Wes, Jen, Eric and all other characters from Power Rangers belong to Disney/Saban. I am using them without permission, however I have not and don't expect to make money from this.
Gaby, Chris, and Proteus are mine.

Rated T: mild language, violence, sexual references, and danger to a child.

A/N: This is a sequel to 'Reversals of Fortune' and part of my AU 'Year of Time' series. It can, however, stand alone.

If you haven't read 'Reversals of Fortune', the main thing you need to know is that during a Time Force experiment in dimensional travel, Wes, Jen, and Eric visited an alternate reality in which everyone's gender is reversed, and met their own doubles: Wendy, Jon, and Erica. Shortly after this Jen revealed she was pregnant, just as Wendy was pregnant in that world. (Jen stayed in our time and she and Wes married some time ago in this fic series.)

Reviews are always appreciated.

Tapestry

Mirrored

- - -

Silver City, 3005

"The theory is that every time a choice is made, every time something happens by chance, all the possible outcomes exist at the same time. Kind of like what used to be called the uncertainty principle; an electron exists in an infinite number of places at once, and you can only say where it's likely to be, not where it is. Well, the multiverse exists in many different versions, all of them sort of possibilities, universes that are parallel to ours, some of them almost the same as us and some a lot different. We only know about one of them, of course, because we only live in one of them; but just because we don't see the others doesn't mean they're not real, and maybe even interact with us in some way we don't know about."

Trix watched for her dinner companions' reactions eagerly as she paused in her explanation. Lucie was frowning in either skepticism, confusion, boredom, or all three. Kevin was smiling, although he looked more amused than scientifically interested. Still, "Fascinating," he murmured. "Tell us more."

Even as Trix took a breath, Lucie cut in, a pained expression on her face. "No, don't tell us more. Parallel universes where things didn't go the same way they did in ours. Some very similar to us, some a lot different. Got it." She shrugged. "What's the point?"

"Some very different, yeah," Trix said, ignoring Lucie's sigh. "Wouldn't you love to see some of them? To see how they developed, and-"

"No. No, I wouldn't."

"Oh, come on," Kevin protested. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

"I've had enough adventure for a while, thank you." Lucie smiled, and stretched her arms overhead before shoving her chair back and standing up. "Don't know about you, but it's been a long week, and I can't wait to get home."

"Hot date with a racer?" Kevin asked, just a little sarcasm slipping into his voice. "And I mean the car, not the driver."

"As a matter of fact, yes. Not that I couldn't get any driver I want." Lucie threw him a playfully arrogant look over her shoulder, flipped her black hair back with a practiced gesture, and started out.

Trix followed, with Kevin behind her. As the three of them passed the mirror-tiled wall of the Time Force lunchroom exit hall, headed for the outside door and the weekend ahead, Lucie stopped for a moment to make sure every hair was in place. Trix, used to her teammate's vanity, also glanced at her own reflection. Both their faces were Asian, but that was where the resemblance ended; while Lucie was tall and beautiful, Trix herself was - well - short, round-faced, and the possessor of a thick mop of startling bright green hair. Kevin, her best friend, towered over her shoulder, his handsome brown face smiling warmly at her for a moment.

"Why the sudden interest in parallel dimensions?" he asked as they emerged under a sky lit with the fading colors of sunset.

The answer surprised Trix herself. "I'm... I'm not sure," she said. "But I have a feeling it's important. Or it will be."

"Oh man, you and your visions..." Lucie groaned.

"Not a vision exactly, but-"

"Hold on." Lucie raised her wrist as the morpher strapped on it signaled, and held it up so they all could see the tiny, three-dimensional image that appeared above its surface.

The face of a black-haired, blue-eyed woman peered out at them as her voice came from the morpher's communicator. "Lucie, Trix, Kevin. Meet me at the timeship hanger bay immediately."

"Alex, what is it?"

"No time. Just get here! We have an escape attempt!"

Trix met her teammates' eyes. Alexandra never exaggerated. This was an emergency. She raised her own morpher. Together the three of them shouted, "Time for Time Force!" A moment later she was in her familiar green Ranger suit, looking at Kevin in yellow and Lucie in blue.

"Let's go!"

- - -

They were too late; Trix knew it even as they ran the last few meters, dashed around the side of the main shipyard building, and skidded to a halt as a scream of pain rang through the air.

"Alex!" Kevin shouted.

"There!" Lucie started forward again. They followed her to a form lying huddled in the open hangar doorway.

At a touch, it stirred. Still alive, Trix thought in relief, pushing away the memory of seeing that same face slackening into what they had thought was death, over four years ago. Alex blinked up at them groggily and then turned her head, a hand lifting in a shaky gesture.

"In there... He knocked out the technicians, got into the ship... Stop him..."

"Who?"

Alex seemed to regain some strength. She sat up. "A guard from the prison, I recognized the uniform."

"But..." Lucie shared a glance with them. "Can't be! Time Force guards are screened!" It was true; everyone who came in contact with the most dangerous mutant criminals on Earth was carefully selected and trained; it was unheard of for one of them to turn against Time Force without an excellent reason.

