Chapter 1
Seventeen Years Later
	Raphael yanked out his sai from the last corpse of many to fall at his feet and wiped the blood from the blade onto the black and red leather foot uniforms his opponents were clad in, then sheathed his weapon back into his belt. The bodies laid in piles around him atop large puddles of their own blood, the alleyway a picture of a cheap horror movie massacre.
	“Well, that about wraps up my work day.” Raph mumbled to the corpses with a grin as he wiped away the sweat and blood that dripped from his brow.
	“Wow. Slaughter house much?” 
	Raph snorted. Turning around he wasn’t surprised to find his little brother jumping off of the fire escape and into the middle of the blood bath. Mikey walked over to him with a disgusted sneer on his lips, careful not to step on any of the bodies.
	“Seriously, you’re not in the least bit subtle.”
	“Subtle?” Raph chuckled. “What, were you expecting them to surrender themselves over? These guys won’t hesitate to chop your head off Mike. Even if it did make a mess. Not that there’s enough blood in your brains to have any cleaning up to do afterward.”
	Mikey’s bottom lip jutted out. “Well you don’t have to be mean about it. I’m just saying, you could be a little bit neater when you kill them. There are people that live around here, bro.”
	“Actually, they should be thanking me. Without Shredder’s obsession with killing us, most likely they would have been taken as slaves by now.”
	“Be that as it may,” Mikey said. “It wouldn’t kill ya to be a little less Chain Saw Massacre and more Assassin’s Creed.” 
	“First off, I’m not an assassin Mikey. I’m a ninja. Second, I’m not a video game character.”
	“Whatever.” Mikey shrugged, he kneeled beside one of the bodies. “Hey, I think this one is still alive.”
	“Then do something about it.” Raph said, not bothering to even look at the body.
	“Should I let him go.”
	Raph stared confusingly at the back of Mikey’s head. “What the hell do you mean by ‘let him go’.” 
	Mikey glanced over his shoulder at Raph. “Well, you could use him for a message to Shredder or something.”
	Raph laughed. “Yeah, like the Shredder doesn’t know our intentions already.”
	Mikey’s shoulders rose up and fell back down again. “It was just a suggestion.”
	Raph shook his head and moved over to where the man was moaning and pleading with them to spare him. Raph had already spared many of the foot soldiers at one point in hopes that the message would come across to the Shredder but it proved to be futile. They always came back and in bigger numbers each time. He was done being the nice guy.
	Raph unsheathed his sai from his belt. “W-Wait . . . Wait!” The man sat up on one arm while his other was outstretched in front of him defensively. “Please, spare me. I have a family. A wife and a son. Please!”
	Raph’s brow quirked. He recognized this type of defense. It was a last resort when all hope of surviving seemed lost. These well-trained soldiers would go down on their knees and pathetically beg at his feet for their life. Even going so far as to try to guilt trip him by bringing their families into this. He had learned it was just better to hardened himself against it. 
“Well, you shouldn’t have gotten involved with the Shredder in the first place.” 
Raph raised his sai and the man shrieked again, “Wait! Please!” He reached up and quickly yanked off his hood, revealing the face of a young man. His blonde hair and pale face was painted with blood and bruises and his brown eyes were wide, fearful, and pleading. 
“The Shredder . . . h-he forced me to do this. He threatened to k-kill my family if I refused.  He tortured m-me until I agreed. Please, what I do . . . i-it’s all for them.” 
Raph closed his eyes and steeled himself against the guilt that was harassing him. He knew if he spared this guy, he would just come back with more buddies to kill him. To hurt his own family. 
Raph opened his eyes and met the man’s with an icy stare. “The only way you can protect your family is if you get rid of the only thing that’s endangering them, and that’s you. The Shredder will have no reason to go after them if he can’t use them as leverage over you.”
Raph raised his weapon again and as the man screamed for him to wait for the third time, Raph ignored him. The sai sliced through the layers of fabric and flesh like a hot knife through butter until the man’s pained cries slowly died away to silence. Raph yanked out his weapon and cleaned it off on the man’s clothing before returning it to its sheath.
Mikey grimaced. “Brutal dude.”
Raph didn’t respond. He turned and walked passed Mikey towards the nearest fire escape. “You know,” Mikey began and Raph paused. “you could avoid all these dramatics if you just kill them the first time.”
Raph rolled his eyes. “Save your criticisms on my job for someone who actually cares Mikey.”
“Just saying dude. I’ve just killed twenty of these guys in the last hour without any of them begging me for mercy. You getting rusty there, big boy?”  
