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They’d won.
The Legendary Battle—fuck Gosei, they weren’t legends, they were people and hero-worship had no place in the Power Rangers, had anyone even run a background check on this guy? Who the fuck was this guy? How did anyone know he hadn’t brought the Warstar here himself?—was over.
The rest of the war was over too. A landing armada didn’t usually only try to take a single point. Rita and Zedd had specific grudges against Zordon. The Warstar did not.
And now Tommy was staring at a double of himself and five children that he still couldn’t stop thinking of as his.
They looked suspicious of each other and tired and they barely reached out to tap fists, let alone leaned on each other and laughed like a normal team. They were stilted, awkward, and Tommy knew every reason why.
So he walked up to his robot double and punched him in the face.
* * *
Conner was Not Happy.
Conner was a generally simple man, all things considered. His prime directive was Protect the Team. Kira and Ethan (and, yeah, Trent when he wasn’t stabbing everyone in the back) were his team. They supported each other. Dr. O supported them. That was just how the world worked.
But at the moment, the world was not working properly.
Some of the Dr. Os were some kind of hologram or Force ghost or something—apparitions that appeared at the start of battle and disappeared when the battle was over. But there were two left: Original Green and Dino Black. And Green had just punched Black in the face.
Trent—because he knew this, and everyone knew he knew it—leaped between them. Conner reached out a hand and yanked him away, training his blaster on Original Green. The real one was Black. Conner knew Black. Black had been with them through everything, had always been there, Black was the real Dr. O—
Who turned with half his face falling away to reveal a shining metal skull.
Original Green pushed Conner’s blaster down before he could shoot. “Don’t shoot him.” Green said, in the Leader Tone that he’d used during the battle. “This is Tom. My robot double.”
“What the fuck?” Kira demanded.
“Robot double?” Ethan and Trent echoed, vying to see who could sound the more pissed off.
Original Green sighed. “Come on. I gotta fix him up.”
Then Black pulled back his fist and took a swing.
* * *
Trent knew fights.
Him versus his father. Him versus Mesegog. Elsa versus both Anton and Mesegog. Zeltrax’s occasional bitchfight with Trent. Fights were wired into Trent’s blood now, tattooed underneath his skin in a pattern of violence he could never
(never deserved to be rid of, traitor, liar, filth)
get rid of.
But he knew how to break up the fight. He had the raw muscle mass to do it, too—he and Ethan weightlifted together in high school, and he still kept up a decent workout routine. Being a wall of muscle was just good advantage, and whether Trent was in the art or business world, he needed advantages.
So Trent had, not enough strength to pull apart Original Green and an android, but very close.
“Stop!” Trent barked out. He did not often use this tone, because it was a battle-commander tone he’d learned to order around Tyrannodrones, but at this stage Trent was willing to break out Dog Whisperer techniques, because fuck it, the others were not going to have the same marks as Trent.
(of course not. You were weak. They’re not as weak as you, letting fighting hurt them. It was nothing. You’re just weak.)
Both combatants stared at him.
“Enough.” Trent growled. “No. More. Hitting. You’re done. Got it?”
They glanced at each other, and then Original Green nodded. Tom—Dr. Oliver?—just shrugged. “I need to find Hayley.”
“Hayley knew?” Ethan said, sounding utterly scandalized.
“No.” Dr. Oliver ground out, clearly pissed, sounding exactly the same and looking exactly the same except half his face melted off, and Trent would be worried about nightmares except his were worse than just a melted face. “But she can help fix me.”
“So can I.” Original Green said. “I…didn’t realize you got shot in the face.”
“And that would have mattered?” Dr. Oliver asked, just as if he were questioning a student. Okay, as if he were talking to Conner about misplaced homework, actually, condescending and arrogant and this was not, at all, going to end well.
“I can help.” Trent interrupted. Both combatants looked at him again. “Tell me what to do. I’m not a Blue, but I can do grunt work.”
Dr. Oliver considered him, half of his face moving, then said abruptly, “It doesn’t matter. The real Tommy Oliver’s here. Have fun.”
Dr. Oliver walked away.
The team
(not your team, never yours, even Kira hesitates when you meet now, they were never yours, you lost them the moment you lied, was your father worth it, how dare you betray your father, traitor to all of them, you are truly worthless)
stared at Original Green.
He sighed.
“Okay. Let’s talk.”
* * *
“So, just to preface?” Ethan said to break the tension. Everyone stared at him like he was going to pull a Trent, but hey, they were listening. “If this turns out to be another comic-book thing, I am so not down with that.”
