Author's Note: Just another lil bit of fun, written at the urging of some friends. Thanks to QueenRiley for the inspiration for this. If you want to read a wonderful story with a similar premise to this fic, you should check out her fic 'Innocence' – it's amazing.

Disclaimer: I do not own Power Rangers or any related media or characters. The story idea is partly own but the rest isn't. Everything is copyrighted to its respective owners.

WARNING!: This fic will contain slash, femslash and possibly even some het (le gasp). Fic rating might change depending on what I write for later chapters, but I will warn before any mature scenes. Please keep this in mind.

Extra Note: Contains some spoilers for certain plot points in the series, maybe. Slight AU since it strays from canon – but most of my fics do that, ne?.

He was the hardest to deal with of all the team. The youngest ranger in the group, the one they hadn't wanted. Ziggy was barely out of those awkward teenaged years, barely old enough to be considered an adult by some standards. The boy was nervous, dorky, he babbled too much, he boasted too much, he couldn't do some of the most basic tasks, and gods he was annoying some days, never shutting that mouth of his. And yet...beneath all of that, there was something endearing about the Green Ranger. Something that made him tolerable sometimes and good company others, but it was something no one on the team could place.

Dillon tended to feel closer to the younger male than the rest of the team, despite his faults. Ziggy's cuter traits and more endearing qualities had found their way into the man's heart quickly, against the older ranger's wishes or better instincts. It was why he'd let the idiot boy who had tried to steal his car in the Wastes had been allowed to ride with him to Corinth, and had been allowed to become so close to his heart. Because really, he did care about Ziggy a lot, even if the younger man was insufferable some days. Sadly, this was one of those days – the ones where almost none of the team could stand him and not even his boyfriend wanted to hang around him.

"How the hell does that boy manage to screw up everything he touches?" Scott's angry voice was loud and angry enough to be heard, even upstairs and out on the roof, where Ziggy'd taken to sitting after he'd realized this was going to be one of those days. Maybe it was just because the others were just that loud when pissed, or because Ziggy's ears were acutely tuned to pick up everything people said about him when they thought he couldn't hear. Either was a completely plausible option, as Dr. K would put it.

Speaking of the good doctor, her voice was the one he heard filtering upstairs next, "While I understand your frustration at Ranger Green, pacing around my workspace while I am trying to complete several projects the team needs is not going to help solve anything." Ah, K. She was a sweetie at heart, but really uptight. Though her statement about him being in the Ranger Room did add some sense to Ziggy's wondering why he could hear them so clearly – there was a vent in that room that just happened to exit right next to where he tended to hide out.

What he heard next was Summer's soft voice, attempting to calm her frustrated boyfriend, "Scott, what did he do exactly?" Ziggy smiled sadly, listening to her. She could be a real saint some days, even if he knew he got on her nerves just as much as he did the others. At least Summer tried to like him, and really, that was more than he deserved from her or anyone else.

And there it was, back to Scott, "He managed to make a dent in my car and he's the one who stuck my red team shirt in with my whites when doing laundry this week." Ziggy huffed and blew his bangs out of his face a bit at that – he had accepted blame for both incidents but it still hurt knowing neither was his fault.

Sure, Ziggy'd been the one doing laundry this week, but only because he had agreed to take over Dillon's shift (the older man wasn't much of a 'housework' sort) and when he'd done that, he'd had to start taking over everyone's shifts. This meant that on Sunday, when he'd gone downstairs and found Gem and Gemma sorting clothes very awkwardly and looking like they'd rather be anywhere else, he felt obligated to tell them to head upstairs and let him handle it. Scott's had already been thrown in the wash by the time the young man arrived, so Ziggy ended it quickly to minimize the damage and told the team captain of the mistake – he really didn't think Scott needed more reason to yell at the twins, especially with how horrified and sorry they'd been when Ziggy privately explained their mistake to them.

The dent had actually also been the twins – playing around in the Garage and making small explosives, they'd ended up shooting something into the side of Scott's car. The younger man had just been coming downstairs and heading out when the red ranger found the dent in his precious vehicle. It hadn't taken Ziggy more than a quick sidelong glance to spot Gem and Gemma cowering from Scott's wrath when he inevitably figured out what they'd done. Luckily for them, the team captain still considered the pair smarter than playing around the Garage like that, so Ziggy was his first choice for likely candidate. And while it was the truth, the boy couldn't bring himself to point the blame at them.

Zigs was drawn from his thoughts by two pairs of arms wrapping awkwardly around his shoulders in a hug. He glanced between each of the twins and found himself smiling a little at their sad faces – the two really were just like children, even if he was younger than they were. "Hey, what's up?"

Gem spoke first, as he was wont to do, "We're really really sorry-"

"-that we got you in trouble." Gemma added, the pair releasing him to sit beside the younger man on the roof.

The brunette shrugged, "It's cool. You guys didn't mean to screw things up, just try not to do it again." it was a comfort, at least a bit, that he'd managed to win their favor a tiny fraction with his actions. The boy was pretty sure he could use all the friends he could get at this point, with how the day had been going.