“It’s not a competition.”
Mikey snorted. “Yeah well, if it were. I’d win.”
“In your dreams, hot shot.” Raph laughed.
“No, I’m serious Raph. I’ve kept a chart and it says that I’ve killed more men then you in the last six months.”
Raph hopped down from the fire escape he was climbing and stared intriguingly at Mikey. “Oh yeah? I would like to see this chart of yours.”
Mikey smirked as if he had expected as much. “Sure, come on over and I’ll show you.”
Raph should have seen that one coming. Mikey had been trying to get him to visit April again for years now and while Mikey had sworn that she didn’t hold any grudge against him for the loss of her husband, Raph couldn’t help but continue to feel guilty for a thing he couldn’t have controlled. Yet, he still believed that if he had done things differently, perhaps Casey might still be alive. Had Raph had just stopped to think about things instead of jumping head first into everything, he might have avoided his best friend from being a human sacrifice. These were the thoughts that haunted him everyday whenever the red-head popped into his mind; and these were the thoughts that kept him from ever visiting her. 
Mikey must have seen the guilt on Raph’s expression because he immediately squeezed his shoulder and softly said, “You know she never blamed you for him.”
Raph sighed and nodded. “I know she doesn’t.”
“But you do. You need to forgive yourself for something you can’t change Raph. Come on, she really wants to see you.”
Raph bit his lip. “I don’t know, Mike . . .”
“Tomorrow night. You will come over for dinner tomorrow night and we’ll just talk and hang out like we used to. It’ll be fun!” Mikey’s baby blue eyes pleaded with him.
Automatically Raph opened his mouth to refuse as he usually did but Mikey quickly interrupted him. “Just, think about it first. Okay? Call me tomorrow if you want to come over. You know you will always be welcomed.”
Raph sighed defeatedly and nodded. “Fine, but don’t tell April until I’ve made my decision.”
Mikey’s face immediately lit up like the fourth of July. “You got it bro! Trust me, you won’t regret it!”
	Raph didn’t bother commenting on it. He honestly didn’t know if he would be giving Mikey that call tomorrow. While he loved April and Mikey to bits and would jump in front of a bullet for them any day, he had grown used to being a loner. Not that he was ever that social to begin with, but still. He doubted he could hold a proper conversation with them, let alone keep it up for the whole evening.
	With a quick goodbye to his little brother, Raph took to the roofs and began sprinting in the direction of his home. The wind was surprisingly cool for this summer’s night and Raph found himself refreshed by the time he made it back to his apartment. He decided to push thoughts about tomorrow night’s rendezvous to the back of his mind for a later concern and focus on just relaxing. He did want to sleep tonight.
	Raph opened his apartments window and crawled through, freezing at the sight of his trashed home. Not that there was much to trash it with besides the empty beer cans and bottles and burrito wrappings, but he remembered specifically that everything had been in the waste basket before he left.
 This was another robbery. 
	With silent movements, Raph eased himself off the countertops and crept around the island, over the debris, and towards the living room where he noticed the trash was trailing off towards. 
Adrenaline spiked into Raph’s system as he heard a clatter of a can behind him. He spun around and unsheathed his sai, prepared to face his opponent when something solid smacked him across the face and sent stars exploding in his eyes. Raph was vaguely aware of his body tumbling across the island and landing on the other side, but a few long seconds later, a wave of pain washed over him. Starting at the top of his head and working its way down. Slowly, the ringing started to fade and he could hear a clang and a gasp. Another handful of seconds later Raph’s vision followed.
Apparently, he had been knocked unconscious because a familiar and loved face came into view. Hands over his mouth and sapphire eyes wide with shock. No wait, they didn’t look quite blue. They looked almost green. Were they always like that?
“Oh my god! Are you okay? I didn’t mean to hit you that hard, I swear!” 
Raph stared confusingly at the face of his ex-lover. His voice sounded weird. Higher pitched. “Leo?”
“Oh shit, I gave you a concussion, didn’t I? Oh, dad is going to be so pissed.”
Okay, now he was really confused. Their dad was long dead. And since when did Leo ever called Splinter ‘dad’? The most casual he went was ‘Father.’
Groaning, Raph slowly picked himself up using the island as leverage. His head began swimming once he made it to his knees, but after a few seconds break, he managed to make it back to his feet. His vision blacked out for a moment but when it finally cleared, he was again standing face to face with Leonardo. 
No. Not Leo.
Leo didn’t have green eyes but Raph couldn’t mistake that beautiful mint green skin as Leo’s. Raph’s eyes travelled away from the face and down his body and his eyes widened.
