The wind rippled and pooled in the lee side of the rock outcropping, strong even after it broke over and around the obstruction in its path. It stung his eyes and whipped his hair about his face as he stared down at the delicately engraved stones.

"I brought you something," he said quietly, reaching into his windbreaker. He removed a single white rose, encased in solid glass to protect it from the merciless wind. "From both of us," he added, going down on one knee beside the circle of four. "Andros and Zhane send their respects as well."

He stared at the rose for a long moment before he placed it on the ground. "I wish..."

There was a long moment of silence before he realized that he had no idea how to finish the sentence. What did he wish? For things to be different? For history to rewrite itself? To give up all that he had now in order to erase their loss?

Once, that had been exactly what he wished. But as the days slipped by and time went on without them, things changed. He changed. He supposed, wherever they were, that they had changed as well. He hadn't noticed exactly when it happened, but... he no longer wished to go back.

"I wish you could know her," he whispered, almost afraid to say the words aloud. They had been his life for so long--to let them go felt like betrayal. But how could he tell them something that was untrue?

"I wish you could know all of them," he admitted. "So young, but so fearless..."

He felt a twinge as he recognized the same thing he had once said of his own team, and his hand clenched around the gems in his pocket. Had he replaced them? How could he be a member of another team when they had sworn to fight side by side forever?

He withdrew the stones from his windbreaker and reluctantly uncurled his fingers. "Who am I?" he asked them, certain only that he still didn't know the answer. "*Am* I one of them, now? Or am I still your teammate?"

The sapphire winked reprovingly up at him. A bright blue version of his own ruby, Lyris had always said the similarity of their stones was appropriate. They were more alike than anyone else on the team. He had said too that bonds like theirs didn't fade with time, because the truest friends were friends forever.

He glanced down at the rose, lying closer to the inscription "Jenna of Elisia" than to any of the others. Had he done that on purpose? He couldn't remember if he had been paying attention to exactly where it fell when he set it down.

"I miss you," he whispered, watching the sand stir a little as the wind shifted. "I know why you wanted me to stay... but it was hard, Jenna. Sometime--sometimes it still is." He sighed, not sure he liked that "sometimes". "The worst part is, I don't know if I want it to get harder or easier."

He got to his feet, looking from the engraved stones to the colored gems in his hand. "I'll see you again," he said at last. He said it every time he came, and every time it could be either a promise or a farewell. He never knew until the next time.

The wind tore through the place where he had been, twisting around the faded color that had started to form in the air behind him. A trick of the light, perhaps, but the air seemed to brighten incrementally, the colors taking on shapes and forms and finally faces, still as insubstantial as smoke.

They moved a little, though as hard as it was to tell where they ended and the wind began it was equally hard to say in which direction they moved. But each form seemed to extend its hands to the others, and as the circle fell into place and their hands connected, the four figures abruptly solidified.

They turned as one toward the path their visitor had taken, but teleportation had already snatched him from the desert's midst.

"Why?" one of them asked, breaking the silence.

There was no answer.

"We have to go after him," someone else said, a little uncertainly.

"No." The boy's voice was firm, though the wind was harsh enough to draw tears from his eyes. "He doesn't need us now."

"We gave our word," the other boy reminded them, unusually solemn. "All of us."

"We didn't know then," the first girl said. "No one knew this would happen."

"But think what would happen if we don't go after him and he finds we were here," the other girl said quietly. "He'd never forgive us."

That was met with silence, and the uncomfortable realization of agreement.

"Are you all right?" Cassie asked quietly.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her watch him. Her homework lay forgotten on the floor when she looked up, and the concern in her dark eyes was as familiar as the smile that graced her lips when he at last nodded.

"I'm glad," she said, pushing herself into a sitting position. "Do you want me to go?"

She always waited for him, respecting his wish to go alone but unwilling to let him return to an empty room. "I wish you wouldn't," he answered, surprising himself. "I find I would like some company. Yours especially."

Her smile brightened noticeably. "Then you've got it."

He smiled in return, knowing he had startled her with his words. It was his habit to spend days like this alone, reflecting--or brooding, as Cassie would say. But this time he just wasn't in the mood.

"Do you have much homework?" he asked, abandoning his place by the door and coming to sit beside her on the floor. He would never understand why she preferred the floor to the perfectly serviceable desk tucked into the corner of his small room.

"Not for tomorrow," she said, a little evasively. "Just catching up on my Lit reading. How come?"

He knew how little free time she had these days, between her duties as a Power Ranger and her efforts to complete her last year of high school on Earth. He sometimes felt badly asking her to give up what little time she had to spend with him, but she had threatened to hurt him the last time he brought it up. So, with only the slightest twinge of guilt, he said, "I wondered if I might take you out tonight."

