Title: When We Stand Together
Author: JoeHundredaire
Rating: R/FR18.
Disclaimer: Right, I actually went and checked to be sure this time… Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all associated characters belong to Fran and Kaz Kuzui. Even though this story sticks purely to the American programming, I still feel I should disclaim Toei Company because without their Bakuryū Sentai Abaranger - or Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger for that matter - we wouldn't have the Power Rangers franchise much less Power Rangers Dino Thunder. Not mine, don't sue, et cetera.
Summary: Dawn spent her first three years of high school on the mouth of hell. Compared to that, Reefside is practically a vacation…
Joe's Note: Just another weird little idea I was toying with. Unlike the past, I've made absolutely no effort to make the Buffyverse and Power Rangers timelines play nice and then build from there; you'll have to just sorta roll with it and pick up the contextual clues as to how it all comes together. This is an expansion of the one-shot Replay that I posted on International Day of Femslash, and so parts of it may seem familiar to you.

"I wanna know, know where you're at. I'm at the front, baby you're still at the back. Oh… can you tell me where, tell me where you're at? Freak you out, freak you out, freak you out. Freak you out, freak you out, freak you out, freak you out."

Sitting on the picnic table with her legs spread and her arms wrapped around her girlfriend's waist, Dawn Summers did her best to keep a straight face as she listened to Kira Ford sing. Because while she was completely and totally supportive of the girl's performances… her original work still was about as deep as Rhianna's songs. But they could work on that. After all, the fact that she was moving past her all-cover phase into a mix of cover songs and originals was progress in and of itself.

While it pained her to admit it, Dawn was actually kinda glad that Buffy had sent her away in those last days before the fall of Sunnydale. Or rather that she'd tried to. As soon as Dawn had woken up from her wonderful experience with being chloroformed, she'd promptly tasered Xander before dumping him off at a nearby church and stealing the car. She'd been tempted to turn around and head back to Buffy but… well, things between them had been strained enough due to Dawn's part in trying to evict Buffy. She had no desire to see how much further things would degrade if she stuck around. And so instead she'd taken the car, the supplies that Xander had packed, and a goodly portion of her wardrobe, and disappeared into the night.

Well, the car, supplies, some clothes, and a decent amount of money. Dawn smirked as she shot a glance back over her shoulder at her messenger bag. Caught up as she'd been in her obsession with resurrecting Buffy, Willow had been totally unaware of Dawn systematically draining money from a half-dozen sources after her mother's death. It still amused her to no end to think that someone as smart as Willow could possibly think that they'd blown through her mother's life savings, the proceeds from the sale of the gallery, and Hank's guilt-induced oversized child support payment in a matter of months. She'd quietly used it to keep the house afloat during Buffy's Doublemeat Palace phase, but most of it had still been kicking around in her savings account when she arrived in Reefside. At which point she'd decided that… well, she'd damn well earned the right to spoil herself a bit.

New laptop - and smartphone and tablet - in tow, Dawn had started visiting the Cyberspace Cafe in hopes of finding more people with similar interests. The owner Hayley Ziktor had turned out to be pretty cool, while Ethan James had been… interesting, if a bit too geeky for her tastes. She'd been quickly adopted by a group of girls interesting in roleplaying games, although that might have been due to the fact that she brought a complete set of Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition books to the party. Time had flown by, friends had been made, and then a week before summer's end, Hayley had announced that she'd be restarting live entertainment when the new school year began. And Dawn had met Kira.

Kira was… a bit like that girl Kit that Dawn had met in her last year at Sunnydale High, a bit like Janice, a bit like Kennedy, and a lot like nobody Dawn had ever met before. She was a giant ball of contradictions, sass, and energy, wrapped in fishnet-loving, black-heavy shell. It had been love at first sight, or at least mutual interest, with Dawn almost immediately proposing that she help Kira record her songs for release on the iTunes Music Store as a reason to spend time with the petite brunette. Kira had eagerly accepted, offering to take Dawn out to dinner to discuss the idea. They hadn't ended up talking much business at the restaurant… or at all when they'd gone back to Dawn's apartment afterward for 'coffee'.

They'd pretty much skipped the 'collaborators' phase to go straight to being girlfriends with interlocking interests, but that was fine with Dawn. The catcalls and looks they got from boys at school, she wasn't quite as fine with but she could deal. She wasn't going to modify her behavior because nobody had taught the douchebags she shared classes with how to properly behave in public. And- Dawn was pulled from her thoughts as a shadow fell over her and Kira, and she looked up to find Principal Randall scowling as she scribbled something in the open notepad she was carrying. "Miss Ford, I'm afraid you need written permission to perform on school grounds. Let's go."

Knowing that her girlfriend was just as good as she was at opening her mouth and getting into trouble, Dawn wasn't at all surprised when Kira opted to return fire rather than concede defeat and accept the inevitable. "Are you aware that kids who play an instrument have a fifty percent higher chance of getting into college?"

That made Randall look up, peering over the top of her glasses as she slowly looked Kira up and down. "Well… you're hardly college material, now are you, Miss Ford? Now come with me."

