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.

Chapter Text

ROSE ORTIZ, SCIENCE & TECH DEPT.

Flynn blinks as the plaque on the office door comes into sharp view, gold and embossed over mahogany wood. Tentatively, he knocks on it, only to find it swinging open without much pressure, revealing the inside of the office to him – a quiet, tidy little room with white walls and a desk and a whole lab set up in one corner.

"Rose Ortiz?" he asks as the woman sitting behind the desk looks up at him. She's pretty, with warm brown skin and short dark hair tied back in a ponytail, her eyes holding that world-weary look he's come to expect in most of Corinth's citizens. "I'm – I'm Flynn McAllistair. Ranger Series Operator Blue, I'm here to – "

"Yes, to work with me on Operation City Storm, I've been briefed," Rose says, offering him a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "Please, come in, have a seat. I'm just finishing up this project. You have the files?"

Flynn waves the manila folder in his hands at her, closing the door behind him as he steps fully into her office. The scent of sweet lemonade wafts across his senses, sweet and welcoming, like coming home. It brings to mind summer days, back in a world where they had real weather, when they didn't have to manufacture their storms. He finds himself filled with a sudden burst of nostalgia for a life he never even had.

"How are you?" she asks, probably more for the appearance of polite conversation and small talk than because she's really interested. She takes the file from him as he sits down in a chair opposite her desk, not looking at it until she finishes whatever she's been typing away furiously on her computer.

"Uh, good," he says in a somewhat belated reply, a little caught off-guard by the question. Most people doesn't stop to ask the rangers how they were, just giving them missions, asking favors, saying thanks for saving the city, that sort of stuff. "I mean – you know. Fighting monsters, all that fun stuff."

Rose's lips quirk in a half smile as she opens up the manila folder for the instructions for their project. "I do know," she agrees, and he has to pause to think on that. "This should be fairly easy. They sent you to explain the mechanic schematics, right? Is this it?"

She pulls out a sheet of paper filled with said schematics, all drawn in his barely-legible scrawl. Flynn smiles apologetically at her, but she only laughs and shakes her head. The sound is bittersweet when it leaves her.

"I used to have a friend who was – way worse than this, don't worry," she tells him with a wistful look on her face. "He was Blue, too, actually."

"Blue?" Flynn repeats, befuddled, and then it clicks. "Oh – oh. You're – you're a power ranger!"

"Didn't they mention that when they sent you here?" Rose asks dryly, ignoring his fascinated in gaze in favor of perusing his schematics. "I figured Truman or K would've pointed that out."

"No," he says slowly, still staring at her thoughtfully. "No, they didn't. I mean – K told us about other teams, well, she told me and Scott and Summer, because we were there first. But we didn't really go into detail, just a rundown of who survived and who was living in the city. You're – you're a Pink, right?"

"That's me," she confirms with a tone that verges on the fake side of cheerful. "Rose Ortiz, Overdrive Pink. Save the autographs for the end, thank you."

This gets a chuckle out of him. He leans forward, placing his elbows on the table as he watches her work in fascination. "So – you were an Overdrive ranger? And now you're…working for the government in Corinth?"

"There aren't exactly a lot of jobs in this city, you know?" she retorts, raising an eyebrow at him. "I had the expertise, and the ties to the Morphin' Grid. Not to mention a working morpher. How do you think K got access to her biofield?"

Flynn blinks. "Wait, so – you've been helping? With our operation? How come we've never met you before?"

Her eyes fade out for a moment, like she's somewhere else. Flynn feels a shiver run down his back; the office suddenly seems to be haunted by ghosts.

"I keep busy," she explains shortly, scribbling down notes onto the schematics. "You're all busy, too, I'm sure. Saving the world, fighting Venjix, all that fun stuff." His words in her mouth are somehow bitter, stinging with loss and grief. Rose doesn't look mad at him, but she's not smiling, either. She looks lost, more than anything, though she shakes her head and focuses back in on the papers in front of her quickly.

"Right," he says, exhaling slowly. "Right, of course. Sorry, I just – it's really cool to meet other rangers, you know? Not a lot of them made it to Corinth – "

He winces immediately, knowing the sentiment came out wrong. Rose tenses, but she doesn't say anything, instead sliding the paper around and back to him, as if they're just having a casual conversation about their work.

"I think the lights could do with some rearrangement in sector three, what do you think? They could work as a blinding mechanism for Grinders in case they attack there, since that sector can't have lightning strikes." Her tone of voice is brisk and earnest, and Flynn finds himself nodding dumbly as she marks the changes on his schematics.

"Rose," he says, watching as she continues to make notes. "I mean – Miss Ortiz?"

"Rose is fine," she says dryly.

"Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer it if it's too personal, I just – I'm curious."

She meets his gaze for a moment, a moment long enough for him to feel the pull of her sadness, the weight of her grief, the loss of her friends and family – she looks like a survivor, with heart encased in steel and her gaze guarded. He's always been better with machines than people, but he kind of gets the feeling that so has she, that maybe they aren't so different.

