reaching out for human faith

by starhawk

There was no one to greet him when he rolled into the garage two hours after sundown, which suited Dillon just fine. Unfortunately, a white-coated figure appeared in front of his car by the time he turned the engine off. She waited impatiently while he collected water bottles and lollipop wrappers for recycling.

The second he opened the door, she was in his face. "Your morpher," Dr. K said, holding out her hand.

He just stared at her. "You've gotta be kidding me."

"No." She didn't budge. "Your morpher, please."

He stripped it from his wrist and slapped it into her hand, frustrated and angry and two seconds from getting back in the car when she turned the little device around, and then around again. Looking at it like she'd never seen it before, she asked, "What did you do to it?"

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Ziggy says you changed it to make Corinth recognize you," Dr. K said, turning it over in her hand. She might as well try to see through the casing. "What did you do?"

"Nothing," he said defensively. "Just cranked it up a little. Doubles my field; doesn't hurt anything. Makes the sensors read normal when I come through the shield."

"Dillon!" Ziggy's voice came from the wrong door, but when Dillon looked up he was already bounding across the landing toward the stairs. "You're back! What, no alarms? How did you get past the shield?"

"The shield," Dillon repeated, watching him trip down the stairs. "The barricade is half a mile wide, and you want to know how I got past the shield?"

"Hey, I've seen you drive!" Ziggy didn't appear to need an actual answer, so Dillon just watched him saunter over. "You got here at the right time; we're gonna have a welcome back party. Movie night in Scott and Flynn's room. Flynn's making smoothies!"

"Why?" Dillon asked, frowning.

"What, right now?" Dr. K actually sounded surprised.

"Yup," Ziggy agreed cheerfully. "Right now, and you totally agreed, so no backing out. Because you're our friend, Dillon, and we needed an excuse to take the night off. Does that cover all the questions? Good. Upstairs, everyone; let's go. That blender won't wait forever!"

With that, Ziggy leaned over and plucked the morpher out of Dr. K's hand. "You can play with your toys during the movie. Come on!" He took a step back when Dillon went instinctively for his morpher, then danced away again even as Dillon realized what he was doing and stopped.

Glancing at Dr. K, he found her frowning after Ziggy. "I didn't realize this event had already been planned," she said. "I thought I was agreeing to a theoretical instance of... teamwork enhancement."

"What good is a theory you never put into practice?" Ziggy called from the stairs. "You promised! I even picked out the movie just for you!"

"What movie is it?" Dillon asked under his breath.

Dr. K only shook her head. "I haven't the faintest idea."

"Well." He was curious in spite of himself, and he had to admit that after two days in the desert, luxuries like fresh fruit and juice were sounding pretty good. "I guess I'm not gonna see my morpher again unless I go."

"He does find ways to be convincing," Dr. K muttered.

"Any day now!" Ziggy shouted down to them. "The movie's starting as we speak!"

"I did promise I would watch a movie with them," she said. She looked perplexed, as though she couldn't quite remember why. "I could return your morpher to you, if you have something more important to do."

"Dr. K watching a movie?" he repeated, and he knew he shouldn't tease her but he just couldn't help it. "I don't think I can miss it. Tell them to save me a smoothie, okay? I'm gonna take a shower first."

"Of course," she said. For once there was no sarcastic qualification of her agreement. He supposed the fact that she had agreed in the first place might be sarcasm enough, but if there was a hidden message there it could just stay hidden.

He tried not to enjoy the water too much. He tried not to think about how dirty his clothes felt after just two days, when he used to go months without worrying about stupid stuff like this. Being alive was enough. Everything else was just a distraction from the all-important work of staying that way.

Still, he couldn't bring himself to put those clothes on again after he got out of the shower. Since Dr. K had torn his other shirt, he took the white one Ziggy had loaned him and figured if it was good enough to sleep in, it was good enough to watch a movie in. He left his jacket behind.

"Hey, here he is," Ziggy announced as he walked into the room. "The man of the hour. Possibly the year. You could have the next smoothie, except that I just spent the last five minutes making sure Flynn gets it right."

"Which is why," Flynn said, pouring the contents of the blender into a sturdy glass, "I'm more than ready to make something for someone else now. What'll it be, Dillon?"

"Whatever you've got," he said, glancing around. He'd been in the room Scott shared with Flynn exactly once, and never with everyone else there. It was surprisingly user-friendly: giant entertainment system echoing the garage screens on the wall, a big couch and a couple of oversized armchairs between their beds.

