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Rocky misses Aisha.
Sometimes he feels like he doesn’t miss her enough; they’d been friends since they were six, he thinks, but it’s hard to remember sometimes. The power of the Zeo crystal makes it easy to forget that something—someone—is missing.
After Tanya finds her parents, no one talks about Aisha any more.
Aisha had a pool party for her ninth birthday. Rocky remembers, because he didn’t know how to swim. She spent most of her party teaching him.
When they were fifteen, the year before—Before—they got their lifeguard certifications together.
He clings to the memory as he sits in the sun, watching over the children and families splashing about in the lake.
There aren’t any pictures of her. Rocky thinks there should be. He has one from Halloween, when they were twelve; he and Adam are dressed as Mario and Luigi (the irony of him in red and Adam in green amuses him now), and the picture is offset, like there should have been someone dressed in a sparkly dress to Rocky’s other side.
But there’s no one there, and he can’t help but think your princess is in another castle.
He starts to forget her voice. Whenever he tries to remember, it comes out sounding like Tanya, instead. Sometimes, he doesn’t even realize that it’s wrong, until Tanya laughs and it sounds nothing like he thinks it should.
Sometimes, he lies awake at night wondering why she didn’t say goodbye to them. Sometimes he thinks it’s better that the last thing she ever said to him wasn’t goodbye. This way, he thinks, maybe they’ll still meet again.
Rocky passes his powers on to Justin. Tanya and Adam start dating. He goes to Stone Canyon, to a park the three of them played in as children. He’s started to wonder if Aisha had ever been real. He thinks maybe there would be something there, some reminder.
Shawna is sitting on a swing, tracing patterns in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. She looks up at him as he approaches, and he sees something in her eyes, some memory that she doesn’t even know she has.
He sits, leaving an empty swing between them. He sees understanding in her tight smile, and it’s reassuring to both of them.
They sit in silence, because there’s nothing else to say.
Adam comes to him a week, maybe two, after giving up his powers. He looks tired, bone weary in a way that Rocky remembers from the spring.
“Do you remember...” Adam starts, twisting at a braided cord around his wrist, black-and-red-and-yellow. She had laughed as they’d fumbled their way through making the bracelets.
“Yes,” he says, and Adam looks relieved to know he probably isn’t going crazy. Rocky can appreciate the feeling.
“Do you think she does?”
Rocky looks away and shrugs.
It takes him three years to save enough money to buy a plane ticket.
Adam surprises him when he shows up with a stack of survival gear and the twin to Rocky’s ticket.
Neither of them knows where to start looking, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The sun in Africa is hot and bright, so by the time they reach the sixth village, Adam’s skin has darkened and Rocky’s hair has started to bleach blond.
After three weeks of searching, they start to give up hope.
The airport terminal is cold and sterile looking, after a month and a half spent on the African plains. The colors on Adam’s bracelet have faded, leaving a tan line underneath; the Halloween picture has a permanent crease from where Rocky has kept it tucked in a pocket.
“I thought it would be easier than this,” Adam says, knees pulled up as he leans back against his pack.
Rocky had thought so too. It was supposed to be like in the movies; they go looking for their lost friend and they’re drawn together by some unknown power for a happy reunion. But it was the Power that had pulled them apart in the first place.
Rocky doesn’t know what to say to Adam, though, so he doesn’t say anything.
He has strange dreams on the flight home, of drowning in a pool because no one ever taught him how to swim, of watching someone else take Jason’s place as the Red Ranger because he’d never believed in himself enough to follow his instincts, of a world where they had never met. He wakes as the plane begins its descent, and he wonders if maybe they weren’t dreams after all.
The airport here is busier, a thousand people headed in a thousand directions and all of them are strangers. It takes nearly three hours after their plane lands before they make it to the baggage claim.
Their bags are off the carousel, and there’s a woman standing next to them, her arms crossed. She’s tapping one foot impatiently. “Took you two long enough,” she says, with a grin that’s brighter than the African sun.
Rocky remembers Aisha.