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It’s so loud here.
Back in Ninjago, that is. The constant noise is one of the first things Zane had noticed upon his return.
Although the Monastery was built atop the highest of mountains, far away from the civilization down below, it is still quite loud. The sounds of his siblings, his dear friends, his mentors, all of them living their lives and moving and breathing and simply enjoying existence, they add up. That place was not like this. That place was quiet. That place was near-silent underneath all the ice and snow. In that place, Zane could find peace.
Not here. Now, the only way Zane can even get close to such blissful silence is by significantly elevating his hearing sensor thresholds. But even then, it is not the same. And he doesn’t want to be left with no hearing ability at all. He just wants peace. No matter what he tries, there was always too much. Too many variables.
That place did not have many variables. There was him, Vex, his creations. There was everyone else. Things were much simpler there.
It is not the thoughts of simplicity that shake Zane out of his meditative stupor, but rather the realization that the memories of silence were accompanied with a kind of fondness and longing that he’d rather not think about.
So, he doesn’t. The thoughts are shoved away for perhaps another time.
Zane considers the costs and benefits of trying to return to meditation, or simply giving up on the endeavor for the day.
He thinks he’d rather not face unpleasant thoughts again. As Zane stands and leaves his room, he braces himself for the ensuing onslaught of noise.
--
Zane had forgotten what it meant to be looked upon with valuation.
As the weeks have passed since his return from the Never-Realm, he has noticed those around him returning to what he used to consider normal life. And this includes treating Zane the way they did before. The way Zane used to allow them to because he did not know any better. Because the valuation in their eyes mattered to him more than his own preferences.
They look to him for knowledge as if he is a dusty book on a shelf. Expectant eyes meet his own when dinner plans are discussed. Messes are left that they make no move to clean.
Before, Zane had fulfilled these duties and more without complaint. But now, he can feel something festering within him every time he cuts a vegetable, recites a fact, sweeps a floor. He thinks it’s an anger. An old one, perhaps. But it was never voiced before. A tool has no mouth, after all.
Now, though, it rises to the tip of his tongue with each direct request or unsaid expectation. And he is ashamed. He should be grateful that he still has a place in this team. Somehow, before, he had made peace with that place. Enough peace that he would die for it. Twice.
Perhaps peace is not the right word. After all, can you make peace with something purposefully built straight into your code? Whatever the answer may be, Zane is doing the opposite of making peace.
“Protect those who cannot protect themselves.”
But what about Zane? Who will protect him? Why must he be both sword and shield? Why must it be his body on the line? When will he ever get to choose himself?
It took being forced into another realm for Zane to be allotted a real choice for himself. And even that turned out to be an illusion. It may have been while under the influence of the staff and Vex’s manipulations, but for decades Zane was able to make his own choices about what he wanted to do. It was the slimmest glimpse at a freedom that he had never had.
That he only obtained such a glimpse when he forgot his most basic programming has not been lost on him.
Zane suddenly feels a great bitterness towards his father. His purpose has never been his own. His desires have never been for him to decide.
Once upon a time, Zane was content with being the knife.
Then he got a taste of being the hands that held the knife.
--
It’s another day with another run-of-the-mill villain with far more technological knowledge than they deserved. And they want a piece of Zane’s state-of-the-art titanium body.
His friends, thankfully, vocally protested the idea. But the goons of the villain whose name Zane can’t remember are actually good at what they do, and so around Zane the other ninja are struggling, while he himself is fighting some nameless muscle.
If Zane wanted to, he could end this fight easily, but that would mean revealing things he does not want to reveal quite yet. The amplification of his control over ice is something he wants to keep close to his chest for now. He wants this one thing for himself.
And as Zane absentmindedly dodges another blow from the goon, he starts thinking of the man causing all this trouble for him and his friends. He is quickly becoming very tired of the way others look at his body with barely disguised greed and hunger, a hardly-secret belief that Zane is no more than an empty husk at the disposal of whoever can get their hands on him. He is more than just exhausted. He is furious. That others can believe that he is a thing to be claimed, not a person. Not a living, thinking being.
His body has never been his own. He understands that now. And it has always been like this. But the dehumanization that enrages him, that had only started when Zane sacrificed himself, sacrificed his body, to save Ninjago. That day, Zane gave his body as tribute. And now, as repayment, Ninjago demands the same tribute every single day. His friends want his aid, the city wants his services, and the villains want his physical parts.
He cannot blame his friends when he himself made it clear that his worth was negligible, when he never spoke up, when he threw his body away to save them all. And his friends still undoubtedly see him as a person, even if their requests of him are unbalanced.
These villains do not get the same grace. If Zane could just manage to vocalize the word “No,” he will be able to solve the issue in his team. But villains will do anything to take what they want. He should know. They’ll kill civilians, attack his home, hurt his friends, all just to get their dirty hands on him. And they never stop. They never stop unless they are stopped.
