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The chart was Jason’s idea.
It sat in the basement at Jason’s parents’ house, and it sparkled. Blue, black, pink, yellow, and red, on a white background. A big whiteboard against the longest wall, that was previously used for football plays but now looked just a teensy bit different. There was a grid on it for the entire month, and if he looked at it at just the wrong angle then he could see next month, the month after, and also for some reason November in 2063 which seemed to be taken over by some kind of rainbow unicorn invasion. Billy had done something amazing to it so that if any of the parents walked in, it reverted to a homework / project chart (and to be fair, it had homework and projects on it – it just had a lot more on it, too).
The chart had come about because of one of those weeks, where Zack hadn’t eaten lunch three days running, Jason had missed basketball practice, Trini and Kim had pulled an all nighter to get Kim’s geography project in, there'd been a hard raucous edge in all their conversations far too often, and Billy had gotten tenser and tenser about all the physical and emotional noise. One night, Jason had sat in the middle of them all in his basement, and he'd watched, and he'd listened, and he'd...
Stood up. That was all there was to it, but Billy's shoulders eased a little, and Kim looked up at him with a hint of playfulness back in her smile for once, and Trini had promptly stolen the last donut from the pink and white tray, and Zack had tossed a popcorn kernel in the air, grinned, then caught it deftly in his mouth.
"I have an idea," Jason had announced. "And I'm gonna need you guys to help me figure out how to make it work."
~~~~~~~~
It was a good chart. Touch-sensitive. Electronic, synced to their phones. Somehow Billy'd used knowledge he'd gained from Ranger tech to make it so that they could write on it with any pen, and it was infinitely expandable. They just touched a day to pull out the schedule on it, touched a note to expand, touched a note on the note to expand. (Zack had tested it one day. They’d come into the basement to find him under a huge note-tent, fast asleep on the carpet, gripping Billy’s blue marker.)
It started out with everyone adding things. For themselves, and each other. Training, homework, family birthdays. The notes had optional fields for locations, photos, icons for ‘done / not done / not gonna be done / why not, Billy? / ‘cos I said so that’s why just kidding I’ll do it’ and everything was tagged with the relevant person’s name.
Jason picked the glitteriest gold pen he could find and wrote on it "EAT LUNCH - ALL" as a recurring note across every single day.
Trini snickered, and added on Tuesday afternoons at 5.13pm, "All - REMIND JASON TO GO TO BASKETBALL PRACTICE" then at 5.15pm "All - REMIND JASON AGAIN" and at 5.27pm "Trini - TELL JASON IF HE DOESN'T GO THAT HIS RED JACKET IS HERS".
Jason retaliated with a 5.29pm note to "Jason - FILL JACKET POCKETS WITH BEES ".
Kim nodded, and added notes for Wednesdays to “RESEARCH BEE SUPPLIERS – Kim, or Zack if he gets bored”.
“You want another board? Isn’t this one big enough?” Zack startled himself out of his history homework. Well. He’d intended to be doing his history homework, but what he was doing was sketching a motorbike with flames coming out of the exhaust, with a basket on the front with boxes of snacks in loving detail. There was a black marker held carefully between his upper lip and his nose, and he rocked back and forth on his behind on the floor.
Billy smiled at him, and after another thirty seconds the chart was populated with reminders on each day for all of them to take their meds.
“It’s not because we all forget,” Billy said hastily, making a concerned kind of face in Zack’s direction. He knew them all well, but he also knew this could be one of those things where people who weren’t on the spectrum could get a little touchy about not being good at looking after themselves. Forgetting food was okay, kind of, sometimes, because it was seen as stupidly heroic or something? But meds were different. He wasn’t entirely sure why. “It’s just to make it easier for all of us. Because one of us might forget but others might remember, and if we don’t know that the others have remembered, then we could end up with me taking five Zoloft or Zack taking twelve Adderalls or Trini taking ten sleeping pills and being a zombie for a week. Uh, not literally.”
~~~~~~~~
“Yeah, crazy girl isn’t a zombie,” Zack said affectionately, and she just as affectionately reached over and grabbed his arm. When he got his hand back, there was a pineapple drawn on the back of it. He laughed, and then he pointed at Billy. “It’s all good, man, I appreciate what you’re trying to do there. We’re all crazy in our ways.”
And they were, which was one of the reasons why he was so damn glad to have ‘em all. If Trini didn’t get her yoga and didn’t get her sleeping pills at night, then she got tense and slept maybe two, maybe three hours tops. If Jason didn’t get his exercise he got ratty, and he’d been on anti-depressants since a little before the final fight with Rita. His therapist’d said he might be able to come off ‘em again sometime.
Zack felt a lot better when he was on his Adderall, and now and then when Kim helped him with the insurance details (he was good about it for his mom, but it was a lot harder to find the energy for himself) he’d go on Prozac for a while himself. His doc told him he could’ve been on Zoloft, too, but of course he picked Prozac. It was a good name!
Billy needed something for anxiety and depression now and then, especially if there were any big changes at home at school. But not all the time. Kim said she’d been diagnosed with social anxiety stuff and SAD herself, and she was trying the supplement route first to see if it made enough of a difference or if her brain chemistry meant she still needed something else.
