Chapter Text
“And then what?”
A digital clock on the bathroom counter reads, in blinking red digits, “12:27 pm,” but it is so dark outside Libber can see her reflection in the window almost as well as the mirror. Both reflections are illuminated by the flickering rhododendron-shaped night light plugged into the outlet next to the door.
The window reflection shares her exact expression and movements and posture, but the one in the mirror breathes slower than she does and has perfectly plucked eyebrows and freckles masterfully covered up with concealer and hair tucked neatly behind her ears and, although it’s hard to tell with only the faint pinkish glow of the nightlight, eyes that don’t seem quite as blue as they should be.
Mirror-Libber raises one perfect eyebrow. “What do you mean, ‘and then what?’ I just explained the whole trick. There are only two steps. It’s not complicated.”
“No, I mean…I guess I meant to say…” Libber trails off. “I don’t know. I just feel like there should be more to this.”
“By ‘this’ you mean the trick?”
She shrugs. “I guess. I don’t know. I just think it’s weird that my reflection gained a consciousness of its own just to tell me about a lightning trick.”
Mirror-Libber laughs, so hard tears bead up in her eyes. “That’s…that’s not…quite what’s going on. Listen, let’s just take things one step at a time, alright? I promise everything will work out.”
“Uh…okay?”
“It was nice meeting you.”
“We, um…we haven’t met before? ‘Cause you look…” Libber scratches her head. “I mean, to be honest, you look pretty familiar.”
Mirror-Libber smiles and rolls her eyes. “One step at a time.”
“My god, dad,” Cole says, choking on a billowing cloud of dust after moving a cardboard box slightly to the left. “How long has it been since anyone’s been up here?”
“Well,” Lou says from the bottom of the ladder to the attic. “About…ten or eleven years, I’d guess.”
Right—that would make sense, considering about ten and a half years ago, Lou was packing up all memories of Lilly and pushing them out of sight so that he wouldn’t have to think about grieving. It’s not particularly surprising that he didn’t usually go up there to reminisce.
Cole breathes out, slowly. His mother’s locket now sits propped open on his father’s mantelpiece, and contrary to how he probably would have reacted a few months ago, before he’d visited Shintaro, his chest doesn’t seize up every time he sees her face. Maybe he can convince his dad to put back up some old family photos of them, too.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Cole says. He coughs again, overwhelmed by the stale dust in the air. “Well, actually, I think a gas mask would be pretty handy, you don’t happen to have one of those, do you?”
“You know what? I might—I think my quartet and I did this once performance abou-”
“Dad,” Cole interrupts. “I was joking. I have a mask.” Kai sometimes makes fun of him for still keeping a ninja mask on him even when he’s wearing civilian clothes, but very occasionally, it actually does come in handy.
He pulls his mask up over his nose and turns on his flashlight for a second, pointing it upwards towards the ceiling.
In a shocking turn of events, it turns out to be a mistake to stare straight up at the ceiling in the most dust-infested place he’s ever been in his life, and Cole knocks over a stack of boxes while fumbling for the cord for the light and trying to get the sawdust out of his eyes at the same time.
“Cole? Are you alright?” his dad cries from the bottom of the ladder.
“Fine!” Cole assures him. “Just…got a little dust in my eyes, that's all!”
“Maybe I should just hire a professional.”
“Wha- a professional what? Someone who clears out other people’s attics for a living, or like…an elemental master of dust? Because I don’t think either of those things exist!”
“I just think maybe this is more dangerous than I thought it would be.”
Cole shakes his head, laughing. “Seriously? Dad, I’ve taken on Lord Garmadon, multiple armies of snakes, a sentient video game hellbent on taking over the real world, and the Overlord, just to name a few. I’m pretty sure I can handle cleaning out your attic.”
“Alright, well. Take a break whenever you need to. I’ll go put a kettle of tea on.”
Cole finally manages to be able to open his eyes without a searing stinging screaming at him to shut them again, and successfully turns the light on.
This turns out to not be too much help after all, as it’s so dim it barely gives off more light than his flashlight.
