1. This story in "Aftermath" is titled "Where the heart it"

2. And no, it's not supposed to be a love story

Project: Aftermath

Kat Hillard

It's the irony of the thing that really gets to me. The thing in itself is not that bad, almost as if I've been expecting it. The irony, though, can make me bowl over as if punched in the stomach. Irony over irony: what is more cliché than "punched in the stomach" as a metaphor for an unpleasant surprise? But punches are sort of what this is about.

Ask me what being a Ranger is all about, and I will answer without hesitation that it is about protection: Rangers protect. What precisely did we protect? Lives, eventually – we were sent out to protect the city and the planet, but ultimately, the job is about protecting lives. Not saving them: saving is the job of the healers. Healers correct wrongs. We prevented wrongs, or at least tried to.

You'll get similar answers from the rest of us Rangers. Protecting, saving, helping – the jobs of the good guys. Rangers are the good guys, right?

How do we tell the good guys from the bad? Most Rangers – most people the age we were then, really – would easily answer: love. Those who can love and care for others are the good guys, and evil are those who see tools where there are people, mines where there are mountains, fuel where there are forests. The distinction used to be so clear-cut to me: love and appreciation versus want and calculation.

My mom told me that if someone loves me, it doesn't make him incapable of hurting me: it means he can hurt me more. I took that saying as being cold, and was angry with my mom for thinking like that, for trying to make me think like that. Villain thinking, I called it in my heart: love as a weakness.

Whoever said villains have to be always wrong? After all, moms have a tendency of being right.

Rangers love, right? And love is a Good Thing. Love makes us Rangers, even, if you'll go so far.

Bullshit.

We used to have a lot of axioms about Rangers' lives. One of them was "Rangers date Rangers": not so much because we didn't try to date anyone else, but more because we couldn't keep up a relationship with anyone else. The nasties on the moon kept a watch, and had a tendency of sending in the monster five seconds flat after the movie started. One or three dates like that, and that would be it. Another reason for Rangers to date Rangers was that we had so much more in common with each other than with anyone else: good lord, but they were children compared to us. Maybe that was a good thing – I doubt many child development experts would think that facing death on a near-daily basis is a good thing for a bunch of teenagers – but it still made for an impressive gap. Whatever the reasons, though, we turned to each other: who else would understand? We turned to each other also because – cliché again – it is next to impossible not to love someone with whom you fight side by side.

Dating aside, the shared secret of being Power Rangers made it too hard to find common ground with non-Rangers. How we wished that it would not be a secret, so that it would not estrange us! I don't think any of us anticipated that the secret would estrange us to one another, but this is what happened. Rangers who left turned to other interests, covering up the tracks that might lead to their Ranger lives. We had to keep up the appearance of being nothing more than a bunch of high school friends, and it seems that the habit of secrecy was engraved into us deeper than any other of our Rangering experiences. To put it simply, we turned apart. We became who we might have been had we not become Rangers.

The forced isolation that made us so close when we were active Rangers disappeared. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted, without being summoned to battle; the hardness that war taught us faded away, because young people heal so easily it is frightening; and suddenly, we did not have as much in common with one another as we had before. We kept in touch, though: to honour what we shared by not forgetting. Even now I honour that ideal: watch as I think in the plural form even after breaking away from the collective.

We didn't drift apart: 'drifting' suggests passiveness, and we were – are - everything but. Each of us stirred him- or herself down the path each of us chose for her or his lives. Naturally, those paths led in many different directions, as many as us. The speed with which our group dispersed was both alarming and relieving: alarming, because 'togetherness' had been the rock of our existence; 'relieving', because the weight of the world is heavy to bear.

My first weeks after leaving Rangerhood behind were very much like the first weeks after becoming a Ranger: nightmares, sudden nausea attacks and a strong feeling of disorientation. By the time the fourth month rolled in, though, I looked back at the life I had had and shuddered. For the first time I realized how young most of us had to be to dare assume that responsibility – young, or guilt-ridden. I realized that it wasn't just the deeply-rooted dictate of secrecy that drove us apart, but also all that life force that had accumulated, dormant, when we served.

Tommy went for the track when we finished high school – when we retired. Adrenaline is as hard a drug as any, and it takes time to kick off. So he drove for a while, and despite the ocean between him and me, we were together – we loved, and it the made the effort possible and worthwhile. I didn't want Tommy at the track, not at all: it was dangerous, and risky, and too much – too much like not moving on; like refusing to change. So when, after a year, Tommy thanked his uncle and left the track and signed up for college, I was happy. I thought we made it past the crisis – past a crisis: I wasn't so naïve as to think it was the only crisis we would ever face. I thought if we made it through one year, through the first, hardest year, then we'll make it all the way through.

Tommy discovered biology one year into college. Biology, of all subjects on Earth! I thought. The eternal athlete had fallen in love with science, it seemed, and he babbled about parsimony trees and point-mutations rates, and other words which I have lost track of. He pursued it with the zeal once reserved for fighting. It seemed he loved biology for what it was – is there another way to love something, other than for what it is?

Tommy: he finished his B.Sc. in two and a half years when it should've taken four. I was proud: my man, who would let nothing stop him, who would let nothing slow him down, who would achieve miracles if so he wishes. I was proud when he told me that he was accepted into a Ph.D. program right away, and laughed when he told me he'd be studying dinosaurs. Dinosaurs and genetic engineering! Tommy thought it hilarious, too, though in a different sense of the word: the genetic molecular characteristic made for a wonderful, possibly groundbreaking basic research, Tommy told me excitedly, a fantastic subject for a Ph.D. thesis, one that might give him an international reputation.

So Tommy graduated from college, and traveled all over the world with the digging expedition; I graduated from the Ballet Academy and traveled all over the world with the company; yet we found the time, we always found the time, to meet and spend time and even live together for short whiles, between stops. Not an easy life, not at all, but we were so certain that it would become better with time: that Tommy's frantic traveling would cease once he became a doctor, that with time I'd be able to take longer breaks between tours. It wasn't easy and it wasn't half as glorious as it may seem, but it seemed possible.

One day he called from Arizona – I was in Darwin – to tell me that he loved me so much; the greeting arrived in my email box later that day; three days later he boarded the plane, and within another day we met. Tommy: with that light in his eyes, and the stride I can still recognize from a hundred yards, and a presence compelling like one of the old prophets. He swept me off my feet in a hug, and did not take his hands off for hours after we arrived in my hotel room. He fell asleep with a look of heavenly bliss on his face, like one who had returned home or who had found the meaning of his existence.

He told me when he woke, how his life was beginning again; I cried, and he thought it was from happiness; I slapped him. We argued, we yelled. He left, got his own room. He called me the next day, and the one after it, and the next, until I left Darwin for Bohn. I never called, and at some point he stopped calling. But I still keep his ring on my finger.

I hear there's a new group of Rangers in a California town, now. I hear that their zords are Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pterodactyl. Dinosaurs, all three of them; but the Pterodactyl isn't pink, and that clenches the irony. Always the heart of the team, pink Rangers: the ones ready with a smile and a hand, the ones who only dirty their hands with the fighting because their friends are there. No pink on Tommy's team, though, and that is hardly surprising.

The difference between a Ranger and a villain is that Rangers love, yes? Look at the perpetual Ranger: his fiancée alone in a darkened hotel room, writing in an old notebook and furiously wiping tears away.