Disclaimer: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers once again belongs to Saban. (Thank goodness.) So, I'm writing a not-for-profit MMPR Season 1 story because, now that Mickey Mouse is gone, Kitty Kat is a bit redundant, huh? ;) (That's a joke, by the way. I've not stopped with my other saga; I just needed a break from it.)

Continuity: This fic takes place after "The Trouble with Shellshock."

The Green Finish on the Portrait
Part I: The Primary Colors
by MegaSilver

"See you guys!" Tommy waved as Jason and Billy departed the basketball court.

"Later, Tommy!" bade Billy.

Zack and Trini headed off next. "See you tomorrow, guys," Zack bade.

"Bye, Tommy. Bye Kimberly!" said Trini.

"Bye, Trini. Are we still going to the mall after school tomorrow?" asked Kimberly.

"Absolutely!"

Tommy couldn't help but quip, "Just so long as Kim can still move—and Trini's able to stop moving long enough to go into a store." Kimberly let her jaw slack and gave him a playful swat on the arm.

They all laughed for a few seconds. Then Zack said, "Hey, yo, Tommy, you were awesome today. Thanks a million, man. We owe you one. You, Jase, and Trini."

Tommy grinned. "Pleasure was all mine. Man… I tell you what, I've never been through anything like that battle in my life." He sighed. "You know what? I know what Rita's like, and I know her monsters are terrible, but… I gotta say I think I'll actually enjoy myself fighting those things."

"Hey, man, we all do. It's kinda weird at first—Power Morphers, Megazord, Blade Blasters, aliens—but… once you see it as part of what you do from day to day it grows on you."

Tommy couldn't help but be delighted. Most of his life he'd been fairly low-key. He saw a few friends here and there at his karate classes but never really tried or even wanted to get really close to them. But now here he was, suddenly thrust into a group of friends.

And while he'd taught a few karate classes to younger students, he'd never really talked to them about anything but martial arts or exhibited in front of them. But now, suddenly, he was a world-class hero.

Trini piped up. "I have to get home quick. See you guys tomorrow?"

"See you!" they all said. And so Zack and Trini went off in different directions, leaving Tommy and Kimberly alone together on the court.

"So, Tommy, where do you live?" asked Kimberly.

"I live on Veracruz Parkway."

"Really?" exclaimed Kimberly. "I live on Santo Angel Drive. It's like halfway to your house right on the path from here!"

"No way! You mind if I walk with you, then?" Tommy asked the question with a cool expression on his face and a cool, ever so slightly flirtatious tone. If only Kimberly could have heard his heart, though, she could have seen that he was anything but cool about stepping into this territory.

To his relief, Kimberly grinned. "Why not?" So they started along the path together. "So, you had a good day?"

Tommy nodded, unable to stop smiling; "Yeah, I did. You know, what you do—I mean, what we do as Power Rangers, I mean, even apart from the whole magic and Morphing and everything, I don't think I'd ever have imagined anyone doing anything so incredibly important."

"Actually… I meant, apart from all that. I mean, the picnic, the basketball, the gang…"

"Oh." Not only had he met a group of friends; he'd met a group conscientious enough to want him to fit in. "Oh, yeah, that was great! You guys are really cool."

Kimberly sighed contentedly. "Well, we try our best."

"Man, though, Billy's a total genius. I mean, he's really nice and he doesn't lord it over anyone but—I feel like a moron just talking to him."

Kimberly rolled her eyes. "Come on, Tommy, how do you think I feel? Ever since I've known him I thought, 'okay, I'm totally destined to be a dumb jock for the rest of my life; better just stick with that.'"

Tommy laughed. "But Billy's not bad at sports, though; you saw him out there on the court! I mean, maybe he's not varsity basketball material but he can definitely hold his own."

Kimberly's eyes went wide. "Oh, yeah, totally! I'm actually kind of amazed, too… if you'd known him as a kid you'd never have imagined he'd turn out to be at all athletic."

This was excellent. "How long have you known him?" Tommy had an in to a topic that he could pretend to talk about casually, but which interested him greatly. He had the impression that Billy and Kimberly were close, but he wanted to find out how close, and whether Billy might be an obstacle if he ended up making a more concentrated move on Kimberly.

"Oh." Kimberly laughed. "Forever! We've been friends since second grade, actually."

