Disclaimer: Power Rangers belongs to Disney. Not me. Oh yeah, and I lied last chapter but it wouldn't let me fix it- Etcetera Kit is actually the one that came up with the Carter/Dana/Syd thing. Read on, and let me know what you think!!!
Chapter One
SPD Base, New Tech City, 2025
"It's hopeless, Bridge."
Z Delgado stared morosely at the chess board in front of her. The majority of the pieces on the board were Bridge's- she had maybe six left at best, and three of those were pawns.
"It isn't hopeless, you just need to concentrate instead of letting your mind wander," Bridge told her, nudging one of his pieces over a few spaces- whichpiece was it, again? Z wondered.
"That's called a rook," Bridge said, propping his chin on his hand and looking at her across the small table. She glared at him.
"What have I told you about that?" she asked, trying to sound mean, but failing miserably. Why did he have to look so cute when she was angry with him? That wasn't very fair.
Bridge chuckled and Z threw one of her pieces at him. He threw his hands up in front of his face, catching the piece before it could hit him, and said, "I told you, sometimes I just can't help hearing certain things!" He set the piece back in its proper place on the board.
"Yeah, why is that again?" Jack Landors piped up from his seat on the sofa. The trio, along with Sky, was hanging out in the common area, enjoying a few hours of peace and quiet before the deluge of cadets returned from their weekend at home.
Jack had rejoined SPD about a month after the defeat of Gruum- Ally had noticed him getting slightly mopey whenever reports of the SPD rangers would pop up on the news, and had finally gotten tired of it and told him if he wanted to continue seeing her, he needed to go back to being a ranger, because he obviously wasn't going to be happy doing anything else. His return had been gladly accepted by the rest of the team, as it just hadn't felt right without him around. Sky had even handed back the mantle of Red ranger, claiming that they had all gotten used to Jack being the leader, and the team had felt off balance ever since his departure. Jack was still living with Ally in their apartment about a block and a half away from the base, but now, five months after his return, it felt as though he had never left SPD in the first place.
"I thought you could only read people's minds when you had your gloves off," Jack continued, idly flipping pages in the magazine that he had been holding, but not really paying any attention to. Bridge frowned slightly.
"That's true, most of the time," he conceded, shrugging his shoulders and leaning back in his chair. "However, if I have an emotional connection to the person, it's much easier for me to read their thoughts and feelings."
Jack snickered. "So you're saying that you have an emotional connection to Z?" Bridge's face turned bright red as he realized what he had said. Z shook her head, giving Jack the finger over her shoulder without even turning around.
"Ignore him," she said to Bridge, smiling. "He hasn't progressed past the maturity level of an eleven-year-old." She sighed, looked down at the board, and looked back at Bridge. "So the rook is the one that does….what?" she asked, furrowing her brow, her nose crinkling slightly as she stared at the piece that had just taken one of her three remaining pawns.
"It moves back and forth across the flats, horizontally or vertically," Bridge explained, grateful for the subject change, as he demonstrated the piece's movements. Z nodded.
Sydney Drew chose that moment to breeze into the room, cornflower blue eyes sparkling and her typical adorable grin crossing her features. Her blonde curls were pulled up into a high ponytail and she was dressed in a short denim skirt and a pale pink camisole.
Syd headed straight for the couch, moving to stand behind where Sky was sitting and reading some sort of mystery novel. Leaning down and resting her chin on his shoulder, she asked, "Whatcha doin'?"
Sky jumped about a foot off of the couch when he felt Syd's chin touch his shoulder, and she cracked up. He glared at her, turning to face her as she stood back up.
"Did you need something in particular?" Sky asked, looking (and sounding) rather grumpy. Syd's smile fell and her lower lip stuck out just the slightest bit. Sky sighed, putting his book down. "I'm sorry, that was a little harsh," he apologized. "What did you need, Sydney?" he asked again, in a much nicer tone this time.
"Well, I'm off to a meeting with my agent," Syd said, leaning her hip against the couch and looking down at him, "and I was thinking of going to the mall afterwards." She smiled at him pointedly.
"No."
"But Sky, you promised," Syd reminded him, letting just a trace of a whine creep into her voice. She saw his face soften and inwardly congratulated herself. She could get this boy to do anything she wanted- well, almost anything, anyway. Shaking herself from that train of thought, she looked at him hopefully, unconsciously biting her lip.
"I said that you could help me find something for my parents' anniversary, not that I would go shopping with you," Sky said defiantly, but Syd could already hear the defeat in his voice. She cheered inwardly. The two of them sat there for a moment, just looking at each other, eyes locked, as Z, Bridge, and Jack looked on.
Finally, Sky sighed and stood. "Okay. But this had better not take all day. I'd rather not spend my entire day off inside the Galleria," he said. Syd grinned.
"Okay, let's go. The sooner we get to my agent's office, the sooner I can get this meeting over with."
Jack watched the two of them leave, shaking his head at the obvious chemistry between the two of them. "Man, Syd has Sky totally whipped, and they aren't even dating!" he paused, furrowing his brow. "Speaking of, is Sky ever going to ask her out?"
Z gave him a pointed look and then asked, in the same tone, "Are you ever going to ask Ally to marry you?"
Jack gulped and snatched up Sky's book, hiding behind it. Z laughed and shook her head, turning back to her chess game.
"Ryan! It's time to go!"
Kelsey Winslow Mitchell looked down at her watch before glaring back up the stairs toward the room she and her husband shared. The former Yellow Lightspeed Rescue ranger shook her head and called again, "Ryan! We're supposed to be at Carter and Dana's in ten minutes!"
