Title: When I'm Gone

Rating: PG-13

World: This story takes place primarily in the 2007 movie-verse. However there are events referenced and characters appearing from the 2K3 cartoon, just because that series (up until the FF season) had some pretty cool stuff in it.

Feedback: Yes please! However, no flames. Flames are pointless and get deleted, not read. Use constructive criticism instead. By telling me in detail what you believe I'm getting wrong and why, I'll have something to work with to improve my writing and the fic. I could really use it since this is my first time writing in this fandom so I'm relying on feedback to let me know what's good and what could be better. But don't think every review has to be a book report or something. Even if it's just to say 'Great! Keep it going!' don't hesitate to say something. I'm being really good about updating right now, but in the next few weeks classes are going to be starting up, so unless there's a significant interest in this fic I'm not going to be so concerned about updating as often when things start to get busy for me, or consider updating more often.

Warnings: This fic does contain violence and some language (c'mon, it's Raph, what'd you expect?). And also a bit of what colloquially would be termed 'black magic'. This is a conglomeration of Hollywood-ized witchcraft, with a few real-life bits of folklore and facts thrown in for flavor. It is not based on any one particular religion, nor are any of the rituals you see here real. They're completely fiction, so no trying them yourself or telling me I got stuff wrong.

Disclaimer: I do not own TMNT, any of its characters, nor the events referenced from the 2003 cartoon or 2007 movie. This is purely a fan-work done for my entertainment, and the entertainment of any who care to read it. A big shout-out to the creators of these wonderful characters who allow us to play on their playground. Oh, but please do remember that any story-line not seen in the movies, comics, or tv shows, and any characters also fitting that description (like Callie and Moonlight) are mine. Please do not use them without getting my okay first.

***Also, my 'witch' is not based on any actual religion or belief system. She's just a girl trying to figure out what she believes in but the magic she practices as stated above is not real.***

Summary: When Raph stops a young woman from murdering a Purple Dragon, he didn't realize she was a witch trying to avenge her murdered brother. As punishment, she curses him to live in the form of her familiar, an Egyptian Mau. Now, unable to communicate and only possessing cryptic information to break the curse, Raph must divide his attention between searching for a way to restore himself to his true form, and trying to comfort his grieving family who are desperately searching for him and slowly starting to believe him dead. But if he's to be there for them and watch their backs as they confront enemy after enemy trying to figure out who took him, he's going to have to somehow convince them not to adopt him out.

Author's Note: Well, here I am with my first TMNT fic... Little nerve-wracking. Well, it's been a while since I've posted a fic here. Anyone who cares to know why can visit my profile. And if you're one of my LOTR readers then I definitely recommend you do so since I've updated the info on those stories. Anyway, I'd like to give a huge shout-out to my betas. Raphfreak, who is absolutely awesome (I recommend checking out her fics). She's the one who convinced me this plotbunny was worth writing. Before I was skeptical if anyone would even like it enough to make fleshing it out worth it. And Skylark, one of my long-time RL best friends, who is always there to listen to me rant about plotbunnies, even if I rarely get them posted and don't always rant about fandoms she's really into. Hugs and cyber-pocky to you both!

Prologue: Signs

Looking back on that night, Callie Henway knew she'd always find some reason to blame herself for everything that had gone so wrong, no matter how improbable her reasons seemed to others.

She would blame herself for not paying better heed to the message in her tarot cards two days prior. They had spoken to her of imminent danger and death, but she had simply dismissed it because her beloved daredevil cat was always finding new ways to give her a heart attack, and of course there was her eighty-something year old neighbor who's heart had been slowly giving out for the past four years. Add to that kidney failure roughly seven months ago and the prognosis wasn't looking good.

She would blame herself for not considering the phase of the moon. It was the waning moon, symbolizing surrender, letting go, and release. It also meant contemplation, and that it was time to let ideas incubate in preparation of the new moon, which was the sign of new beginnings. In the past she had loved to sit outside on the fire escape and do just this as she moon-gazed. But something had been off, and in less than five minutes she had begun to feel so restless and agitated that she'd been forced to abandon one of her favorite pastimes so she could pace away that negative energy which no amount of calming chants or incense could quell. For the first time ever, the cards had shown her the exact same message twice, and she'd forever blame herself for not thinking that such a rare occurrence didn't warrant further investigation.