"Wow. Really?" That seemed promising in itself, so far as platonic friendship was concerned, but Tommy wanted to know more. "Where'd you meet him?"

"Well, see, I went to a Catholic school for kindergarten in Seattle and then we moved to Angel Grove and I went to Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini for first grade. But it was a new school and then they moved almost clear across town because there were more Catholic families over there and my mom didn't want to drive a half-hour to drop me off, so I started going to a public school. But that meant I had to start taking catechism classes at our parish church in order to take my first Communion at Easter. And… that's where I met Billy." She giggled a little as her eyes shone with that sentimental nostalgia that creeps up when one recalls fond memories.

Tommy wanted to know more. "If—if you don't mind my asking, umm… ahh… then what?"

Kimberly's eyes went wide, but she didn't seem to mind at all. "Oh my gosh, you're gonna think this is so cheesy." She took a deep breath, chuckling. "Okay, so… Billy was really shy back then—he still is kinda shy—and he'd never speak up or raise his hand, but we all knew he was smart because he always got exactly the right answer when Sister Bernadette called on him. Sometimes we'd hang around the parking lot for a few minutes waiting for our parents to come pick us up—Sister Bernadette would give the girls chalk to draw a hopscotsch grid, the boys would play hacky sack, stuff like that. Anyway, Billy never tried to talk to anyone or play with the boys. If you said 'hi,' he'd say hi back, but he seemed to be uncomfortable and no one really tried to go further… he'd go off on his own and survey the trees in the parish garden, take notes on the shrubs or even watch the birds nesting through his binoculars.

"Then one day in February we had a lesson on charity and loving your neighbour and mostly it was about people who needed our help, but then this one girl—I don't remember her name but, she was always like, asking questions and sometimes it got kind of annoying 'cause she was kind of contrary. But anyway, she asked Sister Bernadette, what if we didn't know anyone who needed our help? And then Sister Bernadette said, 'Then you look for someone who does.' And the girl went, like, how do we know if they need it? So Sister Bernadette goes, you look for someone who's lonely, you try to find out if maybe he lost something or someone and whether you can be there and help…

"So back then, I was like, über pious, I always wanted to be that perfect little girl that everyone loves and gives candy to and so when class ended our parents were a few minutes late that day, and I was thinking about what Sister Bernadette said and I saw Billy outside, looking through some shrubs, and I realized he might be lonely and—I took Sister Bernadette literally—wondered if he was looking for something he'd lost, so I went up and talked to him. I asked him if maybe he wanted to come over and play one day, but he was a bit shy. He said he didn't know and—my gosh, it was so sweet the way he was just so honest—he said he really wanted to but he was afraid if the other boys ever found out he went to a girl's house they'd start throwing him in garbage cans or something. I guess I understood it wasn't a totally unreasonable fear… he was kind of little back then. So I asked him if maybe he wanted to play kickball at the park instead, thinking that might be more acceptable for a boy. He said he was no good at kickball and that he hated P.E. So… I said I'd teach him, and that if he were good at a sport he wouldn't be afraid of people beating him up so much.

"SO… on Monday, after school, our mothers took us to Angel Grove Park, and we started making it kind of a regular thing. On days when I didn't have gymnastics practice I'd usually go to the park with Billy after school or catechism and we'd do kickball or gymnastics, and he started to get pretty good, actually. But he absolutely refused to try dance. But he was still pretty small and he never really got beat up but some kids did thrash him around a little from time to time, like…"

"Bulk and Skull?"

Kimberly raised her brow. "Uh-huh," she affirmed disdainfully. She snickered a little bit. "It wasn't too bad for him, though. Bulk and Skull are at least smart enough not to pick on anyone who doesn't look 'weak,' but they've always been too dumb to try to suck up to the 'strong' kids, either, so they're pretty much perennial social pariahs. Nobody can stand them but themselves. So it wasn't like anyone would look down on Billy because Bulk and Skull used him as a target.

"Actually, most kids respected and admired Billy, but they were kind of intimidated by how smart he was, so they didn't really try to approach him… I was almost the only one who would ever ask him for homework help and he was always totally willing to give it and so whenever someone mentioned they had a problem I'd be like, 'Go ask Billy,' but they'd be too scared! And Billy didn't really have the personality to seek out friends deliberately, so for a while he didn't have all that many."

"Wow." Tommy thought about that for a moment. This was just amazing. Tommy had never really been shy like Billy, but he'd never had many friends, though mostly because he just hadn't wanted them. He'd never seen the need to have many friends or to open up very much to the few that he had.

