Disclaimer: Not for profit, just evil glee.

Notes: This is most probably a one-shot story. It was just a neat scene that ran through my head one night, but no plot arc has formed around it. A warning to my readers not to hold their breath ) But enjoy nevertheless, and let me know what you think by reviewing! Thanks )

Darkness

It was dark…well, of course it was dark. It was four in the morning. But the lack-of-light darkness wasn't the first that Bridge noticed as he stirred awake; it was the psychic darkness that pressed in on him from all sides. He thought it was a lingering trace of the incoherent but distressing dreams he'd been having, that it would lift soon after he escaped those dreams. But no, the darkness stayed, crystal clear in the waking world.

Well, crystal clear in the sense that it never lost its intensity. If anything, its presence in the waking world was even more stifling than its presence in his dreams, and there, it had been pretty bad. The darkness was no sharp, finite psychic impression that he could name, not like affection, or anger, confusion or contentment. Those impressions were distinct and easy to identify.

What he felt now was murky, heavy, deeply unsettling, and pervaded everything with seemingly no source he could pinpoint. This darkness was new to him—it was unlike anything he had ever perceived before, and he had had his psychic powers for a long time now. Something that could give off such raw negative energy had to be a really bad thing, certainly something that shouldn't be hanging around in his dorm room.

With a shiver, Bridge sat up in his bed and rubbed his eyes with a bare hand. His bed was one of the only places he could get away with not wearing his gloves, the other two being the shower and his lab. He wouldn't be hit with the intense psychic impressions that skin-to-surface contact usually caused as long as everything he touched belonged to him.

This was bad. The more alert he became, the more strongly he felt the strange darkness. He considered the wisdom of scanning it more deeply—that might enable him to get a better handle on it, but it would also intensify the impression tenfold in the process. As things stood, his body was tense and the knot of dread in his stomach was growing larger by the minute. Multiply it tenfold and he might be frozen in utter terror.

Fear. Yeah, that ship was definitely beginning to sail his way. He was afraid to probe the darkness with his psychic senses, afraid of what he would discover; afraid of what he'd be hit with. As he struggled to contain the rising surge of negative emotions, the darkness around him shifted, like a cloud of poisonous ink in water. For all its murky and indistinct nature, the impression of it was finally coalescing into a single, coherent word in his mind. He finally had a name for what he was perceiving, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

Evil.

Bridge quickly stuck his unprotected hand back under the covers, his fingers numb with a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. There was evil in his room. It hung in the air, it crawled across the walls, it leeched the oxygen from his very lungs as it gleefully raked its hand across his psychic senses.

His breaths were coming shorter and faster now, and he quickly glanced at his gloves which sat on the desktop beside his bed. The darkness hung heavy around them too, and for once, he didn't think they would help. A sort of reckless courage shot through his rising fear, and he brought his hand back out from under the covers, waving it through the air in front of him.

Wham! Bridge fell back against the wall with a startled gasp. It felt like an icy dagger had been stabbed into his brain, leaving behind a mind-numbing panic that he barely managed to contain. Images from his dreams, no more distinct than the slides of an inkblot test, were clamoring before his mental eye, threatening to hold him frozen in blind terror.

He ran his hand through his haphazard brown hair, and cast about with his other five, normal senses for something to steal his focus away from the darkness. Sometimes he got so lost in psychic impressions, it became easy to forget that there were five other ways to perceive the world. That was one of the little tricks he'd learned to protect himself from mental overload.

His ears were the first to pick up something—the soft, nearly inaudible rhythm of exhaling and inhaling…Bridge blinked. He'd actually forgotten he wasn't alone in the room. That was a bad sign. He usually rambled because he remembered too much; it ware rare that his mind ever left anything out.

Bridge didn't know when Sky had come back to the room, but it definitely hadn't been before the traditional lights-out hour. Very unlike his by-the-book roommate. He'd assumed the Blue Ranger was off brooding somewhere, as their latest missions had been unsettling, to say the least. But even if Sky had come back late, and was deadbeat tired, he was a light sleeper. The noise of Bridge's back hitting the wall should have at least made him stir, if not awaken completely.

It was dark enough in the room that Bridge couldn't actually see his roommate. Staring across the room was like looking into a black hole, and his psychic eye, which saw light and dark in a very different manner, saw that the darkness was heaviest in Sky's half of the room.

That worried Bridge deeply. With his attention refocused on the intangible evil present, his stomach threatened to knot up in dread again. He hesitated a moment, then waved a hand tentatively at his roommate.

Another icy stab in the brain made him wince. Both his hands were cold now, despite the fact that one was still buried deep beneath the warm covers. His skin was prickling and he suddenly felt a mental lash that was almost like a physical shove.

Bridge's eyes widened as he realized where the darkness was coming from. But how? When? Why? This wasn't good, this wasn't good at all. Of course it wasn't, this…it…he….evil, in the room! Nothing he'd ever sensed from the monsters they fought had felt as dark as this.

Danger. That was the solitary word in his mind, and Bridge knew he had to get out of there. The darkness was intangible, but that didn't make it harmless. As a psychic, Bridge knew that all too well.

He reached over and snatched up his gloves, pulling them on hurriedly as he surged out of bed. He stumbled slightly, the lack of light in the room compromising his balance. His uniform jacket was the nearest long sleeve garment at hand, so he snatched that up too. He tugged it on while heading for the door. The mere five steps it took to get there seemed to waste such precious time. He reached for the unlock button.

"Where are you going?"

He never heard Sky move, not a single rustle or footstep. In fact, Sky didn't move, Bridge was sure. He was just suddenly there by the door, leaning casually on one elbow against the doorframe. Looking down at Bridge intently.

Bridge froze. With the evil this close to him, he couldn't breathe, literally.

"Get…some water," he said breathlessly, his hand reaching for the unlock button again. It didn't work.

"I don't think so."

The panic began to rise.

Sky shifted—not moved; he did not traverse even the smallest of physical space—in a way reminiscent of the hazy, squirming quality of distant heat waves, and suddenly Bridge was blind. He was enveloped in the darkness, wrapping around tight and smothering him, crawling thick and icy across his skin.

And then Bridge realized it wasn't psychic energy creating that cold sensation. It was Sky's hands, slowly wrapping around his neck.