Disclaimer: Power Rangers is not mine... yet.

Maiken: Of course he will!

Chylea3784: Well, this chapter tells you who the father is...

PinkRanger4Evr: Nope, Andros and Ashley haven't even known each other for two years. You see who the father is, but this isn't a happy chapter...

Ashley Hammond/Astro Yellow: Yay, Jenny's not dead! I don't have to beta-read:P

Liz: Well, here's more, and you see who the father is and Andros's reaction.

Mel: Father, not husband. :P There's gotta be something left for Andros to do. :P Rated M is the same thing as rated R, I think, or that's what it was before they changed it.

Chapter 6

Andros was at a complete loss for words, and Ashley was incapable of speech, so they stood there silently for several minutes, staring at each other, the quiet broken only by Ashley's sobbing and her daughter's peaceful, even breathing.

"Ash, how...?" Andros finally choked out. "Why didn't you...?"

He didn't manage to finish either question. Ashley continued sobbing, giving Andros no sign that she'd heard him in the first place. Andros had no clue what he was supposed to do now. Half of him was trying to convince himself to turn around and never come back, but the other half, the stronger half as it turned out to be, wanted nothing more than to comfort her, as she'd done for him when he'd needed it.

Ashley dragged her palms across her face, swiping angrily at her tears, trying to control herself long enough to at least explain it all to him. "Andros, I..." Andros made his decision then, and stepped closer to her, intending to pull her into his arms, stopping short when she flinched.

"No." Ashley shook her head as she backed away from him, trembling, her eyes locked fearfully on his. Andros stood stock still as Ashley crawled into the far corner of her bed, putting as great a distance between them as was physically possible without relocating one of them to a different room.

"I... I'm sorry," Andros muttered helplessly. "I didn't mean to scare you, Ash."

Ashley made no reply, and Andros doubted that she'd even heard him in the first place. Andros hesitated. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No." Ashley's soft whisper managed to carry through the room, and when it reached his ears, Andros found his heart aching for her. "I need to tell you."

"We could talk like this."

"Don't do that!" Ashley wailed, her eyes overflowing with tears kept in far too long. "Stay out of my head!"

"I'm sorry." Ashley blinked tears out of her eyes to look at him. Eyes downcast, Andros certainly looked sorry, but for what, she couldn't be sure, as much as she wanted to believe him. Uncertainly, she nodded.

"I've never told anyone what happened before," she muttered, her voice heavy as it reached Andros's ears. "Promise you'll never tell anyone what I tell you." Andros hesitated. "Promise," Ashley insisted, a few stray tears leaking out of her eyes. "Andros, promise me."

"I promise," Andros muttered reluctantly. The instant he did so, he knew it was a mistake, that he had just done Ashley a huge injustice by agreeing to her condition, but he wouldn't go back on his word to her. "Ash... I-"

"Let me talk first," Ashley pleaded. "I'll tell you everything, I promise."

Andros nodded wordlessly, still hovering near the open doorway of her room. Ashley wished he could be even farther away, but she couldn't exactly shout her story to him. She highly doubted that she could even whisper it, but she had to try. Andros must have read her face correctly, for he said quickly, "If you can't, you don't have to. You don't owe it to me."

Ashley hesitated. She knew that Andros was only trying to ease the pressure that he'd put on her unknowingly, but she wanted, needed to tell him, and yet she was so close to backing out, and making up a less truthful, less painful story that would end in Tawny's creation. But all the lies that she had told and all the secrets that she had kept were weighing down on her too heavily now, and she needed to get them out before they crushed her. "You're wrong," she whispered. "I do."

"Then I'll listen," Andros promised her softly. Ashley blinked at him sadly, wondering at what point he'd get up and walk away. Taking a deep breath that did nothing to either calm her nerves or strengthen her, Ashley began speaking, her voice just barely audible to herself, but somehow reaching Andros's ears just as clearly as if they were sitting side by side, carrying on a normal, cheerful conversation.

"My parents split up when I was ten," she began, starting from the very beginning, long before her life had become hell on earth, but choosing to speak about something that she was comfortable enough with before she got to the events that haunted her nightmares.

