The Way
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Disclaimer: Power Rangers is not mine. After writing this twisted little piece, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to anymore...
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This is the way of a demon: Family is All.
Without family, you are nothing. You will rise with them to greatness, or you will fall with them and be destroyed. If they tell you to kill, you will slaughter and rampage without mercy, and if they tell you to die, then you will fall on your sword.
Humans, Ryan thinks, are not so different. They tell him to kill demons, and he kills demons. They ask him to destroy the family that raised and loved him, and he does not flinch, though it is a difficult test. They have not yet demanded his death, but he thinks they might, oneday.
The personel avoid his gaze and the touch of his hand. Conversation falls silent when he enters a room and the whisper circulates:
'…demon…'
It takes more than a human system to work the Titanium morpher, and Ryan is not human. He is something else entirely, forged of darkness and cold and a trapped scream. He might have abandoned his fellow demons, but it cannot erase what he is. He's not sure he'd want to.
But the humans shrink from his presence. They know what he is. On a clinical level they know, and on a deeper, visceral level they know. He is the horror that stalks the night. He smiles and kisses his sister's cheek and jokes with Carter and thinks idly of slitting the throat of the cafeteria lady who gave him the wrong coffee, or shoving a hooked dagger into General McKnight's guts and winding them out… slowly…
It is worse because he loves them. He'd kill the technician who snubs Dana in a blink of an eye. The janitor who always sneers at Kelsey? Drowned in his bucket of dirty water because Ryan loves her. The boss who once told Joel he was a worthless waste of space? Thrown off a cliff because Ryan loves him too. He'd kill all those who hurt or deride the rangers and display the corpses, like a cat laying out dead mice on the kitchen floor; trying to bring his efforts to the rangers' attention and invite praise.
'Look at what I did. Aren't you happy with me?'
But every human he would kill, he knows the rangers would die to protect. It makes no sense to him. He understands their code of conduct, but he doesn't understand why. He doesn't comprehend the underlying reasons. He knows, but he doesn't know.
He just abides by their law, and hopes that oneday it will become clear to him. He kills whom they tell him to kill. They ask that he kill the beings who were his family for twenty years, and he understands that this is a test. It is nothing less than he expected. They could have demanded a much larger sacrifice for their acceptance: a limb or an eon of imprisonment in a small, cramped space. It's happened before.
He keeps a blank face of resolve. Killing one's family is something he already understands. Treachory is also the way of demons.
He could not turn back now anyway. Even if Diabolico accepted him back, he wouldn't leave. He loves them, you see. He loves his rangers, loves his father, loves his sister with the all consuming fierceness that a demon is capable of. To be without them would be to live a half-life, and he has already done that once before.
So he binds his fortune to theirs. He will rise with their bid to power, or fall beneath the heel of their enemy and be ground to dust. It is the way of demons and humans alike. There is no room for mercy.
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