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When Mia is ten years old, her mother wakes her up one night not two hours after she's gone to sleep.
"Mom?" Mia asks sleepily. Her mother is caressing her cheek, her hair.
"I have to go, Mei-chan," her mother says quietly. There's something in her voice that Mia hasn't heard before, not like this. "Take care of your brother and your father for me, all right, love?"
That makes Mia sit up. She's very awake, all of the sudden, and she knows. "You have to go be a superhero?"
"What did I tell you about that word, Mia," her mother chides, but she takes the sting out by kissing Mia's knuckles. "Yes. I'll be gone a while, I don't know how long. Be a good girl for me, all right? I believe in you."
"All right," Mia says, and: "I promise." She throws her arms around her mother, and her mother responds in kind.
She won't see her mother for another year.
For the first three days after her mother is activated, Mia's father is grim-faced. Mia helps where she can, cooking for Terry and herself, doing their own dishes. On the fourth day her grandparents come so Mia is saved from trying to do the groceries herself. Her father, he worries too much.
At one week, Mia asks. Grandfather says that her mother is all right, and will be all right. When Mia pesters him he gets angry, but eventually – two days later – he says that it was a quick fight, that it was over in a few days.
That's when Mia understand that Grandfather and Grandmother are there to stay, that they came to live with Mia and her father and her brother because Mia can't take care of them on her own yet.
Something happened to Mia's mom, and nobody would tell Mia even that, let alone what had happened.
It's a little over a year since her mother was called when Grandfather picks her up from school. He doesn't say where they're going, and Mia doesn't need to ask. Father has been gone for a few months, now; Grandmother had begun packing a few weeks before. They are going to Mother, Mia knows without asking. Grandfather picks her up from school because his daughter had inherited the Oath from him, and Mia will inherit it from her, from her mother.
The house they stop in front of looks new. No – renovated, but very recently. Mia notices the fresh coat of paint and the flowers not yet planted as she rushes inside. Grandfather raises his voice behind her, but Mia needs to know. She opens the door and races inside.
She finds her mother in the back yard. It's only when Mia pulls back from the hug that she realizes her mother's head is at the same height as hers, notices the chair that her mother sits in, registers the widths of the hallways she'd just run through.
The first words her mother says to Mia since that fateful night are, "I'm sorry, Mei-chan, I was ashamed…"
Mia leans in to kiss her mother on both cheeks before she can say another word. She takes her mother's hand in both of hers and kisses that, too. "No," she says vehemently. And she continues, wishing her own words true: "You are still my superhero."
Mia is waging war on the squash. The large pot is bubbling, vegetables boiling and softening into soup. She's blinking furiously still. She hums along to Uphill; it's a few moments before she realizes that the song is playing in the background, has been playing in the background.
She's taken to playing Lightyears Away From Home in the living room, but she keeps the album in her room. Whoever put it on had to have gone in her room. Whoever put it on had to have searched for it, in her room. There is only one person who would do that; Mia would've known who put her comfort album on for her even if they had not had that awkward conversation earlier that day.
Jayden is sitting when she walks out of the kitchen, but he rises quickly as she walks up the three stairs into the living room.
"I'm sorry," he says and ducks his head, for all that he still stands like a prince. "I didn't know."
"I know," she says slowly. She's still not sure what this is about. "I know now. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"I'm sorry," he says again, voice lower and quieter. "I didn't know, Mia."
"It's not your fault, Jayden." That's the wrong thing to say; she realizes it even as the words leave her mouth. Jayden had been five years old, then, but his father had been the Red Ranger when Xandred broke Mia's mother's spine. "I didn't mean it like that," she adds, hastily. "What happened to my mother is no one's fault but Xandred's, Jayden. You have to know that."
He doesn't. She can see it in his eyes: the same haunted look he gets whenever one of them gets so much as a scratch. That's the very fear she'd tried to soothe, earlier. The Shiba family had paid for the rehabilitation, the wheelchair, the accessible house; but Jayden had not known. "Your family," she tries again, gently, "has done mine nothing –"
"Mia –"
She takes his hands to shut him up. "Have you been listening to this song at all?"
He stares at her.
The fourth verse comes on. Mia sings along through it and through the second refrain as well.
I'm all out of arrows
I'm all out of monsters
But your heart is a wound
And it's not yet out of blood
So I'm pushing uphill
We're pushing uphill
Night after day
The voices they say 'let go'
And I'll chase them away
Don't stop bleeding
The guitars still wail in the background and Mia is still holding Jayden's hands. He's closed his around hers as she sang, and Mia doesn't care if it hurts. She tells him:
"This album came out when I was still adjusting. We were still adjusting." She squeezes his hands, and he lets go suddenly, as if he'd only just realized how strong his grip was. "It's an uphill war, Jayden, but we're going to win. I know we will."
There are unshed tears in his voice when he says "I wish I had your faith." She gives him the only true answer she has to give:
"You do."
It's four months After and Mia is only barely used to the sound of children, again, when she discovers that Antonio had left her a text message. When Mia sees it she slips into the staff room and calls back.
"Hi, Mia."
"Hi," she says quietly. Antonio sounds bone-tired. "What's wrong?"
Antonio snorts. "We're doing all right now," he says. "Sort of. But the past couple of weeks, not so much."
It's not much of a guess when Mia asks: "Jayden?"
"Yeah. It finally occurred to him that the war is over. Like, really over."
Mia's breath catches. She'd expected that, unconsciously. When you're as young as Jayden is, and had never had anything except the war, had never had a moment to think of the day after – Jayden had been expecting to die like his father, she knew that –
"How bad?"