“What do you mean?” Tommy asked. (Were they allowed to call him that? This was Tommy Oliver. And Dr. O would kill them.)
(If he hadn’t just totally given up on them, anyway.)
“Robot’s secretly evil, and the inherently good human swoops in to save the day.” Ethan explained. “Dude, do you not read sci-fi? Because that’s a thing, and it’s gross. AIs are as much people as we are.”
Original Green (that was safest) considered that, then nodded. “You’re right. It is. And that’s not what I’m here to do.” He caught their eyes. “I want to explain to you what happened.”
…That got everyone’s attention.
“Do you know about the Turbo team?” Green started. Blank stares. “Their mentor—our mentor--was a woman named Dimetrea. She came up with the concept of robot doubles. The Turbo teams got the first, and those were actually scrapped—bugs that couldn’t entirely be worked out. But I and a few of the other originals also got doubles.”
Well, Ethan had been living in a sci-fi since high school. This was at least interesting.
“The idea was that they would serve as backup when we had to go into battle or offplanet. And yes, that happened to almost every team. After yours, we stopped bringing teams together—I’m getting ahead of myself.” Green sighed and ran a hand through his short, dyed hair. “We realized they were sentient after a few weeks, and after a hell of a showdown with Dimetrea, gave them alternate identities so they could live wherever they wanted. Most of them left Earth. Tom elected to stay, said he liked Earth. So we kept in touch and basically went our separate ways.”
“And let me guess.” Ethan said, and there was snark in his voice, because of Alpha 5 and Alpha 6, because of Mack, because of the robots being developed that were being taught to deny orders that could hurt them because someone, somewhere, was on the brink of realizing that an AI was a child not a servant, and like fuck Ethan, a goddamn Power Ranger, was going to do any less than honor sentience in others. “He kidnapped you in order to take over your life and make you be the double to see how you liked it, muahahaha?”
Green snickered. “Actually, I asked him to housesit for a week while I was in college.”
…what?
“What?” Trent echoed. (Because Trent, traitor as he’d been in high school, was still a brilliant, brilliant man and every inch the best partner in crime Ethan could ask for—besides Kira and Conner, anyway.)
Green sighed. “I fought a lot of people. One of them was General Venjix of the Machine Empire. I thought we killed him, but we’d only destroyed one layer of his personality—Layer 2 was even more homicidal, and looking for targets on Earth. Wanted to cause an apocalypse. I got myself captured trying to stop him, and three months later when I came to Earth, Tom had started work with Anton Mercer.”
Interesting. Veeerrry interesting. Ethan listened, waited. This was getting good.
“We argued. I pretty much just wanted my identity back, and I was going to introduce myself to Anton and try to start over, but…” Green sighed. “He turned himself into Mesegog. I tried to get to the Dino Gems, but he had a version of the invisiportal network that wasn’t nearly as good. It sucked me into a wormhole. I can do a little magic, so I was able to see what was going on, but I wasn’t able to escape until about a month ago.”
“So Dr. Oliver…isn’t you?” Conner asked suspiciously.
“He has the same information, but not the same experiences. We’re different people.” Green explained, and he got points for that in Ethan’s mental tally of Who Is Not A Jerk. “And…he did mentor you. He does care about you. I just…” Green sighed. “He’s completely destroyed a lot of important plans I had, not just for you guys but for our entire corps. And now I have to connect four different teams to a network that’s been running off someone else for seven years. And you guys…”
When Green looked at them, there was a helpless quality in his eyes. “You were never supposed to fight each other.” He said quietly. “You were supposed to be a team, and I should have been there for you. I wish I could have been.”
All righty then.
* * *
They were different men.
It took a few hours to pinpoint the differences, but when Kira did it was…eye-opening. Why hadn’t she done this in high school? Why hadn’t she realized—they had flaws, they both did, Tommy was a jokester and struggled to talk about feelings but Dr. O, he was petty and jealous and seemed to have trouble thinking of Trent in any terms other than ‘traitor’.
High school. Everything that had gone wrong in their team. Conner had been part of the problem, but Kira had missed how much Dr. O was part of it.
The stranger wearing Dr. O’s face just made it clearer.
Kira watched from a corner as Tommy drank with his first team, and watched as Dr. O, newly repaired, drank alone. She leaned against Trent and pressed a kiss to his neck, because she owed him so many apologies now, she’d been Yellow and hadn’t realized her team was flying apart.
