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Lloyd Garmadon is fucking angry.
Not fight-that’s-going-badly angry, not fabricated-to-get-through-training angry, not even Jay-ate-all-the-fucking-ice-cream angry. Just mad. Pointless and circling and almost edging on scary in it’s lack of direction.
Just mad.
The red light of the alarm clock casts the room in an otherworldly glow that manages to be somehow peaceful, were not for the jittery shape interrupting it, where Lloyd was perched on the edge of his bed, one leg bouncing. If he had been thinking about it, he would have realized the red light reminded him of the inside of a volcano. Maybe that was where the peaceful feeling came from, but he didn’t have the best track record with volcanoes, so maybe not. Jury’s still out.
He stood and paced in tight circles, then sat and tapped his fingers on his thigh, then paced again in the same circles. And again. He tried not to think at all, or to think about anything other than the distant and shrouded source of his anger, of the jumpy feeling in his gut. He tried not to think of the events of the long day, the long and needlessly drawn out fight, the place where his shoulder was cut open, the bone deep tiredness that followed like a second shadow. The temple with it’s pillars. The river beside it.
He grumbled exasperatedly at himself and walked out of his room before he could process what he was doing. The door squeaked in the silence, but no one else seemed to notice. There was an odd absence of noise here at Yang’s temple, and it was more noticeable now than ever - no waves against the hull, no wind pulling gently at the sails, none of the ambient machinery noise that was ever-present on the bounty. Just one more thing about this place that set him more on edge.
None of the other doors squeaked as he pushed past them, trekking further from the temple’s innards and towards the faint light above. No one followed him. No one asked why he was up. He had the feeling that if someone had, he would have snapped back, so he was more than glad for the lack of interruptions as he pushed through the temple’s front door and into the cool night beyond.
Opposite of a volcano, he would have thought, had he been thinking.
He hadn’t changed before he went to bed, sleepless as he was, so when he rounded the side of the building to the training yard, all he had to do was peel off his damp socks and square his shoulders. Feet in the wet grass, spine straight, standing at the center of the semi-circle of training dummies as he bounced from leg to leg. Still all that restless anger. Still the persistent feeling that it was burning him up starting from the very inside and if he didn’t move, move, move, it would only burn him further.
The damp grass and the mud slid under his feet as he moved mechanically through well-practiced motions. Curl your thumb under your cold fingers. Ignore the searing pain in your shoulder as you twist it wrong. Push past and past further the weight in your overworked limbs, calling on some other energy, electric and buried deep. Lloyd advances and retreats, ducks under the erratic movement of the dummy’s sword, throws an elbow forward towards the bottom of the machine and twists out of the way as it topples. He steps to the side, to the next robot in waiting.
The mud slides under his feet.
There is no temple. No pillars. No river.
He plants a kick in the robot’s lower portion, where it spins, and the spinning stops in a scattering of sparks. He darts in and grabs the joint where the machine holds it’s sword, and heaves in the opposite direction that the device is spinning. The joint snaps, leaving the sword in his hand, and he wastes no time in slicing it straight through the abdomen, leaving it to fall next to the first.
With a sidestep and a swift duck to the side, he maneuvers to the next bot and out of the way of its considerable weaponry. In a single movement, he thrusts the sword upwards and directly through the robot’s head, sending another shower of sparks scattering around him. The robot goes limp. He retreats twice, advances.
There is no temple.
The sword flies in at the wrong angle and it doesn’t cut straight through. Just sticks into the dummy’s metal skin, harmless.
There is no temple.
Lloyd yanks the weapon out and tries again, sword splitting the air that moves past it. It sticks again, only a few inches into the wiring beneath.
There is no temple.
He pulls the sword away and it falls towards the dummy again. And again. And again. And again.
There is no fucking temple.
If he’s just hacking at the robot now, he doesn’t care. One of the axes on the lower portion slices his leg and he barely moves out of its way, as he again lifts the sword, now dull and dented. Wires scatter like guts and his thoughts are scattered too, and the source of his anger is shoved into view as the robot falls to bits at his hands. He’s crying, or maybe not.
Jury’s still out.
In a truly dramatic flurry of sparks, the robot falls to the damp ground. Lloyd turns to the next one, but now his head is too full, and he’s lost the desperate concentration that allowed him to take out the other three. Or four. Whichever.
The robot swings out and catches him in the shoulder - the same place another blade fell earlier - and it’s all he can do to stumble out of the robot’s range before he sits heavily on the muddy ground. He didn’t notice how out of breath he was. How he can’t seem to get any air at all. How fast his heart was going.
