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Cam switched views from the outside cameras for the fiftieth time, just for something to do. He could see Tori and Blake by the water. Shane and Dustin up a tree. Hunter practising flips by the north entrance, near the daisies (he never flipped onto flowers, which was something Cam definitely shouldn't use against him if he needed it in the future).They still hadn’t figured it out. To be fair, they were all decent rangers, but none of them had his particular intelligence or firsthand experience with this. He tried the comms again."Can any of you read me? Shane. Dad. Dad." Nothing. Whatever Uncle had done to cut him off from the morphing grid was startlingly effective. Nothing but dead air. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment and then tried morphing again. It left him flat on his back in the middle of Ninja Ops, groaning, his mouth tasting of blueberry popcorn.Maybe he wasn’t so smart after all."Uh uh uh!" The cartoon image of Lothor wagged its finger at him from the main viewscreen. He hadn't been able to delete its code, but he'd managed to reduce it to the corner of his screen once it'd played its initial stupid message about how he was going to die unless he begged Lothor to work with him, blah blah blah. Family was such fun. He stuffed his worry about Dad back down inside himself where it could fester with all his other fears. * * * Tori set herself, one hand high, one low. Resting his chin on one fist, Cam watched for lack of anything better to do. His algorithms ran without his input, trying to find a way back through this dimensional twist that Lothor had imposed on him. There'd be a peep from the main display when they ran out of options and he needed to think of something else. (Or when they found a solution. Idiot. That was possible, too.) Blake raised his eyebrows at her, jogging from foot to foot. Tori focused, pulling power, and water swirled through the air - then shot at Blake about half a second earlier than usual. He was ready, though, and somersaulted over it, only to be smacked in the face by her other jet of water. He squawked, flying back into the ground. Cam grinned. Blake rolled back up to his feet, grinning harder. "He totally wants to braid your hair later because you're, like, soooooo cool," Cam told Tori, wishing she could hear him. * * *He had a generator, and a backup generator. Running out of power wouldn’t be an issue. The problem was that the oxygen pumps were outside the boundary. He was inside a very limited, perfect sphere and he wouldn’t be able to breathe forever. It'd been forty-five minutes, which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem - except he estimated he had maybe another twenty, twenty-two at most. So he couldn't train to keep himself busy; it'd use up too much oxygen. He had to keep trying to find a technical solution.Worst of all, the coffee machine was still down. * * *Shane and Dustin had completely given up on training and were sprawled on their backs, Dustin’s head on Shane’s stomach, Shane’s hand idly playing with Dustin’s hair. Useless. Cam idly set his fingers to running another algorithm while he watched them, and then he turned down the audio. He really didn’t want to hear what stupid lovestruck things they were telling each other.“Duuuuude, I love what you’ve done with your hair, but my fingers are stuck,” Cam said, narrating as Shane’s lips moved.“Oh, no, dude! I must’ve used Cam’s super expensive custom superglue that he has to order that I also keep using on things like googly eyes to stick on Blake when he falls asleep, instead of hair gel, again!”Cam gasped as Shane. “Dude! That means…… wait, what does it mean?”‘Dustin’ replied, “Means we gotta fight together and move as one with your meaty fingers trapped in my locks! It’s already all about teamwork but now even more!”“At least we didn’t glue my hand to your ass, I guess," 'Shane' said thoughtfully.Dustin rolled over, and Shane actually did have to make an effort to extract his fingers from Dustin’s curls, making Cam smile a tired, wry smile. He turned the audio back up again, feeling a little guilty. He was being mean, underestimating their intelligence this far. Dustin said, “Shane? You think Cam’ll let me have little hangy dice in my zord?”Okay. He wasn’t being that mean. He flipped over to Tori and Blake's feed, and noted, yeah, Blake was indeed braiding her hair. To be fair, he was good at it.