DISCLAIMER: Nope not mine. I can dream.

SUMMARY: Tommy and Kim have seen each other again and each is convinced that the other wants nothing to do with them. What can the others do to bring them back together?

"Why don't you lay back down and rest, Firebird? I'll go talk to Tommy and see if we can't straighten things out for the two of you."

"He DOES hate me, Rex. If he didn't, he'd have already come back in here." The tears running from Kimberly's big brown eyes tore great gaping holes in Jason's heart. He never could stand to see this particular young woman cry.

"Just rest, Kim. I'll be back later to check on you." He pulled the covers up to her chin and went to kiss her forehead. Before he could, she rolled over, facing away from him.

He walked to the door and stepped into the hallway. As he closed the door tightly behind him, he leaned against the door and sighed.

"She's still crying?" Billy asked walking back down the hall towards his friend.

"Billy, what are we going to do with these two? She honestly believes that he hates her and he just doesn't know the whole story."

"Jason, I don't know the whole story. All I know is the way he's been since that letter arrived. Why don't you tell me what happened and we'll try to figure out a way to get them back together?"

The two of them walked down the hallway towards the Hartford kitchen. Jason knew he was going to need a snack in order to make it through this without breaking down entirely.

"It all started right after I lost the Gold Ranger Powers. Emily and I decided to go down to check on Kimberly. I wanted to know what was the deal with that letter. When we got there, we found out that she had just packed up her things one day and left. I talked to everyone from the coaches and gymnasts down to the people that clean the locker rooms. No one seemed to know what had changed so drastically. It took me almost two and a half months to get to the truth. Her roommate was on vacation when we arrived. She got back about then. She told me what had happened."

"What was it?"

"One of the other girls had told Kim that she needed to find out if Tommy was still interested in her. She suggested writing a break up letter to him. If he still cared, he would either call her or come down in person to find out what was going on. If not, he wouldn't do anything. She sent the letter and got no response out of him. About a week after she sent the letter, she called her mother wanting to leave. Mrs. Hart told her that she couldn't quit just because of a little stress. That was when she packed up and left, telling her roommate that she just couldn't stay because there were too many reminders of what she had lost for a dream that just wasn't worth it anymore. She moved to Orlando."

"Poor Kim. To have her mom turn her back on her like that."

"You're not kidding. She didn't want anyone finding her apparently and told her roommate not to tell. But she told me because she was scared for Kimberly. Emily and I went up there and knocked on her door. When I pushed the door open, a guy had Kim pinned to the floor and was trying to get her clothes off her. I managed to knock him off of her and then chased him off. I forgot all about that damned letter and asked her what was going on. At first, she didn't want to tell me. But eventually I got it out of her that she was two months behind on the rent and he had said that if she would just have sex with him, he'd forget about the back rent. Of course I wasn't about to let that happen. Then, I discovered that she was working two jobs and not even able to make the bills half the time anyway. She had no food in the apartment. I asked her what she was eating. She confessed that she was living off of her meals at McDonald's and the other restaurant she worked at. That gave her ten meals a week. It was no wonder she'd lost weight that she couldn't afford to lose. Billy, I wanted to cry when I found out what she'd been through. She was working 80 to 100 hours a week and still not managing."

Billy fought back the tears in his eyes. "What happened next?"

"Emily and I bought a house. It was a beautiful three-bedroom place on the outskirts of Orlando. Kim moved in with us and we started getting her back in shape. Once we had things settled, we opened a small dojo-gymnastics center. Emily does the books, Kim teaches gymnastics and I teach martial arts with Zach. It's been like that for years. About four years ago, Kim and I were talking about the old days and she broke down crying. She missed Tommy and wished she'd never written that stupid letter. I told her that she could still get in touch with him but she just shook her head and walked away. She seemed to get better after a few days. But her room is like a shrine to the relationship they had. Pictures everywhere of the team and especially the two of them. The color scheme is wild; pink, green and white. She knew the first time that we saw a story on the Dino Thunder Rangers that he was the Black Ranger. Of course she teased Zach about Tommy stealing his color to cover how much she still missed him but we all knew."

"When did Dulcea first start coming to her?"