Another dodge and punch and kick and a seed begins to enter Zane’s head.
For as much as there was to abhor about being the Ice Emperor, Zane had to admit there was something rather…appealing about the permanence of sending enemies to the Departed Realm. The problem was that for those decades the “enemies” were innocents. But here? Back in Ninjago? That’s far from the case.
It is hardly an effort to shake off the goon and rush straight for the villain of the hour, tackling him to the ground. It takes even less energy to get ahold of a shuriken and hold it just above the exposed throat of the sniveling man.
Zane is exhausted. He is not an object. And these villains never learn. It is high time they retire this old song and dance.
But his friends are watching him now, having defeated their own enemies. And Zane does not want to make a rash decision. He still has scales to balance, considerations to make. So, he leans back and removes himself from the villain’s body, allowing one his fellow ninja to cuff the man. The man will see another sunrise.
His friends laugh it off, believing that the villain was never in any serious danger, that Zane just wanted to give him a scare. Zane doesn’t see the use in contributing to the conversation, so he does not.
The secret of how close the villain was to losing his life that day remains just that, a secret. One only Zane and the villain know. Because Zane knows that his intent had shone through his eyes that day. And the nameless villain was the only one to get a good look at them.
--
Zane has never felt fully integrated with his body. Even before he found out he was a robot, there was always this wall between mind and body. Something unbreachable. He could never understand what it meant to be united in mind and body. His body simply felt like a vessel, a shell. It was yet another thing that made him different from everyone else, it seemed.
And then he found out he was what he was and, well, he didn’t feel the need to think about it anymore. His intuition was right all along. He was a mind with no real body. Or, he had a body, but it was replaceable. When he died, he rebuilt himself, better than before. His body may have been a shell, but it was a shell made for him, one that fit him perfectly. It took him a long time to make the specifications just right. And even after, he would constantly make repairs, small updates, changes to keep up with any changes in his mind.
Zane has not updated his body in 60 years.
He doesn’t know if he can. Not because he doesn’t have the know-how, because he does. Oh, he does. But he does not know how to make a body that would conform to his friends’ expectations.
Ever since returning, Zane does not feel like his body can contain him. He’s felt…compressed. He’s become something smaller. Something unthreatening. Something acceptable. His power, his words, his actions, everything about him, they’re all pressed down deep inside as he tries to fit a mold he broke out of 60-odd years ago.
And he doesn’t like it.
No, he doesn’t like having to second-guess every single thing he does to make sure he does it the way that is expected of him. He doesn’t like pretending like he is not 60 years older. He doesn’t like pretending that those 60 years weren’t as close to unbound as he has ever been.
With every stifled impulse, every reconsidered decision, he feels the deep anger within stirring. Zane wants to destroy this shell, this cage. He wants to start over from scratch.
His inside no longer matches his outside and he hates it.
Why was he ever content changing himself for other people?
It is time to reclaim what is his.
Zane has not updated his body in 60 years.
Something is going to give.
--
When Zane had first regained his memories of his father, first remembered that he was in fact mechanical, he knew right there and then that without intervention, he was going to outlive his friends. Despite his best efforts to push the thought out of his mind, the knowledge became something implicit. The knowledge felt like a curse. Not just because he understood the lonely pain that would be his future, though that was a significant part of it, but because from then on he began to see himself differently.
This different perspective wasn’t so obvious at first, given that Zane was grappling with other parts of his revelation at the time, but over time it revealed itself. Zane started seeing himself as static compared to his friends. A fixed point, unmoving. As their bodies, especially Lloyd’s, changed with age, he couldn’t help but look back at himself and notice all the ways he did not change.
Perhaps this is why he had become so obsessed with updating his body, making his inside match his outside.
Back then, it had helped when he met P.I.X.A.L., the only one who could understand. And then later, finding out the exact blood running through Lloyd’s and Master Wu’s veins, he did not dread the future so much, because he knew that while he would experience losses, it would not be nearly as bad as it had seemed to him before. Ironically, the release of his worry allowed Zane to focus more on the present, savor every moment in time. His friends were aging and growing, and in a way, it almost felt like he was too. The present was something to be experienced. Every second of the day was worthwhile. That way, Zane got to hold onto everything he cared about for that much longer.
That was the way things were.
Things are different now.
Zane is not present, anymore.
The way he moves and carries himself and just observes things now, Zane knows that his friends think he has an air of sluggishness about him. He can tell that they are concerned by it, but do not know how to breach the subject. What they don’t understand is that Zane is not being sluggish, by his own standards. It is just that his standards and their standards are no longer the same. His frame of reference has shifted.
Zane’s perception of time had served him well in the Never-Realm. It prevented him from going mad with boredom in the long stretches of nothing happening in the absolute silence. Perceiving time in this way became second nature to him.
