Disclaimer: I don't own Power Rangers, or anything to do with it.
A/N: This is just a brief, random drabble that came to me while watching TV tonight. I had a particular voice in mind when I was writing this, but honestly I think it could come from almost any of the Rangers.
I haven't abandoned my other story-just wanted to get this out while it was in my head :-)
Afterlife
They never tell you about this part, when you become a Ranger.
They talk about the difficulties of a Ranger's life: never making it through a single date. The friendships that collapse as you withdraw and become secretive. The fights with your parents about sneaking off at all hours.
They talk about the dangers of fighting evil space aliens, physically and emotionally. They tell you you may be captured, tortured, killed.
And if you say you are ready to face all this, ready to handle it all, in the name of defending your planet, that's the end of it. You've accepted your duty in full knowledge of the consequences. They sign you up, give you a morpher, and suddenly the fate of the world is in your hands. And then life is okay—difficult, but okay, and you live day-to-day, and you build strong, trusting friendships, and you fight for what is right every day and are proud of it. And life is okay.
Until the day after.
The day after evil is defeated. The day after your powers are destroyed in some epic, final battle. The day after a lifetime's worth of thanks is piled upon you, albeit an anonymous you, by the grateful citizens of Earth.
That day after becomes also, the first day of the rest of your life, and that day they never warn you about.
Sure, it's great at first. A huge weight is off your shoulders and suddenly you can live again. You can start to think about doing all the things, all the selfish, normal things, that you've put aside for so long. And it's great. For the first week or so. Maybe a month, depending on how hard those last few weeks of Rangering were.
And then there comes a time when you really have to stare in the mirror in the morning and ask yourself, how do I keep living?
How do I now return to my normal, unsatsifying life, as if the last year (or more) of my life never even happened? How do I go back to the real world – how do I put "what's practical" back at the top of my list?
Especially if you're young, college or high school age, still looking for your first "real" job. One moment you're a hero, the next you're sitting bleakly at a desk in some mundane customer service job, shuffling paperwork and getting yelled at by angry customers hour after hour, day after day. And you sit there all day and think to yourself about how amazing your life used to be—how it didn't matter that life was difficult because the mere act of struggling through gave you a high. You used to be a hero – how did you come to this? Is this really all the rest of your life holds – because honestly it's never going to be enough, not nearly, not after being a Power Ranger.
At the end of the day you wander out of work and somehow find yourself at home, maybe at your parents' house or maybe at some tiny apartment somewhere. It doesn't really matter, because you'll always feel alone – always, so long as you're surrounded by people with no way of understanding who you were –who you are.
Then you sit in bed at night and stare at the ceiling and think about the friendships you used to have. Most people are lucky to have a group of friends they can trust with, say, $20, or their car, or even just with their hearts. You? You had friends to trust with your life – and that trust was tested on a daily basis. The three, or four, or five or six of you – you had this life together that nobody else can share or understand. Nobody else ever will understand or even be aware of it. Friends like that—they should be by your side for life.
So why is that you've somehow found yourselves scattered?
Answer: reality. Without the Power drawing you together, real life gets in the way. Job or educational opportunities pop up on the other side of the country. You suddenly have lives, real lives that don't require you to spend hours and days fighting and strategizing together.
That connection will be with you for life...but that seems pretty useless when, physically-speaking, you may never see each other again.
So let's be honest, there's a reason they never tell you, about life after Rangering. Because, life as a Ranger, we could handle. Putting aside our priorities and lives temporarily to protect our planet – doing something great and meaningful, building that kind of relationships with your teammates—that we can do. That we will do.
...But would we really have agreed so quickly to all of this, had we known what the rest of our lives would become?