Gemma smiled, looking out at the sky, "It's very pretty-"

"-up here. Why did you come out though?"

Leaning back against the wall his window was on, Ziggy shrugged, gesturing at the sky. "Because I wanted to watch the sunset." it was a lie, really, but somehow, he was pretty sure Gem and Gemma of all people knew about lies and faked smiles to keep yourself from going completely out of your mind. The understanding nods the pair gave before patting his shoulder and heading back inside showed he was right about that.

Later in the evening, he decided to make an appearance. By that point, Scott had cooled down to the point where he could just grumble at seeing Ziggy and would immediately leave the room. Really, if only Scott had been pissed, he could have handled staying inside for most of the day. It was the compounded rage of Scott, annoyance of Flynn and anger of Dillon that kept the boy hidden away from the others before anyone else could find new reason to hate him.

Things had started badly from the get go today. The first major incident was with Flynn in the kitchen. The man had been practicing making iced coffees and Ziggy, tired and stumbling from having no sleep the night before, had tripped and knocked over the blender, totally ruining the man's creation. He'd cleaned it up but the Scotsman had kicked him out of there pretty fast with curses and phrases he'd been too tired to distinguish. With access to the kitchen and therefore any coffee cut off, Ziggy'd had no choice but to go get dressed so he could make his way to one of the businesses in Corinth that sold fresh brewed coffee so he'd be able to make it through the day. It was on the way out to do this that Scott had been getting pissed over the dent.

Ziggy had had days like this before, where the team were just so upset with him he had to hide or else all the anger radiating from the only thing he had remotely resembling family would just eat him up. It might have been okay if he had Dillon to curl up with during it all, to know at least his boyfriend cared, but they'd had a fight the night before and the older male wasn't even acknowledging his presence today. That'd been the reason the boy was so tired in the morning – he'd been up all night crying like the wimp he was over an argument with his damn boyfriend (and Ziggy was still berating himself heavily for that).

It'd been a stupid fight and Ziggy had started it, technically. Dillon wasn't a very expressive person when it came to emotions, and he was also generally not touchy-feely. His boyfriend, on the other hand, was very expressive and thrived off of physical touches and affection. When he'd grumbled about wishing Dillon gave enough of a crap about him to maybe say he cared back, maybe tell him he loved him, he hadn't expected the man to blow up like that. The Black Ranger had it hard, with trying to search for his lost memories and lost sister, he didn't need his damn boyfriend hassling him about something they both already knew.

The alarms in the base were going off by the time Ziggy reached the kitchen to try and get some food in him. After Scott's tirade that morning, he'd just gone upstairs and gone back to 'bed' and spent the rest of the day on the roof, and hadn't really had anything to eat. But, duty came first so he closed up the fridge, so Ziggy just grabbed his ranger jacket off the hook in the main room and headed out towards where the others were getting into people's cars. He could see Dillon already driving off in the Fury and knew better than to ask either Flynn or Scott for a ride. The young man was about to see if he could drag up that damn scooter they sometimes kept around when he felt Gem and Gemma's hands on his shoulders.

"Come on-" Gem told the young man, a grin on his face as he grabbed the keys to the gold colored car Flynn had gotten him.

"-we're taking Gem's car today." Gemma finished cheerily, taking Ziggy's arm and showing him to their car. He thanked them quietly, hopping in the back and being careful not to mess up Gem's backseat – not that there was much to mess up, as the back was charred from bumpy rides with things that went boom tended to leave it very marked up inside.

The fight was against a deadly new bot that looked like a giant steampunk clock with huge white gloved fists that it punched them with. The beast was ridiculous enough, but with Kilobyte along, it really compounded the strangeness of the whole fight. In the middle, Ziggy got hit with a blast from it – partly because he wasn't able to duck in time, partly because the others were busy with Grinders, and partly because Dillon was feeling a teeny bit vindictive and didn't want to waste his invincibility shield on protecting Ziggy from a monster whose attacks did seemingly nothing to anything they hit. They didn't even blow things up!

Immediately, the boy had felt funny and wobbled a bit on his feet. The world was swimming and he could barely give Dr. K a status report on what had happened to him. What Ziggy didn't know was the only reason he wasn't showing the affects of the attack yet was because his suit partly protected him from stuff like that and the effects wouldn't be able to work till he had de-morphed, just like with the awful aches and pains that came from these fights.

The team managed to eventually push back Kilobyte and destroy this new monster. It had seemed almost too easy, avoiding its attacks and trying not to let the beast ruin too much of the city while huge. Afterward, the team was all very cheery and Flynn was even willing to let Ziggy back in the kitchen to try one of his iced coffees, that morning's trouble seemingly forgotten. Had the younger man not suddenly been called in by Dr. K to be checked for residual energies, Ziggy might have taken him up on that. And had he not been feeling so light headed from no sleep or food all day, he might have noticed how off he felt after de-morphing instead of chalking it up to exhaustion and hunger pangs. In the morning, they all realized how wrong they were about the deadliness of the Attackbot.