Antonio makes a sound between a snort and a sob.
"I could come –" She'd only just found this job but she can guess at what Jayden is like and that's not a job for a single person, what Antonio is doing, and Ji would be useless for that.
Antonio cuts her off. "I'm still not letting him out of my sight for a second. But I got Ji to get your album yesterday."
Her album – Cassie Chan's first album, that Mia would always put on for the bad days –
"He put it on himself," Antonio continues. "I think it's helping. I mean, he's mostly playing Fool's Gold in loops, but –"
"Yeah," Mia agrees through a throat that's suddenly too tight. The bitter disillusionment of Fool's Gold, the broken promise – Jayden would gravitate to this song, right now. Mia had not played it since the very early days, before she fully grasped that the wheelchair didn't make her mom lesser in any way that genuinely mattered. "I'm –" she almost says glad, but changes it to "Thank you."
"Thank you," Antonio counters.
"Play the first song," she tells him. That's the titular track, the album's thematic declaration.
"I know," he says. "We're not lost if we're together, right?"
"I'm still looking out for you," she counters, the first line of the same verse. "I'm still here."
He sounds a little more like himself when he says, "Thanks, Mia."
"Anytime."
Terry organizes a charity concert at his medical school. It's a big college, and it'll be a big concert. Mia says she'll come without asking for details, because Terry is her brother and they have been unable to spend enough time together since they're not living under the same roof, anymore.
It's not until she's there, and had long agreed to volunteer – it's a big event, for a good cause, and Terry is her brother – that Terry tells her that Cassie Chan will also be performing, and Mia's assigned to backstage logistics. Terry knows what this means to her; he was old enough to remember, and Mia used to sing him Lighthouse and Safety Net as lullabies besides. Terry knows.
Backstage is chaotic enough that Mia forgets about this chance until she delivers sandwiches to a room, and finds Cassie Chan there. Mia puts the basket on the next thing to a clear surface. From the look Cassie gives her, she can see just how flustered Mia is. It makes Mia feel even more embarrassed, but it also makes her turn to face her idol fully and meet her eye.
Of everything in her head, what comes out is: "Thank you." She can almost see Cassie Chan shifting gears and Mia continues before she loses this moment. "I know you don't like to perform songs from it, but – Lightyears Away From Home helped me at a difficult time." And because it's true, she adds: "Twice. The second time, I think it saved my team lea- a friend's life."
Cassie Chan's face had cleared up while Mia was speaking, then clouded again when Mia almost said what she shouldn't and then turns to something Mia can't recognize. She walks to the couch and picks up a bag that's laying on it. "Come here," she tells Mia. "I want to show you something."
Mia comes over. What Cassie Chan fishes out of the bag is a photo. It's worn a little, and she holds it with infinite care as she lays it in Mia's palm, her hand not leaving Mia's. There are seven people in the photo, late teens to early twenties, three girls – one of whom is Cassie – and four boys.
Quietly, affectionately, Cassie Chan says: "That's my team."
It takes Mia a moment to draw the connection between the words, the people in the photo, and her own words scant moments before. She lifts her eyes to stare at Cassie, but her eyes get arrested at the lampwork glass beads on Cassie's necklace. There are seven of them: silver, red, red again, pink, yellow, black and blue. Mia's eyes linger on the two reds before fastening to the pink. Emily has a necklace like that: green, yellow, red, red, pink, blue and gold. Cassie is wearing black and pink; Cassie Chan always wears some pink when performing; that hasn't changed since her first album.
When Mia finally meets Cassie's eyes, Cassie is smiling at her softly. Mia parts her lips, but her throat is blocked. Her eyes sting.
"Hey, sister," Cassie says softly, and pulls her in by the hand.
She takes her annual vacation in LA. There's nothing surreal about being tucked into the corner of Cassie's couch, idly playing with a guitar while they're waiting on takeout. Mia can't remember the last time she'd felt so safe.
They have dinner on the couch, and a bottle of red to go with it. They talk at least as much as they eat.
Mia had mentioned it the first time they met, but Cassie still goes silent after Mia tells her about Antonio calling that day. Mia continues to dig into her already-cold noodles and waits for Cassie to find her way back.
Cassie takes Mia's hand before she speaks. It seems unconscious. "Andros' and Karone's parents didn't make it. That – they took it hard. Zhane's family made it through, but – it'd been almost three years for them, but only a few months for Zhane. Plus he'd been morphed in the cryosleep, two years. We're not supposed to sustain a morph that long." Cassie pauses. Mia knows every note of Cassie's first album by heart, knows when it came out – a little over a year after Cassie's team's war – so she isn't surprised when Cassie finishes: "Ashley wasn't the only one who had her hands full for a while there. After –"
Cassie pauses on that word.
Mia knows that look, because she'd seen it before. She'd seen it on her mother's face, the first year after she returned home; she'd seen it on her grandfather's face, every day since her mother had been called; she'd seen it on her own, in the mirror. Cassie's team couldn’t stop Divatox, and they couldn't stop Dark Specter's war. Zordon had to do that. There was supposed to be no more Evil after Zordon's sacrifice, but it'd been barely a year before Xandred rose.
Mia lifts their joined hands before Cassie can say I'm sorry. She kisses Cassie's fingertips and then presses Cassie's knuckles against her cheek and closes her eyes.
Cassie makes some sort of a sound, and then the couch shifts. Her other arm settles over Mia's back, holding her; she presses a kiss to Mia's temple and then rests her head there.
Mia brings up her other hand and puts it over Cassie's hand that's on her shoulder.