After all, they're both survivors. Both rangers. Both fighters.

"Yes," Rose says, bringing him back to reality. "Let me guess, is it about Overdrive?"

Her walls are back, that dry sense of humor he isn't quite used to – sure, half his team has that same humor, but none of them are quite like her. None of them are Pink.

"How did you get to Corinth?" he asks instead of the million other questions he could have asked – where's the rest of your team and is it true your Red was an android and can you still morph? But he's found, over the years, that the journey has always been the hardest part of surviving.

She doesn't answer for a moment, staring down at his schematics like they hold the meaning of the universe. The office suddenly feels so very lonely, so very empty. It feels like there should be so many more people here – her team, the people she loves, everyone alive and smiling. Flynn gets that feeling sometimes, when he walks into rooms that are haunted by the people who survived and the people who didn't. It's ten times magnified in here.

"I was in London," she says finally, her voice quiet and the words choked. "I was teaching. When Venjix attacked, I flew out to find my team, my mentor – Andrew Hartford, his house was nearby, in San Angeles. We were together, and we were fighting, and then – "

"I know," he says softly, reaching out on instinct to touch her hand in comfort. Her hand is absurdly small and cold in his, but he holds on, anyway. "It's okay, you don't have to talk about it, I'm sorry."

Rose shakes her head, a quiet, bitter laugh escaping her. "No, you – it's okay. It's okay, you're a ranger. You'll understand. I'm the smart one, you know? I was supposed to come up with a plan, I was supposed to get us all to Corinth. And I couldn't. I couldn't."

She inhales instead of breaking apart, like he'd half-expected her to do, and he can see the breath seep into her slowly, calming her down almost automatically. He wonders if she's practiced this, bringing herself back from the edge of a breakdown with professional ease. Her eyes are still haunted, but when she speaks again, her voice doesn't crack.

"Andrew's still around," she tells him, like she's listing facts. "If you want to see him, I guess. He's pretty smart, he made all our tech and stuff. Other than that, though, there's just me."

She manages a smile at him, quick and lonely and bitter, and he feels his heart break for the rest of her team – there were six, he remembers, and now there's only one.

"I'm sorry," he says, even though it doesn't feel like enough. "You know if you ever wanna…stop by the garage or something? We'd love to have you. Summer would sure love another girl to talk to, I bet."

Rose smiles again, this time hovering a bit more genuinely on her face. "Maybe I will," she says with the kind of heartache in her voice that makes him suspect she might not, but at least the offer is out there. "She reminds me a lot of Ronny, out there on the battlefield."

Flynn smiles back. "Well, Summer's fantastic, so Ronny must have been something special."

Rose laughs and brushes a hand under her eyes, though he hadn't seen any tears. "She really was. They all were."

She bends her head back over the papers, and he doesn't say much else the rest of the day, just watching her work. Sometimes, she'll get excited and look up to say something and her smile falters a bit, like she's forgotten it's him who's sitting there and not her Blue or Yellow or anyone else, but he doesn't mind. The idea of losing his entire team, of never seeing Scott or Summer again, of having to watch Dillon or Ziggy or K die, is so painful, he doesn't think he could handle it at all.

Rose Ortiz is a lot stronger than he thinks she gives herself credit for. All the survivors are, but he thinks the past rangers must have it worse. They all saved the world once, and then they watched it fall. Looking at her, it's like letting the weight of Atlas settle on his shoulders – he can't fail. They can't fail. They have to save the world from Venjix, or else everything – Rose, the Overdrive team, and every other sacrifice ever made in the name of fighting evil – will have been for nothing.

She smiles at him when he leaves, and it makes him think that maybe, one day, they'll be okay. Maybe there's a reason she ended up here in Corinth, just like there's a reason he did, or Scott, or Summer, or anyone else on their team. Maybe the reason is that they all need reminding that they can survive – they will survive.

He comes back to visit her again, when he can sneak off between ranger duties and working in the garage. She smiles more when she's around him, and though she doesn't come to the garage, he thinks it helps her, anyway, just being around another ranger, someone who understands.

Chapter Text

He’s running – he’s running and running and he has no idea where he’s running to but he knows it has to be any place but here or else oh god he’s going to die – and he needs to keep running or else – or else –

There’s a motorcycle, and a girl, and the next thing he knows is there’s dust in his mouth and his eyes from the ground landing on his face. Or maybe vice versa. It’s hard to tell.

Coughing and spluttering, Ziggy scrambles to his feet, ready to run off and maybe throw a quick apology over his shoulder, but the girl grabs his arm before he can do so. Oh, no, his mind jumps, what if she’s with them?

“Kid, what are you doing?” she demands, in a voice that sounds equal parts annoyed and amused. “You running from someone?”

