Disclaimer: Do I even have to say it? Yeah, I guess I do . . . Not mine, someone else's toys, if they were mine Billy would never have left, etc, etc. and so forth.

Author's Note: So there's been a delay, partly because I'm prepping a partner for trial, partly because this part decided to do its own thing and fought every attempt I made to beat it into submission. The result . . . well I'll let you be the judge.

The Sweetest Thing

(Aisha)

The first time he sees her, she's screaming in pain—ear-shattering, earth-moving shrieks that he thinks will collapse the already unstable complex down around their heads. And she won't stop, he knows she won't stop, because the screwdriver that he plunged through her left shoulder must hurt like a sonofabitch.

He just screams back—Who are you? Where'd you come from? How did you get in here?—keeps demanding answers, all the while digging the metal shaft deeper, tearing through muscle and tendon with abandon. It's not until what she's screaming manages to penetrate the haze of adrenaline and fear cocooning his brain that he lets up. Still, she keeps repeating it, turns it into a whispered mantra as she works to hold herself still so he can remove the screwdriver without doing anymore damage.

"Billy, it's Aisha. Billy, it's Aisha. It's Aisha . . . Aisha . . . Billy."

He'll never tell her that it was his name and not hers that made him stop. Hers means little at first. Even after he's lowered her to the ground and ripped strips from her shirt to staunch the bleeding, he still can't place her. The name comes first. It floats up from the seemingly bottomless abyss of half-forgotten memory, but her face . . . her face stays unfamiliar. He can't reconcile the taut, hardened planes her features have become with the ones he remembers.

It's not until two days later, when she smiles at him over a can of beans that he finds her. Months go by before he stops chastising himself for it, but he does eventually. After all, in this time-stream they've never met.

She doesn't take offense; being forgotten is what saved her. They come to that determination as he patches her up, stitches her together with the surgical thread, bandages her with the gauze, and pumps her full of the antibiotics and painkillers he looted two pharmacies and a hospital to find. He talks to her to keep her mind off the pain, and his off the damage. Together they piece together the story with the fragments each holds, and though gaping holes remain, the framework is terrifying enough.

She was in New York when the first attacks came. If she closes her eyes, she can still see the fires, feel the crush of bodies as people fight to make their way across the bridges by any means necessary. In the end she estimates the brutality of people desperate to survive claimed more lives than any alien firepower. At that remark he starts to remove his hands from her shoulder, but she stops him. Because the world has gone mad, he's the one to flinch at the contact, not her.

He got Tommy's message on Aquitar, months after it was sent because, even though the Red Ranger had somehow managed to put his hands on the strongest transmitter in the Northwestern United States, it wasn't strong enough. By the time he came back it was too late. Maybe it was too late when Tommy sent it. He doesn't know.

From there, the stories merge, becoming variations on a theme. They made their way here because it seemed logical, because they couldn't think of anywhere else to go. Neither of them knew that it had been destroyed long before this.

And in the end it was the ignorance that kept them alive. They were the only ones to run far enough. He skipped the planet; she skipped the time stream.

He tells her to get some sleep, save her strength. She doesn't argue, doesn't ask whether he'll be there when she wakes up. They both know he will be. In the last hour they've come to an unspoken agreement, formed a new family. They'll stick together. They'll survive.

For a few weeks they remain rooted to the wreckage of the Power Chamber, sleeping in a doorway that leads to nowhere because it's the most structurally sound part of the complex, cooking their food over a tiny constant fire that rests in a spot that he thinks once held the viewing globe, and trying to ignore the fact that as each day goes by, no one comes.

They fall into a routine. Aisha gives him lists of supplies and sends him out to scavenge from among the nearby communities. He comes back to find new amenities she's added to their lives, ingenious things she's done to create pillows, direct smoke, provide light. The first time he kisses her on the forehead before leaving, he realizes how oddly provincial they've become, a regular post-apocalyptic Ozzie and Harriet.

By the second week, he's discovered that his talent with machinery extends to hot-wiring cars and disabling home alarms. By the third he's stopped calling out when he enters a home. Nobody ever responds.

In the fourth week, things change, the list Aisha gives him is simple—weapons, ammunition, and fertilizer—it only takes him a moment to realize what she's got planned. Yes, she's the planner, the leader. In another life, another time, their roles might have been reversed, but he's looked into her eyes, watched her stare at the walls of the complex, and he knows she can make the decisions he can't. She wants to live more. Not because she has something more to live for, just because she's fought longer and harder to be here and she'll be damned if she just lies down now.

The fact that she's a fighter shouldn't have surprised him, but it did, and still does at times. It makes him wonder about Africa, about whether that little spot of peaceful land she chose on her quest remained that way over the next decade. He watches her dismantle and reassemble one of the semi-automatics he brought back with the cool efficiency of someone who'd done it many times over, and decides he doesn't want to know.

"What?"

She's staring at him, watching him watch her. And despite her question, he can tell that she knows exactly what. The word is more of an invitation, a test. He could ask the question, could comment on her familiarity with firearms in a way that conveyed disapproval, could do any number of things that would allow him to extricate himself, to draw a line and say 'I go this far and no further. I'm not willing to follow you down.'

He hands her a rifle, watching carefully as a she checks it, so that he can replicate the motions.

Because he'll follow her down, as far as she goes.

And he does. He falls with her, into her.

If this were a world where children still laughed and only evil men committed murder, he might call what they have love. But he's held a man at gunpoint and known he'd pull the trigger, and the last time they saw a child, well . . . Love didn't survive the war. They simply have the core that's left. Its softness burned away by the fires. Its passion cooled by the body's other needs. Its selflessness tempered by the necessary selfishness of survival. Hard, jagged, cold, it is an emotion re-forged, for which there is no word.