"About seven years ago. She started having dreams in which Dulcea told her that her powers had never truly left her and she needed to work with them again. She did. She worked those powers so hard that at points I was worried that she was pushing too hard. One day, she broke a wrist while working out and Dulcea stopped coming to her for a while. Apparently, she told Kim to take it easy for a while in order to allow her wrist to heal. But she almost never misses a workout. She tries so hard but her grip on her powers isn't as strong as it could be. Dulcea says that it's because she misses Tommy so much. I worry that sometime she's going to try to use her powers and it's going to hurt her badly."

"So how did the cast come to be?"

"About four weeks ago, Kim was at the store. Emily had dropped her off to do the grocery shopping while she went to a doctor's appointment. We recently found out that Em was six weeks pregnant. Kim's been so happy for us. Well, while she was at the store, she bumped into one of her old teammates and they got to talking. Her friend offered to give Kim a ride home so that they could talk some more and Kim agreed. She called Em to tell her not to worry about picking her up, that she had a ride. They started heading back to the house. What Kim didn't know was that this woman had been thrown off the team for drug use. She wrecked the car, plowing head on into a conversion van. The front end of the car was basically shoved into the front seat, crushing Kim's leg from the knee down. The other leg was tucked up under her and so it ended up badly bruised and her hip was thrown out of place. Her friend was killed on impact."

"Oh no. Poor Kim."

"Yeah. She ended up sitting there next to a dead body for the 45 minutes that it took them to cut her out of the car. Come to find out, there was a family in the van. Parents and four kids. A fire started and Kim tried so hard to get to the van with the only thought being to save them. They were innocent in all of this. She could hear the kids screaming as they burned alive. The parents were yelling for help. Kim kept trying and it took two firefighters to hold her back from crawling up to the van and dying herself. Sometimes, she still wakes up crying that maybe she could have saved at least one of the kids if the firemen had just let her go."

Billy was shaking his head. He couldn't believe that poor Kimberly had been through so much.

"I know, Billy. It's hard to think of what this has done to Kim but it didn't end there. The press got wind of the fact that Kim's friend had been on drugs and that Kim had walked away from the Pan-Globals. They were all over this story. The hospital had to ban all reporters from the whole floor that she was on. I was afraid to leave her alone because she was so depressed afterward. That's why we came here. We had no idea that Tommy would be here and she was determined at first not to see him at all. She was, and still is, positive that he wouldn't want anything to do with her."

"He still loves her. Jase, we have to find some way to convince the two of them to talk to each other and to tell the truth."

"Billy, he needs to know all this before he tries to talk to her. She'd never tell him about the past due rent or the near rape. She'd be too embarrassed." Jason ran a hand through his hair. "I'm going to have to leave her here for a while and go check on Emily. She's so excited to be pregnant. But I'm a little worried about her."

"First time Daddy jitters." Billy sounded so certain. "It's normal for you to feel that way. Emily's first time being pregnant and you want to make sure that everything goes right."

"Of course. I hate leaving Kim alone when she's so vulnerable but I have to check on Emily."

"Jason, you know that I won't let anything happen to Kimberly. And if something does get past me, Tommy will be right there to stop it before it can get to Kimberly."

"He always has been rather die hard when it comes to protecting Kim." Jase chuckled a bit and Billy did too.

Neither one would have been laughing if they could have seen the look on Tommy's face as he stood by the kitchen door listening to the conversation. He'd only been intending to get a snack but he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Kim had been through so much.

'She really didn't want to break up with me. She was just trying to get a reaction out of me. And the one she got wasn't what she really wanted.' His mind kept coming back to that one point. 'She quit because of me. If I had only called her more or written more or something, she never would have written that stupid letter and all of this would never have happened. She's in the shape she's in because of me.'

He turned and walked away, almost running over Mack in the process.

"Sorry, Mack," he mumbled.

"You okay, Tommy?" Mack asked before the older man had a chance to move away.

"Not really. Gotta go, Mack."

The current Red Ranger turned back toward the kitchen only to find two worried faces watching the oldest Ranger walk away. "What's going on?"

"I think Tommy may have overheard everything we just said," Billy sadly replied.