***
His large eyes had become vacant and lifeless by the time darkness settled. Scanning the ground for any signs of her... he honestly thought by this time he'd even be able to recognize a fleck of her fingernails amidst the brush on the forest floor.
Her scent must be traceable too, he thought suddenly, adrenaline racing through his heart as he realized that he'd overlooked such an obvious search criteria. Her scent... not just her body but the perfume of their mother's that she'd laughingly put on last night. Surely someone with a greater sense of smell would be able to detect it.. even so far away from her last sighting. Miles.. miles away..
Miles away from home. Hours had passed, and the young boy had walked so far he could no longer even hear the regular sounds of the city or the suburban area where his home was. No, no.. but surely a monster wouldn't take a little girl into the city. If he was serious about finding her, it only made sense to go into the woods. That was, after all, where the footprints had come from.
A few hours previous, he'd come to where the tracks (which he followed backwards, of course) began, thinking surely it would lead him to some sort of evil base.
Instead, he found nothing but a small clearing under a tree. And no more tracks, anywhere.
Of course, the first thing he did was climb the tree. Trees were an ideal place for a fort; he'd even wanted to build one to keep girls out. The thought shamed him then, and he wondered if it was God's way of telling him he was being selfish. "If you don't let your sister into your tree fort, I'm going to send down a big mean monster to kidnap her."
It angered him beyond reason to find nothing. In his young and naive way he had seriously expected to find a secret passage, behind a branch or maybe just at the top of the tree.. surely in a knothole or maybe... maybe..
The demon had to be here somewhere.
What would he want with Karone? She was nothing special... she was just a sister! If he wanted a sister so badly, why didn't he just tell his mommy and daddy? Even writing to Santa Claus could have helped... but you didn't just go stealing someone else's sister.
She'd been crying, screaming for Andros to help her. It was so different from when they played Power Rangers. Then, she was happy to play the fair maiden, because Andros the red ranger was always there. Always there to save her. "Yay, my hero!"
Where was her "hero" when it really mattered.
A moment later, he found himself on the ground, unable to breathe and wanting to scream. Above him, the sky had become far away and the spot he'd climbed to was now vacant, unchanged except for a few flakes of bark that had been ripped loose in the process of Andros' failed climb.
Tears spurted from his eyes, the last time he showed any emotion. Foolish tears..
Instead of crying anymore, he began to crawl along the forest floor, studying the footprints. The footprints that had to mean something. Just... god, anything would do.
By the time it had really gotten dark, he realized that not only was he lost, cold, scared and hungry, but he'd come back across what used to be a clear and deep footprint and now was recognizable only as a slight indentation in the dirt. He strained his eyes but to his dismay, he saw that his own footprints dominated and eclipsed the original path with their maddening smallness, leading in endless circles.
"But maybe some of those prints are hers!!!" He suddenly shrieked, falling to his knees to look at the freshest ones. He knew for a fact that his feet were only one shoe size larger than his sister's, and in his near-stupor it sure seemed feasable.
Anything seemed feasable. Just as long as it turned out that the words he felt in his heart turned out to be untrue, he knew he'd do or believe anything. Anything.
He'd believe absolutely anything except that she was gone. He'd believe that she was an ant on that cursed tree.
No words could possibly hurt more than those that his father whispered an hour or so later, as an older man picked up Andros' body which had collapsed from exhaustion, not knowing or caring if he was found. He was only semi-awake, alert enough to murmur a response to the question "Are you Harke's boy?" but not enough to open his eyes when his father's familiar voice demanded for him to "Look at me, son, look at me, oh my god, are you all right??"
In the backseat of the family car, the young child pressed his cheek into the soft leather and prayed that he'd wake up in another world, or at least his own world without any of this having happened. Indeed, the silence of his father and the other man, the one who'd asked if Andros was Harke's boy was very comforting. Not at all contradictory to Andros' wishes.
And then, his father's exhausted voice.
"The monster didn't touch Andros. Monnika had the hovercam capture the whole incident."
"Well, thank god for that." The other man said politely.
"Thank god for my only daughter being stolen?!" Dad's temper.