With a heavy sigh, he plops down and gets started on the monumental task of cleaning out his dad’s attic.
A stack of dusty textbooks on various types of dance styles, some falling-apart luggage, a preposterous amount of ancient sheet music that looks like it's about to disintegrate, moth-eaten blankets, and a ton of other useless junk.
Why are there chairs up here? What reason could anyone possibly have for keeping furniture that they’re never going to use? Some of them are missing legs. One is even missing the seat; the legs are only attached to a wooden frame.
A crushed-up box that a refrigerator came in, a television broken beyond repair, a creepy-looking china doll, ancient-looking toy cars—is that an entire bed frame back there? How did that even fit through the hatch? And how is he going to get it out?
A box that appears to be labeled, “types of fish” which frankly, Cole’s afraid to open, a set of frying pans, a very old-fashioned tuxedo, dried-up watercolor paints…
Watercolor? He hasn’t thought about it in years, but he vaguely remembers that his mom used to use watercolor. She preferred drawing over paints but she was good at both…
Cole digs through the rest of the box he’d found them in. These are all his mother’s art supplies. Some paint brushes, a set of sketching charcoal, a bunch of loose colored pencils, and, at the very bottom, is her leather-bound sketchbook.
He gingerly lifts it out of the box and shines his flashlight on it. Cole traces her name twice, engraved on both the book’s cover and its spine, before opening it, almost cautiously, with bated breath.
On the first page is a charcoal rendition of a vaguely familiar wedding portrait Cole remembers seeing when he was younger. It used to be on the wall in the living room. She has flowers woven into her loosely braided hair, which falls halfway down her back as she tilts her head back ever so slightly, grinning up at Lou with her arms thrown around his neck, while he gazes adoringly back at her, one hand resting on her hip and the other cupping her face.
With the way everyone talks about her, how powerful and strong and commanding she was, Cole often forgets that she was tiny. He would tower over her now; he’s about an entire foot taller than she was.
He flips through the rest of the sketchbook—a couple other recreations of photographs Cole remembers seeing around the house before, a lot of sketches of different types of plants, a few drawings of himself as a baby.
It’s only about three quarters full; the last 25% of the sketchbook is all blank pages. Once Cole gets to the end of the filled pages, though, he stops, brows furrowing.
The last six pages are nearly identical; the same drawing of a flower over and over. It’s not labeled like the other flora she’d drawn, so he doesn’t know what kind it is—and as the drawings progress the clarity of the linework gets fuzzier, until the very last picture is barely recognizable.
Slightly unsettled, Cole sets it aside for a moment to examine a small wooden container nested near the bottom.
“Oh,” he murmurs to himself fondly. “I remember these.”
The little box is full of tiny stone figurines. Cole had thought them impressive back when he was little; now that he realizes she must have used her elemental powers to carve the stone with such precision, he’s awestruck.
They’re so tiny, how had she managed to implement such detail? The little mourning dove has feathers Cole can count. He can’t even fathom ever attaining such skill with his element. He packs the rest of the box back up and takes it down the ladder, setting it near the door so that he remembers to take it back to the monastery with him.
For the most part, the rest of the clean-up is largely uneventful. Occasionally Cole comes across an old photo album or scrapbook that he'll pause to flip through fondly. Mostly it's just a lot of carrying boxes down the ladder and then climbing back up to repeat the process.
Before he knows it, nearly an hour has passed, and he's all but completely cleared out the attic. (In regards to the bed frame, Cole ends up having to bend it using his super strength to get it through the hatch. He's still unsure as to how it got up there in the first place.)
"See? That would have taken anyone else twice as long," he brags, gesturing proudly to the large pile of junk he's lugged out to the curb in front of his dad's house.
"Yes, I suppose you're right," Lou agrees. "Thank you so much for helping me out with this. You're more than welcome to stay for dinner if you'd like." He smiles. "We could try out some recipes from your mother's cookbook that you found."
"That sounds great, Dad," Cole says. "Let me just go back up one last time to make sure I didn't miss anything. I'll be right back."
