Leonardo didn't think he had astrally travelled, but everything was different than it had been a moment ago. He was swamped with impressions, and instantly he was categorizing them all, assessing each input and calculating an overall threat level. It was partly from his training, partly just who he was.

First: They were back in the featureless space where they had started, its whiteness stretching infinitely in all directions around them.

Second: Someone was crying.

Third: Donatello was there twice. He was there as a fifteen-year-old, looking around in bewilderment, and he was there as barely more than a hatchling, hunched up on what passed for the floor and sniffling into his knees.

No. Reanalyze. The younger one was Donatello, but the older one was David. He was fully a mutant Turtle, albeit with pants, and without protective pads or the purple mask Leo had so longed to see him wear. Still, he was a welcome sight after the disorganized, patched-together guise David had taken on in his distress.

Fourth: Leo felt very sick. And so did Raph, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

"Wha'ss goin' on?" Raph slurred.

"The medicine is wearing off," Leo said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. Guys, we're not going to be able to stay here very long on our own spiritual power." He looked at the sobbing Turtle, and made the hard decision not to go to him. Instead, he sat down right where he was, settling into a meditative pose. "I'm going to keep us out of our bodies as long as I can. Do what you need to do. Quickly."

And he closed his eyes, calling on all his training to hold his spirit, and his brothers', on the astral plane.

"Hey." That was Raph, swallowing the bile that was trying to climb his throat - if Leo's own symptoms were a reliable guide - to kneel quietly next to Donatello. "Hey, buddy. What's the matter?"

"Kowaidesu," came Donatello's thin voice through his tears. "Sore wa itai."

I'm scared. It hurts.

"Hi." That was David. "Are you the last Donatello? What can you teach me?"

There was no answer, except the sniffling.

"You still don't want to talk to me?" David asked.

A little shuffling noise.

"How come you won't talk to him?" Raph asked. "Naze kare to hanashi o shinai nodesu ka?"

"Don't understand," Donatello whimpered, in Japanese.

"Aw, crap," Raph said. "He ain't learned English yet."

David seemed puzzled by the relevance of this observation. "Why can't he get it through the connection?"

"You're asking me? I don't know how the hell your connection works!"

"Okay, fine," David said. "Can you translate for us?"

"That'll take twice as long," said Raph, who didn't seem to understand he was wasting precious seconds by arguing, "and we ain't got time. Just absorb him and figure out later what you got."

"It doesn't work that way, Raph," David said. "I have to really want it. I have to feel - you know…"

"No, I don't," Raph snapped, and addressed Donatello again. "Okay, squirt. What do you want to teach him?"

"I don't want to be gone," Donatello said.

"What's that mean?" Raph said. "What should I tell him?"

"I don't want you to be gone either!" Donatello cried, his little voice rising. "Don't leave me!"

"What is he saying?" David broke in. "Why is he hugging you like that?"

"I don't know!" Raph shouted. "Maybe because he's my brother! Maybe because I'm the only one who's ever been there for him! If you hate him so much, maybe you should just let me have him!"

Leo clenched his eyes tighter shut. There was a roaring in his ears. It felt like the lower half of his body was falling off. It was like being jarred out of a deep meditative state, but he'd never experienced it this slow or this intense. His focus was failing.

"Raph -"

"Make up your mind," Raph said, in that low, shaking tone he used when he delivered ultimatums and really meant them. "Do you want him, or not?"

"I can't -"

"Donnie, go!" Raph shouted. "Fly away and don't come back! I'll see you again, I promise!"

"What -" David started, and then light exploded on the far side of Leonardo's eyelids, and he knew no more.

He shuddered back into himself, and immediately vomited on the floor. Embarrassed, he pressed a hand over his eyes, trying to avoid the line of drool dangling from his chin. He startled when someone else wiped it for him.

"Sorry." Mike's voice. "Thought it would be worse if I warned you."

"You knew that was going to happen?" Leo mumbled.

"Common side effect," Mike said, patting Leo on the shoulder before moving away. "Absolutely not my fault."

Leo pried his eyes open as Mike moved over to Raph, who was in similar straits. Then Mike turned to David, who was sitting with a hand pressed over his eyes, but who did not have a puddle of vomit next to him.

"Nice," Mike said. "Your metabo-thingy has to come out ahead sometimes, right?" When David didn't answer, Mike touched his shoulder. "D, you with us? You okay?"

"Yeah," David mumbled. "Just need a minute."

Half a minute was all it took for Raph to recover enough to jump to his feet, staring wildly around the room. "Where is he?" he said in a loud voice. "Where -" He staggered to the couch and flung it away from the wall, nearly flattening David, who instinctively hunched forward, covering his head with his arms. "Where!"

Mike didn't know how to react to Raph rampaging around the room, knocking furniture around, so it was up to Leo to pull himself together and confront his distraught brother.