But it is theirs, and they have it.

It happens by increments—inches, minutes, drops—and if he thinks about it, he could catalogue the steps, map them out the way she does his scars.

When she buries her head in his shoulder so she doesn't have to watch the shell of their one-time safe-haven implode, and for the first time he thinks he might be keeping her afloat.

When a minute later she walks away without looking back, and he thinks the only thing keeping Aisha together is Aisha.

Shrapnel, left arm—he under-estimated the strength of the blast.

The first time he moves inside her, his eyes closed, her hands balled into fists against his back, their bodies barely touching.

When he breathes a name against her skin that isn't hers, and she doesn't stop.

When the name she cries out isn't his either.

Bullet graze, right shoulder—there are others out there, just as desperate to survive, just as untrusting.

The first time she helps him strip a camp, going through the rations with a clinical eye, making him take the jacket off the father's body because it's warmer than what he has.

When they stay that night to bury the bodies.

When she bites the inside of her mouth so hard, it draws blood, but that still doesn't stop the tears.

When she lets him watch her cry.

Home-made spear through his left shoulder—she likes the poetic-justice of that one.

When they stop in what he thinks might be Arkansas, and though she asks the same questions she always does, her voice holds no hope.

When later that night, she admits what they've both been thinking. "They're not out here. We won't find them."

Her eyes hold no more grief than his. In their minds they'd buried the others long ago. He thinks it's better this way, thinks Tommy and Jason should have been allowed to maintain their honor, Kim her goodness, there's only so far some people can bend before they break, before they shatter. Had Aisha stayed he thinks she would have been like the others. After all, it's why Zordon chose them all as Rangers.

He wonders how he slipped through, got lost in the shuffle. Perhaps this thing he's grown into was too young, too half-formed to be recognized. But now he now thinks he knows why he couldn't take the Gold Rangers powers. His body didn't reject the powers. They rejected him, saw within and knew he would always find a way to bend a little further.

When he looks over at her, staring at the wall, planning their next move and realizes he's glad she went away, went through whatever she did, glad she became flexible, too.

Knife wound, down his right calf—he stops trusting children.

When her fingers scrabble at his face, thumbs pressing against his eyelids in a not-quite empty threat, "Look at me, damn you! Just look at me!"

And he does, and in her rage she's so fiercely beautiful he can't bring himself to ever close his eyes again.

The first time she claims him so completely that only word he knows anymore is her name.

Rock, left temple—he can't blame them, he had the man at gunpoint, were the roles reversed he doubts he'd be so kind, or at the very least his aim would be better.

When she looks over at him, her eyes glassy and unfocused from the very nice bottle of . . . whatever it is they're drinking . . . and murmurs the answer to a question he never asked. "Charlie, his name was Charlie."

And somehow he picks up the thread they dropped months ago. "Before or after the guns?"

She pauses, considering, then responds, "Charlie was the guns."

It's not an answer, not really, but he fingers the .38 tucked in his waistband, the .38 she put there, and realizes it is.

When later that night, she rolls on her side to stare at him in the firelight, and asks, without rancor or demand, "When will you forgive me?"

"For what?"

"For what you've always held against me. For not being her." It's not about now. It's about then, that time that doesn't exist, that space of never when he used to watch her, watch her fight, watch her run, watch her come towards him in another's uniform, and allow himself to blur the lines, to ignore the inconsistencies. He never had forgiven her for being the wrong face under the helmet.

"It never happened. It's not important."

"So that's a never." And for the first time she actually looks vulnerable, not very, but enough. He reaches up to touch her face.

"From the first moment I saw you, I never wanted you to be anyone else." It could be romantic, except he's talking about the now, but in this now it's true, for he would never wish this world on Trini, would never wish Trini to see this version of him.

Because Aisha knows what he's saying in all its many facets, she sleeps on the other side of the room.

And he's lonely with her so far away.

When he brings back a brightly-colored scarf for her the next day, the kind she's taken to wrapping her hair in, and she doesn't ask what it's for, doesn't ask where he got it, just trades it out for her current mud-splattered one. He's glad the red camouflages most of the blood.

Her forgiveness is cheaply bought.

Gunshot wound, abdomen—he holds her hand to his skin, presses it against the mess of blood and flesh, and whispers, "I'm sorry there won't be a scar."

"It doesn't matter," she whispers back, and he knows that although he was never the reason she lived, he might be her reason to die, to finally lay down her burdens. This is his gift to her.

No he can't pinpoint the moment, can't say when exactly he fell into this not-love. Sometimes he thinks he slipped, slowly, gently, sometimes he thinks he tumbled head first. Perhaps he fell from the moment he first saw her, the moment he first drew blood. But he has fallen, and as he presses his lips against hers, kisses her for the first time, he realizes that although there is precious little left that he won't do, for her he is capable of anything.

He draws the edge of the blade along her carotid artery with perfect, surgical precision.

In another world, another time, it would have been a pretty thought.

But in another world, another time, he would never have tasted her relief on his tongue, and it is the sweetest thing he has ever tasted.

- + - + - + - + -

I honestly wasn't sure I was going to post this, but Dagmar encouraged me, told me that despite it's darkness it deserved life, so if you like it, thank Dagmar, if you hate it, blame me, I wrote the freaking thing.

So there we go. I finished a fic. Comments and Criticisms always appreciated. At least tell me your favorite part.

Panache

P.S. If you're a writer and any of this has struck you with plot bunnies, please join us. Just tell me you did so I can add you to the C2 archive.