She would blame herself for not thinking twice about it the following evening when her brother had offered her a ride to her college for her night class. When they got to his car they found a white cat sitting on the hood that had proceeded to jump down and rub against her brother's ankles before sauntering off. In Western culture most people would have only found this to be disconcerting if the cat had been black. But Callie was not most people. Her study of symbolism expanded to cultures in every corner of the globe, and she knew that in the Far East the white cat was the most unlucky cat of all. In Japan white symbolized death and it was the color that funeral guests wore in old times. Even in the West people had begun to pick up on this despite the eclipsing notoriety of the black cat. In England school children seeing a white cat en route to school was a sign of trouble. If she had been paying more attention to this and worrying less about her chemistry exam she would have remembered to spit or turn a full circle and make the sign of the cross to ward off bad luck. Especially since American superstition held the sight of a white cat at night to be a sign of bad luck as well.

She would blame herself for not seeing the need to look for deeper meaning in everything that had happened in those two days. She was forever insisting that there was a deeper meaning to everything that happened in the world, no matter how much skepticism and scorn it got her from almost everyone she knew. For all of her studies into symbolism and divination, how could she have dismissed the signs so easily when they were so obvious? The warnings were there, if only she'd been willing to read them.

But most of all, she would blame herself for not trusting her gut. From the time she had woken up that morning, she had known something was wrong. No amount of reassurance from any source could ease her anxiety. Her beloved Egyptian Mau, Moonlight, had been beside herself, picking up on her human's stress and trying desperately to figure out what was wrong.

It had been 11:59 PM when she had gotten the call. When the cop had finally finished stumbling through his apologies for calling so late and told her the most crushing news of her young life, the antique grandfather clock her mother had so lovingly restored was chiming midnight.

For whom did that bell toll?

It tolled for her brother, Charles, age 29. A Professor of Physics at NYU currently working on his second doctorate. Gunned down by a member of the gang known as the Purple Dragons in a back alley as he was walking home from the video store where he had rented movies for their once-monthly movie night.

Because of some stupid punk looking to lift a little bit of cash, the only family Callie had left in the world had been stolen from her.

If she'd thought the night her parents had died was the hardest she'd ever cried, that night she'd discovered how mistaken she was. When she'd finally gotten back in the early hours of the morning from identifying her brother's corpse, Moonlight had practically glued herself to Callie's side. The girl had curled up in her bed sobbing hysterically the entire day through, clutching the feline tightly to her and sobbing into the spotted silver shoulders. Through it all the cat patiently let her, chortling softly to let her know she wasn't alone. She would never let her human be alone.

Several weeks later, a brief ray of hope shone on her in the form of another phone call. This one was from the prosecutor who was handling her brother's case. They got him. They'd caught the bastard who'd shot her brother.

The day the trial started, she had walked into that courtroom with her head held high. The prosecutor had told her the case was airtight, and the bastard would be going away for capital murder. That news had filled her with the closest thing to happiness she could muster. For taking the life of the person she held more dear to her than anyone else in the world, she wanted the asshole to never see the light of day again.

Therefore it had taken every last ounce of strength in her to keep from collapsing into a nervous breakdown when it was discovered that the prosecution's ace in the hole—the handgun that had fired the killing shot, found near the victim with the defendant's finger prints on it—had been improperly handled and processed by a rookie cop, and would not be allowed in as evidence. (1)

Without that gun the prosecution could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that this particular gangster had killed her brother.

That day Callie found out just how blind justice really was, as she was forced to watch her brother's killer walk free and unpunished. All because of some stupid mistake made by none other than the people whose entire purpose in society was to make certain monsters like him got what they deserved.