"Raph." He caught Raph's arm, and his brother looked at him as though he'd never seen him before. "Raph, I don't know what you just did, but you need to calm down."

"He's gone!" Raph roared, and wrenching his arm from Leo's grip, he staggered back to where he had started, fell to his knees, and started shaking David by the rim of his shell. "You took him! You better - He has to -" And then he collapsed, crying into David's pajama shirt.

"Not a normal side effect," Mike said, at Leo's look, and then quickly held up his hands. "But probably still not my fault."

Instead of pushing Raph away, as he probably would have the day before, David slid a hand across the back of Raph's head, until the knot of Raph's mask rested between his fingers, and then just held him like that, letting him cry.

"It's okay," David said. "He's not gone. He's here."

"But the last piece," Raph said, his voice muffled.

"I think it's you," David said. He smoothed his other hand over Raph's shell. "Come on. Pull yourself together and I'll tell you everything."

It took a little time for everyone to pull themselves together. The three astral travelers wanted to clean up, and Mike made them eat and drink, and it was after sunrise before they were all gathered in the kitchen, ready to review the night's events.

And still, Leo wouldn't have described them as pulled together. They weren't the organized, synchronized team that he often envisioned, and that they sometimes managed to roughly resemble. David was uncharacteristically quiet, staring at the tabletop. Disappointingly, he hadn't put his mask back on after washing up in his private bathroom. Raph was emotional, refusing to sit down. And Mike was pulling things out of the pantry left and right, making sure everyone had enough to eat after their exhausting journey.

"Wasn't there less food in the pantry yesterday?" Leo asked.

"No," Mike said. "I mean, only because I hid a bunch of stuff so Raphzilla wouldn't eat it. I put it back while you guys were meditating."

Leo raised a brow. "Are you sure? Nothing happened overnight?"

"No," Mike said again, just a little too loudly. "Absolutely nothing happened. Total peace and quiet."

"An episode of diabetic shock was absolutely nothing?" David said.

"Pff." Mike waved a hand as he set a pan on the stove. "No big deal. Just taking care of my bro."

David looked like he was cooking up a scathing comeback, but then he just said, "Thanks."

"How are you doing?" Leo asked. "Really?"

"I -" David spread his hands, then tucked them under his arms, hiding them in the folds of his shirt. "I've always felt like I was in the wrong body. On the astral plane, I finally felt right. My spirit guise kept changing, but all of them felt right." He shifted, hugging himself a little tighter. "When can we go back?"

"Nuh-uh," Mike said, as he cracked eggs into a bowl. "You can't return-trip on that stuff too often. I'm not making more of it for at least a month."

David's face fell, and Leo quickly interrupted. "I think the important question is, what was your final spirit guise, and how can we help you get closer to that on the earthly plane?"

"It - it was like you," David said quietly, and out of the corner of his eye Leo saw Mike almost spill the milk he was pouring, which was completely unlike him.

"That was the second to last," Leo said. "What was the last? What happened with the last Donatello?"

"Say what?" said Mike, and Leo briefly recounted most of their adventure - how they had encountered five aspects of Donatello, and how from each, David had absorbed the parts of his soul that he was ready to accept at that stage of his journey.

"And then there were two more that I didn't see," Leo concluded, and he stopped there, looking expectantly at David, who had been lost in his own world during the entire story.

Mike slid steaming plates of strawberry-topped waffles onto the table, but no one touched them.

"The sixth Donatello…" David began slowly, "was a strange one. He… that aspect was preoccupied with all the things he couldn't do, all the things he'd never be good at. He taught me to accept that I don't accept everything about myself, and I never will. There will always be frustrations and challenges in my life, and on some level, at least, I can be okay with that." He fiddled with the fork Mike had brought him. "I wasn't ready for that until the very end of the journey."

"But it wasn't the end," Leo said. "There was one more."

David shook his head slowly. "I think the last one was not Donatello."

Leo frowned. Mike hung hungrily on every word and expression, desperately regretful that he had not been able to share this experience with his brothers firsthand. "How could it not have been Donatello?" Leo asked. "I saw him."

"So did I," David said. "But something wasn't right." He let go of the fork and drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. "Raph…"

Raph, who had been haunting the corner, listening to the conversation but not saying a word, froze.

"Raph," David said. "Is Donatello here now? Can you see him?"

Raph seemed to spend a moment calculating escape routes, but retreat had never been his style. "Yeah," he said hoarsely.

"Where is he?" David asked, with remarkable gentleness.

Leo had the sense that time stopped, but of course the tick of the clock had been silent since long before they came to this place.

"He's right there," Raphael said, and pointed - slowly, unmistakably - to David.

Leo realized it was his heart that had stopped.

David was just nodding, as if he had known all along. "I got all of him," he said. "He's not out there anymore. The last one didn't feel right because it wasn't mine."