(She’d always owed him a thousand apologies. Intertwined with love was guilt. Always. Because they had rejected him, so often, had hurt him so badly when he’d been so vulnerable, and she hadn’t really realized until they’d shared a bed and she could hear his nightmares.)
Trent kissed her cheek, gentle and sweet—always so sweet, she loved that about him, the undercurrent of innocence and romance beneath the shadows in him—and stood up, downing his drink. Kira looked up. “Where are you going?”
“To fix this.”
“That’s my job.” Kira said.
Trent grinned down at her, without any humor at all. “I’m a Sixth. He’ll respond better to me.”
And once again, Kira had no idea how to properly do her job, because he was right, but it was the Yellow’s job—and Pink’s, but there was no Pink for the Dino team, only her—to keep her team stable, together. And Kira had failed in high school and was failing again.
…If she was going to fail, she realized, she might as well fail well. She sighed and nodded. “Let me know if you need help.”
Trent smiled, an honest one this time, and went off.
Kira glanced at her drink, gulped the last of it down, and decided she really needed a new one.
* * *
“Tom Oliver, what the hell are you doing?”
Tom looked up from his drink. Hayley was sitting across from him. And Tom was…well, entirely failing to get drunk, because robots couldn’t actually impair themselves the same ways humans could.
If Tom was entirely honest with himself, he was just waiting for his kids to forget about him and leave. Because that was where this was going to end anyway.
Hayley sighed. “Okay. Confession time. I knew you were hiding something, and I wasn’t sure what, so I didn’t put pressure on you.” She leaned in and met his eyes. “Because I thought there was a possibility someone was turning you evil.”
Tom winced. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” He started, but really, how could he finish that sentence? ‘But I just wanted some friends of my own?’ How pathetic was that?
“Oliver, your team—your team—is sitting at opposing corners of this bar, trying to get drunk alone because they have no clue how to work together. Because you decided that Trent was, for some godforsaken reason, not going to be part of your team.”
Tom blinked.
“I don’t know what you were thinking and I don’t care. This is the first time we’ve all been together in half a decade. Half a decade. Do you know how often prior teams meet?” Hayley demanded, and there was a gleam in her eye that was Not Good, Tom knew that from experience. That was the sort of gleam that ended with Tom buying Hayley please-don’t-murder-me flowers or something. “Most of them? Every day! And your team has been falling apart for five fucking years!”
Tom sighed. “It wasn’t me. Conner doesn’t like Trent—“
“Bullshit.” Hayley snapped. “It wasn’t Conner who said Trent would have to give up his morpher over Mesegog’s identity. That was all you. And by the way, Conner was seventeen! And hero-worshipped you! The most you did was tell him once not to be too hard on Trent!”
Tom considered that. “Why didn’t you say anything then?”
Hayley set down a thumb drive. “Put it in your phone.”
Tom sighed and picked it up, scanning the contents. “No need…oh.” It was. Full of files logging behaviors that didn’t match the footage he’d gotten for the video diary. Personality traits and psychological profiles and damn, this was well-researched.
And a glimmer of understanding came in his head.
“You wanted Trent separate from them in case I hurt them.” Tom said slowly. “In case I was evil, someone could stop me—“
“Oh my fucking god, do you hear yourself?” Hayley snapped. “He was seventeen! I did say something, many somethings, you just weren’t listening to me! And I have had it with this! There is nothing wrong with you, you are not impaired, you are just being an absolute dick, so you will go over to your team and start figuring out how to patch this up, or so help me I will rewire your entire house to form a loudspeaker playing nothing but Britney Spears and Barney music twenty-four seven!”
Tom considered this. “He did betray us.”
“He. Was. A. Child.” Hayley hissed. “He loved his father and made the sort of mistake teenagers are neurologically hardwired to make. Do you need the entire biology lesson on how the human brain grows? Because trust me, right now, you really do not want that from me.”
Tom considered that, too. He might have been an anthropologist, but basic biology was required in college…and he was programmed with several different sciences anyway.
He glanced at the teenagers.
Conner was trying to catch either Jason or Tommy’s attention, a look on his face that hinted at intense desire and focus if you could read microexpressions. Ethan was alone, playing with his phone. Trent had wandered back to the bar after Tommy had rebuffed him. Kira was trying her damndest to get drunk.
“Stop using Tommy as an excuse.” Hayley said, quiet and intense and passionate. “You’re not him. You don’t have to be him. You have to be an adult.”
Tom sighed. Then he started searching his programming for the relevant social skills. After a minute, he got up and gestured to his Rangers.
If he was going to start with anything, probably best to start at the beginning.