Disclaimer: No Ownership of Rangers Here
Kelly remembered when she first saw the boy, curly haired and all of fourteen. It was the day she'd opened Storm Chargers and he had been her first customer, him and his mother. His name was Dustin Brooks and he bought a pair of gloves with his own money. The next day he had shown up to browse her merchandise and to get to know her.
Soon, Dustin was a regular, and maybe he didn't always buy things from her, but he was always smiling. She wasn't sure what drew her to the curly haired boy, but she came to think of him as a little brother. Another little brother and a perfect substitute for the ones she had left in Palm Springs. With his dad gone, Kelly found herself becoming his confidant, from everything from his fears of the divorce to his secret fears about being gay; she often wondered if this was payback for leaving when her baby brother hit puberty.
When Dustin turned sixteen, Kelly broke down and hired him, because if anyone knew Storm Charges it was her brown haired little brother. She also undertook to make sure he didn't get killed on the track. When he first started trying out freestyle, she wondered if he would stop racing, but he stayed on with his first love.
At seventeen, he brought to her his first true friend. She'd met others who had claimed to be his friends, but they had all wanted something from him. Shane, this older, dark haired, dark skinned boy, seemed to only want to be his friend. At first, the girl only showed up on occasion, but when Kelly started to add more surf gear to her inventory, Tori, the blond haired surfer became a permanent addition. Kelly liked them, and she felt in them some of the same things that had drawn her to like and adopt her employee as her little brother. She was not, however, in the market for any more siblings.
Along with his new friends, Kelly found Dustin suddenly obsessed with a 'class' he never seemed able to explain. From the outside, she watched him change. He became in some ways more focused and even less focused in others. His memory, which was good if he really cared about the subject and bad the rest of the time, seemed sharper. His clumsy, half-finished body became more cat-like, although he did still have some trouble, just enough to make her feel ok with what was happening.
Then Dustin changed, literally over night. He went from charming, a confident but clumsy young man with strong hints of the man he would become into that man, but in so doing he lost a measure of the innocence that had drawn her to him. When the Power Rangers began to defend Blue Bay Harbor, Kelly fought hard to deny it. She said little as her "little brother" changed, little bits and pieces of his innocence fading away as the weeks past. Then Dustin introduced her to Double Trouble.
She could tell, just by looking at the two of them, that they would be nothing from trouble. The elder of the pair, Hunter, was darkly charming and rude, Kelly could tell in a glance that he had grown up in a bad environment, but it was the younger, Blake, she didn't trust. He was too smooth and she saw in his eyes a bully. He looked at Dustin like he was expecting something, that he would learn something from him. Then she heard them, clearly they didn't think she could hear what when on in the shop from her backroom. When she went out to give them a piece of her mind, she saw Shane staring at them with an expression that assured her that the red clad teen would take care of them.
It still took a lot for her to accept them back, in her mind she still saw how they had devastated her little brother. Dustin had honestly thought they could be his friends but they had done some things that had hurt him badly and he was hesitant to take them back. It took even longer for her to accept that they were Power Rangers, the elder's dark smiles and the younger's slick charm had thrown her. Still, Kelly struggled to see why her little brother liked the elder, even if he wasn't too sure about the younger. Tender baby chicks know a weasel when they see one, she told herself. Still, even he didn't admit it; she worried that her brother would fall too hard for the elder. When he told her that he was dating Cam, the friend she'd barely met. The one he admitted to the surfer that he'd once had a crush on, she couldn't hide her concern.
Instead, she simply did her best to accept that, as much as her brother didn't really care for Blake sometimes, these were his friends. After a while, Kelly came around to the pair, seeing, as she did, how the Bradley brothers were trying. Through Dustin, and her own unseen observation, Kelly saw why they were Rangers. She saw how Hunter tried to be a good person, even if his inner darkness made some people wary of him. She saw how Blake tried to accept people even if he did make snap judgments of people. After their rocky beginning, Kelly found herself hiding smiles as they celebrated the X-Games sponsorships she'd offered them. The world was depending on six young people who still got excited over performing in the X-Games.
In the end, when Lothor was officially defeated, Kelly looked at the Rangers as they hung out in her story. Dustin was finally admitting his college education by debating with Cam on some mechanical puzzle he needed to know for a test. Blake and Tori were discussing his decision to join Factory Blue while Tori stayed in Blue Bay Harbor. Hunter was watching Cam and Dustin debate with a lazy smile as he ran the counter and argued with Shane over whatever the argument of the day was. Today, it sounded like football. She stood in the door to the back room, easily over looked, and wondered if they had ever guessed that she knew who they were.
Then she saw Cam looking at her and smiled slightly, he nodded and she turned away, knowing that Cam knew she'd figured it out. Glancing back at Dustin as his voice rose in denial, her smile returned. Dustin was an incredible adult, and she felt honored to have seen him grow.