Always a Ranger - Part 12
Déjà Evil Part 1: Once There was a Green Ranger…
By Jeannine Trevizo
An
evil white ranger.
I never
thought I’d live to see the day again.
I got up from
the floor where I sat with the rest of the team in the command center/basement
of my house and ran a hand through my hair in frustration. It seems like so
long ago, but all I could think of the second he showed up was me, and how once
upon a time that was *me* being the evil ranger.
God, now I
know how Jason must have felt trying to stop me but not hurt me. It’s just
unbelievable.
I pace the space
in front of where I’d just been sitting, feeling the eyes of my students and
rangers as well as Hayley’s as I tried to figure out
what to do. Except all that I can see, all I can hear is that fight…
We got our
asses handed to us out there. Even me. Hell,
especially me. I don’t know if he was more powerful than an average ranger, but
I know Kira and Ethan weren’t holding back before
they got their powers disrupted. I tried to stop them, warn them, and in the
end, we all ended up on the pavement with our powers fried. The only reason
we’re still here is that whomever this guy is *let* us walk away.
Now, we have
to deal with figuring out whom this guy is, what he
really wants and if we can defeat him or rescue him. And truthfully I don’t
know what to do now.
“Tom?” Hayley calls from her place at the computer and I turn
slowly to look at her. She knows some of the story, but not enough to
understand.
“Keep trying
to figure out who he is and where he came from. Use what little we gathered
from our last meeting and try and sift out the dino
gem influence. We need to find him.”
“What then?”
asks Conner, standing up from his spot on the floor.
“Maybe we can
reason with him,” I explain carefully.
“Reason?” Ethan questions angrily. “He’s evil1 He
tried to kill all of us. You heard him Dr. O. He said there were three rangers,
or I guess four too many. How are we supposed to reason with that kind of
thinking?”
“It may not
be as clear cut as you make it out Ethan,” I try to clarify, feeling my own
surety at my statement trickle away like melting snow.
“What, is he
not evil?” Kira says, still sitting on the floor,
staring up at me, looking for some kind of answer that will help them make
sense of it all.
“It could be
a lot of things. But until we find out more, we can’t assume that he’s just
evil and destroy him.”
They all look
at me with uncomprehending stares, and I shake my head in despair and anger. I
wasn’t supposed to have to deal with this ever again. It was supposed to never
happen. I was going to get all the gems and make sure all the rangers were on
the right side.
I wasn’t
supposed to fail.
“Look, Hayley, work on the scans. Ethan, you can see if you can
help. Kira, Conner, you can see if there’s any
significant damage to the morphers…”
“And you Dr.
O? What are you doing?” Kira asks, standing up to
walk towards me, her eyes concerned.
“I have to
make a phone call.”
With that
said, I turned towards the stairs and head up to the main floor of the house. I
feel like my legs are coated with lead each time I lift them to ascend each
step. It seems to take forever before I actually open the trap door and move
into the living room.
Downstairs I
have no doubts that the rest of the group was most likely feeling the need to
stick together, confused by this turn of events. This was *their* first
experience with an evil ranger. I knew it had to be hitting them all hard. But
for me, I’d been here before… and on the other side. My first instinct had been
to get them all squared away with something to do, keep their minds occupied
while I got a beer and called Kim.
I walk slowly
from the stairs to the fridge, hauling out the last of my MGD’s
and using the palm of my hand on the kitchen counter to get the cap off. A few
quick swigs and nearly half the bottle later, I was ready to make the call I
both dreaded and desired. Dumping the rest of the beer in the sink, I dropped
the bottle in the trash and headed back to the living room.
Grabbing the
phone from the charger, I held it with one hand, using my thumb to press the
buttons in a slow, familiar pattern. The other end started to ring, and I found
myself continuing to pace. As I walked back and forth across the floor, I
brought the earpiece to my head. It didn’t take long before I heard the other
end of the line pick up.
“Hello?”
“Kim,” I
breathed quietly, the weight of everything sitting heavily on my shoulders.