"Jeff was thirteen then. We were upset about it, but we'd been expecting something to happen. My dad, he'd cheated on my mom a few times, and they were always fighting so much in the last few months before the divorce. One night, he called to say that he wasn't coming home. My mom, I don't think that she was all that surprised, and Jeff, I think he knew, but I was too little to really understand what went wrong, why Dad wasn't coming home like normal anymore.

"After the divorce, Dad pretty much disappeared. I think he's somewhere in Nevada now, or maybe Arizona. Dad and I were really close, and when he just left, it hurt. It hurt so much. I haven't seen him in seven years, and it's like he just forgot about me. There were a few phone calls, maybe one a year, whenever he remembered he had two children.

"Two years later, Dad got married again, to some woman he met in Vegas. Last time I heard from him, about three years ago, he was still married. Mom, it took her a few months to get over the shock, but after that, she never mentioned Dad again, except when - when she was screaming at me, she'd say that I was just like him. Mom met Terry when I was twelve, and they got together a few months later. He hated me from the moment he saw me."

Ashley stopped talking abruptly, looking down at her hands, but not before Andros had seen the unbridled terror in her normally laughing eyes. Ashley had been crying silently as she'd been speaking, but now her eyes were flooded again, and she lowered her head, falling onto her side, and curling up on her bed, drawing her knees up to her chin. She attempted to speak through her tears, just needing to get it out, no longer caring much for Andros's reaction.

"My mom needed Terry so much. He was someone who would pay attention to her, who made her feel important enough, who would love her. He made her fall in love with him, and it made her so blind. When Terry started to - to... Andros, I can't."

Andros, who had been staring down at Ashley's shaking form with growing horror, started at the mention of his name. He stared at his girlfriend for a long time, trying to decide what he should be doing.

"Ash," Andros whispered, not too surprised when Ashley didn't look up at him. He'd learned long ago that everything Ashley felt was reflected in her eyes, and right now it was obvious that Ashley was trying to hide from him just how extreme was the emotional turmoil that she was in. "You don't have to keep going if you don't want to."

"I have to," Ashley whispered. "If I don't tell you, then he'll still have so much power over me."

Andros was about to reply when soft babbling reached his ears, and he looked over to see the little girl standing up in her crib. Her eyes were identical to those of her mother's, and Andros couldn't help but feel his heart warming towards her. Tawny was half Ashley, no matter who her other half might be.

Ashley slowly got out from the sheet that she was huddled under, and sat up, rubbing her eyes with the hem of the sheet to dry her eyes before going over to her daughter.

"Hey, Tawny," she said, her usual smile back on her face, incredibly forced and fake. "How are you?"

"Hi, Mommy!" Tawny shouted, flinging her arrms around Ashley's neck as she was lifted out of the crib.

"You're getting heavy," Ashley remarked cheerfully, settling Tawny on one hip. "I'll have to remind your grandma and grandpa that they were going to buy you a bed six months ago."

Ashley hesitated when she walked past Andros on her way across the room again, and timidly turned enough for him to get a good look at the little girl's face. Tawny grinned at him, and Andros couldn't resist smiling back at the little girl.

"Hi," he said shyly, not only having no idea how to talk to a child, but almost frightened of her. Ashley's lower lip quivered, and she set Tawny down on the ground, turning away before her daughter could see how distraught she was.

"This is a friend of mine, okay, sweetheart?" Ashley said, waiting until Tawny nodded. "Will you go play with Panda while I talk to him for a little while?"

Tawny nodded again, and produced seemingly out of nowhere a gigantic stuffed giraffe that had to be taller than she was when not dragged around by its neck. She dragged the poor animal across the room to where Andros still stood, watching her curiously.

"Mommy and you share him," she warned him. Andros stared at her, and for a second, he found himself fighting down the urge to cry. He swallowed hard and nodded as he took the giraffe, setting it down carefully on the floor beside him, halfway between the spot where he'd stood since he'd entered the room, and the spt that Ashley hadn't moved from since she'd set Tawny down, six feet away. Tawny nodded, apparently satisfied, and darted across the room again, vanishing into the closet, materializing with an armload of smaller stuffed animals, among them the panda that Ashley must have been referring to earlier.

