Disclaimer: Someone else's sandbox. I just play here because its fun.
Author's Note: Hey all, I had a very nice surprise last Sunday when I was emailed that someone (whoever that was I thank you) had nominated me for the Guardians of Earth Fanfiction Awards for best Romance Fic. I've got the details posted on my profile, but more than anything I'm hopeful that it will be a good source for fic recs. Also, I've got a Christmas Fic Exchange challenge there that I hope someone will take me up on. Any way on to what you all came for.
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Tilting his head so that he could stare down his nose, Adam gazed at the mass of dark curls that spilled across his chest like silk, obscuring the face of his sleeping girlfriend. Carefully, so as to not to disturb her, he lowered one of his hands from behind his head to caress the curve of her back. In the darkened room, he could only make out her silhouette, those amazing feminine curves that despite having appeared countless times in body-hugging, yellow armor lost something in the translation. He couldn't see the rich chocolate color of her skin now. Now it was just shadows, but earlier . . . earlier it had glistened.
It hadn't really been his first choice for how to begin advancing their relationship to a more intimate level. Not that he'd thought a lot about it.
Okay he had thought about it . . . continuously, but his thoughts had always involved expensive dinners, candlelight, and roses, not sitting around in sweatshirts, arguing over colleges, while Tanya occasionally flicked a Cheeto at his head. But because he seemed to have lost all control over . . . well, everything, it was Cheetos and not roses that were currently strewn around his room.
Cheetos weren't such bad things either. After all the last one she'd thrown had led to a tickling war, which had led to him on top of her pressing into all the right places, which had led to significantly different things being done with their hands, which had led to this very interesting discovery.
Tanya Sloan snored, loudly.
And for all the wonderful new things he had learned about her in the past few hours, he found this to be the most precious.
It was silly really, the kind of thing Kat could probably tell him, but even so there was a kind of simple joy in discovering it for himself, feeling the rumble against his chest. Lying here, he could imagine complaining about it for years to come, joking about it with her when she was teasing him about his weird quirks. He wasn't actually sure he had any weird quirks, but it might be worth it to consider developing some.
The mechanical ring of very unwelcome musical notes interrupted his contemplation of whether obsessive compulsive straightening or ensuring that he brushed his teeth for exactly three minutes every morning would get a bigger rise out of her.
Of all the damned nights . . . He caught sight of the clock, Of all the damned mornings . . . Lifting the communicator to his lips, he grumbled, "Call me again when the world has actually ended."
"Adam?" Kat's puzzled voice echoed through the communicator.
He was about to ask her who she thought it would be when he realized that his communicator was still wrapped around his wrist. Oh hell.
"Why is Kat here?" Tanya murmured sleepily, half lifting her head to peer at him through a curtain of hair.
Silently wondering how this woman managed to turn his life into a comedy of errors, he thrust the communicator towards her, just as Kat's desperate voice broke through, piercing the haze of pleasant confusion that had settled over the pair.
"God dammit will someone just answer me!"
Tanya grabbed the communicator out of Adam's hand, now bolt upright and fully awake, "We're here, Kat."
"Come to the Power Chamber."
"What's wrong?"
"Everything. Listen, just get up, grab some flashlights, batteries, tools, and food."
"Flashli-? Wait, Kat, what's happened?"
"It's Zordon."
Adam was already up off the bed, pulling on his jeans, oblivious to the crushed Cheeto that had ground itself into one leg. A sickening empty feeling had taken over the area where his stomach should be. This just felt bad. Still Kat's voice continued to stream from the little metal box confirming how truly bad it really was.
"He's gone." Her voice broke a little, but she somehow managed to regain control, "he's gone and everything's a wreck, it's just . . . just get here."
Now fully dressed, the Green Ranger laid his girlfriend's clothes on the bed, and gently extricated the communicator from her frozen hand.
"We'll be ready shortly. Do you want us to signal you when we're ready to teleport?"
"No. No, we don't have the capability to teleport anything. Tommy or Jason will pick you up." There was a pause. "Where are you guys?"
"My house." Even as he gave the response, a little part of him wondered bitterly whether he would ever be able to have a private milestone in his relationship. I should just take out a billboard. Attention Rangers today I got to third base.
Lifting the communicator again, he asked, "Mondo?"
"I don't think so. This just feels different, but we're still trying to get a handle on things." Her voice had calmed into a kind of deadened monotone, and Adam realized she must have answered these questions too many times already.
At Kat's words, Tanya had stilled in the middle of tugging on her sweatshirt. Then pulling it over her head, she did something that frankly went down in Adam's book as very strange, even for Tanya.
Reaching across the bed, she grabbed the communicator, and turning her back on Adam, asked, in a way that sounded like she already knew answer, "Kat . . . you're not alone, are you?"
He couldn't make out the answer, but when Tanya turned back her mouth was set in a grim line, her face pulled even tighter with worry.
"Is Kat okay?"
"Wha-?" Coming out of whatever reverie she'd gone into just now, Tanya looked up, her face twisting into an awful, forced smile, "No, she's fine, just . . . fine."
