A/N: I know I JUST posted Chapter 7, and I wasn't really sure if I should wait a few days till sharing this one with you guys, but you know what? I saw no reason to sit on this chappie like some sadistic, powercrazed megalomaniac. If I had been the reader, I would have wanted the author to post, even if it only had been a day - so I'm posting. Heh. I just finished typing up the review responses for Chapter 6, but I guess I'll have to go back there and add to it. Later, though, cuz it's movie time. But I hope you'll enjoy this new installment, where there won't be a whole lot more of them. Thanks in advance.

Chapter 8

Swimming, pounding... all my thoughts and feelings felt like they'd been locked inside a centrifuge, only to be returned to my mind in a big jumbled mess where it was just about impossible to separate reality from imagination. It wasn't until discovering I was sitting with my face leaned on Mikey's still head that I realized I was in the process of waking up. It was strange, though, because I didn't recall falling asleep. Had I been out this whole time?

It didn't take long for the images to return, the feeling of complete loss and hopelessness stirring inside of me as I sat there with my shell against the kitchen wall. But wait? It hadn't been me sitting in that sub car. It hadn't been me getting shot in the knee...

It was Leo.

But how? I didn't understand. I'd seen it all with my own eyes. Had it all been a dream? Was it the wound eating away at the flesh around my shoulder blade that had summoned everything? It had felt so real, so... graphic. I'd felt Leo's anguish, I'd lived his thoughts and I'd cried at his pain. It didn't make any sense, because it made too much sense to be nothing but my imagination.

Was I losing my mind? Was I hallucinating just like Mikey had before he...

Trying tiredly to move my stiff legs, a shot of ice-cold pain went up them, sending a sharp shiver all the way up to my neck. I was so cold. It seemed my body had surrendered completely to the fever while I'd been out. Even Mike felt cold in my arms. But then again, it must have been awhile, so why wouldn't he? He was dead.

How weird it felt thinking it. Dead – my littler brother, who'd always been so full of life and energy – no longer living.

Gone forever.

I tiredly leaned my head against the cold, slippery tunnel wall behind me, my eyes gradually getting used to the blackness, shapes and forms slowly starting to build a world of darkness for me to live in. My heavy thoughts soon drifted back to that dream, and remembering the events of it, I realized how perfectly well all the details of it fit with my discovery upon returning home.

Splinter's body, the entering hole of the bullet that had killed Raph... even that corpse on the bathroom floor. Raphael had mutilated him; there was no other explanation for it. They'd put a bullet in Raph's neck to stop him, and then another one in their friend's head to put him out of his gruesome misery.

And then there was Leo.

Oh god, Leo...

Was he still alive? Was this his way of telling me he needed saving? Or maybe it was just his way of filling me in on the missing half of the story. Could he really be sending me this dream beyond the grave? Somehow managed to reach out to me in this hazy state between life and death. And... had he done the same thing with Mikey, or was that Raph's doing?

My thoughts were spinning out of control. So desperate for answers, none of my theories made any sense.

Leonardo was dead – they all were – and this was just my mind trying to make some kind of sense of it. My time must have been running out, and I was quite literally losing my mind – the only damn thing I had left to keep me company.

I couldn't help but laugh in spite of myself; how utterly stupid this whole day had been.

The security alarm going off... armed strangers breaking into the lair and killing everyone in our brief absence? They had come out of nowhere with their guns and their camera. Who the hell were they? Why couldn't I stop them? Why couldn't we... why hadn't we stood a chance against them? It was as though we'd all been set up to die – a horrible, grisly, heartbreaking death. Right from the very moment we got out of our beds this morning, everything had unstoppably led up to me sitting here with Mikey's cold body in my lap, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it.

It was just too unbelievable to make something like this up, yet it was too inconceivable to be real.

And the analyst in me couldn't help but dwell on that damn motion detector. I'd been so sure it was just the batteries – and it was. They'd been completely dead when we got there, and everything flawlessly kicked back up the moment I put in new ones. Could it have been that the alarm in fact did go off, only for the batteries to run out mere seconds after having set it off, leaving us to believe it was just a false alarm?

It did seem very coincidental; that the batteries would run out the one and only time the alarm did go off. But like I mentioned, everything about this whole tragedy was just too unlikely to make sense, so it didn't really surprise me.