It wasn’t just about the alphabet soup that was their collective list of diagnoses (diagnosises? Diagnoseseses? – whatever). It was about them all being good to each other.
Trini didn’t mind him keeping her company now and then to encourage her at yoga (and maybe to encourage him, too). That meant he didn’t feel bad about her bringing him his pills and a container of sliced pineapple, his current favorite fruit, late one night when his mom was real bad, he hadn’t had a chance to buy himself some food, and he didn’t want to leave her bedroom. Jason let his own problems hang out there for everyone to see, so it wasn’t a big deal when he was a sweetheart and brought them all lunch. Kim let Zack help her bandage up a nasty scratch she got at training, and so it was fine that she helped him with his paperwork. Billy was the biggest sweetheart in the world and did all their tech, so Zack didn’t feel like he was intruding when he explained little social things to him when Billy asked (Zack wouldn’t do it otherwise – Billy wasn’t a child and he wasn’t stupid, and Zack trusted him to know when he wanted to know more about something).
Zack was good at retreating. He was real good at pulling himself up inside himself, kinda, and accepting whatever people did to or for him, and just smiling about it until they left him alone. He only fought when he had to (like for his mom, or pounding Putty heads). But with them, he didn’t feel like he had to retreat so much. He could keep himself out there, and it was okay.
The chart helped. Made him feel even more like he was part of the family to come back from a morning run to get a pop-up about Kim and Jason’s geography project, or Billy’s anniversary of his dad’s death. (That one didn’t make him feel good, but it made him feel needed, especially when he’d remembered without the reminder from the chart.)
What got weird, though, was when the chart started putting notes on itself.
~~~~~~~~
“12.14am – Billy – get beaten up by Putties.”
The location was behind the gym at school. His mom was asleep, so Zack left a note, didn’t question any of it, and just ran. He was half asleep, but he didn’t have to be awake for this. This was one of those times when he was especially grateful for a Ranger constitution. It was freezing outside, but the adrenaline was more than enough to keep him going.
Kim near fell on him leaping off the top of the gym building, but he “whoa whoa whoa’d” at her until she realised he was Zack, and, y’know, not some fearsome creature from the bottom of the pit. Well, maybe both. Whatever. It was a pretty awesome leap and he was later quite regretful that he’d only seen it from the bottom.
They found Billy back to back with Trini, who lived closer to the centre of Angel Grove. Billy was in his usual school outfit. Blue shirt over a black t-shirt, blue jeans. Trini wore a Muppets t-shirt, Animal, he thought. And little pink shorts. He wondered briefly just how many items of clothing she’d stolen off other people, ‘cos wasn’t that t-shirt Billy’s? He grinned as he thought about the Led Zep shirt he’d borrowed from Kim that was in the depths of his own closet, and then there was a strong hand grabbing his shoulder and another idiot Putty making a swipe at his legs, and he didn’t think about anything for a while.
It was good, this. Fierce focus, that ADHD hyperfocus thing really coming in handy and feeling like a pleasure instead of a burden like it could sometimes be.
He lost himself in it, and when the Putties were all finally gone, he found himself again with Jason’s solid presence next to him.
“Hey, man,” he said tiredly.
Jason bumped shoulders with him. “Hey.”
They huddled in the faint Exit sign light through the window into the library. The asphalt practically radiated cold underfoot. Kim was panting, same as the rest of them, but same as the rest of them she also looked energised. “How come you stayed at the library so long, Billy? Everything okay?”
“Lost track of time,” Billy said guiltily.
Jason rubbed his forehead. It wasn’t that unusual to get attacked by Putties. Lord Zedd really hadn’t been much of a nuisance so far. Just feeling them out, Zordon thought. There’d probably be a bigger attack later. Still, they kept up with their training and tried to be careful. “And how’d the chart know?”
Billy, more guiltily, coughed and shuffled his feet. “I probably should’ve told you,” he said. “It, um, developed sentience. And some really intense probability algorithms. Look at next Thursday, five in the morning.”
They all pulled it up on their phones, and saw a note that read, “Kim – forget history assignment”.
As they watched, it shimmered, and changed to, “All – remind Kim about history assignment”.
Zack blinked. “Whoa.”
Billy nodded. “Very whoa! It changed because we became aware of it and now it’ll be less likely that Kim will forget. I’m really sor-”
“This is AWESOME,” Zack cackled, and the rest of them were nodding and grinning as well. Zack really liked the smile that instantly blossomed on Billy’s face. Zack continued happily, “This’ll be really helpful! What should we call it – him – her – them? What pronouns do you use for a self-aware computer chart thingummy?”
There was a ding on Zack’s phone, and he checked it again. “12.49am – all – refer to chart as Clarissa. Then purchase your favorite things as a treat y/n?”
Trini reached over to bump fists with Billy. “Clarissa! Explaining it all, huh? She’s gotta meet Alpha. And Zordon!”
“That’s a yes on the favorite things,” Jason said decidedly, and then Jason’s phone spoke.
“CALLING BEE SUPPLIER.”
“No, no, not that! I don’t need more bees!”
Anyway. The chart was AWESOME, Zack concluded, and it’d be awesome even if only for the belly laugh that Jason’s face gave him.