But now, he was beginning to think he might have missed out on a lot more than he had suspected. "Except you," he said of Billy's limited circle of friends.

"I guess." Kimberly grinned, looking a little embarrassed. "Well, back then we didn't really play together a ton. Maybe once a week, once every other week. We'd see each other at school but we were only in the same class in fourth grade. I had my girl friends and Billy didn't really want to hang out with them, you know—in third grade I invited him to my birthday party and… oh, boy, was that a disaster!"

Kimberly paused for a moment. "No, a couple of girls would tease me about my 'boyfriend' and then I'd be a twerp and avoid him for a few days, but I always felt bad because I really liked hanging out with Billy.

"Anyway, I'm just like, prattling on forever. Took way too long to tell that tale."

Tommy shook his head. "No, Kim, that's a great story! I mean, it's incredibly sweet the way you just went up and made friends with him when it seemed like you had nothing in common but you've stayed friends for what, seven years now? Why on Earth would I think that were cheesy?"

Kimberly sighed. "I dunno… I guess that whole thing about the catechism class—I'm not really super-Catholic nowadays; my family kinda wasn't too good about going to Mass every Sunday pretty soon after my first Communion… sometimes I think I might like to get back into religion but I just don't know where to start." She took a deep breath.

"I see what you mean," said Tommy. "I'm Methodist. We've always gone to church every week but… it's not really something I think a lot about the rest of the week. It's like… I believe it, but when I think about it now, I'm not really sure exactly what it means to me."

"I totally get you."

"But Kim, I mean… what you just told me, that's really something incredible! The way you practiced what you'd learned and you got a really good friend out of it… I mean, that's got to mean a lot to you!"

"Yeah, kinda." Kimberly looked a little uneasy. "You want to know something, though?"

"Of course!" And Tommy meant it.

"I gotta say, about that, I really wish I'd had Sister Bernadette in the sixth grade to remind me what she'd said that day about loving my neighbour."

Tommy frowned. "What do you mean?" Suddenly he became aware that they were standing on the porch of a house unknown to him. Engulfed as he had been in Kimberly's story, he hadn't noticed that they had already reached her house. "Oh… you're home."

Kimberly bit her lip. "Yeah," she said. There was an awkward pause. "Are you… in a hurry to get back home?"

"Uh… not… I mean, I don't want to just—" Tommy was still fascinated by all this but wasn't quite sure how to invite himself for more.

Fortunately, Kimberly opened the door for him. "Want to sit down on the porch swing a minute?"

Relief! "Why not?" So they sat down together and started swinging, taking a few seconds to adjust to a seated position and to admire the beginnings of the mid-southern California dusk.

Tommy rewound to the last bit of information. "So, what were you saying, about Sister…"

"Oh," said Kimberly. "Well… in sixth grade, we started at Angel Grove Junior High, and then things kind of changed. The junior high drew from about four different elementary schools in the city, so social circles got kind of mixed up and blended. And, well… when school started again, I tried out for cheerleading and made the squad, mostly because I'd been doing gymnastics since I was four. But then suddenly, overnight, everyone in school knew my name. And suddenly, the girls started using makeup and perfume, and suddenly, it wasn't the sweet, obedient little girls who were the ones everyone wanted to be like; it was the pretty girls on the cheerleading squad. This one girl on the cheerleading squad, Dana Houston, I don't know why, but she was kind of a 'queen bee'-type; maybe it's because she was the first one in our grade to wear makeup and junior clothes and so we all looked to her to figure out how to fit in with the seventh- and eighth-graders.

"But my gosh, Tommy, she was such a bitch. I don't know why she was or how she could have still managed to keep us all bowing down to her, but she was and she did. And the first two weeks of cheerleading she gave subtle hints that she was mistrustful of me—I don't know whether she thought I was going to do something to her on the squad or what.

"And I didn't want to start junior high with a girl who's a teammate and the most influential girl in school antagonized by me, so…" Kimberly took a deep breath. "I turned into a total bitch myself. I started kissing up to her and at first it made me sick but I made myself stop caring.