Ziggy coughs out more dust and nods, trying to shake his arm loose. She has a surprisingly strong grip for such a tiny girl – he looks at her closely and realizes she has more muscles than he thought, and her face is marked with scars. She’s not just some girl wandering lost in the desert, he realizes – she’s a fighter.

“Sorry, uh, ma’am, but I’ve really gotta run – ” Ziggy manages to get out, glancing over his shoulders. There are voices, and footsteps getting closer, and oh god he is really gonna die this time there’s no way out –

“Are those the guys you’re running from?” she asks, jerking her head towards the shadows coming down the alleyway just behind the two of them. Her hair, cropped close and dip-dyed pink, flops against her forehead, revealing a scar across one eye. Ziggy takes half a second to marvel at how cool it looks, and another half a second to mentally wince in sympathy, because that could not have been a pretty fight, and then nods.

“Are they bad guys?” she asks, finally letting go of his arm. He stumbles a little but catches himself, surprised into stillness when he notices her rolling up her sleeves.

“Yeah, yeah, uh, really bad,” he says wildly. “Like, mob bad. Super bad. I did something and now – well, now they wanna kill me. And I really gotta run – ”

She flashes him a grin, quick and wicked and sharp. “Nah, let me handle this. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good fight.”

Ziggy stares at her in horror. Strong she may be, but she is one girl up against at least five top mob hitmen and she has no weapons that he can see and he’s opening his mouth to stop her but she pats his shoulder and casually strolls past him as if he’s barely a blip on her radar.

And then the hitmen descend.

“Look out!” he shouts, or is going to shout, or wants to shout – he can’t tell if the words made it out of his mouth or not, because in the next moment, he is completely and utterly mesmerized by the girl and her fighting.

And she is fighting – and fighting well. She dodges all their punches, she kicks them square in the gut and brings them to their knees, she dances and weaves around their arms and legs like a fucking ballerina, and then, as Ziggy watches in amazement, she pulls an ancient-looking cell phone out of her back pocket and points it at the confused hitmen.

“What are you – ” he starts to ask, but she mutters something under her breath – is it Latin? – and in a burst of pink energy, the men all seem to simultaneously deflate from lack of air, falling uselessly on top of each other in a pile on the ground, completely unconscious.

“Cool trick, huh?” says the girl, sidestepping the heap of hitmen on the ground with nonchalant ease and rejoining him where her motorcycle is parked. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“I – uh – thank you – ?” Ziggy says in utter bemusement. “How did you – what was that – holy shit – what’s your name?”

In hindsight, that wasn’t the most important question, but with the world having ended, Ziggy finds he doesn’t care. The girl grins at him and pops on her motorcycle helmet.

“The name’s Vida,” she tells him. “What’s yours?”

“Uh,” he says, because it genuinely takes him a moment to remember, “Ziggy! I’m Ziggy. Uh, nice to meet you…Vida? How did you just – what just happened?”

Vida shrugs. “Saw a problem. Took care of it. Not a big deal. Do you need a ride? Where are you headed?”

Ziggy takes a deep breath, his head spinning from questions, and finally formulates the most important one. “Why are you helping me?”

Her face grows shadowed. “It’s my job, kid. Helping people. It’s what I do.”

Ziggy stares at her in confusion. “So, you’re like…a guardian angel? Are you police? Or military? Do you work for Corinth?”

Vida snorts. “Never been to Corinth. Don’t plan on it. There’s a world outside that domed utopia, and I’m going to save it. I can drop you off at the city gates, though, if you want.”

Ziggy gapes. “But – but – why? You – this is a war zone out here! Why would you willingly stay?”

She hops onto her motorcycle and revs the engine. “Some things are more important than safety. I lost almost everyone I cared about when the damn robots attacked. They killed my sister. I’m gonna make them pay. Ride or no ride, make a decision, kid.”

“Uh, yes, please,” he says, figuring it couldn’t hurt to stay with a girl who can clearly beat the crap out of anything in her way. A bit hesitantly, he climbs up behind her on the motorcycle. “So, where do you live out here?”

Vida laughs, the sound loud and dangerous in the whistling emptiness of the desert around them. “Nowhere. Everywhere. I’ve got a few shelters around the place, but usually, I wander around, looking for fights.” She kick-starts the motorcycle, making Ziggy jump as they start moving at what feels like a hundred miles per hour.

“But why? Don’t you have – what was that back there, magic? Are you from that old city, Briarwood or whatever?” he asks, surprised that he can even remember the name. “With all those magical forest creatures?”

She doesn’t reply for a few seconds too long. “You could say that,” she finally says, her voice low and dark. “Corinth, right? It’ll take us an hour or two, but we should get there before dark. You know how to get in?”

“Uh, yeah, hopefully,” he mutters, wincing as a piece of shrapnel whizzes by on the wind and scratches his cheek. “Could you go a little slower?”

She looks at him over her shoulder with a grin. “Don’t want the robots to catch us, kid. Trust me, you’re safe. As long as you’re with me, you’re safe.”

