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After the five of them save the world, Jason invites Billy over for a sleepover.
Jason watches the five of them disperse from the mines after they put the Zords away. Kimberly and Zack both walk like zombies ahead of him. Trini trails behind the pair, straightening her beanie and holding her phone up to her ear, swearing quietly in Spanish as she listens to voicemail after voicemail. Billy walks beside him, saying, “I just have to run home and get my tooth brush, my medication, fresh underwear, and —”
Jason cuts him off with a hand on the arm. He says, “Whatever you need, man. Tell your mom I say hi.”
Billy nods and smiles.
Jason gets home after an hour of thinking he’ll collapse at any moment. He’s halfway up the driveway when his Dad bursts through the front door. He grabs Jason in a huge hug, and Jason slowly hugs him back, the image of his Dad frightened and confused at the battle soaring to the forefront of his mind. They stand like that for a long time before finally heading inside.
When Billy arrives an hour later for the sleepover Jason is sitting on the deck in their backyard with a beer as his Dad barbecues hamburgers and his sister and his Mom set the table.
Jason doesn’t say much that evening, so tired that he just smiles around at his family, listens to his sister talk about the battle with amazement, his parents discuss the wreckage of the town and the economic set backs.
The boys go to bed immediately after dinner.
-
After the five of them save the world, Kimberly sleeps for 2 days straight.
It’s convenient in multiple ways. Her parents are in Ohio on work, and the entire town is shut down anyway. Her parents do get a hold of her via the neighbour who knocks on her door to check that she’s alive shortly after she gets home after the battle (she hasn’t had time to get a new cell phone). She figures the only people she would be talking to anyway would also be asleep for two days.
On the third day after the battle she wakes to another knock on her door, this time her bedroom door.
She jumps when she sees Billy from where she’s laying, mouth open, half asleep, in her bed.
“Hi, Kimberly, I hadn’t heard from you so I thought I’d check in and your front door was unlocked so I just came in,” Billy says in one breath.
Kim blinks at him. “The front door was open?” She says slowly, not moving.
“Yeah, but I’ve already checked for signs of forced entry and I think everything is fine, maybe someone just forgot to lock it,” Billy says, reasonably. He looks around her room curiously, pausing to gaze at the posters above her bed, “Oh, I like that band.”
Kimberly looks up, smiling a little.
“The Beatles?”
“Yeah, Sgt. Pepper is my favourite,” Billy says.
Kim smiles more, she says, “Come lay down?”
Billy accepts, moving cautiously through her room towards the bed, drinking in the foreign space. He sits on the edge of the bed, unties his shoelaces and slides his shoes off his feet before laying straight on the bed.
“Aren’t you tired?” Kim asks, closing her eyes again, and turning on her side to face Billy, “I can’t stop sleeping.”
Billy nods. “I am tired,” he says, closing his eyes as well, and letting out a breath he had been holding.
After the 5 of them save the world, Zack also sleeps for two days.
He gets home after the battle and lays down on the ground beside his mother’s bed. He doesn’t think he’s ever been so tired. Zack wonders if his mother saw Goldar from her window, if she heard the battle, if she saw the Mega Zord, what she might say. He sighs contently, always happy to hear her opinion.
He stares up at the ceiling in exhaustion and listens as his mother wakes and stirs in bed, until her face appears over the side of the bed, looking down at him.
Zack smiles a crazy smile up at her in greeting. She looks over his face, at all of the blood he didn’t bother wiping off and the bruises blossoming around his left eye. She smiles knowingly down at him, and then settles back into her bedding.
Zack smiles until he falls asleep.
-
After the five of them save the world, Trini takes up running.
She asks her Dad (not her Mom) for money so she can go buy running shoes and running clothes. (He still asks for the receipt to be sure thats where his money really went, but thats better than peeing in a cup, so she doesn’t complain.)
Trini stands in the change room at TJMax in the next town over (Goldar smashed Angel Grove’s to bits) and looks over her shoulder at how the spandex wraps around her thighs and ass. Not for the first time, Trini admires how toned and firm all of her muscles have become. Nothing like getting hit by a train to activate your slumbering athleticism.
She buys two pairs of pants — activewear shirts are a rip off, she determines after looking at the price for a Reebok t-shirt, and settles for a pair of pink pull-on sneakers (they didn’t have yellow).
Trini never had the temperance for running before, preferring to stick to cliffside yoga, but she finds her heavy metal suits running as well. But most days she runs without any music, letting her mind quietly process recent events.
She turns chunks of information over and over, like they’ve been impaled on a rod, and they take days to cook over a fire. Certain things, like Jason Scott now being a close friend, are easily categorized as Strange But Not Entirely Impossible. Other things, like having alien powers, take longer to process, and are easily identified under Strange So Don’t Think About It For Too Long.
She runs in the early mornings and sometimes late at night after she gives up on sleeping. It’s not every night that she has nightmares, but when it does happen, running tires her out to the point of exhaustion so that when she gets back from an hour of circling the town, her feet are bleeding and her muscles are sore but she falls asleep fast.
Her feet are healed by the morning anyway.
-
After the five of them save the world, Billy initiates the Ranger group chat.
Billy, like the rest of them, sleeps through much of the following week. He checks in on the others, making sure they’re safe and comfortable. He brings Jason’s family sliced watermelon one night when he sleeps over. He brings Zack’s mom flowers when she answers the trailer door (Zack was dead asleep). He lays and listens to the Beatles with Kimberly. He joins Trini on a 2am run one night.
Billy tells his mom all about his new friends.
In the middle of the night he creates a Facebook group chat after considering that Kimberly still doesn’t have a phone.
He names the group Rangers.
Billy sends the first message.
When do we start training again? :)