"She hated Billy. She just loved making fun of all the less pretty girls or the smart kids, and Billy in particular. And I totally left him there in the mud. I never said anything mean to him or about him, but I stopped hanging out with him. When he tried to say hi to me at school I'd make the conversation as short as I could and his old shy self came back and he learned not to try to talk to me. And of course whenever Dana or her friends started making fun of him I never stood up for him. I wouldn't directly make fun of Billy, but if they'd start in on smart kids or 'nerds' or chubby girls in general I'd definitely just join right in."

Kimberly inhaled deeply. "So I wouldn't say we were really friends in sixth and seventh grade." She looked at Tommy and blinked.

Tommy shrugged. "I guess it's hard in junior high, anyway. I mean, my sister's in sixth grade and there were a couple of boys she was friends with, but this school year they stopped having anything to do with each other." He wondered if maybe it was puberty, but at this point he would still have been far too embarrassed to discuss such a matter with the opposite sex.

"Maybe," said Kimberly. She paused. "About the only thing I can say for myself is that I wasn't so low as to ask Billy for homework help for a couple of years. But I knew he would give it if I asked, and not even because he was a doormat—he just really liked helping people on homework, and he'd show me all these cool drawings in math that were just so much more advanced than what we were learning but—the funny thing is, they totally made sense and it really did make the assignment so much more fun!" Kimberly laughed at the memory.

Then she became serious again. "Unfortunately, I can't say Billy was the only friend I lost or almost lost in sixth or seventh grade. I dunno. I guess some things did need to change. But boy, did they ever change fast."

"What changed?"

"It's kind of long."

Tommy shrugged. "If you want to tell it…"

"It's kind of hard."

"Oh." Tommy might have hit that delicate limit with Kimberly. "Well—if you don't want to tell it…" He would have liked to know, but it was obvious that her friends already knew and she wouldn't need his help to deal with the problem.

Still, she seemed willing to open up. "No, I do, actually. I mean… I want you know."

"Okay." Tommy smiled. "Then I want to know."

Kimberly smiled back. "I think one of the reasons I was so anxious about fitting in at school is that my life at home was becoming less and less palatable. My brother Dave and I started noticing obvious signs that things weren't all right between Mom and Dad. Oh, they tried to be good and not fight in front of us, but there was always that tension whenever they were both in the room… and sometimes they'd forget we were there and crack. Or they'd think we couldn't hear and let loose. One night in October in seventh grade I lay awake in bed from 9 to 11 PM listening to them argue. I got really scared something was going to happen.

"I had been planning to put gymnastics on hold when I started cheerleading, but what I did was start practicing gymnastics even more that year. I wanted to spend as much time away from home as possible and stop thinking about those problems. It worked a little bit, but still, when you're 12 years old you can only avoid your parents so much. Then, right at the end of my seventh grade school year, Mom and Dad sat Dave and me down and explained that they were getting divorced."

"Oh." Tommy was a bit shocked. He'd always been somewhat under the impression—based mostly on a few anecdotal and sketchy experiences with some of his classmates in his Karate schools—that children of divorced parents were unstable, unhappy and unfriendly. Yet Kimberly seemed to be none of those. He wouldn't press her further, but he was definitely intrigued by this. "I—I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"No, you couldn't have," said Kimberly. "I hadn't told you.

"But I thought I had it bad; Billy had it even worse. Two weeks before eighth grade started my mom handed me that day's newspaper and pointed to an article in the Obituaries section. Billy's mom had died in a car accident last night." Kimberly blinked a few times, as though fighting back tears.

Tommy's eyes went really wide.

Kimberly read his expression. "I know, right?" she said. "Suddenly I felt really ashamed of myself for everything. I didn't want to go to the funeral; I was afraid to look Billy in the eye, but I knew my mother would go and I knew she expected me to go. And even though I was mad at her and Dad for the divorce I still… I still wanted my mother to approve of me the way I always had since I was really little.

"So I went… and I tried not to look at Billy but I couldn't not notice how alone and forlorn he and his dad were. I later found out that his mother was an adopted only child from Pennsylvania and that his father was a convert to Catholicism and not very close to his family, so apart from Billy's long-distance maternal grandparents, he didn't really have that many people to be there for him."

A tear slipped out and Kimberly quickly brushed it away. "But I didn't talk to him. Not yet. I just kept thinking about how I'd totally abandoned him and my family was broken and my cousins and grandparents were almost all in Maine or Florida and Dana and the girls I hung out with at school were just so completely not filling up that gap…

"Then, something amazing happened." Kimberly stopped for a moment, tucked her legs beneath her on the swing and looked straight at Tommy. Her eyes betrayed her own amazement. "You know… I'm telling you all this and suddenly I'm realizing myself how, I don't think I ever thought about it all at once like this. I don't think I ever realized how much all this has meant, how much it's meant to have the friends I have today and how much having them there got me through my parents' divorce."