"Dammit, Harke, you know what I mean. You've got a good son there, you know. He had to have been looking for her all day."
"Instead of coming home and telling us? If we'd gotten the Power Rangers notified right away they could have stopped all traffic from leaving the Karova System. You're not going to tell me that demon teleported into the goddamned woods. He was on a ship, probably a freighter. General traffic, as common as anything. One scan and that beast would be in the mines faster than..."
The other man sighed. "We've still got the squad on the lookout."
"If he was stronger, this would have never happened. If he was stronger, he could have saved her."
"Don't be stupid, Harke. Christ, the kid's in the backseat, he can probably hear every word we're saying! He's five years old!"
"I know... I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry. I just feel like the worst father in the world. My daughter's probably dead right now.. or worse."
Andros' eyes had widened, and even though sleep was rushing over his mind in perilous and tempting waves, he felt himself trembling at the thought.
If only he were stronger... if he was stronger, he could have saved her.
If he was stronger...
If...
He leaned his head over the side of the seat and vomited.
***
Andros again felt his stomach muscles contract, stronger... and he suddenly bolted upright and all the way forward as the animal toward the back of his mind sent physical warnings to his body to prepare, his stomach was about to expel something more.
More...
He hadn't thrown up to begin with.
It was a dream... from years ago. The same old one from his childhood.. the one that usually did result in his having to race into the bathroom to spill his guts. But not this time.
He blinked confusedly, rubbing his lower back. Just above his eye level, he saw Zhane curled up in bed. Momentary confusion flowed through him, but it was quickly dissolved as he looked over at the television and saw a 80's B-movie airing.
He'd apparently never finished the film from last night, nor had he gotten a chance to go to his own bed. Great, he mused, noting the soreness he experienced from spending the entire night on the floor, not to mention having a very lucid nightmare.
A nightmare...
Which had been entirely comprised of actual events.
Oh god.. the nausea returned, rising up into his chest. He unconsciously gagged and clapped his hand over his mouth.
"She's here. She's here... she's safe!" He whispered, rocking back and forth and lowering himself back down to the floor.
The television provided momentary distraction as he tried to soothe his queasiness; a blonde with the biggest hair Andros had ever seen was sitting on a dock with a young man with a mullet. They spoke ridiculously stilted dialogue against a hokey backdrop, made even cornier by the constant shaky shift in camera angles and poorly focused zoom-ins.
"So tell me, officer... why is it that a handsome man such as you has never married?" The blonde asked, sounding as if she would have done much better in the movie from last night.
"I was married, Jessica. But..." The man suddenly stopped in a ridiculously overacted "realization" of "having said too much", and he turned away from Jessica, staring at the water.
"But what? You can tell me." She said, putting her hands on his shoulder.
"Marshall Briggs. He found out where I lived." He said anticlimactically. "One night she heard a sound, and the next thing I knew she was lying in my arms, her poor beautiful heart bleeding all over my hands. I didn't even see it coming."
The blonde's mouth opened in a painfully fake expression of shock. "Oh Corey. I had no idea."
"So you see, Jessica..." Corey announced, getting to his feet. "That's why I can't see you anymore. Marshall's escaped from prison. He'll come after me again. Only this time, I'm all he's getting."
"Oh darling, no! Please, I want to come with you!"
"Jessica, I'll always love you, but this is a man's fight."
She began to whimper pitifully. "What if... he should take... your life?"
"He ain't taking nothing he ain't gonna lose first." He said, his voice suddenly booming and cracking as if it had been rapidly amplified by a microphone which wasn't prepared to do so. "If I'd been stronger, Marla would still be alive today."
Andros felt a slight pang in his chest at the coincedental dialogue. He momentarily wondered if he'd seen this dialogue coming, as a sort of precognition, but it wasn't so. His father had indeed said the same thing.
Hokey dialogue in one instance, painful memories fraught with regrets in another. How funny that things worked that way.
"Sometimes things like that were meant to happen. You remember what I said about my brother? I believe it was his time!"
"I don't want you to bring your God mumbo-jumbo into this!"
Andros shook his head, putting his hands over his ears. This was truly getting painful. He decided to get up and turn off the television (among other things, it had to be morning by now), but as he was backed up against Zhane's bedside table, he was unaware of the slight ledge above him and he clipped his head against the sharp corner.