"I'd love to!" Her reply was immediate, though he didn't miss her flicker of surprise at his request. He knew he was often less than sociable when they visited Elisia, and she probably hadn't expected anything different this time. "Where are we going?"

In truth, he hadn't thought that far ahead. "Wherever you wish," he answered, pleased by her enthusiasm.

She rolled her eyes. "I thought you learned not to let me choose last time," she teased. "I'm not too up on intergalactic society."

"I found your choice romantic," he replied, trying not to smile.

She giggled, starting to gather up her books. "You did not. Hey, do you still have--"

He put a finger over her lips, letting his smile show this time. "Wait here," he said. He stood up, turning toward his desk and hearing her climb to her feet behind him. "I think--"

There was a knock on the door, and he broke off as Cassie called, "Come in!" He peered underneath one of Cassie's notebooks--just because she didn't sit at the desk apparently didn't mean she was averse to using it as a storage area--and wondered which of the Rangers was looking for him this afternoon.

A crash put him instantly on alert and he spun, searching for a threat even where his mind told him there should be none. Some tiny portion of his consciousness noted that Cassie's books had tumbled to the floor, but his gaze was riveted to the door.

The years melted away as Jenna smiled awkwardly back at him.

"I still can't believe Eltare fell," Kris murmured. "They were invincible."

"Just like you when you're mad," Timmin cracked.

Seated between his knees on the floor of the observatory, with his arms wrapped around her shoulders, Kris just rolled her eyes and slapped his leg affectionately. "I seem to remember you claiming invincibility when you rigged Saryn's datafeed last year."

"And look how that turned out," Jenna added, her eyes twinkling.

"I don't know how he found me out," Timmin grumbled. "It's not like it doesn't fail often enough on its own. It could have been a perfectly normal malfunction."

"Perfectly normal malfunctions don't involve laughing skulls appearing on the screen," Saryn informed him.

Lyris snorted. "In Timmin's world they do. Usually when his Wrath game fails."

"You're just jealous because you can never get past the second level," Timmin told him.

"Until you start winning when we race, I'm not worried," Lyris retorted.

"Five to four," Saryn remembered suddenly. He was startled by how quickly a four-year-old score had popped into his mind. "You lost that day at the cliffs."

"Not to Timmin," Lyris said, a smug look on his face. "Anytime you think you can take me, Saryn."

He laughed aloud at the challenge in his friend's tone. "As of tomorrow, then, the score becomes six-four."

Lyris actually smirked at him, and he felt the other empath's cocky projection loud and clear. *Keep dreaming, Saryn!*

He knocked hesitantly, not sure what kind of welcome to expect. But the door opened immediately, and Cassie stood there, a surprised look on her face. "Hey," she said neutrally.

"Hi." He took a deep breath and forced the question out. "Are you--ready to go?"

She blinked. "We're still going?"

"If you would rather not--"

"I thought *you'd* rather not," she interrupted. "I mean, it isn't exactly a normal night, and I thought you'd want to... well, you know."

"I want to spend it with you," he said softly. "I will go if you turn me away, but..." He hesitated, searching for words. "There's so much inside my head right now--I'm not sure I can handle it alone."

She studied him for a moment, taking in his expression and, thankfully, choosing not to ask *why* he was alone. "Let's go," she said at last.

The Megaship was in orbit around Earth once more, preparatory to another school day in Angel Grove, and he couldn't miss Cassie's surprise when they appeared in the twilight at the ocean's edge. In the short time he had had to acquaint himself with Earth, he had found no place so peacefully alien as this, and he needed something with no reminders of his past in it right now.

"Saryn," she said finally, when he offered no explanation aloud. "Are you all right?"

How could he explain elation, disappointment, fear and excitement in words that she would understand? In words that *he* would understand? Everywhere he looked it was as though the universe had twisted two halves into a discordant whole, remaking itself into something that he wasn't sure he could deal with. How could anyone live two lives at once?

"I don't know," he said at last, hating the words for their inadequacy. "There are moments when--everything is right, and perfect, and then suddenly I feel like I'm in a nightmare that I'll never get out of."

It didn't explain anything, and it sounded terrible even to his ears. The old Elisia had been a dream for so long that it cut into his heart to hear his own voice calling it a nightmare. But Cassie's words jarred him free from the surreal nature of the day, making his gaze snap toward her in surprise.

"Me too," she said simply.

They were still up when he got back. He wasn't sure what he had expected; after all, the five of them used to stay up talking until the earliest hours of morning. It was, as Jenna had observed often enough, the only way any of them ever saw sunrise. From "the right side of midnight", she called it.

