A\N: GreenGallant and I are having a bit of a challenge to see who can get more reviews for fics. For his version of this story (using Turbo instead of MMPR), go to his profile and see if he uploaded it. Oh, and review! Please! I want to win! :p (And for those of you asking how I'm getting on FFN right now...well, ask me no questions and I'll tell you no stories of highly illegal activities involving supersecret spying.)

When in battle, one might have preferred to look at a flower.

It was a beautiful one. A little rosebush, with a single red bud on its green branches. It was too sick to produce anything else, but to Tommy Oliver, that single, blush-pink rosebud, delicate and trembling in the cool fall wind, was the most precious thing left on this Earth.

Mainly because at the moment the world was in nuclear autumn and a Grinder was battling a vicious sabertooth tiger.

Tommy sighed, staring at his flower. He was sitting curled up on a rock, his hand idly playing with the scar on his face. He hated that scar, hated this whole world, but when he looked at the rosebud, he could almost block it out. And that was a good thing.

Right?

The Grinder screamed, then was flung on top of the rose.

Tommy blinked.

The Grinder sparked and died, one of the sparks falling to the desert floor next to the sabertooth, who shied away. She realized what she'd done and shook her great head in irritation before transforming back into a tall, beautiful Asian woman. "Damnit." Trini muttered. "Hate picking up the instincts."

Tommy stared.

Then, angrily, he shot to his feet, stomping away.

Trini just sighed.

It was the year 2017, and the world had ended. And the Rangers had ended as well.

Most were dead. Venjix had captured Andros' entire team and 'modified' them, only for them to fall apart, literally, on the battlefield. Others had simply just...not been strong enough. The few teams who did remain were leading, or hiding in, groups of survivors, just praying for another day.

Only the first team was strong enough to stay intact.

Of course, Trini mused as she began to follow Tommy, 'intact' was a relative word these days. Especially in the case of Tommy Oliver.

He was a good leader. Trini acknowledged that. Even Jason could never have pulled off the feats of heroism and spectacular stupidity required to gain the loyalty of their slightly retarded group of survivors. (You'd think surviving the apocalypse would make them smarter, Trini's inner voice snarked, but nooo...they still just want to pull out their Blackberries and set Facebook to Not Affected By Apocalypse...)

But for all his facades, Tommy was still damaged.

Trini didn't know the details. She'd been too busy singlehandedly blackmailing, bribing, and keeping peace in the group of survivors that she, Jason, and Kim had found, not to mention trying to find somewhere to take the damn morons. But she knew Tommy and Zack had been captured.

The Dino Rangers had been tortured to death in front of them.

Zack, surprisingly, had handled it better than Tommy had. He was disabled from the tortures-his right leg was a mess of scarring that no healing spell could ever fix-but he was happy enough now, guarding the children and elderly, teaching and entertaining all of them. Slowly, but surely, his spirit was coming back.

Tommy, though, hid.

He locked the pain away, somewhere inside of him, and played the White Knight by day, the heroic leader that even Jason admired. But as soon as he was alone, the bizarre thinking of someone broken by a war showed.

He never lashed out at Kimberly. Trini, therefore, had bluntly told her sister in arms that Tommy was not her problem, since Trini's problems involved playing guardian and therapist to an entire group of survivors and if she had to do one more thing she was going to kill someone, got it? Kim, who was currently the group's peacekeeper, had just shrugged and agreed. But they all knew Tommy was broken.

Except, of course, for the man himself.

Tommy stopped at the final marking point. He and Trini had been on patrol when they'd come across the lone Grinder, and the final marking point was the most beautiful. Well, it was Nevada, Trini thought wryly, it was always beautiful, a stunning mountain range with forests, lakes, and barren ground, but she'd organized the patrol route to leave a bit of reward for finishing, just in case she ever had to make one of the civilians do it.

Of course, the view was slightly wrecked by a brooding Tommy.

"Talk." Trini ordered.

Tommy blinked in confusion.

"You. Talk to me. Now." Trini said, then frowned and moved her mouth. "Damn tiger form." It always left her wanting to eat rabbits, too. Which was fine, since they did eat rabbits now, but raw rabbit and cooked rabbit were two entirely different things.

Tommy sighed and stared down at the valley below them.

"I can't help if you don't let me in." Trini said, for possibly the billionth time.

Literally the billionth.

Tommy sighed again, wrestling with himself. Trini waited. He always won this battle, it was just a matter of letting him do so on his own.

"I miss Dylan."

Oh.

Well, at least it wasn't the Dino Thunders dying again, Trini thought with not quite as much guilt as she probably should have felt for thinking that. "Dylan...Kat's kid?"

"My kid." Obviously. Kim was still slightly miffed over that. She'd adored the twins, though. Dylan was a brooding Tommy clone, and Tanya was an Invader Zim freak who loved explosives, so it was probably natural that Kim would adore the only two kids on Earth to not somehow manage to be cute.

Trini reached out and put her hand on Tommy's shoulder. As much as they'd all liked Tommy's kids, both the Rangers and biological ones, Dylan and Tanya had died with Kat, fighting for what they believed in.

