Thursday, 2:31 p.m.
Reefside, California
His feet hit the ground and the world around him came into focus.
Ninja streaking wasn't for the faint of heart, the first time he'd attempted it when he was thirteen he'd spent a good ten minutes on the grass throwing up, with Hunter doubled over laughing nearby.
But Blake was older now, and his stomach had long since toughened up.
Nowadays the adrenaline rush got his blood pumping, and two seconds after he landed he was ready for anything.
Anything, of course, except for this.
At least before the Wind Rangers had been in uniform, faces hidden behind their helmets as they ravaged Reefside and attacked the Dino Rangers. Now his three teammates were fighting the unmorphed Dino Rangers in their ninja garb, and he couldn't delude himself with the hope that maybe it wasn't really them, that maybe it was someone else impersonating them under the helmets.
If Cam's plan didn't work...
It will work, Blake thought, fiercely stomping out that traitorous doubt. It has to.
Because he couldn't live without Tori.
The real Tori, not the evil incarnation Lothor had turned her into. The Tori who liked to slip out of bed to go for a morning surf before he even woke up, the Tori that liked tiger lilies and made him smiley face pancakes when he had a bad day.
That was the Tori he married, and he didn't know what he'd do if they didn't get her back.
He loved her, even this new world-domination friendly version, but the Tori that Lothor had unleashed on the world was just a pale shade of his wife.
"Shit," Hunter suddenly cursed, breaking Blake out of his reverie. "Cam!"
"I see it," Cam snapped, and started to run.
Confused, Blake frowned, looking back up the hill at the Wind Rangers and his eyes widened in alarm as he recognized the familiar movements of their arms as the pattern for activating their morphers.
If they morph... he thought, his heart in his throat.
If they morphed, the plan was ruined.
"No!" Cam shouted loudly, drawing the attention of the both sets of Rangers on the top of the hill as he moved in their direction. "Wait!"
Blake followed, placing one hand on the railing in front of him and using it to vault himself over. Behind him, Hunter, never one to pass up an opportunity to rub it in about his height, casually swung one long leg over the top bar and pushed off his back foot, nimbly jumping the railing.
The Wind Rangers glanced at one another, as if assessing whether or not they were a threat.
"Wait... Blake?"
Turning his head at the familiar voice, Blake was startled to see Kira Ford, flanked by her friends Connor and Ethan, and suddenly the pieces clicked.
"That's how I know you," Kira concluded. "You're a Power Ranger."
Apparently I'm not the only one, Blake thought, but kept that to himself in the interest of keeping up the act Cam had laid out for them. No wonder you reminded me of Tori.
"Good," Ethan said, sighing in relief. "Because we can use all the help we can get."
"We're not here to help you guys out," Blake informed them haughtily, moving with Cam and Hunter to stand with the Wind Rangers. "We stick with our own kind."
It was all he could do to keep himself from looking back at Tori.
But he couldn't afford to glance back at her, not now, when so much was riding on this little performance of theirs.
If they were going to save Tori and the others, they had to play this right.
Of course, his words weren't all an act.
He would fight anyone who tried to hurt Tori, evil or not, and he wasn't about to stand idly by and watch Shane and Dustin get attacked, either.
They were his teammates, his friends, and they would have done the same for him.
Hell, they had.
"Lothor has shown us the error of our ways," Hunter added, folding his arms and easing into a cold, cocky stance that brought back uneasy memories for Blake of another time when he'd been like this, a time when it hadn't been an act.
"Whoever doesn't follow us," Cam declared coldly. "We'll destroy."
The Dino Rangers exchanged grim, worried looks, and Blake knew they were thinking about how badly three evil Rangers had beaten them.
Six would just be overkill.
"This is gonna be great," Dustin growled, punching his palm in dark anticipation.
"Wait," Cam said flatly, turning to hold out the real power discs. "First, you have to take these." At Shane's raised eyebrow, he smiled thinly. "A little power boost direct from the Abyss of Evil."
"But we already have our powers," Tori sneered.
Blake swallowed hard, trying to ignore the twinge in his chest when her eyes passed right over him, indifferent. Her face was hard and emotionless, like a stone mask, and her once brilliant blue eyes had lost their spark, fading to a dull and icy hue that almost seemed gray.
"Not these ones," Hunter retorted.
Again the Wind Rangers shared a look, not fully trusting them, but finally Shane looked back at Cam, eyes hard and steely. "You'd better be right about this," he warned.
"Believe me," Cam replied, and Blake could almost hear the smirk in his tone. "You won't be sorry."
One by one the Wind Rangers took their power discs.
This is it, Blake thought, holding his breath. If Cam was wrong...
Dustin, Shane and Tori discarded the discs Lothor had given them and slipped their real power discs into place, and were suddenly hurled backward through the air as bursts of yellow, red and blue energy erupted from their respective morphers.
Blake rushed to Tori's side, his heart lodging in his throat at how still she was.
"Tori?" he breathed shakily.
Then, after an agonizing heartbeat, a soft groan escaped her lips and her eyes fluttered open, groggily flickering over his face, and then, to his relief, her eyes widened in surprise and she gasped, lips curving upward. "Blake?"
Smiling in relief, Blake took her hand and gently pulled her to her feet.
"Aww, dude what happened?" Dustin groaned with a sharp wince, rubbing the back of his head. "My bell is seriously rung."