"Then what was that all about?"
"Nothing, it was nothing."
"Tan."
"We've got other things to worry about, Adam. Where do you keep your flashlights?"
And with that the conversation was over unless he wanted it to devolve into a horrible, unproductive shouting match.
There were times when Tanya Sloan annoyed the hell out of him.
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"Shields?"
"Shot."
"Communications?"
"With a day's work they'll be limited at best."
"Sensors?"
Billy shook his head, "Nothing that's going to do us any good."
Adam wanted to throw up his hands and scream. Everything's fried, can't you see that! But of course they couldn't see that. Tommy needed to know specifics, needed to inventory exactly what they had and what they didn't so that he could muster their resources and stretch them as far as possible.
So he, Billy, and Jason stood there going down each element of the Power Chamber's defensive and offensive systems with a fine tooth comb. Discussing it with no more passion than one might talk about putting in new plumbing.
Adam envied them their apparent detachment. For his part he felt very undetached. Upon arriving at the Power Chamber, his stomach had finally returned only to decide it really wanted to be emptier, and he had to fight the urge to run and throw up in a corner. Kat hadn't been lying when she said that everything was a wreck. If anything, she'd really been kind. In the eerie, scattered light cast by the flashlights they had set up around the perimeter of the chamber, he could make out too many details—horrible scorch marks that riddled the metal surfaces like scars, the twisted unruly shapes where the control panels looked like they had been torn into by some wild animal, and above all the horrible black shape that everyone was pointedly ignoring.
It was the elephant in the room, this great mocking monstrosity of shimmering obsidian. Looking at it was a little like staring into the abyss. Except the abyss didn't look back. Despite its gleaming surface it gave no reflection, you simply stared at dark emptiness where all your light should be. Maybe that was why everyone had turned their back on it, it was too painful.
Part of him wanted to rage that they should be doing something, that Billy should be trying to come up with a brilliant plan to find Zordon, or Jason and Rocky should be trying to chip away at its surface, but he knew instinctively that it was futile, at least for now. They didn't even have enough power to see what they were doing up here, let alone actually do anything.
"So what do we have?" Jason asked.
Billy surveyed the chamber with what might have been one his characteristic wry smiles, but came out more as a grimace. "Not much. I don't even know what's caused the power drain, so I can't fix that yet, just try to get auxiliary online. As I said with a day or two of work, we can have rudimentary communications. The infirmary doesn't appear to have taken any damage, so once we get power up, we should be okay there. The Zords . . ."
The ex-Ranger trailed off, an odd expression on his face.
"How bad?" Tommy ventured, and Adam felt the air go out of the room as everyone inhaled in preparation for the worst.
"No, that's just the thing . . . th-they're fine, at least based on Kat's visual check. She should be finishing a preliminary diagnostic scan soon, but they run off their own power base, so they weren't even shut down. It looks like they were completely ignored . . ."
"That's odd . . ." Tommy murmured, a significant look passing between the three veterans who had by unspoken agreement assumed a form of joint command. Adam felt the overwhelming urge to chuck something at them. Hello! Three other, very capable, Rangers standing right here! Let us in on the joke or the dire prospect or whatever . . .
"Hey!" Rocky actually beat him to it, and it was only Jason's very fast reflexes that kept him from being taken out by a bag of Lay's. The trio looked up in shock.
"I'm sorry if I don't get it, but maybe somebody could bother to explain to the rest of us who didn't go Super-Ranger camp what the hell is going on."
"Rocky . . ." Tanya placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off.
"No, Tan. Look, I am standing here looking around at my worst nightmare, so maybe someone could just take a minute and tell me why, with Zordon gone and everything beyond fucked, the fact that the Zords weren't touched isn't the best damn news we've gotten."
Exchanging another extremely annoying look with Billy and Jason, during which they seemed to come to some kind of agreement as to who would speak, Tommy took a step forward, "Because we don't know why they weren't touched."
Billy picked up the thread. "There's absolutely nothing that should have impeded someone who was capable of doing this kind of damage from extending the destruction to the Zords if they so wished."
"So the question is why didn't they? And there's really just two possibilities." Jason ticked them off on his fingers. "One. They overlooked the Zords."
"Highly unlikely."
"Or two. They didn't care. They don't see the Zords as a threat."
"And that's just-"
"Scary." Rocky completed for Tommy, mulling this over for a minute the Blue Ranger looked up, his face now set in a kind of grim understanding. "This isn't the Machine Empire is it?"
He had his answer in the silence.
For his part Adam had to stifle a panicky laugh. This was all too surreal! Like being in some kind of weird dreamscape where people threw chips and Billy, Tommy, and Jason were like the fates passing their singular eye between them except here it was the mantle of authority. That was really the strangest and scariest thing about all of this—Billy. Not that he was here because that was actually probably the only piece of good news they'd had, but the way he was here—just standing there in the middle of the Power Chamber when they got there, solid and permanent as ever, like he had never left.