Hissing and cursing in clumsy pain and anger, he curled back up into a ball on the floor. Above him, Zhane had swiftly emerged from his slumber, looking around in shock. "Who's there?!?!" He yelled, his fists raised.
"Oww... no.. it's okay. I just hit my head."
"Andros....?" Zhane asked suspiciously. "What are you doing in my room..?"
"We were watching the movie last night, remember?!" Andros exclaimed, in no mood to deal with Zhane's early morning memory lapse.
"What, didn't you ever leave? Oh, sorry. I konked out. How did it end?"
"I don't know."
"Did you fall asleep too?"
"No, Zhane. I left 5 minutes before the end, went to my quarters, slept there peacefully all night, then just now I decided to come back and sit on your floor, just to throw you off."
"Jeez, okay."
"Look... sorry, but.. I really have to get moving. The ship won't move unless I give the word."
"And you're absolutely certain you want to do it today." The words came out of nowhere.
"What? Well.. of course.. December.. what, 2nd? Today?"
"Yes."
"There we go then. I've got to get... god, so much to do."
Onto his feet, again, this time successfully. He turned back around to look at Zhane. "0900?"
"Oh... yeah, okay."
"Why are you so hesitant?"
"I'm not. It just seems like it came so fast. I think we should give it more time, that's all. Another week or something. But everyone else is ready to go, so what the hell."
"Is there something I don't know?"
"Just that the planet looks like complete hell and countless are dead or missing. I guess you probably do know that, way at the back of your head, but you don't seem too eager to admit it."
"Of course I know that! That's why we're going back, to help. It's our home, it's our duty. It's not going to go away."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. I'm going to go see if Karone's up."
"Have fun." Zhane said absently.
"Oh, 'have fun'." Andros groaned, floating out the door. By all merits, he looked confident, cool, stable... everything the leader of the Power Rangers ought to be.
And then, he reached my quarters.
I must have scared the holy hell out of him. I really must have.
***
His large eyes had become vacant and lifeless by the time darkness settled. Scanning the ground for any signs of her... he honestly thought by this time he'd even be able to recognize a fleck of her fingernails amidst the brush on the forest floor.
Her scent must be traceable too, he thought suddenly, adrenaline racing through his heart as he realized that he'd overlooked such an obvious search criteria. Her scent... not just her body but the perfume of their mother's that she'd laughingly put on last night. Surely someone with a greater sense of smell would be able to detect it.. even so far away from her last sighting. Miles.. miles away..
Miles away from home. Hours had passed, and the young boy had walked so far he could no longer even hear the regular sounds of the city or the suburban area where his home was. No, no.. but surely a monster wouldn't take a little girl into the city. If he was serious about finding her, it only made sense to go into the woods. That was, after all, where the footprints had come from.
A few hours previous, he'd come to where the tracks (which he followed backwards, of course) began, thinking surely it would lead him to some sort of evil base.
Instead, he found nothing but a small clearing under a tree. And no more tracks, anywhere.
Of course, the first thing he did was climb the tree. Trees were an ideal place for a fort; he'd even wanted to build one to keep girls out. The thought shamed him then, and he wondered if it was God's way of telling him he was being selfish. "If you don't let your sister into your tree fort, I'm going to send down a big mean monster to kidnap her."
It angered him beyond reason to find nothing. In his young and naive way he had seriously expected to find a secret passage, behind a branch or maybe just at the top of the tree.. surely in a knothole or maybe... maybe..
The demon had to be here somewhere.
What would he want with Karone? She was nothing special... she was just a sister! If he wanted a sister so badly, why didn't he just tell his mommy and daddy? Even writing to Santa Claus could have helped... but you didn't just go stealing someone else's sister.
She'd been crying, screaming for Andros to help her. It was so different from when they played Power Rangers. Then, she was happy to play the fair maiden, because Andros the red ranger was always there. Always there to save her. "Yay, my hero!"
Where was her "hero" when it really mattered.
