Title: Little Boy Lost and Little Boy Blue
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Good heavens no, I own none of this. I'd be a lot richer if I did.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Destiny has a sort of inevitability, no matter how much you change the past. The tale of an alternate Tommy Oliver.
Notes: Okay, so this idea sprang from the question of a different Tommy and what was supposed to be a sort of buddy epic about him and Billy. It wound up more about Tommy than Billy, but these things happen. The fic is technically complete, but I may yet make an alteration or two if someone comes up with a great idea.
Prologue
Pauline and Matthew Oliver were a kind couple, one who saw the numbers of orphaned and abandoned children in the care of the state systems and decided they wanted to ensure at least one of those children grew up with a loving home and family. With no close relatives of their own, the couple had bonded over this lack and wanted to provide a child with even fewer roots a better chance than luck of the draw in foster care.
Thus it came to be that they jumped through hoop after hoop, dealt with red tape and nearly offensive questions about their motivations in adopting and whether or not they would abuse a child in their care. It took years, but they eventually brought home a darling little boy. He was American Indian, what people were starting to call 'Native American', and while they didn't know anything in particular about Amerindian culture, there were some vague plans in their minds about trying to at least connect him to something to do with that.
Then again, it all depended on Thomas, little Tommy Oliver. What would he want? Would he be interested? Would he play football or baseball? Would he be an artist or a scientist? Pauline and Matt didn't care either way. The important thing was to give him the chances to become what he wanted to be as best they could.
His first day back from kindergarten, age four, and he'd discovered karate in a video they showed in class. Obligingly they signed him up for it, only to be delighted that the man who taught the class thought Tommy was his best student. Hardworking, devoted and interested in the discipline and history (inasmuch as a four-year-old could be), for the next two years Tommy's entire attention went to the study of karate, and the one thing his parents worried about were the battles they were going to have with him to do his homework when he started into grade one at school, instead of doing katas in the back yard.
Now, in one reality they worked something out and Tommy grew up a bit of a loner, but so devoted to his martial arts that by age fourteen he'd been the deadliest thing on two feet you could imagine, something the Power Rangers discovered to their great detriment.
But for every reality where things go one way, there's an infinity of others where it all goes differently. One might even say wrongly.
Six-year-old Tommy was picked up from school by police and learned a very important lesson in life that day. Sometimes people driving in cars get into wrecks with jerks who should have known to call a cab when they'd been drinking. And sometimes the injuries from those wrecks are so bad that the people go to sleep and never wake up.
He never saw Sensei Robert again. Because the universe chose to spite not only Tommy, but Pauline and Matt in its way. And the little boy they'd tried to save from being bounced around in an uncaring government system of foster care was tossed headlong into that system. Often into the worst that system had to offer. The only Indian kid in a sea of white, black and Hispanic, he never fit in. Too pale for the black kids, they bullied him. Too dark for the white ones, they bullied him too. He might have fit in with the Hispanic ones, middling dark and a lot more physical types to disappear into, but by the time he'd landed up in the seventh (eighth? Ninth? He'd lost count) foster home, going through just as many schools, he had a chip on his shoulder, a personal bubble that extended for miles and emotional walls keeping people away that no one could break down.
Sometimes he'd form pacts of mutual support with a solo Korean kid or someone else who was the only one of his or her 'kind', but his attitude tended to make others form ranks against him. And the bullying never stopped.
Gone was a pure devotion to perfecting his karate form. Tommy wanted to, but what was more important was getting respect. He took classes wherever and whenever he could, but it was a bit of king fu here, ninjutsu there, karate somewhere else and jujitsu in between. He learned to fight, learned to react to bullies by wading in fists first to shut them up, because no adult could be relied on to deal with them. One of his foster housemates jokingly called him The Punisher of the playground, but he rather liked that. Someone who saw the system wasn't working and stepped in to fill the gap.
The attitude that anyone who bullied anyone at all around him was going to get a concussion got him bounced out of even more schools even faster. That started bouncing him around the foster homes in the state even more. He didn't even bother unpacking most of the time, well aware he'd just be moving on the first time some jerk decided to steal another kid's lunch and he decided to intervene. He never started anything, just made sure to finish it.
Two abusive foster homes in a row, leading to his running away twice, meant that when he found himself in a third, thirteen-year-old Tom (Tommy was too childish) had enough. He knew his parents had adopted him in California before moving out to the East Coast. It made his decision to put as much distance as he could between the foster homes in New York State and himself as possible seem almost fated. Once he got to Angel Grove after a year constantly on the move, pretending he was a few years older, scraping by with odd jobs and begging, his silence and the way he'd fallen through the cracks back east meant that he was placed with a new foster family in the city where he was found.
They seemed decent sorts, didn't have any other foster kids living with them and made sure he got three square meals a day and clothes that fit, along with a suggestion he try the youth centre for karate classes along with a warning that aliens were invading with weird grey foot soldiers and he ought to be careful. If they didn't care all that much, he'd certainly had worse and it was novel to deal with adults who didn't greet him by asking what he'd done wrong so far that day.
Tom Oliver squared his shoulders and walked into Angel Grove High.