 “The hell?” This was not Leo.
Unless Leo somehow had a sex change, he was fairly certain that his oldest brother did not have breasts. Or a skinny waist. Or wide hips. Raph was certain this is what the women called an ‘hourglass figure’. Which Leo, again, did not have. 
“Um, hell-ooo?” Raph didn’t immediately register the three-fingered hand waving in front of his face until said hand began slapping him against the cheek. “Hey! Eyes up here, buddy!” 
Raph blinked a few times but eventually he pulled himself out of his trance and back up to the face that was clearly as feminine as the rest of her body. She was slightly rounder and softer in the face than Leo, with a strip of violet cloth around her large, round eyes, and much fuller lips than any of the brothers.
Another full inspection of her body concluded she was also short. Shorter than April by at least a couple of inches. The top of her head coming to maybe his collarbone if he was judging right visually. 
Finally, once the shock had fully passed, Raph picked his jaw from off the ground and narrowed his eyes on her. “Who the hell are ya and why the fuck do ya look like mah brother? And why are ya in mah home?”
The mutant shrank a little at his voice and she backed up a couple of inches. Good. She should be scared of him. “W-Well . . . it’s kind of a long story.” She muttered awkwardly. Eyes darting to the walls rather than him.
Raph laughed. “Well then we ought to best get comfortable now because you are not leaving until you start coughing up answers, girly.”
She sneered. “Aren’t you charming.”
Raph snorted. “If you wanted charming, you should of tried knocking on the front door first.” 
The turtle’s eyes met his and a brow quirked. “And you think my showing up at your front door would’ve given me a different reaction?”
“Yeah, you’re right. You still wouldn’t have been able to leave without answering questions.”
“Plus, you of all people should know that mutants don’t generally walk around in public.” She pointed out.
Raph took in her outfit. She was wearing a black hoodie and ripped jeans. Only the holes in her jeans didn’t look like they were put there for looks. She also didn’t appear to be armed either. Whatever it was that she hit him with, she no longer had on her. Raph glanced over and found a frying pan lying in the middle of the trashed floor. There’s the culprit. 
“Mutants also don’t break into other mutants’ home.” Raph retorted.
The turtle threw her hands in the air with exasperation. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t leave you a voice message or something like: Oh hey, yeah, I’m a mutant female turtle and my dad is related to you! Would you like to meet up sometime? Have a coffee or what not? Call me back and we can have a little chit chat, m’kay? By the way, I also didn’t have your phone number and . . .”
“Wait. Wait. Wait.” Raph interrupted her. “Did you just say your dad is related to me?”
The turtle blinked, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. “Did I say that?”
“Yes, you did. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You got a fixation with ‘hell’ don’t you?” 
Raph growled in annoyance. “Answer me!”
“Okay! Okay! Calm down! My name is Arianna Hamato. I’m seventeen years old and I’m the daughter of Leonardo Hamato.”
Down went Raph’s jaw again. How? Why? This made no sense! Leo? His Leo has a seventeen-year-old daughter? Since when? Why didn’t he tell him? Raph shook his head, stumbling back against the island again for support. He was suddenly starting to feel his true age. Shocks like this were unhealthy to the body, weren’t they?
“I know this is a lot to take in, but . . .”
“I don’t believe you.” Raph said, interrupting her again.
Arianna blinked. “What?”
“I said,” Raph began, irritated. “I don’t believe you.”
“W-Well . . .” Arianna sputtered, at a loss as to what to do now. “Well, how the hell would you explain this?” She gestured to her body.
Raph shrugged. “I don’t know. Coincidence? Maybe you’re an hallucination from that hit I took.”
“I’m the one that hit you!” She shouted.
Raph decided to ignore her and moved over to the waste basket that was lying on its side near the refrigerator. He retrieved it and began picking up the mess that the robbers must have made. Yeah, that had to be it. Robbers have broken into his apartment again and they were the ones that hit him, resulting in the hallucination of this strange girl that manifested from his missing Leo. That made perfect sense.
“Did you even hear a word I just said?” Arianna demanded.
“I’m not listening.”
“Well, listen to me now! I’m telling the truth! I’m Leonardo’s daughter and you are my . . .”
Like a five-year-old child, Raph stuck his free finger against his ear and started shouting, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la!”
Arianna growled with impatience and stomped over to Raph. She snatched the waste basket from his hands and grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her. “I was trying to be polite but since you insist on being immature, I’m just going to have to tell you outright that you are also my dad. Raphael Hamato has a daughter.”