One last time, he climbs up the ladder into the attic, flicking his flashlight back on. Oddly, somehow it looks eerier now than when it was full of junk. Now the floor is cleared. Being as tall as he is, Cole still can't quite stand up all the way, and he has to bend forward slightly in an awkward position to get up there to check the corners.
No, looks like he got everyth-
"OW!"
"Cole? Are you alright?" Lou calls frantically from the bottom of the ladder.
Cole groans, rubbing his forehead. "Fine," he says. "Just stepped on a loose board and it whacked me in the face. Ouch. I'll be alright, though." He swears he hears his dad snicker at him from downstairs.
He'd knocked the board out of place when it had hit him, so he sets his flashlight down and goes to put the board back.
…Wait a minute.
Is there something down there?
Cole picks up the flashlight again and shines it in the spot the floorboard had been. Oh. There certainly is something down there. A whole other cardboard storage box, hidden underneath the floor. How did it get there?
It's too big to fit through the spot the missing floorboard had left, so Cole pries the floorboard next to it off as well so he can get to it.
After putting the floorboards back, Cole shines his flashlight on the label on the side of the box. ' Libber's stuff,' it reads.
Holding the box under one arm, he descends the ladder. "Hey, dad?" Cole asks, as he latches the hatch shut and folds up the ladder. "Who's Libber?"
Lou, from the kitchen, is quiet for a moment before he says, "Why? Where do you see that?"
"I found a box with that name on it. It was hidden underneath the floorboards."
"It...was?" Lou emerges from the kitchen and stands in the doorway for a moment. "Libber was...just a friend of your mother's. You can put that box out by the curb, too."
"Don't you wanna look inside it first?" Most boxes had simply been folded shut; this one had a frankly excessive amount of duct tape sealing it shut. Cole pulled a pocket knife from his pocket.
"I'm sure there's nothing of worth in there," Lou says warily. "Why don't you just leave it be."
"If there's nothing of worth in here, why was it hidden like it was?" Cole points out. He begins to cut away at the duct tape.
"Cole." Lou's sudden tone change startles him slightly. He sounds angry. Cole looks up at him in alarm. "Do not open that box."
"What?" Cole furrows his brows in concern. "Why, what's wrong?"
"Nothing," Lou snaps. He snatches up the box. "I just don't want it opened. Go and set the table, I'm going to throw this out."
Baffled, Cole watches his father storm out of the house. What was that about?
"You guys are so freaking lame," Libber says, taking a bite out of an apple while sitting on Lilly's kitchen counter. "Remember when we used to be super ultra-powerful badass elemental ninja who fought crime? Now we're becoming, like, a mom group!"
Libber has a point. Two twenty-something pregnant women discussing baby names is not usually what one pictures when they hear the phrase "super ultra-powerful badass elemental ninja who fight crime."
"Yeah, well it looks like even when I'm pregnant, I can still make you eat dirt," Lilly says, looking up briefly from her list of baby names. "That apple you're eating hasn't been washed."
Libber contemplates this for a second before taking another bite. "Whatever," she says with her mouth full. "You guys are still lame. I thought we were gonna do something interesting."
"It's anyone's guess what you're going to find interesting," Maya says. "You complained the whole way through the ancient caverns we went through that one time, but you had a two hour long conversation with the electrician at my house about circuit breakers a few months ago."
"I'm the master of lightning, of course I find electricity interesting! That cave, on the other hand, was just a bunch of old rocks. Big deal."
Lilly slingshots a ponytail holder at Libber's forehead.
"I did have a super weird dream last night, though," Libber says.
"Ugh. Is this gonna be one of your hour-long recounts of increasingly nonsensical and unconnected events?" Maya complains.
"No, no, it wasn't one of those. In this one, I went in the bathroom and my reflection started telling me about this trick to make my lightning more powerful."
"What kind of trick?" Lilly says.
"One to make my lightning more powerful."
"Yeah, no, I got that part, smartass. I mean what did it tell you to do?"
"She told me that during a thunderstorm, I can go outside and absorb lightning, and that lightning gets supercharged with my elemental powers, and then when I let it go it's like ten times more powerful than my powers normally are."
