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They’d fought the primeval dragon of Chaos itself and won. Perhaps it wasn’t their average city menace of the week but they’d faced worse odds before. It had been close. The Green Ninja had fallen. But when he breathed once more he didn’t cry or scream.
Tears could not express the invisible weight crushing him from the inside out.
But it wasn’t a new feeling so he pushed it away and kept his gaze fixed ahead.
He let two of their own walk away – one led astray by promises that none but the liar could make, and the other following the first with vows to be together no matter the cost. There was no fault placed on either of them for their decision. They were young but they were not naive. None of them had been children in a long time.
Then the rest of them made it back to the Monastery and his feelings stayed firmly stuck in his chest. He was relieved, really. He could hear the dragging footsteps and deep sighs. Everyone was tired. It wouldn’t be fair to make them deal with a breakdown after all that they’d already gone through today. It never was.
He died and they paid the price. He did whatever it took to keep them safe. That was how the story usually went. And he preferred it that way, after all.
Arin, desperately shaking his broken body. The ninja, digging him from the ruins of their own home. Emperor Garmadon leaving him to die alone on cold and barren sands. He’d been aware of none of it but the anguish in their eyes every time they told him what had happened was enough.
Then there was every time he’d been there to watch his family be torn apart. The Overlord forcing them all under his will one by one, leaving him so completely and utterly alone. Chanting his own father into the Cursed Realm, never to be the same again. Holding an inconsolable Kai and Jay when the only girl that’d ever mattered to either of them was lost.
Everything he ever saw and felt and heard was death, death, death.
Lloyd winced at the memories. He wondered how long it would be before he could think of latest demise today as a distant moment in the past, harrowing but too far away to hurt him.
He wondered what it would feel like for dying to be permanent, to never wake up or see his family again. He wondered how long it would haunt them, if the team would break the way they did after Nya’s sacrifice. But even that had been temporary in a way that death was not supposed to be.
He plastered a smile on his face the way he had back then and pushed the choking emotions further down to join in the festivities. In the space of a few heartbeats, he let the mask drop to be replaced with real joy and relief. He felt alive. He was alive. Everything was fine.
He was happy.
He hugged and laughed and felt every hand on his shoulder and pat on his back. It was as though everyone the ninja knew in this new, unfamiliar world was crammed into the monastery courtyard. For once, it was brimming with life and exuberance in a way that he’d missed dearly since the Merge.
He caught glimpses of Jay exchanging short words with the rest of the ninja and even if his memory was lost, this was the first time Lloyd’s entire family had been together since that fateful day. They were all changed and different now, five years of age and life lived since then having left their marks on all of them, but surely that didn’t matter, right?
The celebration continued long after dark until Mr. Frohicky shooed everyone out with a broom to let the ninja finally rest. They piled inside and spent a good chunk of the next hour raiding the kitchen and unwrapping hasty bandages to patch each other up properly.
Lloyd ended up being the first to say his goodnights and trudge into his room. He was covered in Band-Aids with colorful ninjas stamped across them decorating every cut and scrape from the battle.
It had gone unsaid but understood in carefully exchanged looks by them all that they’d been lucky to walk away without any major injuries today.
The door to his room opened without protest and he flicked on the light. For a moment he thought the floor looked wonderfully enticing but he fought the urge to just collapse onto the ground. His bruised back would thank him tomorrow.
He practically threw himself onto his bed instead, adrenaline long gone and the exhaustion of the day weighing on his every movement. The black and blue along his spine and ribs twinged a protest but he just threw a forearm over his face in an attempt to block out the light. He laid there long enough for sleep to nudge at the edges of his consciousness.
His entire body panged with the sharp throbs of his powers knitting cuts closed.
He gave in and rolled onto his less injured side, cheek pressed into the soft sheets, knees tucked up close to his chest.
Instead of succumbing to sleep, his gaze was drawn to the row of pictures carefully framed and lined up on his shelf in front of him. One of them was crooked. He didn’t think it’d been like that the last time he’d slept here.
Slivers of the brown cardboard backing peeked out around the photo’s edges. The tip of Kai’s hair disappeared under one of the frame’s corners. He mentally added straightening the picture to the list of things he probably had to do before going to sleep tonight.
