Another million and one apologies that this chapter took me so long to post. Hopefully you guys are still hanging around waiting for its conclusion, which I think will be coming in the next chapter or two. Once this one is done, I will begin working on the next story in this arc... "Donatello's Dream." Leave me a review when you're finished reading to tell me what you think. Thanks guys!

Chapter Twenty

"That's not fair!"

Leonardo rolled his eyes a little. "Life isn't fair, Mikey. You need to concentrate…"

As the youngest turtle continued to rub at the place on his arm where Leo's blow had landed, the elder brother was busy trying not to groan in frustration. They had been at this for nearly an hour now, and every few minutes it seemed that their sparring session was brought to a halt because Michelangelo simply wasn't focused on what he was doing. Leo was able to land his blows with far more ease than normal, and Mikey didn't even seem remotely interested in taunting him the way he usually did.

Everything had been different over the last few weeks, tensions running higher than normal between the brothers as they all struggled to comprehend the new reality that they were confronted with. Master Splinter had spent several hours in his room with Raphael, listening as his son recounted the entire story to him a second time. No one had dared to approach the room until their brother had emerged, but even then they didn't have the opportunity to speak to him. Raphael had immediately left the lair and gone out on his own. And their sensei was quick to tell his remaining three sons that they needed to give Raphael the same space that they were giving Destiny so that he too could process things.

"If you don't focus you're not going to get any better."

"You're not training Leo," the younger turtle shot at him with an accusatory glare. "You're taking your frustrations out on me and it hurts!"

Leo frowned darkly. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"I know that's what you're doing!"

"Fine."

Swords were sheathed again before further words could be spoken as Leonardo stormed out of the room, making his way through the lair and down the corridor that would take him to his bedroom. From his place at the computer desk, Donatello watched the exchange with fear etched into the depths of his dark brown orbs. What was happening? All of a sudden it seemed that none of them could stand to be so close to one another, a thought that shook him to his core. The family that they had was small…only a handful of people were permitted to come within their family unit. Had they made a mistake in bringing Destiny into it?

Donnie cringed when he heard Mikey's nunchuks hit the floor at his feet as he threw them in anger and stalked off to the living room, sitting heavily on the couch. He folded his arms tightly over his chest and turned his head away so as to avoid any form of eye contact with the others, breathing heavily as if he were trying to calm himself down. Mikey wasn't the type to get angry, Donnie thought to himself. Not like this…not in a way that reminded him so much of Raphael when he was holding onto his emotions too closely.

"Mikey-"

"What?" snapped the younger turtle as he rounded on his brother. "Are you going to tell me that I'm not trying too?"

But Donatello was quick to shake his head, holding his hands in front of him to show that he meant no harm. "No!" he told his little brother quickly. "No, not at all! I just…" The turtle breathed a heavy sigh. "I don't like to see us fight one another….that's all."

Mikey's anger slowly began to vanish as he watched his older brother, shoulders slumping forward slightly. "I'm sorry, Donnie. This whole thing with Des just has me so freaked out."

"Freaked out how?" Donnie asked him.

The orange masked turtle dropped his eyes and shrugged his shoulders a little. "I dunno," he sighed. "It just doesn't feel right, ya know? I feel really bad about all the stuff she went through. I don't like that Raph lied to us about her. And it just…it just feels wrong."

"Would you rather I go?"

Both heads turned with a snap as they stared at the entrance way of the lair, the very same place through which she had run almost two and a half weeks before. She looked better now though. There were no bandages, cuts or bruises immediately noticeable on her skin, and though she was certainly pale and showed evident signs of not having slept well, she didn't look as beaten up as the other times she had been down there. Her hair was clean and hanging freely around her shoulders. She wore a pair of jean leggings and a dark grey long sleeve that hugged her every curve, along with a pair of light brown cowboy boots that cut off around the ankle. She was every inch the seventeen year old teenaged girl that everyone else might have expected her to be…not at all like the masked vigilante that they knew made up the other half of her personality.

The look on her face was suddenly filled with caution though as she looked between the two brothers with wide set eyes. She made as if to step backward and perhaps leave the lair altogether, but Mikey jumped to his feet and stretched out his hands, indicating that he didn't want her to go.

"No, Des…that's not what I meant-"

"But you're right," she cut him off gently, leaning against the edge of the wall a little and using it to partially hide her body behind. "You guys probably didn't have any problems at all until I showed up, did you?"

Donatello was on his feet in an instant. "We had problems," he assured her. "We're brothers. We're always going to fight."

"But Des, you brought something else into this family that we didn't really have before," Michelangelo pressed. "We…we've never had anyone else who understands what it's like to be different. Not like this."

The purple masked turtle nodded slowly, taking a few more steps toward her until he was standing close enough to reach out and touch her shoulder with his green hand. She didn't flinch. She didn't draw away. Those were the two things that Donatello noticed immediately as she looked at him with a sadness in her eyes that cut into his heart. But it was the only emotion that he could read.

He gently squeezed her shoulder as he looked at her, ducking his eyes for a moment with a soft sigh. "The truth is, I don't think any of us realized that we needed someone like you in our lives until you were gone."

Destiny tilted her head, clearly confused. "Like what?"

"A friend."

Was it the word that struck a nerve within her or was it the sincere tone of voice that he used when he spoke? Destiny wasn't entirely sure which, but within the span of a few seconds she found herself moving to slip her arms around Donatello's chest, her head pressed close to his heart as she held on tightly. There was a moment of shock that registered in the turtle's face, then he too was wrapping her in an embrace. He wasn't exactly the most physical of the four brothers, preferring to work with logistics and facts before he resulted to his physicality. The truth of the matter was that Donatello wasn't really secure in a lot of things…and his greatest strength was in his ability to think ahead or find a solution to a problem. That was what really allowed him to contribute to the team that the brothers formed.

