The Garden of Vacant Dreams

Hearts and Minds

AN: Saban/Disney owns the characters you know. I own the ones you don't.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HEARTS AND MINDS

There was a crash out of nowhere followed by a loud thump.

"What was that?" Ashley asked the empty room she sat in. She sat up in her bed before hearing a male's voice. He yelled as she heard another thump. Had someone just fallen in the main control room?

"Oh God... Andros!" Ashley leapt out of bed and ran down the hall toward what she thought would be an unpleasant scene.

'How did no one else hear that?' She thought making her way into the room.

"Ah..." The man groaned.

"Andros...Hold on! Please just hold on!" She frantically looked around the panels for the emergency generator. She wondered why the lights were out to begin with, they were usually always on.

"I'm coming!" She kept yelling at the injured man a few feet away.

"Got it!" She yelled as all the lights slowly illuminated again. She could see his arm behind one of the center consoles from where she was standing. She quickly ran around to the other side of the control room.

"Andros..." But when she looked down Andros wasn't the man she saw.

"Tommy..." Ashley said in a whisper as her breath got caught up in her throat. She bent down and picked up his hand, leaving her left on top of his chest. "...What happened?"

Tommy didn't answer. He was shaking and trying his best to breathe as his panicked eyes glared up at her. "I'll go get some help!" She said, trying to calm him down. But looking at him made her want to cry. The pain he was feeling was real and she knew she had to stay with him. He was in his final moments alive.

"No... you c-can't... he-elp me... Andros is... de-ead..." Tommy told her between breaths.

Ashley was whimpering now, feeling as if she were about to have a panic attack.

Had he really just said the love of her life was dead?

Ashley didn't know how she was keeping it together now.

"Tommy... it's okay... you're going to be fine... we're all going to be..." She nodded her head as she said this trying to make him believe it were true. But she could see it in his eyes. He knew what was happening to him. Her gaze fell to the floor, her hands still holding his. Her eyes became squinted as she tried to keep herself from crying.

As his hand started to become limp, his eyes began to flicker before slowly closing altogether.

"No..." She said in a soft, cracked voice.

Ashley lowered his hand gently, placing it on the floor next to him. She used the console behind her to hoist herself up off the floor, doing this while trying to maintain her balance. She was crying now, there was no way she could hold it in at this point. The only man she had ever loved was dead and the man he was trying to save had been the one to deliver this news before dying himself.

"Oh Ashley..." A voice said behind her.

She turned around and immediately gasped. She couldn't believe her eyes.

There they were; all six of them. In Gasket's arms was Andros's body. He dropped Andros onto the floor. His body rolled once, leaving him face down.

"You're next!" Came Rita's squeal.

"No... no... no." Ashley kept murmuring, shaking her head in disbelief.

"Ashley!" She heard someone else yell. 'But who had said that?' She wondered. They sounded so distant.