Chapter Ten

Kimberly had never cried so hard. She cried so hard that her head hurt, just so that her heart wouldn't hurt so much in comparison. Cried so hard that she couldn't' cry anymore, no more tears would come, but her body wracked with the muscle clenching, throbbing, deeply burning pain that she couldn't ignore.

She cried for everyone; first for Tommy, then for Jason, then Trini, and Billy, and Zack. She cried for her team. Cried for her friends. But now she was crying for her. For her heart. How ironic that her last name was the one that seemed to be the most symbolic. Hart. And she had the biggest one. The one that made her go out of her way to make the new kids in school feel comfortable. The one that made her try, no matter how long it took to get people to see that she wasn't fake and, honestly, was interested in their lives.

The one that made her feel badly for those that had become affected by the monsters that Rita and Zedd sent down. The one that made her feel so much empathy and grief for the numbers of people that had been lost when they couldn't evacuate in time for the monster attacks. The girls who, literally, stopped and smelled the flowers every time she passed them.

Of course she would hurt the most, when she finally hurt for herself.

Tommy didn't deserve what'd happened to him. She surmised after bouts of bargaining, pleading, anger, denial. He truly didn't.

His life was always hard, by anyone's standards; he was adopted, didn't know until he was well into his teens. He moved around a lot, not having many friends because of it. He was so good at martial arts that people called him a showoff and didn't want to spar against him—because he won every time. He moved to a new city and got taken over by an evil witch. Hurt a lot of people when he was taken over. Woke up and he hadn't known what he did. Probably suffered from a sort of trauma that none of them ever anticipated and felt that, no matter how many people he saved, he wasn't able to come back from all the evil things he'd done.

But she remembered his laugh, his smile, the way he seemed to come across as shy and quiet but could throw out barbs and zingers as quickly as the rest of them could—especially if it was against Bulk and Skull.

Tommy, the boy who she loved, who was now lying in a coffin waiting to be buried. Or maybe, he was in the morgue. She didn't know. Didn't care. Only knew that he was the best of them, facing everything in his life with a smile. And he didn't deserve to have that life, that smile, taken away from him. Selfishly, she didn't deserve for him to be taken from her.

They were good people.

There was something about Tommy that was interesting to her. Yes, he was one of the best looking guys she'd ever seen. But there was more to him than that. Maybe because he was so shy he was different. He wasn't like all the other California guys, who cared how she looked, who cared how they looked, who were so confident in themselves that it was annoying. Who thought that, because they lived in California, they had to be California guys and "go with the flow", not having much direction in their lives.

Tommy was different.

Why did bad things have to happen to good people?

So she cried because now she was alone and helpless. A huge part of her, part of her heart was ripped away. Ripped in half. Tortuously grasped, twisted and yanked away. She cried until the aching sobs and muscle clenching stopped.

Cried until her head pounded, feeling heavy. Cried until it felt that it was sloshing over her shoulders when she stood and moved to her window so that she could at least let some sunlight in to break the darkness. A low grunt escaped Kimberly's lips when the light hit her. A very unladylike grunt. Just like the sorts of sounds she made when she hit the ground after a particularly hard fall from the monster of the day. This time, it was less painful, just a matter of waiting until her eyes became adjusted to the light.

Funny, how quickly her eyes could adjust to new, harsh things, but the rest of her couldn't.

Kimberly sighed, leaning her forehead against the warm window. She looked out toward the far-off, smoky gray mountains in the distance. Just barely visible through the sprawling land and homes. The used to be something she was excited to see, something that held some sort of mystical wonder. A getaway, as it were, from a large city filled with so many people.

They meant nothing to her now.

Nothing meant anything to her anymore. Nothing but a sure sense of emptiness. She'd stopped feeling pain, stopped feeling anger, didn't feel much of anything at all. Her mother was worried, kept pushing her to talk to someone.

Kimberly didn't care enough to worry.

She'd get back to her normal self soon, she reasoned. Tommy would've wanted that.

She slept, but no matter how much or how little made no difference in how she felt. The next thing she knew, she was outside, in the backyard, in the garden. She heard her mother call her name behind her, worried about her daughter, as she'd always been since the news of Tommy's death reached her. But Ms. Hart didn't know what to do or how to move on.

She just watched her daughter, and was there for her.

Kimberly looked over the flowers. The ones she used to stop and smell. But could only look at. When it started to rain, she wasn't sure, but at some point her mother had walked over and put an umbrella over her head, threw an arm around her shoulders, tried to coax her back inside. But Kimberly found herself unable to move.

Because it felt good. The rain felt good. Cold and wet, sliding over her face.

It helped her feel something.

Something other than the slowly warming, slowly burning fire of revenge that started in her stomach and spread outward.

A/N: I promise that this is the last very depressing, very short chapter. More action and more of the plot coming with the next chapter! Things will really be moving forward, but considering I've had people as if Kim was going to be the Ranger Slayer, I needed to move this chapter forward quicker than I originally planned.

Let me know what you think.

~Av