Raphael drew a deep breath as he readied to enter Splinter's room. Splinter's sleeping patterns were erratic, so he had no guarantee that his sensei would not wake up. He stood at the threshold for a moment, sweating bullets.

Am I seriously going to do this? he asked himself. Splinter will kill me if I do this and he catches me!

At this point, however, his curiosity had reached an unbearable pitch. What on earth would sensei write about if he did actually keep a journal? Some of it might be really personal.

I won't actually read it, Raphael told himself. I just want to see if he actually has them.

As silently as possible, Raphael slipped into Splinter's room. He glanced around. He had only been in the room a handful of times, so he wasn't sure where Splinter might stash a journal. He walked over to the closet and saw a cardboard box. Curious, he opened it, thinking that maybe it had some of the turtles' old toys in it or something.

His jaw dropped when he saw that the whole box was full of leather journals identical to the ones that Splinter had given to each of them.

With a quick glance back at Splinter, he lifted up the whole box and stealthily left the room. Then, he hurried back to his own room and locked the door.

His heart was racing. What the heck was that? He had promised himself that he wouldn't look at Splinter's journals. But now that he had them in his hands the adrenaline rush of having successfully taken them overwhelmed him. There was no going back now. Slowly, shakily, he lifted up the journal on top.

They're probably just blank spares, he told himself. That's all.

But when the book opened, Raphael gasped to see the miniscule, tightly cramped Japanese script that covered nearly every square millimeter of the pages. He laid the journal down and picked up another. It was the same. These were Splinter's archives—how far back did they go? He went through all of the books until he found the one that looked the most worn and opened it to the first page.

He squinted; Splinter truly had written in these as though unsure when he would find paper again. The script was tiny. Furthermore, it had been a long time since Raphael had read anything in Japanese. Even then, they were usually mangas. Manga definitely used its own specific dialect. Proper, formal Japanese? They had not actively used or learned it for at least five years.

Granted, Raphael knew every Japanese swear word in existence, and of course he understood all things related to ninjutsu and discipline.

Maybe, with a little practice, it will come back to me, Raphael thought. There. That's the date. December 24, 1998.

Whoa. We only would have been like one year old then.

As his recognition of the Japanese characters and words slowly flowed back to him, Raphael began to read.

I must say, I have never celebrated Christmas before. My family tended to cling to the old ways, resisting the Westernization that crept across Japan. But I am in America now. I have left my home behind. Perhaps I would do well to teach these turtles of mine the traditions of their own country, in addition to my own.

Unfortunately, all I have to offer them is garbage, what I can scrounge from the dumpsters and alleyways above. There will be little celebration, but perhaps I can cobble something together. I will go out and see what I can find.

December 25, 1998

A crafts store had many scraps of fabric in their dumpster. It was good quality, heavy fabric. I draped them around the little tree like garlands. I'm not sure if these colors are really Christmaslike, but they are bright and colorful. The turtles were very excited about the whole thing. Michelangelo showed his appreciation by sucking on the end of some of the orange fabric. Then he proceeded to choke on it. I definitely wonder about him.

Raphael laughed out loud, then clapped his hands over his mouth. Hopefully he didn't wake anyone up.

There is enough fabric that I used some to make masks for the boys after I decorated the tree. I decided that Michelangelo should have the orange, since he seemed to like it so much. Raphael and Leo fought over the blue mask until I broke them up. Donatello looked as though he thought I was mad to be suggesting that he cover his face with it. When I finally got them to wear the scraps of fabric, they looked so cute. The little bandanas on their faces—adorable! I love my little turtles.

Raphael felt very strange. He knew that he was definitely trespassing into a part of Splinter's personality that he had never realized before. Splinter had always seemed so solemn and distant. It was not that Splinter did not express love; indeed, Raphael recalled Splinter actually saying "I love you" on a few occasions. This, however, was far more gushy that Raphael expected his sensei was capable of. With a shrug, he flipped forward near to the end of the book and started reading again.

September 29, 2000

Three years. It seems like so much longer. I feel as though everything I once knew was an entire lifetime ago. I should be happy that I have my new family, but I am not. I feel the darkness again. I haven't felt it for nearly two and a half years. I do not know what has changed. Perhaps it is simply the time of year? Yet last year, I did not feel so depressed. So why? What has changed?

I can hear Donatello running around in the other room. I should go out and greet him. But even louder than the sound of his footsteps are the whisperings of my sword. Whispers I have not heard for so long.

Maybe he will come in here. Maybe he will come in and save me again, talk to me, bring me out of the darkness. If I just see his face—any of their faces—maybe the thoughts of death will subside.

Raphael's stomach felt like it had been plunged into a bucket of ice. Whispering swords? Thoughts of death?

No. I will have to make them subside on my own. I cannot rely on children to help me. When Donatello first spoke to me two and a half years ago, it renewed my desire to live. What could he do now that would drive away the suicidal urges? I must find that answer inside of myself.