The picture was of his team – his old team – long before the merge. It must’ve been between the fiascos with the Hands of Time and Harumi. And the whole disaster that’d followed after he met her.
There was a faint pang of heaviness that sank deep into his stomach as he let his thoughts linger on those memories for too long. It joined the tangle of jumbled feelings that’d been weighing him down since he’d woken up with unforgiving stone digging into his back and choking on his own hoarse gasps.
No, that wasn’t right. The angry mass of wordless pain was not new. The smiling teenage hero in the picture was a version of him that he hadn’t been in a long time. Oh.
How ironic it was that, of all things, the straw that finally, finally broke him was a happy memory. Of the time before everything fell apart. He missed feeling happy like that. But maybe happiness was just another thing he’d outgrown, along with his childhood.
He unraveled the way he should’ve when his friends – his family – were hovering nervously over him. For a moment that lasted an eternity, he could feel the panic rising up from the bottom of the chasm that’d been swallowing everything in him for as long as he could remember. Long overdue tears stung his eyes and it hurt. It hurt so much.
The pressure that had been pressing desperately against his eyes and lungs and throat built and spilled over the way he’d wanted it to when he was surrounded by the ones who could hold him and tell him it would all be okay. That it was over. That he was safe. That it was okay to cry and scream and be afraid.
He wished Kai was here to run warm hands through his hair. He wished Nya was here to fill his mind with rambled monologues about her new projects. Or anyone at all.
But they’d all had long days, too. Lloyd remembered the look of terror and burdensome responsibility in a teenaged Kai’s eyes. He would never forget the exhaustion and the devastated look in an even younger Nya’s. His pain weighed on them all and he knew it. He couldn’t force them to carry it for him again. Because he knew they would. He would.
The tears didn’t fall. The building sob didn’t echo through his room. The awful chaotic mess of invisible feelings pressed against him from the inside out but it was almost as though he didn’t know how to set it free anymore. So he tried to escape them instead.
He pushed them as far as he could into the deepest recesses of his mind, deeper even than the void they’d collected and risen from, and ran in the other direction.
The lump of that nameless emotion vanished.
He floated away with it.
The day’s leftover panic, the anxiety, the grief, the pain, the fear – all of it faded away until there was nothing left. It probably should have scared him that it felt so freeing. He felt nothing but the slow rise and fall of his chest. Some distant part of himself felt like it was drowning. The air was thick and heavy and light and intoxicating.
His lungs took deep, slow breaths and for once, he could finally just breathe. Living felt an awful lot like drowning, lately.
He was so tired. If he thought hard enough, he could feel himself getting up to straighten the picture in the frame in front of him but why would he? He was content to lie here forever, eyes open and unseeing as the death he had lived just hours earlier.
So he stared at that picture and the way it was wrong and he felt wrong but everything about the nothingness inside him felt right. The emptiness welcomed him and he leaned into its embrace. He had no regrets. There was no pain.
It was exhilarating in a calm and quiet sort of way.
He stared.
And stared.
And stared.
He distantly wondered whether he’d snap out of it if the door opened and someone walked in. But no one did so he lay there, knees curled to his chest and facing a crooked photograph. His thoughts were far, far away in his own oblivion where that awful tension couldn’t strangle his heart anymore. He felt nothing and the nothingness felt good.
His grasp on time as it slipped past was loose and sporadic. In some moments he was closer to reality than others but he let his mind wander and float away again. His awareness was like a tide ebbing and flowing but always peaceful. Always quiet. Always calm.
He drifted between disconnected thoughts that he forgot between one moment and the next. Time passed and he was too dead to the world to know it.
He didn’t know how long it’d been when the door opened and a blurry figure made its way towards him. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t think he could’ve anyways.
His vision was empty just like the rest of him – there but not, clear but filled with a weird void of static. Like tunnel vision but without focus. His body was numb just like his mind but he still felt the warmth exuding from the new thing in the way only one person could. Kai?
The thought of propping himself up or saying something or even just looking up at Kai crossed his mind. But he was too numb, too tired, too apathetic. It was nice here in the safety of the emptiness and as much as he didn’t want to scare his brother he couldn’t find it in himself to care.