But in that moment he felt that there was something more than that to him…something that made him feel a little more like he was part of the team and not just the "smart one." In a way…he almost felt like he was normal.

With a bit of a squeeze, Destiny slowly began to pull away from him and Donnie took that as his signal to let go. The fear was gone from her eyes, and instead there was an ease that he didn't think he had ever seen in the time that he had known her personally. A soft smile appeared in the corner of her mouth as she stepped back and looked around her, clearly searching for someone or something in particular.

"Is Leo around?"

Mikey ducked his head, looking a little ashamed. "I think he's in his room. I kinda yelled at him…"

She crossed the distance between them in a few quick steps, laying a hand against his cheek and bringing his face toward her so that she could brush her lips against the opposite side of his face. "I'll go talk to him. Don't worry…it'll all be alright."

The colour that rose in Michelangelo's cheeks at that moment was unmistakable, and Destiny giggled softly when she saw it. She couldn't resist shooting him a bit of a wink before she let him go, and was rewarded with an awkward shuffling of his feet. Suddenly all of his courage seemed to fail him when it came to the human girl in the room. But like his brother he watched her head down toward the corridor that would lead her to their eldest brother, wondering if she might actually be able to remedy the situation at all. Leo had been so unpredictable lately that it was almost impossible to tell how he might react to her knocking on his curtain door.

That same feeling of nervousness was roaming around in her stomach like loose butterflies, but she knew that she couldn't allow herself to chicken out now. She had come this far, hadn't she? He was the last of the brothers that she needed to see in order to try and bring herself some kind of inner peace over the whole situation, and she needed him to understand just how much his friendship had come to mean to her.

For so many years she had been alone. After her sister died there was nothing Destiny wanted more than for the men who had killed Savannah to return so that they could kill her too. At nine years old, all she had wanted to do was die…

Her footsteps came to a pause as she stood on the outside of his curtained door, her heartbeat picking up just a little bit faster as she thought about what she was going to say. There was nothing planned, of course. Despite her best efforts to come up with something each sentence sounded more pathetic and scripted than the last…so she had abandoned the notion that she might actually be able to plan for this meeting. Destiny inhaled slowly and let out a short exhale quickly afterward, turning her eyes to the curtain.

"Leo?"

The result was almost instantaneous. The turtle came through the curtain so quickly that Destiny jumped back a little in surprise, and soon found herself wrapped in a firm embrace that told her just how much he had apparently missed her company over the past few weeks. She returned the gesture with equal enthusiasm, holding on just a little more tightly than she had with Donatello.

He breathed a sigh of relief. "How are you feeling?" he asked her after a moment, releasing her enough that he could pull back and look her in the eye.

"Better," the human admitted softly. "Still trying to come to terms with certain things but overall, much better than I was."

Leonardo nodded slowly, his hands drifting to her upper arms. "Eight years is a long time to hold onto that kind of fear and anger."

"It is. But if Raph hadn't come to stop me that night then I don't know what would have happened."

His hands tightened around her arms a little as the distress began to show on his face. Dark orbs looked down into her face, as if he were silently pleading with her not to return to that frame of mind again. No doubt Raphael would have told them what she had said that night when she confronted Powers in his lab…and had he not been there to talk her down, she didn't doubt that she would have allowed the both of them to become trapped in the fire. And that would have been the end of the Hunter.

It would have been the end of a lot of things.

Sensing his discomfort, the brunette quickly shook her head and offered him a bit of a smile, hoping to set his mind at ease. "Hey, it's okay," she told him gently as she reached up to give his hand a firm squeeze. "It took me a little while to wrap my head around things but I'm still here. And if it's okay with you guys…I'd like to stick around for a while."

Leo blinked at her. "Really?"

Destiny nodded her head, the smile beginning to grow. "Leo, I've never really known what it's like to have people in my life who care about me. My parents abandoned me when I was a child, Savannah died when I was nine…all my life I've been afraid of what other people might think if they were to find out what I could do. It's like I told you the night that we met…we're really not so different, you and I. And just because you don't look like me doesn't mean you're not human where it counts."

She stepped in toward him again, arms wrapping around him as she lay her head against his chest. "I never realized just how much was missing from my life until you guys wandered into it. Now you've turn it completely upside down…and I can't imagine not having you in it."

He didn't think that he could trust himself to speak. What words could possibly be said after that? So the turtle settled for the way things were in that moment, just the two of them standing in the hallway with his arms wrapped firmly around her smaller body as she warmed his chest with her touch. The sentiments that she expressed couldn't have been truer if Leo attempted to rephrase them himself. The girl that he had once hunted in the night to try and stop her vigilante ways was now perhaps one of the most treasured people in his life, a light at the end of a dark tunnel he hadn't realized that he had been stuck in. And he knew in the back of his mind that he would protect her just as fiercely as he protected the rest of his family, without question.

For a long moment the two of them seemed frozen in time, standing there without any regard for the fact that someone else might happen upon them in search of Leo or that someone might think their innocent embrace was perhaps not so innocent. But when that moment had passed Destiny drew back out of his arms and left a chill against his skin that Leo didn't welcome at all.

She lifted her eyes to his face, biting her lip nervously. "There is something I would ask of you though. Something that I need your help with."

The turtle nodded immediately. "Anything, Des…what is it?"

"I don't know that you're going to like it. But for your safety, I have to do this."