The moment I
say her name, I can almost feel the tension on her side of the line. She knows
me like no other. Maybe better than I know myself. She is my soul, and if
anyone or anything could begin to even scratch the surface of my conflicting
emotions, the woman on the other end of the line can.
“Tommy?
What’s wrong?” she asks me in a frightened tone.
“We’ve got
trouble.”
“What kind?”
“An
evil ranger. An evil
*white* ranger,” I force out, my spare hand raking at my hair again.
“Oh God,” she
murmurs, and I silently agree with her statement. “Who?”
“Don’t know
yet. You know how it is, it could be anybody.”
“Maybe you
can identify who it is. You could check their energy signature, or how about a
mystical aura? Anyone with glowing eyes?”
“It’s still
too early for a lot of that. Hayley and I tried a
scan… the dino gem merged with the guy’s DNA. I don’t
know if we can figure out who it is that way. And I don’t know how to search
any other way. I mean, you guys were the ones searching before, and then you
found me, remember? Anyway, I asked Hayley and Ethan
to try and figure something out.”
There was a
pause, and I thought for a moment that Kim didn’t want to discuss it anymore
when she spoke up quietly, wrenching my heart with the concern in her voice.
“Are you
okay?”
I felt my
throat choke up for a minute, and I couldn’t speak. God how this woman knows
me…
“No,
not really Kim. I
thought that I’d left all that behind, you know? The pain,
the guilt, the memories. But as soon as he showed up, it all just hit
me, *wham*, straight in the gut. Of course, the fact that he blocked my staff
in mid swing and then fried out my powers might have been partially to blame of
the pain.”
I could hear
her unspoken concern for my well being. As a ranger, Kim knows how bruised and
battered you can get in a fight, even protected by the ‘armor’ of our uniforms.
And she knows that my statement about getting my powers short circuited was
just the tip of the iceberg in regards to what the team probably went through.
You don’t
know the half of it Beautiful.
“Is everybody
okay? Are you going to be able to go after him?”
“Yeah. We all got banged up, Kira and Ethan worst, and we’re all a bit power deprived
right at the moment. But everything will get fixed. We’ll figure it out.”
“You have to
find this guy, and fast. If it’s a spell, then whoever he is, he needs to be
freed before he does too much damage,” she urges, and I feel myself start to
give voice to the question that’s been plaguing me since the white ranger
showed up.
“What if that
isn’t the case?”
“I don’t
understand.”
“I mean, what
if the white ranger isn’t good? If he really is evil, what do we do then? Do we
destroy him to get the gem back and find a new person to hand over the power
to? And if we do that, how do we live with that? Or do we just have to keep
fighting him along with Mesogog until they give up?”
I know that
I’m not being fair, asking her to tell me what to do. She’s not the leader.
It’s not her responsibility. Hell, if this person is evil, and has a dino gem, it’s *my* fault for them ever being found in the
first place.
“I can’t tell
you what to do Tommy,” she says softly, “You’re the one who’s there. Maybe once
you figure out what the white ranger wants, you can figure out if you need to
destroy him or not.”
“He wants us
out of the picture, or so he says,” I relate despondently.
“So did you,
once upon a time,” she softly reminds me, and I feel my heart crack in my
chest.
There never
seems to be a day when I don’t wonder what would have happened if Rita hadn’t
made me her evil green ranger. If I hadn’t treated Kim the way I did back when
we’d first met. If I hadn’t attacked Angel Grove or the whole
ranger team. If I hadn’t nearly killed Jase on
the beach before he saved me.
Would I be
here today? Would I have made the life I have? Would I have been able to
connect with Kim like I have? But those were questions I couldn’t answer. All I
could do was deal with the here and now. And find out if this new player was
really like me, if I was dealing with ranger déjà vu, or if he really wasn’t on
my side.
Either way,
this wasn’t something that was ever supposed to happen to me,
or another team if I could help it.
“Why did this
happen Kim?” I blurt out suddenly, looking for answers
I know don’t exist.