"See?" Flynn told Ziggy. "There's a man who knows when to let an artist work. You're welcome, by the way."

Ziggy mumbled something that might have been "thank you" around the straw in his mouth. He wandered over to the couch, where Scott and Summer were apparently waging a silent war over who had to hold the popcorn. Neither of them seemed to be paying as much attention to the movie as they were to trying to sneak popcorn into each other's smoothies.

It was Dr. K who got Dillon's attention, though, lifting his morpher when he looked at her and waiting until he came over to take it. "Thanks," he said, since it seemed like the thing to say. She looked both larger and smaller than usual: her lab coat was bold and unapologetic in the comfortable room, but her legs were tucked up underneath her in a chair meant for someone half again her size.

"Your friend is easily bullied," she informed him.

He felt the corner of his mouth quirk. "Yeah," he agreed, shooting a glance in Ziggy's direction. "He's too nice."

Ziggy, who had lowered his smoothie and opened his mouth as if to protest, seemed to change his mind and beamed at him instead. It was Summer who said, "There's no such thing as being too nice. I think we could all learn something from Ziggy."

"Thank you, Summer," Ziggy declared, with perfect if somewhat exaggerated courtesy. "But you know my role model is you. Every day I ask myself, what can I do to be as nice as Summer today?"

"Not easy," Scott observed.

"But something to aspire to," Flynn said, chopping fruit with the ease of long practice. "Dillon, you're na allergic to anything, are you? Citrus? Strawberries? No, of course, what am I saying. Never mind."

"No," Dillon said anyway.

He was sliding the morpher back into his wrist brace when Dr. K said, "I'd still like to know what you did to it. And how you knew to do it."

Dillon eyed her. "You told us," he said. "You're explaining how they work every time we turn around. I just cracked it open and expanded the bioenergetic link."

"Well, yes," she said, looking taken aback. "I repeat myself because I don't think anyone's listening the--but you said you didn't understand."

"Did you just interrupt yourself?" Dillon asked. "That's so..." He glanced up at the ceiling, pretending to think about it before he caught her eye again. "Not like you."

She made a face at him. It was just a little grimace, but it wasn't accompanied by biting sarcasm and he thought maybe she'd given him that point. It was harder than he'd expected not to smile.

"Hey, just out of curiosity," Ziggy was asking, "how come the nice guy doesn't get any popcorn? I mean, I realize you guys are staging some kind of smoothie contamination ploy over there--"

"So what movie'd he pick?" Dillon muttered, hitching a hip on the arm of Dr. K's chair and slouching as much as he could. He still towered over her.

"Apollo 13," Dr. K told him. "Disturbingly apropos. I don't know whether to give him credit for the parallel or be worried that a successful failure has now become our greatest inspiration."

"Hey, Dillon," Scott said. "Want some popcorn?"

Ziggy squawked indignantly from the other side of the couch, and Scott just grinned. "Dr. K?" he added. "Popcorn?"

Dillon glanced down at her when she hesitated, and the look on her face convinced him even before she began, "Does it have--" He straightened up and grabbed the popcorn bowl from Scott, passing it to her without a word.

"Butter?" she finished, studying the bowl like she wanted to run a scanner over it before she ate anything one of the Rangers handed her. What did she usually eat, anyway? And where?

"You can't have popcorn without butter," Summer said.

"Apparently, some of us can't have popcorn at all," Ziggy grumbled.

Dr. K took a handful of popcorn and thrust the bowl back at him. Dillon assumed this meant he was supposed to pass it back down the couch. The best thing to do would probably be to take it to Ziggy himself, since who knew what Scott would do if he handed it back. It wasn't like Ziggy didn't have space to spare at his end of the giant couch.

"Scott," he said, shaking the bowl in Scott's direction. "Thanks," he added, when Scott actually leaned around Summer and handed it to Ziggy.

"Hey," Summer complained, but she laughed at the smirk on Scott's face. "That was totally uncalled for. Just because you can't defend one little glass..."

"Speaking of," Flynn announced. He came around the end of the couch with two glasses, passing one of them off to Dillon and holding the other one out to Dr. K. "Here you are. Enjoy."

Dillon lifted his glass in a silent toast, bypassing the curly straw Flynn had stuck in it for a first gulp. "S'good," he said, swallowing anything more appreciative. It was the best thing he'd had in days. He did manage to add, "Thanks."