That night as she lay in her bed with Moonlight purring contentedly on her chest, Callie fumed at the injustice of it all. Her brother was dead, she was alone, and his killer walked free. Her espresso-brown eyes narrowed at the ceiling, as though if she stared at its white expanse long enough, it would give her the answers to her problems.

It wasn't as though she didn't know the answer already. It was quite simple really. The asshole who murdered Charles could not be allowed to get off scott free because of a technicality. Her brother needed justice, not the mockery of it she'd seen paraded around in front of her in the courtroom. The question however, was how to get justice when the law stated that someone couldn't be tried for the same crime twice? She had begged the prosecuting attorney, and he had assured her that there was no way that they were going to be able to get a mistrial declared so that they'd have another shot. It was just the luck of the draw. The only thing that would see that Purple Dragon behind bars now would be him getting busted for a whole new crime.

Suddenly restless, she shot upright and out of bed. Moonlight growled in annoyance as her living pillow unexpectedly dumped her on the floor.

"Sorry, Moon," Callie muttered as she began pacing. The Mau jumped back on her bed and curled up on her pillow, gooseberry green eyes glaring at her in annoyance as she started to pace back and forth across the room for the thousandth time since the whole nightmare had started.

"There's gotta be something we haven't thought of yet, girl," she said. "He can't be allowed to get away with this. He just can't. It's not fair. I can't live with it if he doesn't pay for what he's done."

Moonlight meowed in response as a moth fluttered across the room, catching her attention. She got to her feet and began stalking it, looking for all the world like a tiny sterling silver cheetah.

"It's not just my brother that needs justice, Moon. I need it. I already have enough guilt over the fact that I didn't do something to help him," Moonlight meowed again, multitasking as she kept up the running dialogue with her human and at the same time hunted the fascinating creature that was now fluttering above the dresser.

Callie kept pacing. Her vision blurred and became unfocused as she turned her thoughts completely inward. Of course logic would tell her that she was being stupid. There was nothing she could have done differently. She may be obsessed with scrying and symbols and reading signs, but she was most certainly not a true clairvoyant no matter how much she wished she could be. The logical side of her brain continued saying that even if she had read the signs differently, she couldn't have been sure when the danger was to come. Even the night of Charles' murder, she'd still had no indication that the one in danger had been him.

But that side of her brain was swiftly beaten back by the side of her that said she was his sister. Even if she was the younger sibling, she still should have been there for her brother when he needed her. And she hadn't been. She'd been at home instead fighting with her mom's old sugar cookie recipe, which she was determined to master some day even if she had to incinerate a thousand batches to do so. Anger and frustration and anguish swirled and raged like a storm inside her as she desperately tried to think of a way to see that killer get what was coming to him. She'd failed her brother by not being there for him the moment when he needed her most in life, now it was her task to redeem herself by avenging his death.

Sudden wetness on her cheek alerted her to the fact that she'd begun to cry. Great, as if she didn't feel like crap already. At the rate she was going, it would take years to get the puffy, bloodshot look out of her eyes.

A sudden crash made her whirl around. "Moon!"

The Egyptian Mau had apparently found her way to the top of the six foot armoire and had then proceeded to attempt to leap clear across the room to get at the moth, which was now hovering in the corner near the ceiling. In her failure to calculate an appropriate landing spot, the cat had come down on top of Callie's desk, sending the precariously stacked mini-mountain of books toppling to the floor. At the moment she sat on top of one of the three or four that had managed to stay on the desk, using the classic wide-eyed, "worried" look that the Maus were famous for to make herself look cute and innocent. If she could have spoken English it was assured that she would have said something like "Oops, was that my doing?"

"Ugh, you pain," Callie groused as she came over to pick up the mess. She snatched the cat up and held her in front of her face so they were nose to nose. "If you're not going to help me figure out what to do the least you could grant me is a little peace and quiet to think." With that she planted a kiss on the cat's cheek and set her down on the floor. She huffed and was eyeing the mess ruefully when something made her do a double take.

At first glance the book was nothing special, just a two-inch thick hardcover with a bright blue binding. It was the title spelled out in stark white lettering that alerted potential readers to its more dire contents.