"Wow." Tommy couldn't think of any other words. He was completely blown away.

"See… the first day back at school, I was flagged by the principal and asked if I would escort a new eighth-grader who had almost the same schedule as me. It was Trini. And so I spent the day with her and I forgot all about my cheerleader friends—I even forgot to try to find them to sit with them at lunch—because Trini was just so incredible. She was pretty, she was smart—but not verbose like Billy—, she was polite, she was athletic, she was willing to try anything… and then at the end of the day I went to cheerleading practice and seeing Dana and some—not all—of the others I was kind of annoyed. You know why? I wished I were hanging out with Trini and not with them!

"So Trini and I hung out a bit over the next few days, and when I saw how into science and mechanics she was, suddenly I thought of Billy all alone and I thought about how much I missed him and how much he and Trini would just click on this stuff. I still felt kind of ashamed, but now I had an excuse to talk to him again."

She laughed a little. "I remember the day I introduced them to each other. It was Friday on the first week of school. I was a little nervous, I thought, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna look like a total bitch, and then I just swallowed it up and said to myself, You've been a total bitch. There's never gonna be a better time to stop than now. So we walked up to Billy and I said, 'Hey, Billy, how's it going? Umm… do you know Trini? She's really big on chemistry; she came over yesterday to look at my garden and came up with this tubular nutrient formula. She swears that within a week my flowers will be blushing with color like never before!'

Tommy put a hand over his mouth.

Kimberly laughed, a sheepish expression on her face. "No, seriously, I said that. Word for word, I swear. And the thing that was even funnier—" Kimberly could not stop herself from chortling and chucking as she spoke. "It was hilarious, because, like, when I said that, Trini gasped and looked at me like she was totally shocked, then I realized what I had said and I wanted to disappear, and Billy, oh, poor Billy… well, let's just say that Billy started 'blushing with color like never before'—and dropped all the books he was carrying, and he was totally shaking and you could see it." Kimberly doubled over laughing. "Two girls, one boy—chemistry—flowers—blushing like never before… oh, my gosh, I think Billy and Trini must not over the trauma, 'cause if they were, I'd definitely be hearing about that all the time!"

Tommy was chuckling a fair bit himself. Of course it wasn't as funny for someone who hadn't known Billy for so long, but he could definitely see there was a lot to be amused about in this story.

Kimberly coughed a couple of times and sat up straight again. "Okay. Sorry."

"No, actually, that is really funny."

"Anyway, after that, I was way too embarrassed to try to talk to Billy again. Luckily, Trini got ahead of me. We sat down at our usual table in the cafeteria that day and she called Billy over when she saw him come in. He blushed a little and hesitated—I think he was kind of scared maybe we were in cahoots with Dana to make him look stupid—but we signalled him again and he came over and it was all cool.

"Then he and Trini actually started dating for about three weeks, but it didn't work at all—Billy had no idea what he was doing and Trini didn't like calling all the shots after a while." Kimberly brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "Pretty predictable junior high romance story.

"So… yeah, that's how I became friends with Trini and re-became friends with Billy. 'Course, Dana tried a bit to make my life—and Trini's—hell now that she had the pretext of our hanging out with Billy, but you know what was funny? When I stopped kissing up to her, a couple of other girls on the squad stopped kissing up to her, too. Sure, she still had her little clique who wouldn't—or couldn't—see her for what she was, but as the months wore on you could tell the average girl in the halls was less enamoured of her.

"Plus, two more amazing things happened. Number one, Billy became friends with Jason and Zack—and once that happened, only Bulk and Skull were stupid enough to pick on Billy and even then, only if Jason weren't around—, and number two, at the end of the first semester, Dana's father got arrested for money laundering and had to plea-bargain his way out. The family was bankrupted with a massive fine and had to move to Michigan. And once that happened…" Kimberly shook her head. "Tommy, now that I think about it, it's unbelievable. The cheer squad was just a totally different place. Even Dana's former friends who'd been kind of nasty all along were just so much more… chill."