He heard Kai say his name in that awful ‘too loud for stealth’ whisper. He remembered Jay’s complaints that it always foiled their recon missions, as if they weren’t already doomed before they started. For a team of ninja, stealth had never quite been their forte.
There was a warm hand gently pressed against his forehead.
Kai said something that sounded important but Lloyd let the words drift aimlessly through his mind. He couldn’t remember which words had come before the one he was hearing and soon that one was gone, too. Like a leaky faucet drip, drip, dripping away into a puddle where no one knew which drop had come first or next or last.
Gentle, warm arms wrapped around him and pulled him sideways. The world shifted and tilted around him until the faces in the pictures were right-side up. Lloyd remembered looking at those pictures. Time had gotten weird after that, he figured.
Deep brown eyes stared into his own and he could feel a bit of the numbness detaching. His vision cleared enough to stare back for a moment before his mind grew tired. Kai was terrified. He recognized it in the little tells – the slight furrow of his brow, the way he grit his teeth.
Lloyd thought he heard his name again but the sound echoed around the void where he was supposed to be until he couldn’t tell if he’d imagined the whole thing in the first place. Was that really his name?
Warm hands held his own. His gaze slipped down to his lap where Kai's fingers were tangled in his. Kai’s voice still trickled through his mind, untethered and unheard.
His hands were far too warm now, especially with Kai’s resting in them. It was almost like they’d become disconnected from his body – or maybe he had – but still, they radiated heat in a way that felt wrong. It all felt wrong. The edges of the fuzzy haze covering the wrongness dissipated at the realization.
His arms refused to cooperate when he willed them to move as though the invisible connection between his body and his mind was still broken. So he shifted his focus to the tip of his finger until he could practically feel it tingling. He felt it, even if it was only a phantom sensation.
He tapped the back of Kai’s hand once, twice, three times, then over and over again in a steady staccato.
“Lloyd?”
Too tired to open his mouth just yet, Lloyd let out a sound somewhere between a hum and an exhale. Kai squeezed his hand with a sigh of relief that Lloyd knew would be etched clearly across his face if he looked up. He squeezed back, letting the numbness slowly trail out of his arms.
He was mid-breath when the odd, blurry tunnel vision widened and disappeared, almost exactly like a camera’s stutter when it focused on a nearby object. The world was back in focus.
Lloyd gently pulled his hands from Kai’s grasp, took a deep breath and stared at them, flexing and turning them with the control that had been returned to him just as suddenly as it’d been taken.
His body didn’t rebel when he finally looked up at Kai who offered a small, tired smile and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. The Master of Fire was sitting awkwardly on the floor in front of him in a pair of red pajamas with his own cartoonish face patterned across them. His hair was damp and flat against his forehead.
“You wanna talk about it?” Kai asked.
Lloyd couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth and force the words out so he just shrugged in response. Later, he wanted to say.
“Okay,” Kai said, somehow understanding every unspoken word, “Well I’m going to set up the extra blankets in my room tonight. Consider this your invitation to my sleepover.”
And with that, Kai stood up and walked out of Lloyd’s room, stretching dramatically to let a frankly impressive number of firecracker popping sounds come from his spine. A small grin and a silent chuckle wormed their way out of Lloyd as he flicked off the light and followed.
Nya was somehow already passed out on Kai’s bed when they tiptoed into his room. Kai just sighed and shook his head while smirking and muttering something about intruders and invitations under his breath.
Kai switched off the ceiling light and clicked on a nightlight – Lloyd rolled his eyes at the Red Ninja merch again – before pulling the stack of blankets out of his closet. They were worn and faded after years of use but still thick enough to cushion the floor.
They halfheartedly attempted to scoot Nya over but the moment she was lying somewhat normally on the bed she rolled over and somehow ended up taking up even more space. Whatever, this was to be expected.
Lloyd met Kai’s eyes, then looked down at the pile of blankets in front of him and gasped dramatically. The back of his hand came up to his forehead in a cartoonish imitation of someone about to faint. Lloyd let himself go limp. The way he ended up starfished across the entire blanket pile was definitely unintentional.