"How did we get here?" Tori asked in bewilderment. "The last thing I remember..."
"Lothor," Blake sighed. "He's back."
And he's going to pay for what he did to you, he added silently.
"Yeah, we know," Shane said grimly, with the same steely resolve of his evil-self, only not quiet as terrifying. "Sensei told us."
"That wasn't Sensei," Hunter informed him bluntly.
"No, dude," Dustin insisted, shaking his head. "I know Sensei when I see him
"No," Blake said wearily. "It's Lothor."
"Okay..." Dustin frowned, clearly trying to make sense of it all, and then his expression lit up with enlightenment. "Unless it was Lothor dressed as Sensei, huh?"
Blake opened his mouth to retort, when Connor suddenly inserted himself in their midst.
"Okay, this is all highly amusing," he drawled, in a tone that made it clear he didn't think it was. "But does someone want to tell me what's going on?"
Shane frowned. "Eric?"
Connor blinked, then rolled his eyes in exasperation. "That would be my brother. I'm Connor."
"Also known as the guy you've been wailing on all day," Hunter piped up, earning a dark look from Connor and eliciting a troubled expression from Shane. "Long story short... these three are the new Power Rangers, Lothor made you guys evil, and you wiped the floor with them."
"Only because Dr. O told us to hold back," Connor insisted.
"Yeah, right," Kira scoffed with a smile. "They were totally kicking our asses and you know it."
She glanced at Blake, clearly wanting some answers and expecting some kind of explanation for all of this, but Blake couldn't worry about her now.
He had more important things to focus on.
"It's good to have you back," he told Tori, reaching out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
"I could say the same to you, hotshot," she retorted with a weak smile.
"It's good to have you both back," Hunter declared, ruffling Blake's hair, and ignored the glare Blake shot him to clap Shane and Dustin on the shoulders. "To have all of you back."
"Were we at least cool evil?" Dustin inquired. "You know, all menacing like Darth Vader?"
"We didn't hurt anybody," Tori asked softly, saving them from having to respond to Dustin, but presenting them with a question they wanted to avoid just as badly. "Did we?"
Blake exchanged a look with Cam and Hunter, hesitant, and that must have been answer enough.
"How bad?" Tori demanded, looking instead to Kira.
"The city's pretty torn up," Kira admitted after a moment's pause. "People were injured, but no one died... I think."
"Dude," Dustin muttered despondently.
"Oh God," Tori moaned softly, shaking her head. "We have to help," she insisted, gazing up at Blake with wide, pleading blue eyes. "We have to fix this."
"We will," he promised. "But first we have to stop Lothor."
"Let's go back to Ninja Ops and talk to Sensei," Shane suggested. "The real Sensei."
"He's not there," Cam cleared his throat and gave the Wind Rangers a pointed look that reminded Blake of the old days. "No one is, actually. It seems while you were evil you helped Lothor defeat and capture our students."
Shane's face became clouded at that news.
"It wasn't you," Blake told them, laying a hand on Tori's arm when she wouldn't look at him. "It wasn't your fault."
She bit her lip, but nodded.
"Did I attack Marah?" Dustin wanted to know, and he groaned without waiting for an answer. "She's gonna kill me, dude."
"Let's get back to Dr. O's and regroup," Connor suggested.
"Yeah," Ethan agreed. "He'll know what to do."
"Dad's gone to meet with him anyway," Cam said when they all looked in his direction. "So we might as well join him. Maybe he's picked up on Lothor's trail by now."
They started down the hill, and Blake could make out Ethan eagerly asking a bunch of ninja questions, which Dustin was more than ready to answer, but Blake hung back as the rest of the Power Rangers, both past and present, headed off.
Tori lingered at his side, and once they were alone he turned to her with a worried look.
"You sure you're okay?" he asked softly, letting his eyes rake over her in search of any sign of injury.
"My head is killing me and I can't remember what I did over the past few hours or who I hurt," she answered truthfully, and gave him a weak smile. "But yeah, I'm okay. Now that you're here."
"You know," Blake drawled, unable to resist teaching her. "There are easier ways to get me to come home early. Like, for instance," he waggled his eyebrows suggestively. "That little blue silky thing hanging in the closet?"
"Pig," Tori accused flatly.
"You love me," he retorted smugly.
"Really do," she said softly, tilting her head up to kiss him.
Blake closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of having his wife back in his arms, of being able to kiss her again after so many weeks apart.
After an all-too-short moment, they broke apart, and he sighed, knowing the others would be waiting for them. "Duty calls," she said lightly, and gave him a smile that melted away all other concerns.
"Yeah," he agreed, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Let's go save the world."
When they got down to the parking lot nearby, Blake was surprised to find the red car that had been there earlier, presumably Connor's, gone, and Hunter's lone figure leaning against a light pole at the edge of the lot.
"They went ahead," Hunter explained without them having to ask. "Thought you needed a minute, so I told them I'd wait for you and we'd streak there."
"And how do we find 'there'?" Blake asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Got it covered," Hunter said without concern. "They told me how to get to Oliver's place."
Tori smiled, leaning away from Blake to kiss Hunter on the cheek. "Thanks for coming after us, Hunter," she said.
"Hey," Hunter said, smirking, and shrugged his shoulders. "What's a brother-in-law for if not to save you from evil space ninjas who turn you into evil ninjas yourself, right?"