"That was real then," Cassie's voice told him quietly, speaking out of his memories with words she wouldn't dare remind him of today. "This is real now."

She was trying so hard not to offer anything but sympathy... even when he had asked for her opinion, she had refused to give it. She was part of only half his world, and he knew that if she had never believed that before, she did now. But did he *want* her to believe that?

He watched the four of them, unobserved, from the shadow of the doorway. Effectively unobserved, at least--he knew Lyris had sensed his arrival, and the Blue Ranger's gaze had flicked in his direction briefly. The other boy said nothing, though, allowing Saryn to eavesdrop without comment.

They were planning to reclaim Elisia. Eltare had bogged down under the weight of its own reconstruction effort, but with Rangers to rally the refugees and even minimal backing from the legendary Eltaran government, they were convinced it could be done.

"We never used to wait for anyone to take care of us," Jenna declared at one point. "We're not going to wait this time either. We take care of our own."

Her words stirred something inside of him. He wanted to see Elisia rise again; he wanted it so badly that he could feel the ache in his heart. He wanted to stand with his teammates again, and defend their home against anything that would challenge it, whether it was Eltaran government or the ghost of Dark Spectre himself. But he couldn't do it alone.

*Alone?* Something in his mind rebelled at the idea that he could be alone among his own teammates, his best friends in the universe.

He swallowed, watching Jenna cuff Lyris on the shoulder and then shriek with laughter as he pulled her into his arms to tousle her hair in retaliation. Timmin chuckled too, whispering something in Kris' ear that made her elbow him hard in the stomach. He pretended to be hurt, but Saryn saw the tender look that passed between the empathically bound couple.

He heard someone clear their throat softly, right behind him. He stiffened, but suppressed the instinct to whirl. "Yes?"

"Guest rooms are ready," Zhane's voice offered neutrally. "I was going to come in and tell you, but I guess you saved me a few extra steps."

"Thank you," Saryn answered, not turning.

There was a brief pause, and then Zhane continued, "Not everyone gets a chance to go back, you know."

He tried to suppress his annoyance at the intrusion, intending only to ignore the unsolicited remark. But Zhane had lost his life too... Three months ago he had woken up in a time not his own, on the receiving end of a one-way ticket two years into the future. The change had been just as abrupt, if not quite so final. Or was it?

"Would you?" he asked suddenly.

There was a moment of silence, and he wondered if the other had gone. But then Zhane answered, "At first? Yeah. I used to wish for it, almost every night. Just to go back to what I knew, to be home again. At least there I knew who I was--how do you stay yourself when everything you knew is gone?"

Saryn turned his head a little, surprised by the Silver Ranger's reflective words. He shouldn't be; he had heard Andros' friend turn philosophical before... it was a part of himself that Zhane seemed determined to hide. "And now?" he prompted reluctantly.

"Can't," Zhane said, so easily that he wondered if the other was about to make a joke. "Too late. I've been here too long; I've changed. If I went back, it wouldn't be my world anymore. It would be the old me's world, and I'd be as lost there as the old me was when he showed up here."

Saryn sighed quietly, envying the other's calm acceptance of his fate. "Do you ever wish to go back anyway?" he couldn't help asking.

Zhane's answer surprised him. "Sure I do. Me and Andros were everything back then. We could finish each other's thoughts. Now whole days go by when I don't even see him. And when I do, it's 'Ashley this' and 'Ashley that' and 'Ashley and I are perfect.' If you tell him I said that, by the way," Zhane added, not missing a beat, "I'll kill you."

His usual ability with words had deserted him, and he could only nod.

Zhane apparently took that for agreement, for he continued without prompting. "Still, even when I wish I could go back? I don't *really* wish it. Like if a temporal portal opened up and someone said, 'This is it, this is your chance, go for it'? I'd tell them thanks, but no thanks."

Saryn finally turned to face him, searching his expression. "Why?" he asked, desperate for an answer. "Is it not disloyal to give up those years? What right do you have to stay here when you promised yourself to someone else in another time?"

"You said it yourself," Zhane pointed out, not at all disturbed by his intensity. "That was another time. I'm promised to people in this time now. I can't abandon them any more than I would have abandoned the ones in the other time if I'd been given a choice. But the fact is that I wasn't given a choice then, and I *am* being given a choice now. Doing the wrong thing now won't set right a situation I didn't have any control over two years ago."

*Not alone,* he realized, listening to Zhane answer his questions with an unscoffing seriousness that he reserved only for his closest friends. He wouldn't be alone with his teammates after all.