"Not his fault!" Alex was gasping as she struggled to get to her feet. "He's been taken - by Proteus!"

"Proteus?" Kevin protested. "But - how? He's in containment!"

"He has no physical form, we had to keep him in a force field - he must have been able to reach out mentally even in containment - took a guard over - now he's trying to escape in a time ship - just like Ransika..."

Again they exchanged a glance. There was no way they would let something like that happen again: a powerful criminal escaped into the past, the year-long struggle to recapture her. Trix jumped as the deep rumble of an engine sounded from the dark interior of the hangar.

"Stop him!"

"Too late! Come on!"

Even as Kevin grabbed at Alex, scooping her into his arms and running, Lucie and Trix dived out of the way of the almost spherical ship that hurtled at them from the shadows. It flashed by, coming within a meter or two of hitting them, then lifted in a long arc into the dusky sky. Lucie cursed as a beam shot from it, opening the whirling tunnel of a timehole. An instant later it was gone.

- - -

"His name is Theodore Rubin. Been a prison guard for ten years. He's had a good record, up until now."

Trix glanced back at Alex as their former red Ranger trotted to keep up. She didn't look so good; her face was pale and marred by a black eye and a bruise on one cheek, the result of Rubin's surprise attack.

"We know, Alex," Lucie muttered as they started walking again, hurrying into the auxiliary timeship hanger. "This isn't his fault."

"We'll try not to hurt him," Kevin agreed.

"I'm not so sure now," Alex said. "Proteus can't possess someone who resists."

"That's not true!" Trix blurted, and then flushed as she realized she had just contradicted her superior officer. "I - I mean, he can take over someone's mind if they're sleeping or unconscious or maybe if they don't realize what's going on; it just won't last very long if they fight back."

"That's why he usually did this to children..." Kevin scowled. "What a monster."

"That's certainly something we can all agree on." Alex came to a stop as they reached the round metal shape of the spare timeship they had been authorized to take.

A monster, Trix thought. Not something she'd usually call anyone, even Ransika at her worst. But in the case of Proteus, it fit.

Centuries ago he had adopted the name of an ancient god of the sea with the power to change his shape at will - not that shape-shifting was an ability of the Proteus they were after. No, what he did was infinitely worse, more insidious, and more cruel. Proteus was that rarity, a natural mutant, and one who had been born long before humanity had created such havoc by tampering with its own genetics. Perhaps his first life had been normal; no one really knew. He had lived and died as a human, a thousand years ago. But he had not really died.

His mind, his mental force, could survive outside of his physical body. And it could find a new body to control - if it could overpower the mind that was already there. His easiest targets were children too young and mentally undeveloped to resist - he possessed their bodies, used them, and discarded them when they grew too old for him. How many times had he done it? How many lives had he stolen? How many more, if he wasn't stopped?

"Remember," Alex was saying. "Be careful. He may try to control one of you."

"Not as long as we're on guard against it," Lucie said. "We'll find him, and we'll stop him."

"You'll have to." Alex raised her chin slightly. "He's gone to the year 2006, to Silver Hills, California. To the time and place where he lived in his original human body."

And the time and place Jon, Wendy, and Erica lived in... Trix thought, and in one of her flashes of empathy could 'feel' the others thinking.

"You're familiar with the time period and the location. That'll be an advantage. And... if necessary you can get help from - from the others." Alex's voice was steady - but she hadn't been able to bring herself to say the names of her former fiancé and the woman he had married and stayed with in the distant past, the woman who was her own double except for hair color.

"Don't worry, Alex," Trix said.

"We'd better go." Lucie pressed the door trigger and started into the ship with Kevin behind her. Trix turned to follow.

They stopped for a moment to look back, seeing Alex's form silhouetted against the hanger worklights, her shoulders back and straight, head up, but somehow looking fragile and alone despite the strength they all knew she possessed. "Good luck, Rangers," she said softly. She was still standing at attention as the door slid shut.

- - -

"Why would he have come here? To Bio-Lab?"

"Shhh." Lucie frowned at Kevin's question.

Trix was wondering the exact same thing. Why Bio-Lab, where Proteus must know he'd have a good chance of running into three active Rangers? Did he hope to catch one of them unawares, and take them over as he had done with Rubin, the hapless Time Force prison guard? But Jon had been trained to resist mental attacks; he wouldn't be an easy target. Wendy and Erica lacked that training, but they were both exceptionally strong-willed...

She didn't even realize she had stopped until she saw Lucie and Kevin staring back at her. "Are you okay?" Kevin asked, returning to her side.

"I'm... I felt something..." She looked around, trying to orient herself in the reality of the warehouses, sheds, and piles of boxes and cartons surrounding them in this back area of Bio-Lab. But another image seemed to hover in front of her mental eyes, a double exposure of somewhere else, bewildering as her surroundings seemed to shift into something similar yet not quite the same. She caught a glimpse of three people...

"Trix? Trixie? What is it?" Kevin had caught her shoulders in his hands as she swayed.

"I - I - I'm not - I don't..." she stammered. "Can't be... I thought I saw Jon and Wendy and Erica - but they were - were reversed..."

"Reversed? How?" Lucie was peering into her face, her voice demanding.