Wow. Holy unprofessional conduct, Batman. Dawn waited for Kira to slide off the table first before hopping down behind her, grabbing both their bags as she joined a procession that included not only Kira and the principal, but also some kid who looked like he'd been dragged off the soccer field. Evidently it was Crack Down on Everyone Having Fun Day, and someone had forgotten to forward Kira and Soccer Boy the memo.

They didn't even manage to clear the edge of the crowd of admirers that Kira's performance had attracted when the sprinklers suddenly burst to life, soaking all four of them within seconds. As Kira swore violently and tried to curl herself around her guitar to protect it, Dawn's eyes swept back and forth across the lawn… and then landed on a familiar black boy who looked incredibly pleased with himself as he strolled along under an umbrella. Her right hand curling into a fist, Dawn smirked. How nice of Ethan to provide her with an easy way to join Kira in detention…

"Well what do you do in your spare time?"

"Me? I go out with girls. You know, they're the ones at school that smell really good, with the long hair and the makeup?"

"Oh, it's like that, is it?"

"Yeah. It's like that."

Dawn rolled her eyes as Ethan and Conner McKnight bickered back and forth. Not only because on one hand, Ethan had no leg to stand on - his love life was kinda like his Ferrari: he didn't have one - but because on the other, Conner was all talk and no getting any action. "Ahem." Both boys looked over at her, and she made a show out of using the arm wrapped around Kira's waist to pull the brunette closer, pressing a kiss to the corner of her girlfriend's mouth. "Raise your hand if you actually have a girlfriend?" Dawn raised her free hand, while Kira raised the one that wasn't stuffed into one of the back pockets of Dawn's jeans. The boys grimaced practically in sync. "That's what I thought."

Why hadn't they just waited near the hole for rescue to come? They all had cell phones and unlike Kira, Dawn had a non-Verizon carrier and so she actually had service in the majority of Reefside. But no. After Conner had made a brief - and unsuccessful - attempt to climb to freedom, the others had decided that wandering through the tunnels was a good idea. Then they'd found a dinosaur skeleton sticking out of a wall, Conner had been dumb enough to touch it, and now they were in someone's high tech secret lair.

And Kira was totally right about it being a cool place to shoot a video for her YouTube channel, but focus damn it!

Thanks to her time in Sunnydale, Dawn had long ago learned the importance of being as observant as possible and so she was the first to notice the giant chunk of rock sitting in the middle of the room, hissing softly as it emitted thick tendrils of smoke. While on one hand, the walnut-sized gems that studded the top appealed to her inner kleptomaniac, on the other… it was a rock that was somehow smoking on its own. And sitting in someone's lair. It would take a special kind of idiot to mess with something like that.

Lo and behold, Conner was that kind of idiot. Brushing past her, he reached out to grab at the largest gem only to flinch back when Ethan called out to him. "Yo, don't touch that!"

"Why not?"

"You really are taking this dumb jock thing to a whole new level."

Conner just rolled his eyes in response. "Look. I have sat through enough lame science classes to know that thing looks really prehistoric." Reaching out again, he let his hand hover over the red stone. "And while detention trips to museums might be right up your alley, if I don't have to miss practice…"

Ah yes, Doctor Oliver's promise to cut their week-long string of detentions short if they could find 'something prehistoric' to show him. While the man had clearly been sending them on a wild goose chase to get them out of the way so he could do… something… evidently Conner was taking it seriously. But- "I hate to agree with him. Really, I do." Et tu, Kira? "But I already missed one rehearsal. Just because I'm the star of the show doesn't mean I don't need to practice."

That seemed to make even Ethan reconsider the prospect, and Dawn sighed as she watched each of her companions grab one of the stones: Conner the red gem that he'd been eyeing from the beginning, while Ethan took its blue peer and Kira snatched up the yellow one. That left two for Dawn to choose from, because she sure as hell wasn't going to be left without something to research from when this all went horribly wrong and she needed to bail the others out. Her eyes bounced back and forth between the green and pink gems, and then she realized… why not both? It'd give her a spare to mail over to Scotland if things got really bad.

Because hey, what could go wrong with gems that glowed when you pulled them out of a smoking chunk of rock?

Snort.

Growling, Dawn ducked under another of the strange scaly monster's wild punches before kicking it in what passed for its face. This was why it was a terrible idea to rob people's secret lairs: the shit in them tended to belong to people who got really pissed when they realized they'd been robbed. And while the others were apparently spontaneously developing superpowers thanks to the stones they'd stolen, Dawn herself most certainly was not and so she was being pushed to her limits to keep up with their freaky, inhuman-looking attackers.

Then Dawn twirled and delivered a palm strike to the chest of one unsuspecting attacker, caving its ribcage in and sending it flying twenty feet through the air to impact with a tree trunk, snapping its spine in half. Staring down at her hands in disbelief, Dawn's eyes widened as a distinctly pink glow stole over her skin and then the left pocket of her jeans lit up with brilliant pink light.

Well wasn't that just fanfuckingtastic?