Maybe it was fate, then; a cruel, unmerciful fate. Or perhaps there was no reason at all for this. It just... was.

It didn't bring me much comfort, but it spared me the energy of trying to make sense of something that couldn't.

Parting my lips, I felt them stubbornly sticking together. My mouth was so dry, and my breath felt like sandpaper forcing itself up my throat. How long had it been since I last had something to drink, anyway? Breakfast had been hours and hours ago. God, I was so thirsty. It felt kind of ironic, sitting in the sewers, cold water all around me, yet I couldn't even taste it. We had all seen how sick Mikey had gotten when he'd done it as a kid. He threw up like a pig, and Master Splinter had him in bed for days. I remembered how he would constantly lecture the rest of us about it, saying:

'See what happens when you drink the tunnel water?'

He'd been so worried for Mikey, and even though we couldn't have been more than… what, five or six? We still picked up on that worry. We sensed the danger he was in, and neither of us had any plans on tasting the forbidden fruit.

Even now, where I knew I was going to bleed to death anyway, unless those trigger-happy idiots found me first of course, I wouldn't consider drinking it.

Water bad. Water hurt Mikey.

It was a simple as that.

It must have been sometime around then that the three of us started looking out for Michelangelo as obsessively as we did. It wasn't that he was weaker than the rest of us – certainly not. He could hold his own any day of the week. In fact, he was probably the only one who dared to stand up to Sensei. Or perhaps he was the only one Sensei would let off the hook, all because of those puppy dog eyes of his. No, our reason for worrying about Mike as much as we did was his... lack of judgment.

Mikey was... he'd been the kind of person that acted on his emotions, much like Raph though in a lot less violent way, and a bit more stupid. His decisions weren't always the safest ever made, and sometimes he seemed completely oblivious to that.

I remembered this one time. We must have been around ten, I think, and like we oftentimes did when Master Splinter was out scavenging the city streets for food and useful stuff for our home, we'd left the lair to explore the nearby tunnels. Or so we'd told Leo, anyway. He had seemed OK with the idea of us playing right outside, and so we simply told him what he wanted to hear.

In truth, we went off a bit farther than just "right outside."

Mikey had wanted to try out some new stunts on his skateboard, and even though I wasn't nearly as skilled as he was, it seemed like a fun idea. I might not have been as good as Michelangelo, but I still loved riding on my board. Plus, it was something the two of us would always do together.

Leonardo and Raphael would fight, and Mikey and I went skateboarding; it was kind of our thing.

Anyway... We stopped when we reached this perfect little three-way tunnel crossing. There was hardly any water there, and it was right beneath the streets, so there was just enough light slipping through the storm drains for us to see what we were doing.

We started out riding up and down the perfectly concave walls, laughing and joking off, daring each other to go higher up the wall until we had both touched the ceiling of the tunnel with our hands.

Then of course Mikey, who was always up for a senseless challenge, thought of the brilliant idea to skate on the big, rusty pipes attached to the side of the tunnels. I was skeptical of his suggestion, to say the least, but having watched him do it so effortlessly, I soon found myself riding my board across that noisy pipe, landing on the tunnel floor with an exhilarating, screeching hit.

Eventually, Mikey got tired of that as well, but I was too busy having fun to notice him eyeing that upper pipe, attached dangerously close to the ceiling of the tunnel. I recalled his sudden voice interrupting me riding across the pipe, shouting,

'Hey, Donnie. Check this out!'

Looking up, I found him standing on one end of the pipe, his skateboard facing the crossing of the tunnel, and before I could do anything to stop him, he just kicked himself off with his right foot.

I could still remember the rusty metallic noise vibrating in my ears as he rode across that pipe, the most blissful of smiles lighting up his young, ignorant features. I remembered thinking something like: 'Oh no, he didn't,' as I watched him ride towards the end of the pipe.

The next thing I knew, the both of us hit the ground with our skateboards, me still balancing on top of mine while Mikey painfully fell off of his at the collision with the hard, brick clad floor. His skateboard just continued without him down the tunnel, and I quickly jumped off of mine to have a look at my motionless brother.