"Hexes, Curses, and Malevolent Spellcasting: A Research Guide and How-To," Callie read as she picked it up (2). Truth be told she'd thought she'd gotten rid of that book. Five years earlier when she'd first gotten interested in pagan practices she'd dabbled in a plethora of different things before deciding that divination was her forte. Some of the books she'd bought when she was in her dabbling stage she'd kept if she'd thought she might have use for them at a later date, the rest she'd sold or given away.

Momentarily forgetting about the mess her cat had made, Callie sat on the bed, staring at the book in her hands. She'd thought she'd gotten rid of it because quite frankly she had been frightened out of her wits when she'd tried to read it years ago. Two chapters in she had been thoroughly horrified by the rituals and practices that were laid out in graphic detail on its pages. By the end of the third chapter she thoroughly understood why Wiccans were so adamant about maintaining their cardinal rule of "harm none", and the belief that should a person harm another, something three times worse would be visited upon them.

Even if one didn't believe in magic, the things she had read in that book were still creepy beyond belief, and definitely not something she'd expect she'd want to mess around with, ever.

Until now.

The horror she remembered paled in comparison to the vicious glee she felt as the 'helpless victims' her imagination had conjured were superimposed by the face of the asshole who'd killed Charles. The thought of him writhing in agony as the karma of three-times-three came back to bite him in the ass was just too tempting to ignore.

Thoughts whirled around inside her head at lightning speed. Spinning, screaming, jostling; demanding to be heard. She felt like she was being sucked into the depths of a whirlpool as she tried to keep up with them all; the side of her who wanted to leave justice to the police and grieve in peace warring with the side of her that was overcome with rage and demanding that justice be done, even if it had to be by her hand.

Curse casting was a dangerous and nasty undertaking.

It would be worth it to see the bastard get what was coming to him.

She was untrained. There was no guarantee that a curse would even work as she wanted it to.

It didn't have to be textbook, it just had to hurt him.

It could backfire on her and the murderer could walk free a second time anyway.

Karma didn't care about stupid things like judicial procedure.

She'd vowed never to use any of her craft to harm another human being.

Before she'd never had a reason.

Charles would never have approved.

Charles never had to stare their parents' killer in the face because he'd died in the same accident.

He'd want you to move on.

I can't move on until that Purple Dragon pays!

That thought rang the loudest of them all. Her eyes felt dry and her vision had clouded from staring down at the book for so long. She squeezed them shut and rubbed at them. Then she took a long, calming breath and slowly let it escape her lips. When she opened her eyes again, they were hard and filled with the determination that comes when one knows that they no longer have to grasp at straws because there was a plan of action to be carried out instead.

Steeling herself for the ordeal she knew lay ahead, she lowered her eyes to stare at the book's front cover for barely a moment before she jerkily reached to flip it open. She wasn't going to give herself a chance to second guess the crazy idea forming in her head. She was always telling people that the signs were out there to lead people to their destinies if they would only open their eyes and see them. Now it was time to practice what she preached.

Moonlight mewed and leapt up onto the bed to join her human. Callie lifted a hand to stroke the back of the cat's neck, silently thanking her.

Failure to read the signs had cost her the last of her family. Now they had shown her a path by which she could redeem herself, and she wasn't going to let silly little things like morality or common sense stop her.

TBC…

Author's Note: And so it begins. No turtles this chapter, but my antagonist did need a bit of introducing. Our boys and Splinter will be there next time. Promise. People who have read my fics before will be happy to note that as of this posting, I have 1 and a half more chapters written. I'm going to schedule the next update for a week from now, since I have no idea how long it will take me to finish Chapter 2, and I'd like to stay at least two chapters ahead in case God forbid I hit writer's block. Still, reviews make the muse want to write more! *hint, hint*

Notations:

1. Okay, I'll freely admit that I'm no lawyer or law enforcement officer, but we all know that if there's a way to get damning evidence banned from the courtroom, defense lawyers will find it and capitalize on it.

2. This is not a real book. I totally made the title up off the top of my head.