Ziggy frowns at the back of her head as she turns back to the road. “But why did you help me? How did you know I wasn’t a bad guy?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “I’ve got a radar for those kinds of things. You remind me of an old friend of mine.  People like us, we gotta stick together.”

“People like who?” he asks, frankly unable to believe that he could have anything in common with an ass-kicking, magic-using, pink-haired, motorcycle-riding girl like her.

Vida lets out a deep breath. “You’ll find out one day,” she says, and falls so utterly silent that he forgets to fill the quiet for the rest of the ride. His questions and thoughts remain jumbled, but there’s something freeing about the way Vida drives, fast and reckless and wild as the wind, getting them through abandoned city after abandoned city until all he can see is desert and dust and history.

When they land just outside the Venjix blockade around Corinth, she ducks them into an underpass of trees and parks the motorcycle, watching him as he gets off. Her gaze is sharp but not unkind, and it doesn’t unsettle him like maybe it ought to.

“Thank you,” he manages to get out, combing a hand through his curls – every part of him is a disaster from the running and the riding but he’s still in one piece, which is better than he expected this morning. “Are you sure you don’t wanna come to Corinth?”

Vida looks a little wistful, but shakes her head. “I’ve got things to do out here, kid. But you have fun. Don’t die out there, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, then frowns, debating over one last question. “Are there – are there more of you? Like, are you alone out there or – ”

She grins at him. “You catch on fast,” she says, pulling something out of her pocket and tossing it to him. “Hold onto that. If you ever meet one of my team out here, show it to them. They’ll help you out.”

Ziggy stares down at his hand. It’s a dragon scale, bright red and glimmering under the setting sun. “What – how did you – is that a real – ”

“The realest there ever was,” she assures him. “Good luck, kid. Maybe I’ll see you again someday.”

“Yeah,” he says wonderingly, turning the dragon scale over in his palm. “Maybe.”

Vida winks at him, puts her helmet back on, and drives away. Ziggy stares after her, confused and full of adrenaline, surprise, and a healthy amount of fear. He still doesn’t know who she is or what she does or what she means by her team but it feels like a secret, a good kind this time. A kind that matters.

Chapter Text

we could be immortals (but not for long)

some far away
some search for gold
some dragon to slay
heaven, we hope is
just up the road

― coldplay, atlas

iv. cassie

He’s out looking for Summer and Dillon in the wastelands the day he stumbles across a spaceship buried halfway in the sand.

His first thought is VENJIX, which he discards when he notices a woman sitting in front of the ship, watching two little boys playing together in front of her. She’s dark-haired and dressed in pink, old enough to be the little boys’ mother, though she doesn’t look related to either of them.

When she notices him approaching, she smiles, but doesn’t stand. Scott isn’t quite sure what to do as the blond boy nearly runs into him while chasing the other one.

“Um, excuse me?” he asks slowly, stepping closer to her. “Can I ask what you’re doing out here, ma’am?”

She hums under her breath. “Scott Truman,” she says in response, and he blinks. Her voice is harder, brighter than he’d expected. “RPM red ranger? I’m surprised you don’t recognize me.”

He stares at her. “Should I?”

She tilts her head up, allowing him a better view of her features. “My name is Cassie Chan.”

Scott has to work very hard not to let his jaw drop. “You’re – the Cassie Chan? Pink ranger Cassie Chan?” Saved the world from an invasion, fought the Alliance of Evil, lost all your friends to Venjix Cassie Chan? He doesn’t say it, but he knows she knows what he’s thinking.

“The one and only,” she says, gesturing for him to sit down next to her. “Well, not the only pink ranger. Though, I suppose you wouldn’t know.” Her sidelong gaze is critical, but amused, like she’s making fun of him for not having a pink ranger on his team. “What brings you out here?”

“Oh, um.” Scott has to think about it to remember what his original mission was. “I was out looking for my friends. They’re out here somewhere, working on some restoration projects.”

“Mm,” Cassie says, turning her attention back to the boys. “Black and yellow, plus black’s sister? I’ve seen them around.”

“Wait – really?” Scott blinks at her. “You mean, you… you live out here?”

Cassie chuckles. “No, I live in Corinth. But I have friends out here. And I’m babysitting, and the boys like fresh air,” she adds, nodding to where the boys have started a sparring match. Given that both of them are around ten years old, it’s less sparring and more just trying to hit each other, but they’re pretty good for kids.

“But – ” Scott tries to work through this information before he speaks. “The dome is still up,” he points out, even though he knows it’s easier to get permission to leave Corinth these days, ever since Venjix was defeated. The dome was only still up as a precaution, and there were plans to lower it in the next year or so, barring any accidents. But still.

“I have pretty high clearance with the government,” Cassie says, sounding amused that he’d have to ask. “They weren’t exactly going to deny a former power ranger, you know?”

“I do know,” he admits. “But there are parks in Corinth. And – why do you have friends out here?”