Suicide? Splinter?

Splinter was a rock. He was impervious. How could he—he was really thinking about suicide? Raphael's mind was spinning.

I am ninja. I am strong. I will persevere through this for these little ones who have become my sons. Perhaps these thoughts will come and go, and I must learn to survive them as they do.

Now I hear Leonardo calling for me. "Spinner-san," he calls me, adorable child. How I wish I had taught them to call me father. By the time I thought of them as sons, they were already calling me by my name. It is too late to teach them differently.

I have the strength inside of myself to do this. I will get up from my bed. I will not go to my blade. I will go to my sons.

Raphael slammed the journal shut. His heart was racing. They were only three! Three years old, and Splinter was thinking about killing himself! What if he had?

He hadn't. He had survived his ordeal.

But the thing that stunned Raphael the most was that apparently this had happened to Splinter before. Raphael knew that Donnie was the first one of them to speak, but he hadn't realized that somehow Donnie's talking to Splinter that kept their sensei from taking his own life.

Did Splinter—

Did he still think about killing himself?

The thought sent shivers down Raphael's spine. He imagined walking into Splinter's room and seeing his sensei lying dead on the floor.

Raphael suppressed a desire to vomit.

Please, Master Splinter, he thought. Please tell me that you don't think about that anymore.

Putting down the old, battered journal, Raphael grabbed a newer looking one and cracked it open.

July 16, 2008

I swear I am going to kill him. Heaven help me, I will break his neck if he does not stop driving me insane. Twelve years old, but of course being able to properly handle sai makes him so much superior to his brothers. Twelve years old, but of course his sensei couldn't possibly teach him anything. Twelve years old and twelve years worth of being the biggest pain in my…

Raphael grinned wickedly. I love you too, sensei, he thought.

Of course, it's just because he's too much like me that he drives me insane. I was rather like that too. I assumed that courage was contingent on being the strongest; that my raw fighting skills were enough to make me the best. It wasn't until my own sensei finally knocked some sense into me that I understood the ways of the true ninja.

Heaven knows I have tried knocking sense into the boy. But Raphael is…a special kind of stubborn. I fear that I cannot teach him to let go of his anger or teach him to embrace patience.

Just as our sensei could not teach Oroku Saki to change his ways.

Raphael nearly yelled. Shredder? Splinter was worried that he was going to be like Shredder?

But if I had embraced my sensei's lessons sooner, before I had contributed our petty feud, would Tang Shen and Miwa still be alive? I can never know. Nevertheless, I pray endlessly that Raphael will not choose the path that I chose—the path that Tang Shen saved me from. If I had stayed on that path, perhaps I would have been no different than my enemy.

Will Raphael listen to my lessons? Will he take what I say to heart?

Will he, like me, learn too late?

Hands shaking, Raphael shut the journal. Silently, he organized them in the box the way he had found them. He stole back into Splinter's room and returned the box to its place in the closet.

He drew a deep breath and released it silently as he stared at his sleeping sensei.

Splinter seemed so serene as he lay there. His chest slowly rose and fell. Occasionally, his nose and ears twitched slightly. To the outsider, he looked perfectly content.

To Raphael, he looked like a mystery. Splinter: solemn, stoic, disciplinarian Splinter, thought his sons had been cute as babies. Peaceful, rational, meditative Splinter, a calm ocean of zen, thought about ending his own life. Splinter had regrets. Fears.

Did he have nightmares, too?

How could Splinter contain everything? With all of those conflicting feeling, Raphael probably would have exploded trying to hold them in. How did Splinter manage it?

Then, Raphael noticed a considerably newer leather journal lying on the floor next to Splinter's bed.

Silently, Raphael went back to his room. He shut the door softly behind him, undid his red mask, and looped it around the knob on his bed frame. He crawled into bed, but before he shut off the light, he picked up a pen and took his journal from the nightstand.

He put the pen to the first blank page. Clumsy, unpracticed Japanese characters flowed from the nib onto the paper.

Courage comes in many forms. Strength, in many shapes.

Without either of these things, there can be no leadership. There can be no intelligence. There can be no joy and heart. But neither courage nor strength look the same to everyone. They do not even always look the same to one person.

I, however, have been given the insight to see that courage and strength have a name and a face.

And I will do everything in my power to be like the man that embodies them.

Wow, thought Raphael. That's just about the cheesiest thing I have ever thought, let alone written down.

He was about to close the journal when he realized that he wanted a bookmark, even though it was just the first page. He got up and rummaged around in his closet until he found what he wanted. A tiny red scrap of fabric: the first bandana he had ever worn. He laid it between the pages and shut the journal. Then, with a yawn, he crawled back into bed and turned out the light.

He smiled when he felt Spike crawl onto the bed with him, and with a sigh of content, he fell asleep.

The End

Thanks for reading, everyone. Let me know what you think. If you want to read more of my stories, also check out my latest, "The Girl Next Door."