Flynn was trying to coax Dr. K into taking hers. "Come on," he insisted, holding it closer like maybe she couldn't reach it. "It's for you."

"I didn't ask for one of those... things," she said, eyeing it warily.

"Well I'm na gonna leave you out," Flynn said indignantly. "What kind of a gentleman do you think I am? Now, no one says you have to like it. But if you like something else, I can make you another."

"No," she said, taking the glass with a frown. "I'm sure this will be quite sufficient." There was a brief pause, and she added, "Thank you." It was hard to tell whether she meant it or not.

It seemed to satisfy Flynn, who went back to collect his own smoothie and claim the other armchair. Dillon leaned against the arm of her chair again and asked under his breath, "What's Apollo 13?"

She stared up at him in a way that seemed to indicate he might be mentally deficient. "Earth-moon spacecraft from the 1970s? Exploding oxygen tank? The crew had to abandon ship and fly home in the lunar lander?"

"Why are you looking at me like that?" He didn't know whether to be amused by her familiarity with old space age technology or embarrassed that she seemed to think it was so obvious. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"The United States had a space program," she said, very slowly, and he gave her a look. "What? You don't recognize Apollo; how do you expect me to know what you know?"

"Apollo was a spaceship," he guessed, shifting against the chair. He sucked on the straw in his smoothie to keep from snapping when she rolled her eyes. Like he'd been brushing up on his history since Corinth closed.

"A series of spaceships," she said. "The thirteenth one went wrong: one tiny piece of bad technology. The ship was doomed before it ever took off. It was almost to the moon when the oxygen tank blew up, damaging the engine and venting air."

"Do you mind?" Scott interrupted. "Some of us are trying to watch the movie."

Dr. K narrowed her eyes at him, possibly seeing extra training in Scott's future. "Dillon missed the beginning," she informed him. "I'm merely providing him with the background he needs to appreciate the remainder of the experience."

"No air, no fuel, abandoned ship," Dillon muttered. "I got it."

"They wouldn't have had anywhere to go if they hadn't been destined for the moon," she said, but she lowered her voice. "The ship they'd taken for their lunar landing had its own air and batteries. But it didn't have a heat shield, because it wasn't designed for an atmosphere--they used it to steer their other ship home, then dumped it once they reached Earth and rode the first ship the rest of the way."

"Sounds dangerous," Dillon remarked.

"It was incredibly dangerous." She sounded like she was about to say something else, but she didn't, and after a moment he took his eyes off of a screen that looked a lot less exciting than whatever she was talking about and glanced at her.

Dr. K was drinking the smoothie Flynn had made for her. Intent expression on her face, pink curly straw in her mouth, she had never looked so much like someone who should be studying history instead of making it. He looked away again, sure she wouldn't appreciate the sentiment.

He never quite made it to the couch. He wasn't used to having so many people crowded around him. He just couldn't see jamming in there with everyone else when he was perfectly comfortable sitting on the floor, leaning back against a chair that was easily as solid as the couch was. It wasn't like he needed their constant commentary, either: once he realized what the astronauts were trying to do, he found the dialogue made more sense than the other Rangers' jokes.

Not that that was saying much, really.

They were all quiet by the end. Dillon had made a personal deal with himself that the next time Summer looked over at him and smiled, he was either going to think of something really mean to say to Dr. K or he was going to get up and walk out. That had been three smiles ago.

His only consolation was that the others seemed to be experiencing the same inertia, and it was, after all, more comfortable to sit here than it was to be annoyed with Summer. Scott had apparently reached the same conclusion more than an hour ago, since the popcorn-smoothie war had run its course. Ziggy was sprawled against the cushions, asleep, while Flynn was sitting forward in his chair like he could help the characters home through remote determination.

It wasn't until some reporter asked the astronaut commander about his flight experience, and the fear associated with it, that Dillon remembered what Dr. K had said about parallels. He didn't dare look up at her--he'd swear Summer was watching their every move out of the corner of her eye--but he listened. He listened to the whole story about jammed radar and compromised homing signals and no running lights in the middle of a huge, black ocean at night.

"I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit," the astronaut was saying. "All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean.

"And I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this, uh... there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was leading me home, you know?

"If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So... you never know what--what events are going to transpire to get you home."

Dr. K leaned over the arm of her chair just then, taking his straw and stacking their glasses before replacing both straws in the top one. She didn't say anything, and he pretended not to watch. But they were all right there, in the same room, doing something that wasn't fighting for their lives.

It was as close to home as he could ever remember being.