Her face darkens. “Not every ranger made it to Corinth,” she tells him, her voice light but her words heavy. “Some didn’t want to. But we kept in touch.”

“Um.” He frowns, trying to puzzle that one out. “How?”

A grin brightens her face, if briefly. “We have our ways,” she says airily. “Once a ranger, always a ranger, and all that crap. You’d be surprised how many ways there are out of Corinth that even the government doesn’t know about. Even the rangers don’t know about.”

Scott makes a face. “How many of you are there, then? And how come we’ve never met most of you?” He amends any of you into most of you before the thought leaves his mouth, remembering in time the photography studio where he went without Summer once just to see what left her so unsettled, and the scientist on the third floor of the government building where Flynn spent half his free time when he could.

There are others, too, he knows, working in the government, helping with the ranger program, or just around the city. He’s run into a few, though never talked for very long – a dry-witted man in green who helped Dr. K with biofield mechanics once; a café near the outskirts where the waiters had sad smiles; a lifeguard at the city pool; a blue ranger barely older than him who never looks him in the eye when they pass in the hallways.

But none have ever stopped to say hi, and honestly, he finds it easy to forget that they’re there at all. Corinth has its power rangers. They don’t need any more.

“Because most of us hate you,” Cassie tells him frankly, and he’s startled out of his musings with a jolt. She half-smiles when she notices his stare, but not in a way that makes it seem like she was joking. She clearly isn’t.

“Are you going to make me ask a question for everything you say?” he asks when she doesn’t elaborate, a twist of annoyance unfurling in his stomach. He tries to stamp it down – Summer would definitely hit him if he did anything to piss off a former ranger, especially a Space ranger, Earth’s first public heroes, but it’s there anyway.

One of the boys interrupts them, running up to Cassie and declaring proudly, “I win!”

Cassie grins, genuinely this time, smoothing down his blond hair. “Good job, Sky,” she says fondly. “Bridge, are you okay?”

The other boy, Bridge, comes up to them with a bright smile on his face. “That was so fun!” he enthuses. “Can we go again?”

Cassie sends them off with a smile before she turns back to Scott and her expression changes. “It’s not because of you,” she says, her smile turning wistful. “It’s just the fact that…”

“We survived?” he guesses, because he figures most people feel that way. Most people have lost loved ones. Most people carry around the anger and guilt with them, even now that the war is won and the world is starting to turn again. She’d be the first one to hate the rangers for it, but he supposes former rangers get a pass.

“You survived as rangers,” she corrects. “And we didn’t. You survived with your team and we didn’t. Not one of our teams escaped whole. Well, except – ”

“Except who?” he presses when she trails off, a frown on her face, like she’s lost track of her thoughts.

“Except the Galaxy rangers,” she finishes, shaking her head. “Other planets got Earth’s distress call too late. But that’s not the point. The point is you’re wearing our colors, our powers, our mission. And you won, and we didn’t.”

She doesn’t sound angry or even upset, just tired and sad. Scott’s heart aches, but before he can figure out the right thing to say, the blond boy – Sky – comes up again, this time looking at him more closely.

“Aren’t you the red ranger?” he asks curiously, and Scott takes notice of his bright red shirt for the first time.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he says, pulling up the smile he uses for kids and other citizens who are excited to meet him. “My name’s Scott, what’s yours?”

“Sky,” he says very solemnly, offering his hand to shake. “My dad was a red ranger, too.”

Scott raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t question the past tense, instead shaking Sky’s hand with a smile. “It’s nice to meet you. Do you live in Corinth?”

“No, I live with SPD,”  Sky says as Bridge wanders over, having lost interest in a bug he’d been chasing. Scott’s eyebrows get even higher. “I’m gonna be a red ranger too, one day.”

“Are you?” Scott asks, struggling to keep his smile in place. He’d met kids who wanted to be power rangers before, but this boy, with his wide eyes, too understanding of the world already, who speaks about his father in past tense – it’s unsettling. “That’s great. Give me a call when you do, yeah?”

Sky’s face brightens. “Yeah! Oh, this is Bridge, by the way,” he adds, as Bridge gives a cheery wave. Scott realizes that he’s wearing gloves, which strikes him as odd.

“Hi!” Bridge says, then turns to Sky very seriously and whispers, “I thought we were gonna spar,” very loudly.

Cassie looks down to hide a smile as Sky rolls his eyes and lets Bridge drag him away again. Scott turns to her, practically overflowing with questions. “I know,” she says, holding up a hand before he can ask. “What’s SPD?”

“That would be a start, yeah,” he agrees. “And who was Sky’s father?”

“SPD stands for Space Patrol Delta,” Cassie explains, leaning back on her hands to stare up at the sun. “And the rest, I’m afraid, is classified. Need to know basis.”

Scott gapes at her. “I’m – I’m the red ranger, how do I not need to know?”

