A\N: So this is pretty much what it's like to grow up in an at-risk neighborhood. And then I've been rewatching DT, since my brain is too spazzed to write anything, and this showed up. Honestly, if someone had asked my classmates to be Power Rangers, I'm pretty sure you'dve gotten Conner, Kira, Ethan, and Trent. So is this AU? Well, not in my headcanon...but it's not like it contradicts canon, either. So up to you.
One day, a picture went up on the walls of Haley's Cyberspace.
It was a picture of five teenagers drinking from unlabeled bottles at an inner-city park. Lit by the orange streetlamps, their breath made cold puffs in the air, but they were all laughing, the girl dressed in yellow getting up to chase a boy dressed in blue.
At the moment Trent took that snapshot in his mind, he got out his sketchbook to draw it down.
That had been a week before the picture had gone up, a cold December night, and Conner had eyed the sketchbook and snorted. "Dude. Really? What the hell've you got to draw here?"
Trent hesitated, then shook his head.
Conner raised an eyebrow. "...No. Really. I thought you only drew superheroes?" He shook his head, took a pull of beer. "No offense, dude, but we ain't morphed right now."
Trent shrugged. "Yeah..." He sketched in another line before saying what was on his mind. "Con? You ever think we're, I dunno, white trash or something?"
"No. Why?" Kira answered, dropping to her knees behind Trent and resting her chin on his shoulder to look at the sketch.
"Yeah, dude, I'm kinda missin' a skin color for that." Ethan pointed out, dropping down, taking a swig from a can, wincing, handing Kira her beer, and taking his own fruitier one. (Which for once was not a gay joke from Conner; Trent always made sure to grab something that tasted like fruit for Ethan, because Ethan hated normal alcohol.)
Trent pointed his pen, listing off his reasons. "Conner got kicked out, again, because he's not going to military school even though his grandpa's General McKnight; Eth, it's been like a week since your parents've been home; Kira, you got in a fight with your dad again; and I'm homeless and steal my dad's wallet sometimes to buy you guys beer." He paused. "And we broke a park lock to drink beer in the middle of the night. So there's that."
The Rangers considered.
They had never met older Rangers, or adults who talked about their own childhoods honestly, without moralizing imbued in it. Neither had most of their classmates. If any of them had, they might have heard that they were in an 'underprivileged' neighborhood and were 'at-risk' students; they might have heard about parents who helped make dinner or listened to a bad day...
But they would have known, then, that they were society's trash, and that by a simple accident of demographics, they had been thrown away.
On some primitive level, a level that was built in to keep societies together, they knew what was wrong. They knew that Kira shouldn't be such a ready fighter, eager to leap into battle; that Conner shouldn't be so insecure when his life was the epitome of high school; that Ethan shouldn't resort to childish pranks to get attention from other people. But that was the same part of them that had whispered, when they had first found the Dino Gems, that they had been recruited as child soldiers into a war bigger than they could dream of.
They tended to ignore that part.
They all shrugged. "Yeah, probably." Conner said, finishing his beer and tossing it at the trash can. "We should totally get Four Locos at some point."
Ethan rolled his eyes and slid Conner the concoction. Conner cackled evilly.
Later, Trent had been going through his sketchbook in art class when he'd stumbled on the draft, and he looked at it, and thought.
The thoughts were...tangled. Trent wasn't quite like the other Rangers, or even like his classmates. For a little while, he'd had parents in his life. He'd had hopes and dreams, and he'd never known what it was like to live like this.
Trent could remember that.
But he'd been living with Anton long enough to have seen what was behind the doors of the wealthy, and how much hatred and coldness lay there. Maybe this was just another version of that. Maybe there was no real normal, and those fifties-TV-show ideals were...well, television.
What was real?
Somewhere in his internal argument came a new thought. Conner had a niece from an older sister. Trent had seen Conner with the girl; it was like some part of Conner just lit up playing with her, teaching someone else the self-worth and -love he never had. Sometimes, late at night, Kira would pull out her guitar and sing, and the stage was a pale comparison; she transformed into a Muse the Greeks could only imagine. Ethan's romance with Cassidy had been doomed from the start, but when Ethan had started even thinking about her, he turned from a slightly-bratty nerd into someone wholeheartedly devoted to someone else.
The Rangers would grow up someday. They would have families. And they would always have each other's backs. Someone would always be there to vent to or talk with or drink with. Their children would grow up with parents and uncles and aunts that loved them.
In the end, it didn't matter which world was real. The Rangers were building a new one.
Slowly, Trent started to draw.
Strong brushstrokes of oil paints. Soft watercolors. Colored pencil here and there. Trent was called away mid-drawing and, in the battle, sank into the place that took away his pain, where he could decide, without any Gem or Mesegog screwing with his head, what he wanted and who he was. When he returned, light came to the painting, a glimmer of hope in the bright colors of the clothes and the laughing faces.
He didn't hang it up, and hadn't even planned to. It had just been a cathartic drawing. But Haley had found it, and stuck it on the wall. Trent had blushed and hoped the others didn't give him crap about it.
"Hey, dude, sick art!" Conner said as soon as he saw it. "What's it called?"
Trent considered. "Superhero."
End note: ...And that's how my classmates dealt with it, too. Because they're awesome.