Disclaimer: Power Rangers Super Megaforce belongs to Saban, and not me.
A.N.: To be honest, I haven't watched that many SMF episodes, but I feel drawn to Orion somehow, and Silver Linings Pt 2 prompted this.
THIS IS MY KINGDOM COME
By Tangerine Tales
Don't want to let you down
But I am hell bound
Though this is all for you
Don't want to hide the truth
- Demons by Imagine Dragons
Orion doesn't need Troy to point it out for him to notice it himself. He knows what being a part of a team means, he knows he can depend on the other Rangers in a fight, he knows he shouldn't try to take on every soldier from the Armada by himself.
But knowing these facts on a cognitive level is vastly different from letting them translate into physical actions.
"We're a team. You're not fighting alone anymore."
"Yea, Orion, you can count on us!"
He knows all these things, but everything fades when they enter the battlefield.
It's as if there's another Orion that takes over when he morphs – another version of himself that he doesn't want to exorcise. This Orion is angry, vengeful, hurting from the loss of Andresia, and willing to go to whatever lengths necessary to get his revenge. This Orion rushes into the fight, and just wants to kill, just wants to see blood.
He hides it well – laughing in battle, making clever quips and witty comebacks. The other Rangers don't seem to notice how hollow his jokes sound. They don't hear the impossibly loud war-drums pounding in his ears urging him to move faster, slash harder, destroy them all.
Orion wonders what they would say if he tells them about this other force within him. The subject of Andresia and his coping with the loss is always tip-toed around, as if the Rangers are afraid of provoking him into remembering what had happened.
He's grieved. He's had a lot of time alone to cry for his family, his friends, his old life. He's had enough of feeling sorry for himself, feeling sorry that out of everyone on Andresia, out of everyone who's infinitely more talented and skilled and worthier than him, he's the one who was spared and not them. Some lowly miner who's done nothing much with his life, except for discovering a strange trinket in a stone (in his darker moments, Orion speculates that finding the morpher had been what drew the Armada to his planet – these two extraordinary events seemed too close together for it to be mere coincidence).
It's easier to push these feelings down whenever they surface than confront them and face the yawning darkness that's growing in the chasm that is his chest. There are moments he feels flashes of the blood-thirsty Orion emerge during normal conversations, when he's serving fro-yo at Ernie's, at random innocuous times – and it takes all he can to silence that Orion, to resist the urge of taking his Megazord into space and blasting the Armada out of the sky. That Orion is scathing and disgusted with how he's wasting time pretending to be human when he should be focused on revenge.
That Orion is reckless. He doesn't mind losing his life in the battlefield, so long as he annihilates the whole of the Armada in the process.
Andresians are raised to be non-violent and peaceful, and Orion wonders if he's already destroying what's left of the Andreasian identity if he lets this anger fester within him. Can there even be an Andreasian identity if he's the only one left?
Sometimes, the fear of losing control is paralysing, and he's not sure if he wants to morph again. With every battle, the anger grows stronger and the other Orion grows more and more unsatisfied with his lack of progress.
But Orion can't let him go. He needs this insatiable thirst for revenge to drive him on, to sharpen his every move. He can't deny that it feels good – the best he's ever felt in his life, enough to almost make him feel whole again – to blow up, no, kill, an Armada general (do the other Rangers feel this rush as well?, Orion doesn't quite dare to ask).
Orion has nothing left to lose. And if what it takes for him to win is to give himself completely over to the other Orion and his blood-thirst, he will gladly make the trade.
He will do anything, anything to fill the emptiness in him.
Anything to feel complete again.