She smiles at the sky. “You’ll find out one day. Probably when the dome drops and your father stops keeping so many secrets. I can tell you it’s an organization dedicated to stopping evil.”

“That’s nothing,” he grumbles. “We’re an organization dedicated to stopping evil.”

“To stopping Venjix,” she corrects. “Not all evil. SPD spans galaxies. Hence the name.”

Something she said earlier in the conversation clicks in his head. “Does that mean – the galaxy rangers – ?”

Cassie brings her head back down to look at him with a thoughtful smile. “You’re smart,” she says. “You’ll figure it out.”

Scott frowns, watching Sky flip Bridge onto his back. “Can you tell me who his father was?”

She shakes her head. “Nobody you know. He worked for SPD, one of the first volunteers to help with the mission. He was a good fighter, so we gave him a test suit and a team. They didn’t operate near Corinth.”

“Wait, you mean there are other places – other cities that need rangers?”

Cassie smiles. “The world is big, Scott,” she says softly, staring at him like she’s thinking of somebody else. “Corinth may be the last bastion of humanity, but there’s more out there than just us. Aliens came down to help, and with good aliens come bad aliens. That’s why the Earth chapter of SPD was started, to help us recover from the Venjix attacks and to keep the criminals from other planets in check.”

Scott blinks, processing the information. “So, you’re saying…there’s another battle going on out there somewhere? With aliens?”

“With aliens, against aliens,” she says, nodding. “There’s always another battle. The only question is, who’s going to fight it.”

He catches her gaze and holds it. “Then why do you hate us?” he asks, watching her face go carefully blank again. “We stepped up for this fight. Other people stepped up for another fight. Why do you hate us?”

A sad smile quirks one corner of her lips. “Maybe you remind us of people we lost,” she suggests. “People who died fighting a war that you won.”

“That’s not fair,” he says automatically, then his voice softens. “What happened to your team?”

“What happened to anyone’s team?” Cassie asks with a bitter laugh. “They died. They died fighting. And I survived.”

He doesn’t ask her if she hates herself, too. “Did anyone live?”

“Yeah,” she says slowly, her face faraway. “A few. My silver. Two of the rangers who gave my team our powers survived, too, but not many more. They’re around, you’ll find them, if you’re looking. My best friend – she died. TJ and Carlos and Andros. All dead.”

The names are familiar, ringing old bells, like he read them in a book once, or a newspaper article. He doesn’t say I’m sorry because he figures she knows already. “How did you end up here?”

“Crashed the megaship,” she says with a wry smile, nodding at the spaceship behind her. “Got lucky, I guess. Maybe I was meant to. Somebody has to look after these kids.”

Scott’s gaze travels back to the boys, now arguing over the species of a bug they’d found in the sand. “Ranger legacies?” he guesses.

Cassie smiles at them. “Yeah. Red and blue. That’s why we’re all fighting, right? To give them a better world?”

He eyes her carefully. “Are you fighting?”

“Every day,” she says, exhaling. Her breath clouds the air in front of them briefly. The sun is dipping below the horizon. “You remind of him, you know. My red. My first red. I’ve seen you in battle, on the news, everywhere. He had the same red confidence, the same charisma.”

He tucks away the names – TJ, Carlos, Andros – to look up later. “I’m honored,” he says honestly. “I’ve read about you guys. You fought an invasion, too. Astronema’s, right?”

Cassie sighs, tilting her head up again and closing her eyes. “That’s the one. Seems like forever ago. Scott – you don’t have a pink, right?”

“No,” he admits, feeling vaguely guilty for a reason he doesn’t know. It’s not like he chose their color scheme.

“Got a girl?” she asks, opening one eye to look at him. “Summer?”

He thinks, for the first time in an hour, about Summer and Dillon and Tenaya out in the wastelands. “Yeah. She’s yellow.”

“Be good to her,” Cassie mutters, then stands, brushing her jeans off. She glances down at him and half-smiles again. “Red and yellow. I’ve seen that story before.”

“It’s – it’s not a story,” Scott protests. “She likes our black, I think.”

Cassie considers this. “Tall, dark, and broody? That cyborg girl turned out to be his sister?”

“Yeah, long-lost sister,” Scott explains, standing as well. “She was brainwashed and turned to evil. Took us a while to figure that mess out.”

Cassie stares at him for an uncomfortably long moment. “Huh. Same story, different color. How about that?”

Scott resists the temptation to ask. “Too bad I don’t have a pink,” he offers, a little feebly, but it makes her laugh.

“You would do well with a pink,” she agrees, raising a hand to wave Sky and Bridge over. “Who knows, maybe his sister will turn out to be your pink. Or just a pink. That’s happened before.”

Scott raises an eyebrow, but she doesn’t explain it as the boys run over to her, so he doesn’t ask. “Will I see you around Corinth?”

