Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There's a little photography studio tucked away in a corner of Corinth, a slice of normalcy with a pink painted welcome sign and flowers set up in the window. It's quaint and bright and pretty, and Summer has to go there to pay the wedding photographers for their time even though the wedding never happened. She enters and it feels like stepping into someone's home uninvited.

"Hello?" she asks, looking around the empty counters and the shelves stacked with glistening photos of Corinth's citizens. "Anyone here?"

The back door opens and a girl emerges, not much older than her, with long brown hair and a tired kind of smile. She's wearing normal clothes, a battered denim jacket and a pink dress. Summer's eyes pick out the spots of dried blood soaked into her jacket, matched with tears and rips in the fabric, without even trying.

"Can I help you?" asks the girl, shuffling some papers around on the counter as Summer approaches her. "Oh, you're the Landsdown heiress, right?"

"Right," Summer says uncomfortably, shifting her feet. The girl has a way of looking at her that makes her feel like her soul is being searched. "That's me, Summer Landsdown. I'm here about my wedding – it never happened, so I wanted to pay off my parents' booking."

The girl studies her closely, her brown eyes bright and wistful. "No need," she says after a moment of prolonged silence, "I don't charge rangers."

Summer pauses. The rangers get a lot of free stuff around Corinth, mostly food and the like, simply for being such easily recognizable heroes, but she's never heard of them getting free photography. "Did my parents tell you that? Because, trust me, I can pay for this – "

"I'm sure you can," says the girl, offering her a small smile as she hoists a box up under her arms. She's a tiny thing, but she lifts it with no problem. "But you don't have to. Thanks for stopping by."

It's a clear invitation to leave. Summer stays.

"Can I ask your name?" she asks because at the very least maybe she can get K to look up her home address to send her flowers or something. Leaving here without paying her makes her anxious, a habit she's not sure whether she picked up from always having money to throw at things or being a better person in the wake of the apocalypse.

The girl doesn't look at her as she drops the box on the floor of the backroom and pushes it inside with her foot. "Emma," she says, the name filling the room. "Emma Goodall."

When she turns around, her smile is back – it's a customer smile; Summer recognizes it – and she points at the batch of business cards sitting on the counter with the cash register. Summer gravitates over to them, picks one up out of sheer curiosity – Emma Goodall, Phoenix Photography is printed there in curly pink letters, surrounded by flowers. The name tugs at something inside her, though.

"Well, I – " She pauses, trailing off because the words have died in her throat. She was going to say something, but she can't remember it when she looks up at Emma. "Thank you for – "

She's not sure what she's thanking her for.

Emma smiles at her from behind the counter. "It's okay. I get a lot of cancelled weddings, really. Not a problem." Her voice is light but her words are tinged with sadness. Summer looks around for clues and finds no pictures of Emma anywhere. She wonders if she had a husband, or a fiancé, or just a boy she loved. Or a girl she loved. People she couldn't stay with, people who died. People who left her. People she left.

The apocalypse doesn't leave much room for weddings. Looking at this girl in her blood-stained denim jacket, Summer thinks she understands it more than most.

"Thank you for your time," she says finally, earnestly. "I really – I appreciate it. And I'm sorry if my parents were – " My parents, is how she wants to finish that sentence, but it seems rude, and Emma cuts her off with a laugh. It's only half genuine a laugh, but the sound is sweet and feels like coming home.

"I gotta say," Emma says, "I don't understand how they raised you. No offense, but those aren't the people I'd expect to have given birth to a Yellow."

The way she says yellow sounds like she's saying strong, or kind, or brave instead. The words press into Summer's heart, lingering there like an old friend, like a toy she's stopped playing with but never stopped loving. Emma sends her a smile and she gets the feeling yellow means more to her than just the color of a stranger's spandex.

"I used to be a lot like them," she admits. "But then Venjix attacked and – I guess I grew up. Most of us did. Most of us aren't like that anymore."

Even her parents aren't like that anymore. Emma looks at her thoughtfully. "War tends to unravel people," she says, her voice low like she's telling Summer a secret, even though it feels like common knowledge. "Shows us what we're made of, deep inside. You're strong, Summer. You wouldn't be Yellow if you weren't."