A moment later, he found himself on the ground, unable to breathe and wanting to scream. Above him, the sky had become far away and the spot he'd climbed to was now vacant, unchanged except for a few flakes of bark that had been ripped loose in the process of Andros' failed climb.
Tears spurted from his eyes, the last time he showed any emotion. Foolish tears..
Instead of crying anymore, he began to crawl along the forest floor, studying the footprints. The footprints that had to mean something. Just... god, anything would do.
By the time it had really gotten dark, he realized that not only was he lost, cold, scared and hungry, but he'd come back across what used to be a clear and deep footprint and now was recognizable only as a slight indentation in the dirt. He strained his eyes but to his dismay, he saw that his own footprints dominated and eclipsed the original path with their maddening smallness, leading in endless circles.
"But maybe some of those prints are hers!!!" He suddenly shrieked, falling to his knees to look at the freshest ones. He knew for a fact that his feet were only one shoe size larger than his sister's, and in his near-stupor it sure seemed feasable.
Anything seemed feasable. Just as long as it turned out that the words he felt in his heart turned out to be untrue, he knew he'd do or believe anything. Anything.
He'd believe absolutely anything except that she was gone. He'd believe that she was an ant on that cursed tree.
No words could possibly hurt more than those that his father whispered an hour or so later, as an older man picked up Andros' body which had collapsed from exhaustion, not knowing or caring if he was found. He was only semi-awake, alert enough to murmur a response to the question "Are you Harke's boy?" but not enough to open his eyes when his father's familiar voice demanded for him to "Look at me, son, look at me, oh my god, are you all right??"
In the backseat of the family car, the young child pressed his cheek into the soft leather and prayed that he'd wake up in another world, or at least his own world without any of this having happened. Indeed, the silence of his father and the other man, the one who'd asked if Andros was Harke's boy was very comforting. Not at all contradictory to Andros' wishes.
And then, his father's exhausted voice.
"The monster didn't touch Andros. Monnika had the hovercam capture the whole incident."
"Well, thank god for that." The other man said politely.
"Thank god for my only daughter being stolen?!" Dad's temper.
"Dammit, Harke, you know what I mean. You've got a good son there, you know. He had to have been looking for her all day."
"Instead of coming home and telling us? If we'd gotten the Power Rangers notified right away they could have stopped all traffic from leaving the Karova System. You're not going to tell me that demon teleported into the goddamned woods. He was on a ship, probably a freighter. General traffic, as common as anything. One scan and that beast would be in the mines faster than..."
The other man sighed. "We've still got the squad on the lookout."
"If he was stronger, this would have never happened. If he was stronger, he could have saved her."
"Don't be stupid, Harke. Christ, the kid's in the backseat, he can probably hear every word we're saying! He's five years old!"
"I know... I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry. I just feel like the worst father in the world. My daughter's probably dead right now.. or worse."
Andros' eyes had widened, and even though sleep was rushing over his mind in perilous and tempting waves, he felt himself trembling at the thought.
If only he were stronger... if he was stronger, he could have saved her.
If he was stronger...
If...
He leaned his head over the side of the seat and vomited.
***
Andros again felt his stomach muscles contract, stronger... and he suddenly bolted upright and all the way forward as the animal toward the back of his mind sent physical warnings to his body to prepare, his stomach was about to expel something more.
More...
He hadn't thrown up to begin with.
It was a dream... from years ago. The same old one from his childhood.. the one that usually did result in his having to race into the bathroom to spill his guts. But not this time.
He blinked confusedly, rubbing his lower back. Just above his eye level, he saw Zhane curled up in bed. Momentary confusion flowed through him, but it was quickly dissolved as he looked over at the television and saw a 80's B-movie airing.
He'd apparently never finished the film from last night, nor had he gotten a chance to go to his own bed. Great, he mused, noting the soreness he experienced from spending the entire night on the floor, not to mention having a very lucid nightmare.
A nightmare...
Which had been entirely comprised of actual events.
Oh god.. the nausea returned, rising up into his chest. He unconsciously gagged and clapped his hand over his mouth.
"She's here. She's here... she's safe!" He whispered, rocking back and forth and lowering himself back down to the floor.