Cassie hums, the same half a tune she had when he’d first seen her. The chords are vaguely familiar now, but he still can’t place them. “Maybe. You should come outside more, you know. There’s a whole new world out here.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, finally smiling as the boys wave at him before they all turn to leave. “Bye,” he calls to their retreating backs. The sun sets over Corinth in shades of reds and pinks. It’s a beautiful sight, from the outside. Like the world is starting to turn again.

Chapter Text

we could be immortals (but not for long)

she's got lions in her heart
a fire in her soul
he's got a beast in his belly
that's so hard to control
'cause they've taken too much hit
taking blow by blow
now light a match, stand back
and watch them explode

― the script, superheroes

v. kat

He has no interest in babysitting, but Summer drops a tiny, blonde child in his lap and asks him to watch her for a bit while she goes to deal with a Ziggy-and-K problem at their school, and it's really hard to say no to Summer, so here he is.

Sydney is actually not that tiny; she's about ten, which means she can entertain herself. Dillon keeps her in his sights as she runs around the park, but otherwise tries to do as little babysitting as possible. She seems like a smart girl; he's fairly confident she won't die if left alone.

"Dillon!" she screeches about half an hour past the time Summer was supposed to come back to relieve him, hurtling herself at his legs. "Look who I found!"

He looks up to see a tall, blonde woman standing there, smiling fondly down at Syd. She's wearing a pink coat that seems unnaturally bright in the otherwise muted colors of the fake-autumn day around them, and when she kneels down to Syd's height, he has to wonder if they're related – same blonde hair, blue eyes, shining smile.

"Is this your new friend, Syd?" she asks, and her accent takes him by surprise – he's used to Flynn's Scottish, but he's never heard anyone Australian around Corinth before.

"This is Summer's boyfriend," Syd says in a sing-song voice, shaking his knee enthusiastically to punctuate her point. Dillon grimaces. "His name is Dillon and he's the black ranger. Dillon, this is Kat. She's a – "

"Why don't you go play with your friend on the monkey bars?" Kat interrupts quickly, making him frown. "And I'll get acquainted with Mr. Black Ranger over here?"

Syd blinks, but brightens up. "Okay!" she says. "But I wanna go with you for pizza later."

Kat laughs and sends her off with a wave. He stares after Syd for a moment, making note of where the monkey bars are, before turning back to Kat, eyes narrowed.

"Who are you?" he asks, probably more bluntly than needed. Kat seems amused more than anything else though, rising to her feet and taking a seat next to him on the bench. "How do you know Summer and Syd?"

She adjusts herself so her elbow is on the back of the bench and she can face him properly. "Family friends," she replies lightly. "Syd is the daughter of two of my friends. And her adopted parents and Summer's run in the same sort of circles."

"Oh, you mean they're super rich?" he asks sarcastically. He rewinds her statement and notices that she separated Syd's parents from her adopted parents. "Are you friends with her adopted parents?"

"We get along," Kat says. "But no, I know her through her birth parents. She's quite keen on you, did you know?"

Dillon stares at her. "What does that mean?" he asks warily.

Kat laughs. "Oh, come on. Public identity black ranger, and you still don't know how popular you are – especially amongst teenage girls? And pre-teen girls, for that matter."

He frowns at her, casting aside the rest of her, quite frankly, ridiculous statement and zeroing in on the part that stands out. "Public identity? Are there secret identity rangers?"

She goes silent for long enough to confirm his suspicions, then says, "Do they not teach you kids your history over at RPM headquarters?"

"They didn't bother with me," he says. "What's your story?"

Kat looks at him with a hard gaze, like he's being judged – and maybe not only by her. "It's not for strangers."

"I'm not a stranger," he finds himself saying before he can think about it. "I'm one of you. Aren't I?"

"Are you?" she asks softly, playing with a ring around her – around her left ring finger, he notices with a shattering of realization. "You know who I am?"

"No, but I bet my girlfriend does," he says, nodding behind her. Summer walks up to them, surprise on her face as she takes in his companion. "How's everything with Ziggy and K?" he asks her quietly as she smiles at Kat and sits down next to him.

"Oh, fine, part of the school blew up, but it'll be okay," she says brightly, offering her hand to shake. "Hi, I'm Summer. I'd like to apologize if he said anything dumb."

Kat smiles and shakes her hand. Her ring gleams gold in the fake sunlight. "Don't worry, we were having a lovely conversation. You got lucky with this one."

Dillon snorts, but can't help feeling pleased as Summer nudges him in the side. "She was telling me about how she used to be a power ranger," he says casually, and everyone goes still.

Summer looks between the two of them, then asks, equally casually, "How'd you figure that one out?"

He holds up a finger. "Syd was going to say something about you before you interrupted her; if you're secret identity that makes sense." Two fingers. "If Syd knows, that means she was raised knowing – that means her parents were rangers, and you said you knew her through them." Three fingers. "You didn't deny it."

"Must be the robotics," Kat remarks, shooting Summer a smile. "Most people don't figure it out that fast."