"I can't find my blueprints!" Ryan yelled back. He was an architect, and Kelsey assumed that the blueprints he was talking about were the ones for the new Silver Guardians Headquarters that Mr. Collins had contracted him to build. Ryan had been hard at work on these for months and now that he was finished, Kelsey understood that he would want to show them off, but they were running dangerously late.
"Just give up, Mom," Kelsey's seventeen-year-old son Brian said, in response to Kelsey's frustrated sigh. He was sitting on the couch in the living room of their modest two-story rancher, just outside of Mariner Bay. He looked just like Ryan, Kelsey thought, smiling at her little boy. Well, not so little any more, she thought wryly.
Brian's twin sister Caroline chose that moment to bound down the stairs, brown curls flying, and her heeled pink sandals making Kelsey nervous that she was going to fall on her face. "Okay, I'm ready. Let's go," she said, picking up her denim jacket from the back of the couch where her twin was sitting. Kelsey rolled her eyes.
"We can't," she informed Carly, folding her arms. "Your father is still looking for his blueprints." Carly's eyes narrowed and she frowned.
"But we're supposed to be at Uncle Carter and Aunt Dana's in, like, just a few minutes," she said, adjusting the strap of her pale pink sundress and sitting on the back of the sofa.
"I know, but your dad wants to show his new blueprints off to Carter and your grandfather, and apparently he's having trouble finding them," Kelsey told her.
"Mind like a steel trap, that one," Carly muttered. Kelsey gave her a warning look and Carly at least had the decency to look sheepish. "I just mean he's always misplacing things, and seriously, I'm never ready before anyone," she remarked, looking a little proud of herself. Before Kelsey had to reply (thankfully), Ryan came running down the stairs, a cylindrical tube in his hand.
"Got 'em," he announced, as Brian and Carly rose from their respective positions on the couch.
"Good," Kelsey said, taking his arm and steering him toward the front door. "Let's go."
The Mitchell family exited their house, the twins laughing silently at their parents as they went.
"Thanks for the ice cream."
Sky looked over at Syd, who was walking next to him, happily licking her strawberry ice cream cone that he had bought upon seeing an ice cream stand when they entered the park. The two of them were cutting through on their way to the mall from Syd's agent's office.
"You're welcome," Sky said, smiling down at her. He took a bite out of his own vanilla single scoop cone. "So what was that all about?" he asked once they were both finished with their respective cones, referring to the raised voices that he had heard coming from Syd's agent's office. Sky had stayed in the posh waiting area, flipping through several fashion and entertainment magazines uninterestedly.
Syd sighed, a frown marring her pretty face for a moment. "She just doesn't think that it's good for my image for me to be a ranger. She wants me to focus more on my singing career- put out another album." Sky slipped a comforting arm around her shoulders.
"Well, what do you want?" he asked.
"You," Syd replied, seemingly without thinking. Sky stopped abruptly.
She gasped when she realized that she had actually spoken out loud and clapped her hand over her mouth, looking stricken. Sky just stared at her, stunned. Had Syd actually just admitted to having feelings for him? A slow grin spread across his face.
"What are you smiling abou-" The rest of Sydney's sentence was cut off by Sky's lips crashing down on hers. She stiffened in shock at first, but quickly relaxed and began kissing back with fervor, pouring all of her pent-up feelings for him into that one kiss. Her arms wound around his neck and one of her hands played with the hair at the nape of his neck.
As the kiss grew less urgent, Sky's arms loosened their grip on Syd's waist a little. After a few more short, lingering kisses the two pulled apart, staring at each other.
"What was that?" Syd asked looking slightly confused. Sky tucked a blonde curl that had escaped from Syd's ponytail back behind her ear and shrugged, keeping his other arm around her waist. She bit her bottom lip. "So it was just, like, an impulse?"
"Not really," Sky admitted. "I've wanted to do that for a long time." After he spoke the words he realized just how true they really were, and it felt as though a weight had lifted from his shoulders after finally having said them aloud.
A wide grin broke out across Syd's face. "Then why didn't you?" she asked, moving her hands from the back of his neck to his cheeks and kissing him again. Pulling away, she gave him a slight scowl. "We could've been doing this a long time ago."
"Well, to be fair, you didn't exactly say anything either," Sky pointed out, letting go of her and crossing his arms. Syd tilted her head as if conceding a point.
"Well, what do we do now?" Syd asked. She put her hands on her hips and gave him the look that he typically got when he was in trouble. "I mean, I can't just go back to being your friend Syd."
"I don't want you to. I want this- us," Sky admitted. "Don't you?"
"No, Sky, I just kiss every guy I see," she said sarcastically. Then her face softened and she moved back toward him. "Of course I do," she said, hugging him like she had a million times before. Only now, it was different. Sky was acutely aware of just how perfectly she fit in his arms and just how much he liked holding her. He dropped a kiss on her temple, and she sighed happily.
"What were we doing?" she asked a moment later, looking up at him. He laughed.
"Wow. You must really have it bad if I can make you forget about going to the mall," he told her. She playfully slapped his shoulder, sending him a withering glare that would usually have had him cowering. However, it just wasn't as effective when pieces of hair were falling out of her ponytail and a smile was threatening to creep across her face.
"Okay, well, we can talk about this later. For now, let's get going before something happens and we get called back to base," she said, pulling away from him. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a laser blast just narrowly missed her. Syd ducked and rolled, coming back up in a fighting stance. Sky turned to face the direction from which the blast had come. What he saw shocked and confused him.
Arrayed in front of them were no less than twenty Krybots. Sky was puzzled- they hadn't seen any sign of the Krybots since the defeat of Gruum six months earlier. He glanced over at Syd, who nodded briefly, before reaching into the back pocket of her skirt.
"SPD, emergency!"