Summer runs the words over in her head as Emma watches her, feeling like she's being tested, like Emma's waiting for her to find an answer to a puzzle she doesn't remember trying to solve.

"Thank you," she finally says, slowly, unsure of what thank you really means in this context. "Can I ask… why do you seem familiar?" she blurts out, curiosity edging away her normal societal graces. "I'm sorry, I just – I feel like I've heard your name before."

Emma tilts her head, considering. Summer gets the feeling she already knows the answer, though. "Just one of those faces, I guess," she says, which means she knows the answer and isn't going to tell her. "I'm Corinth's only professional photographer, after all."

It's true, only because there aren't really enough people in Corinth for most industries to be competitive. Still, Summer can't shake the feeling there's something else.

"What made you want to open a photography studio?" she asks in the hopes of getting to something real, of unwrapping the layers around this girl with the bright eyes and the blood on her jacket.

Emma bites her lip. It's a gesture reminiscent of a high school girl, of another world where things like tests and crushes and prom night mattered. It makes Summer's heart ache.

"Capturing memories is important, don't you think?" Emma says, her fingers curling around the air in front of her chest, like maybe she's used to having something there to hold onto. "If we don't remember the people we loved, the lives we lived – they might all be gone tomorrow."

Her smile is bitter; Summer knows what she's thinking about. Venjix could attack tomorrow and the rangers could fail and the world would end – again. Nobody left to remember things like weddings or photographers or even phoenixes. She feels suddenly small, like she's being swallowed up by this room of shiny photographs and nothing real to touch except a girl in a pink dress and a denim jacket.

She feels like it's suddenly so terribly possible for them to fail in protecting Corinth, in fighting Venjix, in saving the world. Standing in this little photography studio, looking at this girl with her warm brown eyes and secrets, failure seems inevitable. It feels like it's tattooed onto Emma's skin, and onto her own by transference.

Summer wants to stay, ask more questions, clear the air and her mind, but she only has one left.

"How did you get here?" she asks, her voice softening as she watches Emma's face close up. Everyone has painful memories of coming to Corinth, she knows from experience. Her own has left her with scars and a heartache she doesn't think will ever go away.

"The same way we all did," Emma says, her smile faded and her eyes lost. "Took a bus."

The words ring in the silence. Summer can't find any more questions to probe her with or any way to insist on paying, so she bids her goodbye and heads back to the garage, one of Emma's business cards curled up in her hand. When she gets home, Scott is the only one around, everyone else out training or inventing or whatever it is Ziggy does. Probably annoying K.

"Long day?" he asks upon seeing the expression on her face as she enters – she can pretty much guess what she looks like, lost in thought and filled with an unbearable, inexplicable sadness. "What happened, Summer? I thought you were just going to the photography studio."

Summer slides him the business card. "Do you know Emma Goodall?" she asks, watching him puzzle over the card for a moment. "She refused to let me pay because she didn't charge rangers."

"That's not unusual," Scott points out, but when he looks up at her, his face is clouded. "I do know her. Remember K's briefing on past ranger teams in Corinth?"

Summer's eyes widen and she says at the same time Scott does in dawning realization, "Megaforce."

Megaforce, who fought the Armada. Megaforce, who saved the world from the brink of alien invasion only to watch it fall to a virus invasion not five years later. Megaforce, with ranger keys left collecting dust in an old trunk in the garage that she and Scott find locked away in a cupboard.

Megaforce, who died trying to save the world. All except two – Silver, who had been rebuilding his home planet and heard of the invasion too late to save his friends, and Pink, left running a photography studio in Corinth.

Summer looks up their team on the computer and is struck by how much their Yellow looks like her – blonde hair, bright smile, boundless energy. She wonders what Emma thought when she looked at her, wonders how she got to Corinth alive when all her friends died, wonders why she still wears that same denim jacket.

Wonders what Emma thinks, watching a new team try to save the world she couldn't. Wonders why she gave them their ranger keys. Wonders what she thinks of them having no Pink.

She doesn't go back to the photography studio, but she keeps the business card. Just in case.