“I don’t know
what you mean.”
“I’m their
mentor, I *made* them. It was hard enough nearly forcing them into being
rangers, since they’d bonded with the gems and we were under attack… but I
never wanted what happened to me to happen to anyone else. For this team to
have to face the same pain and conflict that you, Jase
and the others had to. If someone’s been forced to be an evil ranger… it’s my
fault Kim.”
“What?”
“Mesogog is here after me. My work, my
knowledge. If I had given it to them…”
“Thomas James
Oliver, don’t you dare finish that sentence!” she nearly yells through the
phone, and I feel myself freeze at her use of my full name.
Okay, I think
I remember Kim this pissed off at me on possibly one occasion. With that in
mind, I hold my tongue as my love imparts her wisdom to me. That was why I
called her, wasn’t it?
“You have
never done anything but try and do the right thing. If you had given in to Mesogog, you’d probably be dead, and the Earth enslaved by
now, or destroyed. Don’t you *ever* feel guilty for doing what had to be done.”
“But…”
“*No*. Bad things happen to good people. Look
at every bad thing that has happened to you over the years. Did you deserve to
be turned in to the evil green ranger? Did you deserve to lose the green ranger
powers? Did you deserve to have Lord Zedd hate you
with everything he had? Did you deserve to have me leave you? Did you deserve
what Prince Gasket put you through? Do you deserve what Mesogog
is doing now? *No*.”
I stop and
listen carefully to what she’s saying. Yes, it all makes sense. And no, I
didn’t do anything to deserve the pain I’ve been through over the years. But I
still feel guilty over the fact that a ranger exists, possibly enslaved because
of what I’ve done in the last couple of years.
“Kimberly, I
understand what you’re saying, but it still doesn’t change the fact that this
guy might be under a spell because of *me*.”
“And it’s not
fair,” she simply states.
“No.”
“Life isn’t
fair Tommy. If it was, Trini would still be alive.
You and I would have been able to make things work all those years ago so we
wouldn’t have had to spend all this time alone. Things happen, and we can’t
always fix it. We’re human beings and rangers, not gods.”
“Still, this dino gem… if I had found it…”
“Yes, you
might have prevented it. But it didn’t happen. You can’t second-guess what you
could have done. You have to deal with the now. You know in your heart that
this ranger isn’t truly evil. You know that from being there yourself. Find out
who he is. Help him. And maybe in the process, you’ll help yourself too.”
As Kim says
this, I wonder, would rescuing and breaking the evil ranger’s spell actually
help me rid myself of some of those demons? I couldn’t break the spell on
myself before. Jason had to do it by breaking the Sword of Destruction. Could
my helping the white ranger finally give me peace regarding my own past?
I didn’t know
the answer to that, except that I knew I had to try. If for nothing else, to
help the team deal with this, and to save this guy the years of pain I had.
“Thanks Kim,”
I said softly, putting every emotion I had towards the love of my life into
those two simple words.
“You’re
welcome,” she replies with a smoky tone, and I feel my heart swell at the
thought that I am loved by this wonderful woman.
“Beautiful, I
hate to say this…”
“But you need
to get back down with the others and figure out a battle plan,” she states, and
I smile. She knows me *too* well.
“Yeah. I really should see if I can help.”
“Go.”
“I love you.”
“I love you
too Tommy. Be careful.”
With that, we
hang up, and I turn to look at the trap door leading back downstairs. The
battle may not be over, but I feel like with this little extra support from
this woman, one who has been where I stand now, trying to rescue a ranger that
I can get us *all* through this.
I take the
first step towards the stairs, and with each one, I feel more confident. Maybe
we can get through this. Stop the white ranger and maybe bring him over to our
side.
And maybe
when we do, I can finally let go of the pain that being evil left on me all
those years ago.
-End-
Due to the 3
part series, I’ll try not to have to re-write each of these parts. Depending on
the TV schedule, I’ll have pt 2 of the story out as soon as I see part 2 of
White Thunder.
tbc....
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