Summer snorts. "Tell me about it. One time, I had an entire conversation with the Megaforce pink ranger and didn't realize who she was until I went home."

Kat's face softens at the mention of Megaforce. "She doesn't really talk about it that much… Megaforce was hit harder than most of us," she says quietly, twisting her ring again. Dillon finds himself staring at it, wondering how she picked up that nervous habit – it's on the wrong hand to be a wedding ring, and it almost seems sad, the way she does it. Like she lost the person who gave it to her.

"Megaforce and Overdrive," Summer agrees, and he sends her a curious look so she explains, "Only one survivor from each. Although, I guess technically, Megaforce has two, but he doesn't live on Earth. And… that's besides the originals."

"Dino Thunder," Kat adds, smiling wistfully. "But you wouldn't know that, I guess. One survivor, but he doesn't live in the city, so I guess that doesn't count."

Summer looks like she's cataloguing that fact away for further research, so Dillon speaks up. "What happened to the originals?"

Kat's smile fades almost instantly from wistfulness to bitterness. He almost regrets asking – almost. "What happened everywhere else," she says, and he catches her looking down at her ring. One pink diamond surrounded by rubies on a gold band. Pink and red and gold. "They died."

"Aren't you one of them?" he asks carefully, looking at Summer for verification, but she only shrugs.

Kat sighs. "If you use a loose definition, yes, I suppose I am. But I wasn't one of the first six. None of them survived."

"I'm sorry," Summer offers, and he can feel her hand sliding into his, squeezing tightly. She hates this part, he knows – the apologizing, the guilt, the sadness. It's worse this time; he can see it in Kat's eyes, the shadow of blame, the knowledge that they're sitting in front of her wearing black and yellow and her friends aren't.

He veers the subject back with no large amount of deftness. "If you're using this loose definition… how many of you were there? Or – are there?"

Kat raises her eyebrows. "Lot of questions for someone who didn't know about secret identity teams before now."

Dillon grins at her. "I'm trying to learn about my history." Summer elbows him, but he ignores her – if Kat's a ranger, she's not going to take his attitude the wrong way.

She laughs, proving him right. "You really want to learn about your history? Come to this pizza party with me and Syd. Every ranger in Corinth will be there."

Dillon exchanges a look with Summer. "Um… what?"

Kat pulls a card from her purse and hands it to him. Jungle Karma Pizza is written on it in bright blocky letters, along with a date and time – tonight, at 7pm. "Kind of an annual get together type of thing. We all try to keep in touch. I guess it's time to induct you guys into the family, huh?"

"Every ranger in Corinth?" Summer repeats, taking the card from him to study it. "How many?"

Kat grins at them. "You never know. Some of them come to Corinth just for this, if they can make it."

"Whoa, wait," Dillon says, holding up a hand. "There are rangers outside of Corinth?"

"There are rangers everywhere they're needed," Kat says with a soft smile. "You'll learn that soon enough. Come by, it'll be fun. You might recognize some people."

"Okay," Summer agrees, giving him the card so he can tuck it into his pocket. "We'll be there."

"You still haven't told me," he points out because it looks like she might leave now. "How many of you were there?"

"Originals?" she asks and he nods. "Twelve. The records count twelve. Zordon's chosen."

"Bit of a pretentious name," he says with a smirk and she manages a laugh. "How many are left?"

"Four," she says, but not bitterly like he would have expected. "There are four of us left. But seven of you, and so many others. Life has a way of working out, Dillon."

Kat stands up as he and Summer sit there, her words settling around them. The pink of her coat seems a little sadder now that he knows – knows her color, know her story. Her ring catches the sunlight and shines gold, and he remembers one more question before she leaves.

"Wait," Dillon says quickly. "Can I ask one more thing?"

Summer sends him a warning look, but Kat nods at him to go on. He swallows, because suddenly the question feels heavy, too personal, too much – but the ring is itching at him, and he wants to know. Wants to understand her, this woman in pink who sat down and told him that she was part of his history, part of his legacy. Wants to know why and who and how.

"Who was he?" he asks, and a shadow passes over her face before he even finishes, because she knows what he's asking. "Your fiancé – was he – did he – "

Kat looks down at her ring, her blonde curls falling over her face and hiding it from view. "Jason," she says finally, quietly. "His name was Jason. He was red. He was the first red."

The first red. The words knock the breath out of him as he watches her walk away. I wasn't one of the first six, she had told them. None of them survived.

He can't imagine losing Summer like that. Can't even imagine losing Scott, Ziggy, Flynn, any of them. He looks over at her, memorizing every part of her face like he hasn't already done it a million times. Just in case. She smiles gently at him, reaching up to brush his hair away from his forehead, and presses another business card in his palm.

Emma Goodall, Phoenix Photography. The words are written in pink. He looks back up at her and she shrugs.

"Maybe she'll be there. I'll call the others?"

"Yeah," he says, pulling out the card Kat gave him and comparing them. "I think we should all go tonight."