He also doesn’t notice the squelching footsteps behind him or the figure that sits next to him, till a hand falls on his shoulder. If he was less tired, he’d jump.
“Lloyd? Can you hear me?”
He nods blankly. The figure shifts into his line of sight and it’s Nya, worry written in her brown eyes.
She tilts her head in confusion. “What are you doing up this late?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” he says, with an offhand shrug. “And I could ask the same for you.”
“Good one. But really. It’s almost 4, and I can see that you haven’t even closed your eyes, so what’s up.”
That’s a Nya habit - questions as statements, unable to dodge. She deals in absolutes, doesn’t take answers that are offhand and false, shapes her words like swords and points them at you until you tell the truth. If she wasn’t a ninja/samurai, she’d make a very good human lie detector.
There’s a moment where he pauses, the ever-present weight of being The Leader weighing on him, where he doesn’t want to worry her, where he feels the need to pull himself together and be the Green Fucking Ninja.
But Nya is watching all too closely with her lie-detector eyes, so Lloyd gives up and starts with the truth. “I’m still - I can’t stop thinking about the temple today.” he says, quiet. He can feel himself sinking into the mud. “I’m so, so angry about it and I don’t know why.”
Nya blinks, tilts her head again. “What can’t you figure out? A bunch of assholes want to bring your dad back to life. You don’t want that. Of course you’re mad.”
Now it’s Lloyd’s turn for the surprised expression. “No, no, I - I should want him back. Right?” He’s running scenarios in his head, silently comparing the past and each possible future. “I killed him.” Yes, his voice goes quieter. “I should want to save him.”
“That’s not quite how that works.” Nya says. The human lie detector is going off. “I actually did get my parents back from the dead. But I didn’t want to. If we hadn’t found them alive last year, I would’ve been pretty happy to let them stay dead. As is, I’m pretty mad too.”
Lloyd stays quiet. Nya doesn’t. The robot in front of them whirrs to itself.
“Look, a bunch of people who don’t know you and don’t know your dad want to resurrect him - evil him, in fact - and use his power to take over Ninjago. You’ve fought him once and you don’t want to do it again. You don’t know if your real dad will be a part of the one they release or just the evil version of him. And maybe this is a leap, but it’s what I thought, and you wish you had been the one to find a way to bring him back, not some random guy who dresses in the same color as you. So yeah, I think you have a reason to be mad.”
Lloyd stays quiet again. What Nya said, every iota of it absolutely true, hangs in the night air. Some odd fear lingers that admitting it will make it more concrete in a frightening way.
“I guess.” he says. Nya rolls her eyes. “I just.” he pauses, makes a split second decision on whether or not to trust Nya with this, then remembers that she was the first of the five of them to trust him, in any capacity, all those years ago. Remembers when she let him drive the bounty, just for a moment, when everyone else was gone, when he was still almost too short to reach the wheel, how she wasn’t surprised in the slightest when he was the green ninja. She had just given him a thumbs up from the other side of the room, and things had felt a hell of a lot better.
So he trusts her.
“I don’t want him back at all.” he says. “It’s all the stuff you said too, I still think you should be the master in training instead of me cause you always know stuff like that but I also just don’t want him back. Not even. Not even if it had been me. But I didn’t want to think about that and-” ok, yeah, right now the tears are definitely happening, but Nya doesn’t seem to care so he keeps going - “and now I’m mad because I should. I did when we lost Zane. But I want my dad to stay dead. Real dead.” There’s a joke somewhere in there about ‘dad’ and ‘dead’ being one letter apart, but he can’t find it, so he lets it go.
She doesn’t comment. She just tilts her head again.
“What on earth did we do to you?” he would have heard her whisper, had he had better hearing, or had she been worse at whispering.
Instead, he watches her lean forwards and wrap him up with her arms.
“It’s okay to want him to stay dead.” she says, as Lloyd puts his head on her shoulder and leaves it there. The stars are spinning too much for him to look at anything other than the inside of his own eyelids. He closes his eyes and relishes this tiny, temporary moment of safety.
In his mind’s eye, the temple is burning to the ground. The stars stop spinning.
Nya stands and reaches out a hand to help him up. “You fucked up your shoulder again, didn’t you.” she says, again with the brutal, older sister honesty. He nods. She rolls her eyes.
“I’ll help you fix it again.” He trails after her back into the light and warmth of the temple, of their new home. Just enough like a volcano. “I’m also gonna make hot chocolate.”
And again with the absolutes.
Lloyd could not be more grateful.