After the battle, Jason checked on his team.
And then he stopped, remembered the things that were said around the campfire days ago, half a lifetime ago, and he checked on his friends instead.
He started by just showing up at their houses. That didn't go as terribly as it might once have. It turned out J. K. Rowling was right, and it didn't matter if it was a ten-foot mountain troll or a hundred-foot monster forged of magic and molten gold — if you fought something like that together, you couldn't help but be friends.
Trini scowled at him when he showed up, looked like she was about to tell him to take his smile and shove it up his ass, but then Jason heard Trini's mother say, "Who is that? Is that a friend? Are you going to-"
"Let's go." Trini said, shoving past Jason.
"I'll be back later," Trini yelled into the house, and closed the door firmly behind them, not waiting around for a response.
She took shotgun and started flipping through Jason's iPod and judging his music taste, and Jason called it a success.
They grabbed Zack next, without even talking about it. He lived closest to Trini, after all, which would be great except that Jason never quite knew where he was going to be at any given time. Heck, he could be hanging at the construction sites downtown for all they knew, or hiking, or visiting his mother — but Jason followed a gut instinct and drove up towards the quarry where they'd first met.
And it paid off. They found Zack walking along the road before they even get off the bits that were open-access, and he noticed them coming and held his thumb up like a hitchhiker.
"What's shaking?" He flashed them a grin and climbed into the backseat. "I didn't know I'd earned a personal chauffeur, but if it gets me out of the heat, I'm not gonna complain!"
"Shut up and help me find some decent music in here," Trini said.
Zack, sensing easy prey, laughed and decided to do just that.
By the time they arrived at Kimberly's place, Trini and Zack had reached a compromise, and the melodious strains of a 1980s power ballad blasted through the truck.
"Why do you even have this song?" Trini asked. Jason was too glad she was laughing to care that she was laughing at him.
"Heck if I know," Jason said cheerfully. "I've got a lot of random stuff."
"No kidding," Zack said.
"Why are you blasting the Transformers theme outside my house?"
And there was Kimberly, inches from Jason's open window, and Jason definitely played it super cool and didn't flail, not even slightly.
Zack snickered at Jason but said, "Come on, girl, get in the car already!"
"Yeah, okay," Kimberly said, climbing in the back with Zack.
When they finally got to Billy's place, Billy came out grinning so wide it looked like he was going to strain his face.
"So, what's up?" Billy shoved a backpack full of stuff into the truck and climbed in behind it. Space was tight in the backseat, but Zack offered a fist bump and Kimberly offered a smile, and they all leaned into each other while they navigated seatbelts and legroom, and they ended up all wedged into each other, and it worked out.
"Are we going to the spaceship?" Billy asked, from vaguely behind Zack's shoulder. "Because I had some cool ideas about training and-"
"Actually, I was thinking we could just hang out," Jason said.
Jason suddenly felt like he hadn't thought this through. What if they didn't want to? What if they thought it was boring? What if-
"Really?" Kimberly asked.
"Hell yes," Zack said.
Trini just raised her eyebrows, but from the corner of his eye, Jason could see that she was smiling. He let out a long breath.
"Oh," Billy said, like this option hadn't even occurred to him...and it probably hadn't. Jason decided that they should be doing this regularly. "Oh! Okay, sure! Do I...Should I grab anything? What do we-"
Jason shrugged. "I was thinking I could order a pizza and we could watch dumb movies with explosions and shit, if you guys don't mind."
"I love those movies." Zack said. "Bring it on."
"Oh, wow," Billy said, bouncing slightly. "This'll be awesome. Can we throw popcorn at the screen when they do something dumb? Because I've been doing research, and like half the time, they don't even have a plan but it works anyways. And actually, that has been working pretty well for us so far, but I've been thinking that we should-"
"I'm in, but only if the pizza doesn't have pineapple on it," Trini said. Kimberly laughed. Zack gasped, as though this was a personal betrayal.
Jason headed back towards his place as the truck devolved into a spirited discussion about pizza, and fruit, and appropriate combinations thereof, and he felt something inside him settle.
This was his team. These were his friends.
Together, they would make something incredible.
THE END