SPOILER: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN WHAT HAPPENED TO SHREDDER IN "EXODUS" PART 2! SKIP TO THE DISCLAIMER AND MOVE ON! For those who do not know- Shredder is not (according to the series) dead. Without going into more of a spoiler detail than necessary, he is in exile. Only Karai, the Turtles, Honeycutt and their friends know this. To everyone else, Shredder is dead.

TMNT are the property of Mirage, who are backing the new CGI movie that I swear, I dreamed about last night in such a weird way- the Three Stooges were portraying the Turtles, and Curly was MIKEY!-

Concentration

"Karai's group are not having any luck," Hun's second in command pointed out.

"Yeah- I figured they might run into the same trouble," Hun responded, as the limo made its way through Midtown.

The snow that the cold snap had been promising had finally arrived. Though the streets were well-plowed, everyone was taking it slow. It had been quite a storm, and had pretty much shut down a lot of activity on both sides of the law.

"Have they had any more run-ins with the freaks?"

"No, Master Hun. Just that one time. But the weather, and the number of homeless- forgive me, but this job is just impossible. If them government guys can't find him..." he trailed off, wondering if he'd gone too far. Hun had made him second-in-command, and he was supposed to offer his views (just as long as his views coincided with Hun's that is).

Hun merely grunted. He, too, was wondering if it were worth all the manpower.

And then he thought of what this guy could possibly do for him.

That bullshit story he'd told Karai about cloning- he wasn't sure if it had worked, but at least she had agreed to put aside old differences and help search for this guy.

Whether she would let him know if she had found him or not was another matter. Fortunately, Hun still had a few friends in the Foot organization. The various bits of information that they slipped to him matched what his second-in-command was telling him now.

"I want this guy, no matter how hard it is to find him," he said, no trace of anger or bullying in his tone; merely a statement of fact. Hun himself marveled at his own self-control; leadership suited him, he had always known, but recent months had been a revelation to the behemoth who had only been used to using his sheer strength to get what he wanted. He had started attracting the attention of larger, legitimate business contacts, partly thanks to Ruffington, but more and more on his own.

It had floored him that he found a certain talent for the tedious paperwork end of these things; he even enjoyed it sometimes, sitting behind his desk with invoices, forms, ledgers and correspondence. He laughed to himself, wondering what his old man would have thought- not as stupid as you sai I was, eh Pop?

"Keep looking, but scale back on the search," Hun decided. "Let's keep an eye on the Foot; if they find him, then all we gotta do is make sure Karai honors the agreement to turn him over to us. Let her ninja do the 'foot' work!"

The second-in-command laughed heartily; he wasn't stupid, he knew when Hun was making a joke, and he knew the right amount of force to put into the "appreciation" of the wittiness.

"Damn it, Mikey, you're goin' down!" Raph bellowed, plowing through the snowdrift in pursuit of his younger brother, trailing the remains of the massive snowball he'd just been pelted full in the face with.

Mikey, with a high-pitched scream, ran as fast as he could, but traction was his downfall literally. He slipped and fell face first into a large fluffy drift. Before he could recover, Raph was on him, and it took a lot of his ninja training to keep from getting both frostbite and beaten to death by his loving brother.

"Come on, Raph! Where's your sense of humor?" Leo, practicing katas in the snow, wasn't watching the sibling carnage, but he knew that Mikey deserved it. Well, perhaps not hypothermia. "Let him up out of that drift before he goes into hibernation. I for one do NOT want to carry him home. He's gained weight."

On the roof of a warehouse that was close enough for their investigations into the mysterious "pied piper" (as Mikey had started referring to him) yet far enough away to honor Splinter's command, the foursome were mixing business with pleasure. Don was taking final readings with his various instruments, inputting all the information into his handy laptop, keeping up a constant stream of indecipherable (to Leo) chatter with Prof. Honeycutt via shell cell.

Raph, in his enthusiasm for the white stuff, had been building a magnificent snowturtle with the help of Mikey- who just could NOT resist lobbing the occasional snowball at his brothers.

The first one to hit Don's precious laptop had earned Mikey his first "beating" of the late afternoon ("Man, I've never see Don so riled up!" Raph had commented to Leo as they'd watched their youngest brother trying to dodge- and failing to do so- the well-aimed swings of the expertly wielded bo staff as it repeatedly found its target, namely Mikey's ass).

"Yeah, I'm not gonna do it either," Raph agreed, and with a final shove down into the snow, he got off of Mikey and made his way back to his creation.

Mikey, spitting out the mouthful of snow that Raph had been force-feeding him, still managed to grin his thanks to Leo.

"Aww, always looking out for me!" he said cheerfully. "I'm going to repay you someday, loving brother of mine!"

"Just make sure no more snowballs come at me," Leo, still doing katas, said, leaving any implied threat to Mikey's vast imagination.

"Don, you about finished? I'm freezin' my ass off," Raph, putting the finishing touches on his "snow sculpture", had started to show the effects of being outside for so long. He had shed a lot of the outerwear, as had the others, when they had been active, keeping warm with their practice and sparring. Now he quickly donned the jacket, gloves and even boots, wondering why none it warmed him up, and dreaming of a nice mug of hot chocolate, full of those little marshmallows that he liked so much.

Don, the only one who had immediately gotten redressed after Leo's insistence that they train unencumbered by the warm, protective yet bulky outerwear, merely made some noncommittal grunt and continued taking readings, staring at various buildings with his specially designed goggles, making notes, and communicating with Honeycutt.