This sort of early adolescent dynamic puzzled Tommy and Kimberly, for the moment. What they did not know—not yet, at least—was that that was actually a fairly typical consequence of the removal of a sociopath's negative energy from a circle. Dana was in fact a sociopath, charming and domineering but literally incapable of feeling empathy with those whom she crushed to achieve her goals. Her move to Michigan and from the lives of quite a few of the girls on the Angel Grove Junior High School cheerleading squad had thus been a Godsend for them—and a terrible affliction for a number of girls and eventually boys in her new school.

But the psychology of the junior high female on such a formal level was of little interest to Tommy now. For what had begun as an inquiry into the nature of Kimberly's relationship with Billy—and by now it was increasingly obvious that this nature was strictly platonic and even borderline fraternal, at so far as Kimberly was concerned—had blossomed into a sort of catechization in the history and substance of the bonds that formed the group. Though Tommy had known that this was a tight-knit group, he had never really thought about what that meant or how it might have become that way.

And he was beginning to see Kimberly as a profoundly appealing person. Sure, he'd found her quite attractive from the start, but she wasn't the first "mall girl"-type who had ever expressed interest in him and he'd always been wary of them: they seemed obsessed with their image and with the amassing of irritating and superficial friendships to bolster that image. But Kimberly's popularity, constructed as it seemed to have been around a sort of heroine role—as a sort of angelic figure having taken the first step to lead the school out of Dana's grip—now appeared to him genuine, deep-seated and well-merited.

Tommy longed to know more, and he was searching for the best words to ask how Jason and Zack had come into the picture and fleshed out the social network that had seen Kimberly and Billy through what might have been turbulent junior high experiences. However, he was interrupted by a woman's voice from inside the house.

"Kimberly? Are you home? It's time for dinner!"

"I'm here; I'm coming!" called Kimberly. She looked into Tommy's eyes and frowned wistfully. "I have to go."

"Yeah, me too." Getting up and stretching a little, he glanced at his watch. Six-fifteen P.M. "Aww, man… I'm late! My grandparents were driving up from L.A. and my mom said to be back at six P.M. sharp for dinner!"

"Oops." Kimberly gritted her teeth. "Sorry."

Tommy sighed happily. The lecture his mother was sure to feed him—the next in a long series of such lectures—about punctuality would be well worth the time spent getting to know Kimberly—and through her, the entire group. "Hey, don't be. Best walk home I've ever had."

"Thanks for walking with me."

"Thanks for talking with me."

Kimberly shrugged. "Or to you, rather. Thanks for listening."

"It was fascinating." And Tommy truly meant that.

Kimberly blinked. "So, next time I talk to you, you can tell me all about your friends," she grinned.

Tommy wondered whether he should say that Kimberly quite clearly knew far more about "his friends" than he did, but at that moment Kimberly's mother's voice cut into the atmosphere once again. "Kimberly!"

"Coming!" She inhaled and exhaled deeply. "See you at school tomorrow?"

"You bet. 'Night."

"'Night!"

Peacefully under his bed covers, Tommy stared at the ceiling and smiled.

What an amazing day.

The heroes, the friends, the walk home…

And Kimberly at the center of it all. Kimberly happy to spend time with him.

A million questions might he ask himself right now. Would Kimberly really be interested in him or did she see him the way she saw Billy—just a recipient of kindness and friendship? Would he screw up these friendships? Was he capable of being friends with such good friends when he'd never really even tried being a good friend to anyone? Would they think he couldn't and not even give him the chance to prove himself a good friend? What if some tragedy struck the Ranger team? Could he keep on pretending he knew what he was doing as a Power Ranger and as their friend until he at last did in fact know what he was doing?

Tommy shrugged all those anxieties right off. He wasn't interested in answering those questions right now. All he knew was that he wanted all this to continue: Kimberly, the team, the friendships… There was so much more to know, and he wanted to have enough time to know it all.

He wanted this to continue. He wanted to talk with Kimberly again, to walk beside her again, to go off somewhere without the others. He wanted to fight once more alongside the others, help them save the world again, help save his friends again. He wanted his friends to stay his friends, to share not simply the fight but life and all its triumphs and tragedies.

For the first time, Tommy realized how much he wanted people in his life. Moreover, he knew which people he wanted in his life.

So he shoved out all his doubts about the future and lulled himself to a peaceful sleep in the confidence that, for the moment, the people he wanted in his life were indeed there.

TO BE CONTINUED…