"Wow," he murmured softly, still watching her. Ashley was in tears again, and Andros longed to hold her, and comfort her, but he knew that if he tried, she wouldn't let him. "You've got to be the strongest person that I know, Ash."

"Don't say that," Ashley whispered, slowly backing away from him and sinking back down onto her bed, burying her face in the pillow she clutched to her chest. "If I was strong, I wouldn't even have Tawny. I would have been able to fight back when-" she stopped and swallowed hard before choking out, "Terry raped me."

Andros closed his eyes as her words cut through him. Ashley's body seemed to grow limp after her last sentence, and she curled up under the sheet again. Andros watched her silently, resisting the urge to cross the room to her. He wanted to comfort her, not make her hurt even more than she already was, although he almost changed his mind when Ashley began screaming wordlessly, the sound half-muffled by the pillow, but not enough for him to miss her terror and her pain.

Ashley stared at Andros, eight feet away, across the room, suddenly deathly afraid that he was going to come closer. "No," she whispered to him, squeezing her eyes shut as she wrapped her arms around her knees, as though she could somehow physically hold herself together.

Ashley had always understood what had happened to her. She knew exactly what Terry had done to her, but she'd never allowed herself to dwell on it, and the memories had quickly been buried by her mind, shoved into a forgotten realm for years. It was her way of protecting herself, and it had worked well, allowing her to deal with her two lives, the dark one here in this house, and the cheerful one a complete opposite of it outside.

For two years, she had been able to look at Tawny and see only Tawny, and not remember how frightened she had been, because she hadn't felt her fright, not until now. She'd been able to let herself fall in love with Andros because she hadn't remebered the look of complete hatred in Terry's eyes, coupled with triumph. She'd been able to survive for the last three years because it had never truly seemed real. If she thought about it, for whatever reason, it was with the detachment of a stranger, as if it had happened to someone else, someone she didn't know, as opposed to her own self.

Everything came crashing back to her, and she screamed, overwhelmed by it all. She remembered eveything that had happened on that awful night, and the ones that followed it, feeling now the fear, the anger, and the shame that she hadn't felt then.

"No!" Ashley screamed, seeing motion out of the corner of her eye. "Stay away from me!"

"Mommy?"

Ashley raised her head out of the pillow, and saw her daughter staring at her, wide-eyed with fright. Too late, she tried to plaster on the smile she always wore around Tawny. She'd tried so hard to be happy for her sake, and now that was gone too. Ashley stared at Tawny as though seeing her for the first time, wondering how she could be able to love so much this child that she had never wanted.

"I'm okay, sweetheart," Ashley whispered. "Go play some more, okay?"

"Okay," Tawny agreed cheerfully. "Play with me?"

"Mommy doesn't feel like playing right now, sweetie," Ashley said, guiltridden at the crestfallen expression on her daughter's face. "We'll play later, all right?"

"You play?" Tawny asked Andros, who caught himself before he started backing away from her. His eyes flickered to Ashley, who was curled up again, trembling, her forearms covering her face.

"No," Andros said softly. "I don't want to play."

Some time later, Andros didn't know how much, Ashley sat up again, extremely self-conscious of even the smallest movements that she made. "I'm sorry," she muttered.

"Don't apologize," Andros whispered fiercely. "Ash, it wasn't your fault."

"He told me it was," Ashley choked out. "He told me that no one would believe me if I said anything. Then later he told me that if I ever told anyone who Tawny's father was, he'd take her away from me, and I'd never see her again."

"Did you believe him?" Andros asked gently. Ashley shook her head and gave a sad, bitter laugh.

"Not at first," she said, now clutching the giant giraffe by the throat. "I tried to tell my mom. I told her that he was hurting me, and she laughed at me. She told me I needed to learn the difference between nightmares and real life. I believed him then."