The television provided momentary distraction as he tried to soothe his queasiness; a blonde with the biggest hair Andros had ever seen was sitting on a dock with a young man with a mullet. They spoke ridiculously stilted dialogue against a hokey backdrop, made even cornier by the constant shaky shift in camera angles and poorly focused zoom-ins.
"So tell me, officer... why is it that a handsome man such as you has never married?" The blonde asked, sounding as if she would have done much better in the movie from last night.
"I was married, Jessica. But..." The man suddenly stopped in a ridiculously overacted "realization" of "having said too much", and he turned away from Jessica, staring at the water.
"But what? You can tell me." She said, putting her hands on his shoulder.
"Marshall Briggs. He found out where I lived." He said anticlimactically. "One night she heard a sound, and the next thing I knew she was lying in my arms, her poor beautiful heart bleeding all over my hands. I didn't even see it coming."
The blonde's mouth opened in a painfully fake expression of shock. "Oh Corey. I had no idea."
"So you see, Jessica..." Corey announced, getting to his feet. "That's why I can't see you anymore. Marshall's escaped from prison. He'll come after me again. Only this time, I'm all he's getting."
"Oh darling, no! Please, I want to come with you!"
"Jessica, I'll always love you, but this is a man's fight."
She began to whimper pitifully. "What if... he should take... your life?"
"He ain't taking nothing he ain't gonna lose first." He said, his voice suddenly booming and cracking as if it had been rapidly amplified by a microphone which wasn't prepared to do so. "If I'd been stronger, Marla would still be alive today."
Andros felt a slight pang in his chest at the coincedental dialogue. He momentarily wondered if he'd seen this dialogue coming, as a sort of precognition, but it wasn't so. His father had indeed said the same thing.
Hokey dialogue in one instance, painful memories fraught with regrets in another. How funny that things worked that way.
"Sometimes things like that were meant to happen. You remember what I said about my brother? I believe it was his time!"
"I don't want you to bring your God mumbo-jumbo into this!"
Andros shook his head, putting his hands over his ears. This was truly getting painful. He decided to get up and turn off the television (among other things, it had to be morning by now), but as he was backed up against Zhane's bedside table, he was unaware of the slight ledge above him and he clipped his head against the sharp corner.
Hissing and cursing in clumsy pain and anger, he curled back up into a ball on the floor. Above him, Zhane had swiftly emerged from his slumber, looking around in shock. "Who's there?!?!" He yelled, his fists raised.
"Oww... no.. it's okay. I just hit my head."
"Andros....?" Zhane asked suspiciously. "What are you doing in my room..?"
"We were watching the movie last night, remember?!" Andros exclaimed, in no mood to deal with Zhane's early morning memory lapse.
"What, didn't you ever leave? Oh, sorry. I konked out. How did it end?"
"I don't know."
"Did you fall asleep too?"
"No, Zhane. I left 5 minutes before the end, went to my quarters, slept there peacefully all night, then just now I decided to come back and sit on your floor, just to throw you off."
"Jeez, okay."
"Look... sorry, but.. I really have to get moving. The ship won't move unless I give the word."
"And you're absolutely certain you want to do it today." The words came out of nowhere.
"What? Well.. of course.. December.. what, 2nd? Today?"
"Yes."
"There we go then. I've got to get... god, so much to do."
Onto his feet, again, this time successfully. He turned back around to look at Zhane. "0900?"
"Oh... yeah, okay."
"Why are you so hesitant?"
"I'm not. It just seems like it came so fast. I think we should give it more time, that's all. Another week or something. But everyone else is ready to go, so what the hell."
"Is there something I don't know?"
"Just that the planet looks like complete hell and countless are dead or missing. I guess you probably do know that, way at the back of your head, but you don't seem too eager to admit it."
"Of course I know that! That's why we're going back, to help. It's our home, it's our duty. It's not going to go away."
"Yeah."
"Yeah. I'm going to go see if Karone's up."
"Have fun." Zhane said absently.
"Oh, 'have fun'." Andros groaned, floating out the door. By all merits, he looked confident, cool, stable... everything the leader of the Power Rangers ought to be.
And then, he reached my quarters.
I must have scared the holy hell out of him. I really must have.
***