Herp derp. I should have finished this chapter ages ago. All my chapters have actually been sitting half written on my laptop for a year now. Unfortunately, I'm still no closer to figuring out the second half of the last chapter as I was back then. This chapter was brought to you by DeeMG's prodding whilst I was writing stories about giant robots. So yeah. Be sure to thank her. This is the second last chapter of this fic and we're almost at the end...

Anyway. TMMT = Not mine.

"You were lucky tonight."

"Yeah, I realise. Can we just go home now?"

"No. We need to talk."

"Oh goody, you're going to lecture me?"

"What are you doing Shadow?"

"I'm doing what you taught me. You showed me what the world is really like. I can't turn away from it; I can't go home and ignore it. Not when you've given me the power to change it, you taught me how to fight."

"We taught you how to defend yourself. But maybe…it was a mistake to take away your innocence."

"Uncle if I die out there, promise me you'll take up the good fight again."

The turtle paused and studied her. "No."

She gaped at him, then raised her fist in anger, "How can you-"

He calmly caught her fist. "Raph and Mikey say you've been asking questions. If you don't die doing something stupid in the next couple of months, you're going to stop by yourself."

"I won't stop. Ever," she promised defiantly.

"You're already slowing down Shadow. This is the first time this week you've been out. And you've started to question yourself, wondering when it's going to stop, whether you're making a difference. I was in your position fifteen years ago, except I didn't have a commitment to getting through school or faced the possibility of getting a criminal record. It'll end faster for you. Trust me, this is how it starts. You can only do things over and over again before they lose their meaning."

It was a beautiful day.

Donatello gazed blankly down at the simple headstone, clad in a long trench coat. There were words inscribed on the chunk of marble but the haze surrounded the mutant's brain deliberately stopped them from sinking in. He didn't want to know the human's name. The name of his mistake. The name of his guilt.

Slowly, he unrolled the newspaper in his hand and read the feature article over, eyes skirting over the one detail he was omitting. According to human press, the young man had been killed in a mugging gone wrong.

It was true.

And yet it was false.

It had been an accident really.

The fight was over; he'd taken down the muggers and stopped to take stock of the situation. His mind was dosed up with adrenaline, muscles tensed in preparation for more combat just in case anyone else came to join the fight. Every part of his trained body hyper-alert, primed and ready for anything.

Then there was the touch.

One cautious human hand reached out and brushed his elbow and he reacted. A lifetime of training and violence had honed his reflexes; he pivoted around, striking out with his bo. When he determined his assailant had stopped moving, he relaxed slightly.

It was after several long minutes of silence, of stillness as his body wound down from its combat ready state that it occurred to him that the alleyway was too quiet. There was no panicked breathing, only the slow deep breaths of the unconscious muggers. The silence crept down his shell, paralysing cold and horrifying because it was just too quiet-

He turned and there was a young man, the one he'd set out to rescue. But the picture was wrong, the man lay on the ground next to a dumpster, head bent at an unnatural angle and there was blood-

Too much blood. Red and thick and it pooled beneath the man's body-

There was a moment of blank incomprehension. Then came the horror. The realisation that the man had tripped as he went down and hit the back of his head on the dumpster and it was all so very wrong, the angle was wrong, why-why was the angle so damn wrong?

He took a half step towards the body and stopped, his brain was awhirl with panicked thoughts and every piece of medical knowledge he'd ever read and the certainty that he could not fix this.

His hands froze in mid-air as he reached down to do something, anything that could possibly make this right and then the cold logical side of his brain kicked in and he backed away. He couldn't fix this, right here and now and by himself and touching the man would leave fingerprints that would raise questions.

It took him only a couple of minutes to place the call from a phone booth. He didn't wait for the sirens; he launched himself up onto the roofs and ran.

And he didn't stop. As his feet pounded on harsh tiles and concrete, he wished that he could just forget what he had done and the further away he got meant that it hadn't happened.

It had been an accident.

It had been a mistake.

But it had happened.

It was a beautiful day.

Donatello turned away from the headstone. There was nothing for him here, no one to absolve of his crime, to judge, condemn or punish him. There was the grave and the uncomfortable knowledge that something had gone wrong with him. The constant battles had shaped them, sculpted them into dangerous combat machines and it was getting harder from them to switch back to normal, to relax and stop treating everything as a threat. How much good could they do if they couldn't even tell the difference between enemies and victims?

This wasn't what he wanted.

The turtle backed away. They couldn't continue like this. This wasn't the life he wanted to make for himself, it had gotten out of control and he was going to go insane if he kept it up. He'd made a mistake and Donatello absolutely refused to make another one.

This wasn't what he wanted at all.