"Does it get better, Tri?" Tommy asked.

Trini sighed. A memory of her own flashed into her mind-her daughter Katylyn's mangled body, dead at age four, killed by crossing the street. "Yeah." Trini said quietly. "It does."

"He was a cop." Tommy said, a vain protest against Death. "And Tanya shouldn't have even been there, she was a hippie for God's sake..."

"She was a Wiccan who took an oath to preserve life. And Dylan took an oath that was pretty damn close." Trini reminded him. "They were both warriors, and they both died with honor."

Tommy's rage flashed up again, and he knocked Trini's hand from his shoulder, turning away. "Yeah, Tri. That helps. Just so much."

Trini rolled her eyes.

A shadow passed over Tommy's face. "Sorry." He said. "I'm...I'm sorry. I just...I'm sorry."

Trini put her arm around him. Tommy was tactile, after all, a man who communicated through touch, and it did seem to help him to be physically near. "It'll be okay, Tom." Trini said. "Trust me."

Tommy looked at the settlement below, the tents pitched at random around a mountain lake.

"Yeah." He said quietly. "Yeah. It will be."

*MMPR*RPM*MMPR*RPM*

Kimberly couldn't sleep.

It wasn't for any particular reason, her brain just didn't want to turn off. It wasn't even that annoying, honestly. Kim smiled at her unconscious husband beside her, snoring away and drooling on the pillow like a baby. No, she decided as she gently brushed her fingers through his hair, it wasn't annoying at all.

She loved Tommy. No-not just loved. Every single atom of her being was impossibly devoted to him. Which, honestly, made sense. Kim was one of the Daemon people, Maligore's Heir. Not that anyone really cared. It had been a bit of a mess just after they'd escaped the island-she and Jason had been kidnapped by Zedd, who had thought the Rangers were trying to hold them hostage for some reason-but they'd gotten it sorted out that a) Jason and Kim's newfound genetic changes were a result of highly illegal spellwork, b) Maligore was in posthumous disgrace for that, and c) Jason and Kim, being more than ready to murder anyone who tried to annoy them, were to be left well alone.

But as a Daemon, Kim formed deep bonds. That was how Trini had explained it, anyway, and Trini was the best healer Kim had ever met.

So when Kim said she loved her husband, she meant it.

However, Kim decided as he snored again, even the most devoted wife could get very tired of that sound. She leaned down and kissed Tommy's forehead, then slipped out of bed and into a robe.

The advantage of living in a tent was that you only had to step outside to look at the stars, but Kim walked all the way out to the far ridge, high above the camp. After all, she wasn't so much looking at the stars as avoiding them.

The forest lent a quiet, subtle hum of power to the air around her. Kim smiled. She and the others were far too sensitive to the Power now, and even magic, in her opinion. She preferred the days of morphing and beating up bad guys. Where had those days gone?

Blown away on the nuclear wind...

Kimberly smiled at her own joke as she reached the ridgetop. Nukes? As if. Venjix hadn't even bothered, the EMP would have stopped him cold. But he'd put a poison in the air. Kimberly frowned at that thought. It hadn't gotten here yet, by a miracle and a half, but when it did...

Well, it was a problem for the future. Maybe she'd bring it up tomorrow. Jason and Billy could come up with a solution. It would definitely get Billy away from the giant-robot idea. Kimberly shook her head. She loved Billy like a brother, but damn was he an idiot sometimes.

Kim reached the top of the ridge and sat atop a rock, looking down.

Not a beautiful view, in her opinion, just a lot of mountaintops. But then, she and Trini had never seen eye-to-eye on that. Or any art, for that matter. Kimberly snorted. Yeah, she remembered that high-school field trip. The two friends hadn't spoken for days after that little debacle.

Tommy slipped up to the ridgetop.

Kim gazed up at the sky. The view wasn't the best from here, it was better at the lake, but she liked it anyway. It was like a curtain over the world.

Tommy slipped his arms around her waist.

"It's like a curtain, you know. The sky." Kimberly said, relaxing into his body.

"Really?" Tommy asked, frowning at it. "Oh. Yeah. I guess it is."

Kimberly chuckled.

Tommy slid onto the rock behind her, holding her. They'd been married four years now, and had no real reason to need words. They just stayed together, linked in body and spirit.

Kimberly's eyes drifted shut.

They slept together under the stars, in a pure, perfect moment of tranquil sorrow. An observer, placed near the couple, would find it heartbreaking.

And then, somewhere in her dream, Kimberly heard explosions.

She frowned, but just turned and hugged Tommy closer. Whatever K-Mart was blowing up this time, it could wait until morning. The girl was wonderful company, and invaluable to Kim's police force, but she still had an obsession with explosives.

Then something cold pressed into her skull.

She leaped out of the dream and into reality. Somewhere in the single, fragile instant between waking and dying, she saw the entire scene perfectly. The smoke rising from the camp, the tranquil night shattered by Grinders, monsters, and bombers, and the Grinder aiming a blaster at her as she leapt out of Tommy's arms.

And then the pain shattered her into a million pieces.