at night, he came and left by the window. She got a kick out of seeing him scaling buildings like the laws of gravity didn't apply to him, and it was easier than chancing a meeting with neighbors who'd ask him about why the Nightwatcher wasn't making any more appearances.
He left by the window this time, too. He didn't say goodbye to her - the picture in his hands was more the Kate he knew than that body on the floor was. But he said goodbye to the apartment, and it was almost the same thing.
Hell, maybe he'd been in love with the idea of it all. Maybe it could have been any girl, any apartment.
He cradled the picture in its frame as he went his quick, quiet way up the fire escape to the roof. He knew the route so well that he hardly had to look up when he jumped over the ledge onto the flat surface of the roof.
Which was probably what did him in, really.
The truly successful ambushes weren't stand-offs or fights. They were one strike, and then they were done.
He didn't see who, or how. He felt a moment of splitting pain in his skull, and he heard the sound of a plastic picture frame clattering on the roof.
And as he fell all he could think of was that he'd forgotten Leo, standing in the hall outside Kate's apartment waiting patiently for him.