* * *Time for Hunter's camera. Cam tried desperately to ignore the first strains of lightheadedness. If only these idiots had some kind of sixth sense for when he was in trouble. You could put a kitten in a tree and Blake would streak up it before the kitten uttered its first confused mew, or you could destroy a building on the other side of the world and Shane would arrive just in time to catch the first valuable possession tossed from the top floor, especially if it was a game console, but Cam? None of them knew he was about to d- be in trouble! Hunter was gone. Cam frowned, and checked the time. Hunter didn't have a shift at Storm Chargers, and he was conscientious as anything about getting his training done, even though he was nearly as obsessed with his stupid hair as any of the others. He wasn't exactly inclined to duck off for a sleep, or to read comics. Hm. He wasn't with any of the others. Was he okay?...and yeah, he could rely on all of them in their ways, and they all meant well, and they were all brave, selfless rangers. Wasn't like they did anything wrong at all when they knew someone was in danger. They were simply dumbasses, or to be more polite, witless hindquarters. Unintelligent glutei maximi. Moronic behinds. The anoxia had to be messing with his brain. Usually he could come up with at least another five synonyms. * * *He jolted awake face down on the console at someone calling his name. Head muzzy, temples pounding, he said, "Yeah? Yeah, what is-"It was someone yelling for him on the screen. He rubbed his eyes, trying to focus. Hunter? Carrying a cardboard tray. "Cam! Dude! Let m-!"Everything went grey again, and Cam fell over. * * *A gentle hand under his head. Everything faded in and out, in a way that Cam would've found really alarming if he'd been present enough to be alarmed by it, and that made him giggle to himself. Voice sounded like Shane. "Cam, it's okay, we've g-"* * *He found himself in a bed, and there was a soothing waft of coffee just under his nose. Double espresso. "Knew that'd help. It's fresh, don't worry." Hunter's gruff voice, exposing more concern than he usually allowed himself. Cam opened one eye, which went reasonably well; the world didn't go sideways. He decided he'd chance the other. His head throbbed immediately at the increased light, making his nostrils flare. Hunter reached back behind himself to tug the curtain more securely over the window, then plonked the cardboard cup down on the stand next to Cam's bed. "We found the doohickey Lothor set and we destroyed it. And we gotta work on a new system, dude!"Blake stood next to him, arms folded in that particular defensive way he had. But he was butted up against Hunter's shoulder for comfort, wrinkling Hunter's black jacket. Neither of them seemed to care. "Yeah, knowing that you like your coffee dead on ten should not be our only warning system that maybe our tech guy and Green is about to die.""You knew that?" His voice was a croak, and a yellow-clad arm came into view with a cup with a straw on the end of it. Held in a hand. It'd be weird if Dustin's hand had fallen off, though as Cam gratefully took a few sips of the almost unbearably cold water, he noted that wouldn't be the weirdest thing about today. Dustin gave him a quick smile, and let him take the cup. He rubbed Cam's shoulder, then shoved his hands in his pockets. They actually knew him. Maybe if he'd been stuck up a tree or tossed out a window, one of them would've helped. (...Of course they would've, he thought, allowing the 'our tech guy' to warm him a little. He was an idiot. Not like he actually thought they didn't care. And maybe occasionally they had more than two IQ points to rub together.)Tori was visible through the window to the corridor, then Shane. They came in and closed the door. "Hey, there," Shane said warmly. "You're gonna be fine," Tori told him. She reached down and squeezed his hand lying on top of the blanket, then squeezed in between Dustin and Blake to sling an arm around the neck of each. Blake's shoulders relaxed noticeably. "Doctor Singh said your blood tests came back normal. You have to stay overnight for observation, but you can come home tomorrow." "It is excellent news, Cameron," said a small furry voice from Shane's shirt pocket, and Cam embarrassed himself immediately by bursting into tears. * * * He didn't know who was holding onto him, but he suspected it was all of them. * * *Some time later, Cam felt exhausted, but better. Dustin perched a hip on the edge of the bed, and Cam leaned against him just a little. He kind of had to, or he'd be shoved out of the bed, of course, but it was still comforting to have that touch that he didn't have to ask for and couldn't refuse. That warmth. “No, no, no, Blake’s voice is more like this,” Dustin said.Cam gave him an outraged look. “You think you can do it better than-“Dustin pinched his nose and promptly went into what sounded like his impression of Cookie Monster with food poisoning. “TOR’. I LOVE YOU. BECAUSE I’M A LITTLE MANLY MAN AND I LOVE ANYONE TALLER THAN ME.” He paused, with his fingers still on his nose. “Should that be ‘me’ or ‘I’ there?”“’Me’,” Cam responded, always happy to help his teammates with grammar. One of the few areas where he could just show them Google if they argued with him.“Thanks, dude!” An awkward high five that nearly smacked Cam in the face. Dustin continued, “ME LOVE ANYONE TALLER THAN ME.” . . . Cam sighed around the headache. “SO THAT MEAN EVERYONE BUT ALSO YOU’RE KINDA COOL AND YOU HAVE A PRETTY NOSE.”“You guys know we can hear you, right?” Tori’s voice was muted by the glass of the window, but not muted at all by the…. By the partly open door that she gestured towards. When the hell had that happened?Dustin gulped, and slumped against Cam, murmuring, "Play dead! Play dead!" Cam just laughed.