"Your mother didn't believe you?" Andros couldn't keep himself from asking increduously. He regretted it the moment that Ashley burst into tears again, but he couldn't reach out and cram the words back down into his throat. Ashley shook her head.

"I'd just turned fifteen," Ashley whispered. "I was only fifteen, Andros, and my own mother thought I was making it up. She didn't want to hear it, and eventually she decided that I was trying to get them to break up so I could go after Terry."

"She what?" Andros was feeling more than a little sick now.

"He brainwashed her," Ashley muttered before choking out a long stream of words in a rushed whisper. "She went on a business trip, and he talked her into letting him stay with us, instead of my grandparents. That night, he - he - I woke up, and he was standing there, looking at me. Andros, I was so scared, and then he asked if I was going to scream. That's all he said, and I was so scared, and I didn't know what he was going to do to me, so I said no, and then he got into the bed with me and started to-"

"Stop," Andros whispered, his face white. "Oh god, Ash, please, stop."

"A few months later, I realized that I was pregnant with Tawny." Ashley continued with her story, although thankfully with a different account than the one of that night. "I don't think I'd ever been more terrified in my life, and I had no idea what to do. Mom would have made me get an abortion, and I knew I couldn't live with myself if I let that happen, so I waited as long as I could before it started showing, and then I ran away until it was too late to have one.

"I was eight months pregnant when I came back, and my mom, the look on her face when she saw me, I knew that she hated me then. She and Terry were married by then, and he just laughed at me. They were going to make me give up the baby for adoption, and then Terry decided that it would be more fun for him if there was a reminder of what a horrible person I was."

Andros stared Ashley, furious that someone would even dream of hurting her. When he'd first met Ashley, he had thought that it would be impossible to wipe her smile off of her cheerful face. Ashley was eternally optimistic and hopelessly romantic, two qualities that he had initially caused him to think her naive and childlike.

Yet somehow, her smile had grown on him, and he'd found himself craving the sound of her laughter. He had become so accustomed to Ashley's bubbly cheerfulness that seeing her now, like this, it seemed entirely wrong, and made him love her all the more, for being the person that she was with such darkness in her life.

"Ash, how did you do it?" Andros couldn't keep himself from asking. "We were in space for so long. How did you stand being away from her for months?"

"They won't let me raise her myself," Ashley said softly. "They know better because they're older, and they're right. I have no clue what I'm doing. I'm lucky they even let her know that I'm her mother, not just her sister. They kept her away from me for so long that when we were gone, I was almost used to it. I was used to hiding it, anyway."

Ashley stopped talking again, nothing left in her that could make her keep going. There were nightmares upon nightmares that she could share with him, and maybe she would someday, but for now, she was completely drained.

"Ash, do you want Tawny to move with you to the Megaship?"

"Please," Ashley begged him, the look in her eyes more pleading than anything Andros had ever seen before. "You'd never even have to see her if you didn't want to. Please, Andros, if I don't bring her with me, I'll never be allowed to see her again. I'll wait as long as I can before bringing her there and I'll leave as soon as I find somewhere else to stay, I promise, just please let me, I can't lose Tawny, Andros, I just can't."

"Ash, stop," Andros said, looking directly into her eyes. "You and Tawny can stay for as long as you want to. Don't wait until next week, Ash, please. I can't stand the thought of you and her staying here."

"You really mean that?" Ashley stared as him.

Andros nodded instantly. "Please, come right now, and get out of this place."

"What about everyone else?" Ashley asked him fearfully. "I'm not ready to tell them yet. Please don't make me."

"Ash, I'd never make you," Andros said. "But when you're ready, there's someone else that I think you need to tell."

"Who?"

"The police, Ash," Andros said gently. "He deserves to rot in prison for what he did to you."

"I can't tell it again that many times," Ashley whispered, shaking again. "It's too much. Andros, everytime I think about it, it's like I'm reliving it, every time it happened, and I just can't do that again."

"When you're ready, Ash," Andros said again. Ashley only stared at him, wondering how he didn't despise her for keeping her entire life a secret.