"Then what was it?" Leo asked. As it sank in that his brothers had been that close to a spirit that wasn't Donatello, while he was otherwise occupied and unable to protect them, a black ball of fear gnawed at his stomach - even though the danger was well past, and his brothers were unharmed.

David turned to Mikey, who had begun absentmindedly picking the strawberries off Leo's waffles and eating them. "You told me we had a spiritual connection," he said. "Well, what if that connection literally has a spirit? And it's supposed to be embedded in us, but my part of it isn't, because I rejected that too? And I -" He looked around at each of his brothers - Leo, and Mike, and even Raph, watching them wide-eyed from the corner. "I wasn't able to take it back. I'm sorry."

"So then at the end," Leo said, "your spirit guise…"

"I don't think it changed," David said quietly.

Leo hardly dared to hope that his plan had actually worked. "Then… this is what you are?"

"I - I don't know," David said. "How can it be? How am I going to do the things the fourth Donatello said? I think that's the key to all of this, Leo."

The next phase of the plan suddenly crystallized in his mind. "I've been thinking," Leo said, careful not to implicate anyone else in the development of this idea, "what if we stayed here for a while? Like you said, we can teach you how to be a Turtle. I think it would be good for all of us."

"What about Master Splinter?" asked Mike, who had progressed to folding up Leo's entire waffle and sticking it in his mouth. "He's gotta be freaking out."

"He's actually been pretty calm about the whole thing," David said. Everyone stared at him. "I, um… I called home a couple times. Our parents have no idea where we are. If you want, I can call them again, just to let them know we're fine and we're going to stay here a while."

"Then you're okay with this?" Leo asked. He noted the odd way that Mike had stopped chewing, then resumed with furious determination, and put the observation in the back of his mind for later.

David didn't answer for a moment. "I'm going to miss my computer, the clinic, and my mom," he said. "Not necessarily in that order. But… I want to try it."

"When can you call?" Leo asked.

David shrugged. "I can do it right now." He got up and went to the phone, and Leo couldn't help following him to hang over his shoulder and see how he operated the mysterious technology.

"I didn't know that's how a phone works," he said, as David tapped at a small lever.

"It's not," David said. "It's called tone - just never mind, okay?" He pressed the phone to his ear, and listened. "Mom, it's - yes. Yes. Yes. Mom. Yes. Mom. Mom. Put Splinter on the phone, okay? Leo wants to talk to him."

And the next thing Leonardo knew, he was holding an unfamiliar device, and his father's voice was coming out of it.

It was a long and elegantly-phrased lecture on how while it was commendable that he had planned and executed the kidnapping of his own brother, and had enlisted allies to aid his family in travelling to a location that was secure from and unknown to his adversaries, and surely in doing so he had gained many skills that would serve him well some day, he still was in so much trouble and should never under any circumstances do that again, which left Leo both ashamed and wondering in what way, exactly, his new skills would ever be of use to him in the future.

"Gomen nasai, Sensei," he said, over and over. "Watashi wa anata o fumeiyo ni shita."

"Craaaaaap," said Mikey, sotto voce, which didn't make Leo feel any better.

"What's he saying?" David whispered.

"He's in serious deep shit," Mike whispered back, and then Leo made both of them get out of his personal space.

"Sensei, please," Leo said, in his most formal Japanese, when Splinter finally let him speak. "Already I could not have brought more dishonor to our clan. My life is worthless and forfeit and I have nothing left to lose. Please, permission to stay here for a time. We have much that we need to -"

"Absolutely not," Splinter interrupted. "Leonardo, you have put your family in grave danger. You will return as soon as it is safe to do so. We will discuss your punishment when you are home."

Leo attempted one last, desperate strategy. "Father, please," he said. "We saved your lost son. We brought him back to us, when he would have left forever. He wants to stay here with us for a while. Please, let us do this for him."

A long, long silence. With Master Splinter, long silences could mean anything.

"Let me speak to my son," he said at last.

Leo pushed the phone at David, who lifted it to his ear. "Hello?" Leo couldn't hear what Splinter said, but David replied with an emphatic, "Yes." And then again: "Yes." And to a third question: "Yes." After listening for a long time, he said, "I accept your terms." A shorter pause, and then: "Okay. I will see you then."

Leonardo had already taken note of David's negotiating skills, so he was only moderately afraid as he asked: "What did we just agree to?"

David set the phone back down on the other part of the phone. "Number one," he said, "a trusted ally will visit us at least twice a week, to make sure we're all right and we have all the supplies we need. Number two, we will find out the, and I quote, 'phone address' of this house, and we will call our parents with that information. Number three, we will call them immediately if any emergency should occur. And number four, at the first real snowfall, or when we can no longer safely stay here, whichever comes first, we will go home."

"I can live with that," said Mike, and Raph made no sign of disagreement, which for him indicated wholehearted support, and Leo nodded.

"Then it's done," he said, and his only regret was how much better it would have felt if Splinter was not going to beat the living daylights out of him when this was all over.