It is not so useful, now.
Often, he finds it has been hours when he has only perceived minutes. There have already been a handful of times he’s lost entire days. Once, Cole had asked him a question while he was resting, and when Zane finally formulated an answer, he turned to see that Cole had long left, believing Zane had simply ignored him. Zane later explained that it had not been his intention to offend, but he could tell that while Cole wanted to believe him, he did not quite understand how Zane could only bring himself to respond nearly an hour later.
He knows that his friends may never understand. And it is not always so bad. When he puts in the effort, Zane can perceive things the way he used to, or a close enough approximation. But it doesn’t come easily to him the way it did before. And putting on such an act doesn’t feel right. His code is unchanged, but his perception of time is fundamentally altered. He’s not sure if it will ever go back to the way it was. Those savored seconds are lost on him now.
Zane is a person outside of time. Or, more accurately, his time is outside everyone else’s.
He wonders if this is how Master Wu feels. If Zane was truly bothered by this, he would ask Master Wu how he deals with it, having a completely different perspective and barely anyone to share it with. But Zane is not bothered. He’s come to realize that this was something of an eventuality, it just happened far earlier than it would have had he never traversed realms.
The day-to-day is no longer something he can invest in. In fact, time on such a small scale is starting to feel…insignificant. His time in the Never-Realm was not spent being aware every waking moment. He spent the vast majority of his time thinking, sinking deeper in deeper into a stupor, seconds blending into minutes into hours into days. Slowly, time became meaningless there. Much became meaningless there. Much became…small.
Such little things. Such little lives. They are all insignificant compared to the broader strokes of change. The larger trends are all that Zane can see, now.
Zane no longer worries about the future.
The act has become meaningless.
--
The day Zane finally sees the path forward and decides to retire the old routine is by all accounts an unremarkable day. It is yet another fight with yet another nobody, and when Zane makes his decision, it is laughably easy. And with the act comes something like a rebirth. Or perhaps like a return. Zane does not know which it is, only that he feels different now. Lighter. But whether that is from the lifting of a weight or a hollowing of the insides, he is unsure.
In this moment, it is like he can remember how to experience the seconds the way his friends do. The body sinks to the floor, unsalvageable. A drop of the crimson thread of life coagulates and falls to the ground. Sharp breaths, terrified whimpers. He traces his eyes from the floor to the downed ninja in front of him. The lives he saved by ending another. It was an easy calculation. He understands that they do not see it that way. The him that was the Ice Emperor would have felt contempt over their lack of will. The he who Zane is now knows that such ruthless practicality is not easily cultivated, that to them such sacred lives are not subject to mathematical manipulation.
Those who believe lives are short will always be unnerving to those who find that life is long.
The ninja he saved look at him with fear, and Zane knows why; they do not see eye to eye.
He does not need to turn around to know that the rest of the ninja will have undoubtedly realized that something has shifted. His sensors pick up the heavy breathing of the ninja behind him. Listening to the sounds of their breathing, Zane is struck by just how isolated he feels in that moment. Words will never be able to explain the way he sees the world, now. The utter exhaustion lining his body from the constant abuse of it is incalculable. The accompanying fury is unyielding. For Zane to be who he knows he is now, the Zane who was the Ice Emperor who was the Titanium Ninja who is now someone new, it would mean a chasm would open between him and everyone he knows, and it would never close. It would never be crossed. Could never be crossed. The thought scares him as much as pretending infuriates him.
Zane closes his eyes, no longer looking at anything. Just thinking.
He could shut this part of himself off, shove it into a recess of his mind, lock it up in a box. He could mold the progression of time into a facsimile of what it used to be and feel every moment. He could turn back to his team, to his family, and display regret and sorrow for having backslided into a murderer. He could return to their standards of protection. He could be accepted back into the fold. He’ll be loved. But he’ll never be safe or free the way he longs to be.
Or…he could live with the fear, the disgust, the sure to follow hatred. He could exist out of step with the rest of the world yet be in his own time. He could let the harsh words wash over him. He could deal with being only just put up with, if not simply pushed away forever. He could accept being distrusted indefinitely. He’ll have security. But he’ll never be loved again.
With the scales set, Zane weighs the balance.
The decision is right because it is his. The control is ecstasy.
He sets his shoulders, holds his head up high, and stares straight ahead. His hands clasp behind his back. A new regality overtakes him. He marches forward, stepping over the corpse of the last man who would ever dare try to take from him and his. Zane doesn’t look back.
See, at least the fear means he’ll finally be left alone. He’ll never have to leave his fate to chance, in the hands of another. His body will be his. His mind will be his. No one will ever be able to force him to change, to mold himself for them. No one will ever hurt him.
Never again.
And Zane? Zane can live with that.