He was lying on his shell with his eyes closed, and there was a big nasty bruise covering the entire right side of his face. At first, I thought he was dead; I really did. The fall had been so high and so hard, I just didn't think it was possible to survive it, but upon cradling his mumbling form in my arms, I realized he was merely unconscious.

I may not have been older than ten, but I definitely recognized a concussion when I saw one. We'd all suffered concussions due to accidents in the dojo, but none as serious as the one Mikey earned himself in that insane stunt of his.

Calling his name, I managed to get him to open his eyes, and remembering how Master Splinter had cared for us, I made it my mission to keep him awake. I told him it was time for us to go home, and when helping him into a sitting position I had to steady the back of his head, feeling his blood smear across my palm at my touch.

I had wanted to panic then. I wanted to cry and scream and just lose my mind till Master Splinter would come and make it all better. There was lots of warm blood on my hand, and Mikey couldn't even sit up by himself, his eyes swaying back and forth in disorientation.

I knew I had to get him home as soon as I possibly could.

And even though he weighed more than I did back then, I somehow managed to pick him up in my arms and carry him down the tunnel, leaving both our skateboards on the scene of the crime. I couldn't care less about them, favorite toy or not.

He was so heavy. Even now, in my foggy existence of numbness, I could still recall the feeling of my legs wanting to fold to the weight, shaking violently with each draining step I took, yet I somehow managed to carry him all the way back to the lair, not even stopping once to rest.

Luckily, Sensei was already home by the time we came stumbling through the door, and he knew exactly what to do. It hadn't been as bad as I'd feared. It was a concussion, but after closing up the wound in the back of his skull with some stitches and making sure Mikey stayed in bed for a few days, he was back to his normal, risk-ignorant self.

You couldn't really blame us for looking after Mikey the way we did, yet the older we got the more he despised it. He wasn't any more of a kid than the rest of us, and he hated being treated like one. But, looking at his lifeless body now, I only regretted not looking after him better.

That deep, jungle green color of his skin had been replaced with a sickly pale tone of it, beads of sweat still covering his cold body. The cloths around his right arm and thigh were all dried up with his blood, and his head rested heavily on my plastron, his pale lips frozen in a peaceful line only the deepest of sleep could be responsible for.

He was so innocent, so full of life and possibility. He shouldn't have died. He shouldn't have been allowed to die. I almost felt a bit relived for the others' sake, because I seriously doubted any of them would have wanted to trade places with me, having to watch our sweet Mikey slowly surrender to the death that had claimed everyone else.

I missed him so much already.

As unbearable as it had been having to go on after discovering the others back at the lair, it had somehow seemed less horrible when he'd still been around to keep me company, to keep me focused. I just couldn't believe I'd never get to see him smile again. Never again would I hear that belly-tickling laughter of his. Never again would I walk passed the bathroom sub car, only to realize he was in there, singing 'Oh, Happy Days' to himself while taking a dump.

Never again. They had seen to that. They had taken him away from me; just like they had taken everything else I cared about.

Swallowing once, I realized to my dull surprise that the burning sensation in my throat was gone, and I didn't feel cold anymore. My head didn't pound and my chest didn't ache. If anything, I felt strangely weightless, as though all my thoughts were floating drunkenly in my mind.

This must have been it, then. My senses were all fading, so it must have meant it was finally my time to go. Closing my eyes in exhaustion, I suddenly realized I still had some of my senses left.

It was very foggy, so faint and still so distant, but I could definitely hear footsteps coming from down one of the tunnels. They didn't move fast, it was as if someone was promenading in peace, nearly dragging their feet through the water. Still so far away, but it was there.

I opened my heavy eyelids, knowing exactly who to expect.

It didn't bother me.

But it did inspire me to move. Sluggish, heavy arms gathered Mikey's stiff body, holding him protectively to my chest. It was weird, because I knew there was nothing left for me to shield. He was already dead; they couldn't harm him anymore than they already had, but it was the only thing I had left to protect. It was something for me to hold on to, and, trying to sit up straight, I promised myself that no matter what happened now, I wouldn't let them come near my little brother. They had put him through so much pain, so much heartache, he deserved to rest.

He had paid with his family, his innocence – his life. All that was left for me to do was to make sure he got his peace.