"They were - no, it doesn't make any sense." How could she explain that she had just seen an image of Jon as a woman, Wendy and Erica as men, without sounding insane? No. She grabbed onto the one thing that she knew was real, and important. "It's Proteus!" she exclaimed, pulling free of Kevin's grip. "His mind is so powerful, I can sense it!"

"Can you tell where he is?"

She hadn't fully realized it until that moment, but, "I think so! Come on!"

At a run, they rounded the corner of a warehouse building, and saw him. Theodore Rubin, the guard, crouched in the bushes next to the wall, his face pale as he cast a glance over his shoulder in their direction. His expression twisted into a snarl, then went wide-eyed. He lurched to his feet, stumbled, and almost fell.

"Rubin's fighting him," Trix said softly to her teammates. "Proteus is losing control."

"Quick, stun him!" Lucie ordered, her blaster already out of the holster on her hip and aimed at the man before them, whose mouth opened in a soundless grimace of anger and fear.

Three stun blasts reached out, the flare of light almost making Trix blink. They had caught him; the beams struck home, sending Rubin spinning into the warehouse wall and then collapsing limply to the ground. But even as Kevin got out the instrument they had brought to pull out and contain Proteus' mind-field, she knew it was too late.

"He's gotten out!" she cried. She could feel it strongly now that Proteus was no longer shielded by the body he had taken over, the malevolence and inhuman coldness of it, the determination to find another...

"Where is he? Where is he?" Kevin was gasping, turning in a tight circle, his blaster held out stiffly in one hand, the trap in the other.

Trix felt it when he moved - away from them. "There! Come on!"

They ran again, dodging between buildings, looking frantically for someone, anyone, who could have fallen victim... and stopped abruptly as they all saw a strange light ahead, silvery and sparkling, flashing into the sky for a moment or two before it was gone.

And the light wasn't the only thing that was gone. "I've lost him!" Trix cried.

"Come on, he must have gotten inside someone; we've got to find him!"

Lucie was running again, in the direction of the light they had seen. Trix and Kevin followed, turned another corner in the maze of buildings and storage yards, and came to another sudden stop. Four heads turned to face them, surprise written on all four. Two broke into grins, a third frowned, the fourth looked uncertain.

"Lucie! Kevin! Trix!" Wendy exclaimed, brushing a strand of dark blonde hair out of her eyes.

"What the hell's wrong this time?" Erica said, arms crossed, half-Asian face still frowning. An unfamiliar young man with dark brown hair was standing at her side.

"What are you doing here? What's going on?" Jon asked, his arm going around his wife and his smile fading as he eyed their blasters.

"We're after a criminal," Lucie said, taking another cautious look at the area before holstering her weapon.

"A criminal?" Wendy glanced around, too. "Another one?"

"Yes." Katie caught Jon's eye. "Proteus."

"Proteus..." Jon seemed to lose color. "He escaped?"

"And stole a timeship. He was controlling a prison guard, but he left that body and came this way."

"No." Jon pulled Wendy a little closer. "He couldn't have..."

"What's wrong? Proteus can't take over an adult unless he's asleep, or unconscious, or agrees," Lucie said.

Trix took a closer look. Jon was staring down at Wendy, whose hands were spread over her stomach in a way that seemed almost protective... and she knew...

"Oh, no..."

- - -

"Oh, no..."

With a jolt Trip woke up, his body twitching in the reflex of his sudden return to reality. The reality of his own bedroom, now quiet and dark in the night. Still breathing heavily, he sat up, hands to his head.

"Computer. What time is it?"

"It is 4:21 am," the feminine-sounding voice answered.

"Four... Man, what a dream." The computer made no comment. "Half-lights, please," he said.

As the requested illumination made his room visible, Trip swung his feet out of bed and got up, making his way to the small adjoining bathroom. A few splashes of cold water helped to clear his head - or maybe not. He was somehow startled to see his own, male, face in the mirror, instead of a female version of himself. "What a dream," he repeated. A dream that had seemed almost more real than his own life - he could remember it in detail, including exactly what it felt like to be a woman... He found himself blushing.

It must have been the story of Wes, Jen, and Eric's adventure several months ago, a trip into three parallel dimensions as part of a Time Force experiment in dimensional travel. In the first alternate universe they had visited, the genders of everyone they knew had been reversed, and they had met opposite-sex versions of themselves. Must have been really strange - the idea had caught his imagination, and been the topic of several conversations with Katie and Lucas at the time, speculating on what each of them was like in that reality.

That was when Jen had told them she was pregnant, and in that other universe Wes's female counterpart, Wendy, had been expecting too. How long ago? About seven or eight months... she had already been a month or two along... A thousand years ago, it must be about time for that baby to be born... Maybe that was why he'd had the dream; subconsciously he'd been thinking about Jen, and Wes, and Eric, wondering how they were doing, wishing he could see the baby someday.

But... As Trip climbed back into bed and dimmed the lights, it occurred to him that one question remained unanswered. There was no mutant he knew of who was anything like the Proteus of the dream... where had that idea come from? Just my imagination, he decided with a yawn. And yet, it had seemed so real...

TBC...