It had been some time ago now that they had made up their "rules". They both valued their space, but she knew how reluctant he was to turn her away. She worried that she might intrude some night when all he really wanted was to be alone, and he wouldn't tell her.

So they kept their separate rooms on the Megaship, and whoever went to bed first went to their own room. If one of them wanted to be alone, they set the privacy lock. Otherwise the door was left open for the other.

She hadn't set the privacy lock on her door, but neither had she expected him to join her. It had been hard to fall asleep for wondering what he was up to, and the sound of the door sliding open woke her from a restless doze. She didn't move, almost holding her breath as he slipped into the room. She heard him set the lock as the door closed behind him, and then the whisper of movement as he prowled around the room.

Finally, she felt the mattress shift as he sat down beside her, laying one hand gently on her shoulder. He thought she was asleep, she realized, feeling something tickle her skin. She bit her lip, wondering whether to speak, when finally the tickling feeling clicked in her mind and she knew what he was doing.

She let him slide his hand under her head, slowly, being careful not to disturb her as he slipped the gold chain around her neck. She felt tears well up in her eyes, knowing the necklace meant one of two things. He was staying... or leaving without a goodbye. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, forcing herself to stay still and let him choose.

Then the mattress shifted again, and she felt his arm go around her as he lay down, pressing close on the cramped twin bed. She squeezed her eyes shut, displaced tears trickling across her temple. She heard him sigh softly, relaxing a little, and then he whispered, "Good night, Cassie. I love you."

She swallowed, fumbling for his necklace and clenching the ruby in her fingers. "I love you, too," she murmured.

There was a startled pause, and then, "You're awake."

"You're quick," she whispered, smiling through her tears. "Empathy on vacation?"

"So it would seem." As the surprise faded, she could hear relief tingeing his voice. "Thank you."

She squirmed, managing to roll over onto her back. She felt him shift too, propping himself up on his elbow so he could look down at her. "For what?" she wanted to know, trying to wipe the tears away from her eyes without him noticing.

He noticed anyway. "For being my destiny," he whispered, brushing her tears away.

"No..." She reached for his hand, trying to keep him from slipping away. His hand was solid beneath hers, but she could see the walls of the Medical bay through their joined fingers. "I thought it would be longer."

She tore her gaze away when the sound of footsteps intruded, in time to see their former teammate standing breathless in the doorway. He was as quick to respond to Lyris' mental summons as ever... but the dark-haired Cassie he had told them so much about was at his side, neither of them in uniform. Time passed, and they were not the only ones who had changed.

From the look of horrified comprehension on his face, she knew he could see the ethereal flickering of their forms as well. "No," he whispered, echoing her without knowing it. "I don't want to lose you again."

She felt fingers tighten on hers, and she heard Lyris answer quietly, "You never lost us the first time, Saryn."

She shook her head vehemently, agreeing with him. "Part of us was always here. Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to come back."

"But why..." He trailed off helplessly, and her heart went out to him.

"Why not?" Timmin answered, a half-smile on his face as he pulled Kris closer to him. They were both ghostly transparent by now, but they were obviously as solid to each other as Lyris was to her. "Lighten up, Saryn; it's just a game. Time to play the next round."

It wasn't they that were transparent, she realized suddenly. It was the Megaship that was fading from view. They only looked see-through because it was shifting around them... she glanced quickly at the girl beside Saryn, wishing she had had time to say something to her.

The other girl caught her eye, as though Cassie knew what she was thinking. Jenna smiled a little, lifting her hand in farewell. *Take care of him,* she thought, feeling Lyris' arm go around her shoulders as the Megaship disappeared from view.

"You okay?" she asked, watching him watch her. The wind flung her hair over her shoulders and tossed it in every direction, but she paid it no mind.

"I can't help thinking they were right," he said at last, his gaze stealing across the desert. "'We take care of our own,' Jenna said. 'We never used to wait for anyone to take care of us.' And yet Elisia remains underpopulated and ungoverned in the wake of Dark Spectre's defeat."

"You help who needs helping," she reminded him. "That's what Rangers do. You can't do everything at once, and you have to start somewhere. Sometimes 'somewhere' just isn't as close to home as you'd like it to be."

"Is that it?" he wondered aloud, glancing down at the stone-carved inscriptions rising out of the sand at their feet. "Or is that only an excuse? Would they have found a way to make it happen?"

"Saryn," she said sternly. "I have two words for you, and they should sound familiar." She waited until he lifted his gaze to hers, hoping it wasn't the wrong thing to say. "Lighten up."

He stared at her a moment before cracking a smile, and she grinned in relief when he offered her his hand. His words were quiet beneath the whistle of the wind, but she caught them anyway. "Let's go home," he said softly.