“Lloyd, c’mon,” Kai whined in the same awful whisper he’d used earlier. “Even ten-year-old menace to society you would never do this to me.”
Lies and blasphemy was what that was but Lloyd didn’t bother to comment on it.
Instead, he pressed his face deeper into one of the pillows and let out a loud fake snore. Kai grumbled unintelligibly and before Lloyd could react, a heavy weight flopped across his back. He squeaked and twisted to stare back at Kai who’d apparently decided that lying perpendicularly on top of Lloyd was better than the floor.
There were sure to be complaints about back pains tomorrow but that was a problem for himself in the future.
He was asleep within seconds, cheek smushed into a pillow that was absolutely going to leave marks on his face by morning and blessedly sinking into an exhaustion so deep that even nightmares didn’t dare touch him.
He didn’t wake up when Kai cracked an eye open to watch Cole creep into the room and fall asleep sitting up against the foot of his bed. He was still asleep when Zane somehow ended up silently entering the room to stand sentry in a corner to power down.
The door opened for the last time that night when the first streaks of deep purple were dancing on the horizon just before dawn. Drawn by some subconscious instinct, Jay found himself searching for a place to sleep in the Fire Ninja’s room. He ended up stepping over multiple people asleep on the floor to curl up in the one corner of the bed that the Water Ninja hadn’t sprawled herself over.
He didn’t know why but the little space felt right. Like it had been left for him on purpose. Sleep dragged him under before he could follow that train of thought.
Lloyd woke up to the ever obnoxious lightning chickens in the yard screaming their heads off at the sun – they were still a few hours late for dawn as per usual – and found Kai’s room absolutely packed. The entire monastery, including family old and new, was there.
And while he could feel the missing pieces where Arin and Sora were supposed to be, the empty spaces weren't all-consuming. They were held back by the presence of the people in this room. He remembered the long years of keeping watch over an empty monastery with no one but himself to talk to, but he wasn’t alone anymore.
He had a whole new team here, willing to help him do whatever it took to get his students – his kids – back. It was all going to be okay.
“Rise and shine, Ninja!” he yelled, trying and failing to stifle his giggles at the chorus of groans and the volley of pillows thrown his way. Only Nya’s was even close to hitting him.
He grinned as he met Kai’s death glare and dodged the Red Ninja plushie flying at his head with surprisingly good aim for the Master of Fire first thing in the morning.
“Breakfast in five!” he called over his shoulder as he left the room and made his way to the kitchen, whistling to himself and fighting the urge to scream back at the chickens that had still not shut up.
He missed the relieved sigh that Kai let out as he ran his fingers through his absolutely disastrous bed hair.
Everyone was safe. It was fine. Lloyd was okay.
The chickens screamed outside and Kai heard a certain grandson of the First Spinjitsu Master yell an impressive string of curses back.
“Language!”
“Shut up, Kai!”
In the end, Kai made it to the kitchen just in time to snuff out the flames beginning to dance across the frying pan.
“Lloyd. Why? How the fuck did you burn cereal?”
He knew he’d probably have to bring up what’d happened last night at some point but for now, he just stood at the kitchen entrance and listened to the kid (not a kid anymore, how crazy was that?) launch into an explanation that seemed to defy more and more science as he went.
If he didn’t know better, Kai could almost believe that last night’s events had never happened.
Then again, the ninja were no strangers to death. It was heavy and empty and a word that meant someone was never coming back. It was supposed to be permanent, it just never quite seemed to stick for them. Yet for all the times they mourned, it never got easier. He supposed maybe that was why death was meant to be permanent.
But instead they got to keep living for each other and themselves in spite of the memories over and over, again and again. Ninja never quit, they said, and they meant every word of it. They’d been given so many chances and Kai would be damned if they didn’t get to live, for real this time.
Everything was going to be okay. Even if that promise had been ripped out from under them too many times to count in the past. Ninja never quit. That was the motto and by the First Spinjitsu Master himself, if burning the world to ashes was enough for his family to be happy, Kai would do it in a heartbeat.
He didn’t think he could lose any of them ever again.