And they had all accepted it, without question. That had really been the moment when it had hit. No pleasantries passed between them, no one questioned their good fortune to have him there. There was no time for that. No energy to spare. So he just slipped into the team once again.
But not into his customary place. Billy had a different quality about him now, a kind of resigned confidence, like because he had left, because he had found he could leave and knew he could do so once again, he didn't cling to this place, didn't seem to become its human embodiment the way he once had. It frankly made Adam more than a little uncomfortable.
He felt Tanya's touch and looked down to where she was twining her hand in with his, admiring the stark contrast of their skin.
"Hey," she whispered.
Lifting their intertwined hands he brushed a kiss against the back of hers. "Hey."
And then because he suddenly needed to be closer to her, he pulled her tight against him, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her hair, glad that the others were once again occupied with their depressing inventory.
"This isn't exactly how I imagined this morning." She whispered against his chest.
"How did you imagine it?"
"Differently," She laughed softly, "There were pancakes."
"When this is over, I'll make you pancakes."
Lifting her head a little, she looked up at him. "Promise?"
He stroked her face, all too aware that she was asking him to make promises he couldn't keep. "Yeah, I promise."
At that moment there was a scrape that echoed through the too silent chamber, as the doors leading up from the Zord bay were forced open with a shudder, fighting the entrant every step of the way.
Tanya tensed and turned her head to look at her best friend. Following his girlfriend's gaze, Adam watched as Kat entered the room. It was the first time he had seen her all night, as she had apparently called everyone from the Zord bay, and stayed down there to complete the scans Billy had talked about. That was another weird thing about this day. It was very obvious that Kat had some kind of authority regarding the Zords, and it didn't seem to come as a surprise to anyone except apparently him . . . and maybe Rocky. But Tommy and Jason had just nodded in unquestioning acceptance when Billy had informed them what she was doing as though they hadn't expected her to be anywhere else.
Now she stood silhouetted in the doorway looking like she had every right to command that authority. There was a tool belt slung around her waist and she held another in her grease stained hand. It must have been hot down there because she had stripped down to a pale pink tank top which was soaked with sweat, and only served to highlight her surprisingly defined arms.
The room had paused at her entrance, every eye fixed on her. For her part, Kat seemed to be very focused on the trio in the center of them room. Well I'd be looking at Tanya if it were me. But there was something grim and intense about her eyes like she was taking no comfort.
Then Tommy moved towards her, breaking the tense spell her presence had cast over the room. Gathering her into his arms, the Red Ranger pressed a kiss to her forehead, murmuring something soft that Adam couldn't make out, but Kat barely responded, like she was just going through the motions.
Adam leaned down to ask his girlfriend whether she thought Kat was okay, but Tanya wasn't looking at them. Instead her gaze was focused across the room, watching Billy with a frown on her face. Following her gaze, Adam narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. Their newly returned friend had turned his back on the reunion, his mouth set in a grim line. Instead his concentration seemed to be newly focused on the shields he had so eloquently told them were shot.
"You're hurt!"
At Tommy's words, Billy's head whipped around, terror lining his entire body.
"I'm fine." Kat gently but forcibly removed her boyfriend's hands from her face, but not before everyone got a good look at the long, thin cut that ran down her left cheek.
"Are you sure?" Billy asked, his voice thin with worry and something Adam didn't understand.
"Yeah," Her eyes locked on his. "I just tried to unthread a probe from the system too quickly, the wire whipped back on me."
She tested the cut gingerly with her fingertips emitting a little hiss pain as they encountered a tender spot. At the sound Billy took two quick steps forward, and then stopped short, his whole body jerking back like someone had just slapped him.
"You should probably get something on that." He turned, "Tommy, why don't you take her down to the infirmary and--"
"I said I'm fine." Kat growled, stepping just out of Tommy's reach.
For a second the two were facing off like dogs over the same bone, and then all the fight left Billy.
"Fine." He sighed, "Let it get infected, try to lose vision in your left eye. What do I care?"
Except he sounded like he cared very deeply.
"I brought your tools." She extended the other tool belt she'd been holding out to him.
Billy paused his eyes flicking to the tool belt and then back to Kat's. The pause lasted just a split second too long.
And in that second everything crashed down on Adam. In a blinding flash, a hundred different things came together—Tanya's odd question when Kat had called, Billy's presence here, why Kat had been here at five in the morning. He remembered them together in the mall; remembered Kat's desperate over-protectiveness the night of Billy's collapsed; remembered seeing her when he'd gone to the bathroom during the movie night, standing in the kitchen doorway pleading softly with someone. It all came together in this weird moment that seemed to stretch out in a horrible endless infinity, and he didn't like the picture at all.
Oh god.
And in the next moment he realized he wasn't the only who had seen.
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Thanks for reading. Comments and Criticism are welcome as always.
Also, I feel it necessary to warn you all that I'm about to enter lawschool finals. Consequently I probably won't be able to keep up the rather regular pace I've set for myself these few weeks. However, I promise you that I will keep writing.
Panache