Leo looked at Don and sighed.

"Why don't you and Mikey head back?" Leo suggested, noticing that the youngest brother, though he still was tossing snowballs at the unprotesting warehouses, seeing how far he could throw the easily packed, frosty missiles, was beginning to look more blue than green. "I'll wait here with Don."

Raph would normally have argued this, but he was too damn cold.

"Come on, Mikey!" he ordered. "You're gonna make me the biggest cup of hot chocolate in the world for peltin' me with that snowball."

The youngest turtle did not argue. He, too, had wanted to go home- hell, he'd been wanting to go home for the past half hour, and not because of the cold. As he'd been staring down at the street where he and Leatherhead had been walking a few days ago, he kept seeing in his mind that sight of the rats, flowing like liquid in a relentless tide- only to halt and retreat to the sound of that whistle.

As he threw a few final balls of snow, a sudden movement near the corner of one of the warehouses drew his attention. Before he could react, the last snowball he'd thrown hit someone just coming around the side- smack square in the face!

Mikey had already ducked down safely out of sight. He waited for someone to shout, to curse, to threaten the world with retribution.

"Mikey, what did you do?"

Raph's accusing voice reached his ears, and he turned to see his brothers also staying out of sight- they had seen him dive for cover.

"Probably hit some security guy with a snowball," Don grumbled as he still kept working.

"Doesn't sound like whoever he hit seems to mind," Leo commented. They were all puzzled by the lack of outraged protest.

Mikey eased up slowly, peered over the side- and froze! The man he'd hit was still standing there in the gloom of the late afternoon. He was standing still, and staring directly up at where the snowball had come from.

He made eye-contact with Mikey- and Mikey felt as if things were spinning. He was conscious of his heart racing uncontrollably; his breathing was fast and shallow; his mind was blanking in strange ways-

"Mikey!"

He snapped back to himself, realizing that he was staring straight into Raph's concerned face. He'd been shaking him by the shoulders, trying to get his attention.

"Mikey! What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Maybe he's hypothermic," Don, still absorbed in his research, said without concern. "Take him home and warm him up."

Mike looked back towards the street. No one was there. He looked back at his older brother. He tried to speak, but his mouth had forgotten how to work it seemed. His voice cracked; his throat was tight and dry, and he could not swallow for a minute.

"Bro, you need to snap outta it and come on," Raph sad, trying not to sound concerned, yet failing miserably. He began to lead Mikey towards their exit.

Mikey looked back again, knowing he would see nothing.

Ghost. That's all it was. A ghost. He had just seen a ghost from his imagination.

A ghost with a familiar, strange way of staring.

Victor.

Stockman checked and rechecked the information. No matter what he told this woman, she was going to not accept it. But what she wanted was impossible.

Bishop may have had the secret of prolonging his own existence, but science could only do so much once the brain was damaged.

Stockman, genius that he was, still did not understand why or how he could still be "alive" as it were; a fully functioning brain that existed in this strange bio-fluid, in control of this new and improved robotic body that he (naturally) had designed and had built. The Shredder had known many strange things that he had passed on to others- like that rock for brains homicidal caveman Hun- but to this day the secret Utrom method of preserving Stockman's brain and restoring "life" to him was still a mystery.

When Shredder had been destroyed (A/N- see top of this chapter), Stockman had managed to bring many of his secrets, his inventions, his research, and other such things and turn them over to Bishop, who had marveled at the amount of information that had fallen into his lap as it were. But this process of preserving the brain...

Stockman looked again at what the Turtles had left of Bishop. Bishop had been successful in cloning himself, though only a few of those still existed, forever preserved in the bio-fluid, useless for anything except perhaps research. If Stockman had the ability of Shredder, perhaps he could technically "bring back" Bishop.

But though he was not a religious man, he did know that once something is dead, and has been dead for a while- that something is gone. That "something" that made that person unique is no more.

"Well, I'm obviously the exception," he sniffed disdainfully, putting the remains away for the day and preparing to go about his own business of trying to regenerate a real body for his magnificent brain- to truly be "alive" again.

He'd worry about what he'd tell this obsessive woman later.

PAIN!

"Sensei, can I talk with you?"

Mikey had knocked at Splinter's door. It was late at night, and everyone had thawed out and gone to bed early for once. But Mikey couldn't sleep.

He'd debated all evening over what he'd thought he'd seen; it was his imagination- maybe- no, it was! Victor was dead! He just thought he'd seen him because he's been planning the memorial- yeah, that was it!

Those eyes...

"Come in, my son," the reply cut into his thoughts, and Mikey entered, bowing and then kneeling down next to his father.

Splinter had been reading, though Mikey could see that he was almost ready for bed. He felt bad coming in here, bothering Splinter. Splinter had not had any stress-free days since that night-

Mikey smiled nervously.

"What is it, Michelangelo?" Splinter encouraged his son gently, wondering what sort of trouble the youngest once again found himself in. "Have you broken something of Donatello's? Are you in the bad graces of Raphael, perhaps?"

He waited for the protest at such accusations, but none came. He could see that something substantial was disturbing his son's peace, something beyond pillowcases filled with rocks or messy food remains carelessly dripped upon precious computer keyboards.

His son seemed unable to speak for the moment; then he looked his father in the eyes, and they reflected the hesitancy he was feeling.

He roughly cleared his throat; took a deep breath:

"Father- do you believe in ghosts?"