Lilly and Maya exchange confused and slightly concerned glances. "So you just…your subconscious just…made that up?"
"No, my reflection did."
"Your reflection was part of your dream, Libber, your subconscious made it up too."
Libber makes a face. This is due to the fact that she has just accidentally bitten into the apple's core, which is mildly unpleasant. "Yeah, sure. Hey, stop calling my reflection an 'it.' She is a she."
"Your reflection isn't a person," Maya says.
"She is too a person. How else could she have come up with that brilliant trick?"
Maya rolls her eyes. "You're so weird, Libber."
"I don't know if you should listen to your talking reflection, Libber," Lilly suggests. "That sounds pretty dangerous."
"How is it dangerous?" Libber throws the apple core towards the trash can across the room. It bounces off the rim onto the floor.
"Absorbing lightning into your body doesn't sound dangerous to you?"
"I'm the elemental master of lightning, Lilly, it can't hurt me," Libber says, waving a hand dismissively.
"What kind of logic is that? I'm the elemental master of earth, and it still hurts if you throw rocks at me. Maya could drown, Ray can get burned, Acronix and Krux will still die of old age, Ice could get frostbite or hypothermia…probably. Actually, I really don't know, Ice is a weird element.”
“And a weirder person,” Maya adds.
“Well, so am I,” Libber counters, crossing her arms over her chest. “As you remind me during every conversation we have.”
“Yeah. Okay. You’re weird,” Lilly says. “What’s your point? Do you think that makes you invincible?”
“Don’t even ask that, you know what she’ll say,” Maya sighs, shaking her head.
“Yes,” Libber nods her head in an as-a-matter-of-fact-ly manner. “Being weird makes me invincible. You finally get it.”
Maya gives Lilly a look that says ‘told you. Can you believe this girl?’ Lilly just exhales in amusement.
“Right. Okay, then, invincible master of lightning—I still think you should talk to Wu about this first before you go absorbing preposterous amounts of electricity. I just don’t want you to get hurt, ‘kay?”
“I know,” Libber says. She gives them a genuine smile. “I’ll be fine, Lilly, you don’t have to worry about me.” Inspecting the rest of the fruit in the bowl on the counter, she adds, “You do have to worry about these stupid names you’re making up, though. Seriously, who names their kid Terran?”
“ Okay, ” Lilly says. “Those are some bold words coming from someone named Liberty Castaspella Gordon.”
“Shut up, dirt clod, that’s my point! I’m not letting my godchild suffer from Stupid Name Syndrome like I did!”
“Why are you just assuming you’re gonna be my kid’s godmother? What if I pick someone else?” Lilly yawns. “What if I pick Maya?”
Libber gasps, offended. “You wouldn’t dare!”
Lou botches Lilly's chicken parmesan recipe and they end up ordering take-out.
"I should have guessed her recipes are more like notes for herself," Lou sighs, looking forlornly at the sad-looking attempt on the kitchen counter. "She didn't write precise instructions, just a list of ingredients and tips."
"Don't sweat it, dad, it's okay," Cole laughs. "No one could cook like mom." Truth be told, he barely remembers her cooking. But from what he'd heard from his dad and the Royal Blacksmiths, it was apparently unparalleled.
"Oh, I suppose you're right," Lou says. "Thank you again for all your help today. It was so nice to spend time with you, too. You don't visit nearly often enough; you should drop by more often."
"I should," Cole agrees. He hasn't been on such good terms with his father since probably before his mother died. They should make up for lost time. "I'll try not to go so long without seeing you next time!"
It’s dark by the time Cole leaves. He says goodbye to his father again, picks up the box of his mother’s art supplies he’d set aside to bring with him, and starts to head back to the monastery.
He stops to look, amused, at the large pile of junk at the curb, wondering what the garbage men will think when they have to collect all of it in the morning.
And then, shooting a glance back towards the house to make sure his dad isn’t watching, he sifts through it to look for the mysterious box he’d found under the floorboards.
Cole finds it shoved underneath one of the seatless chairs, which was covered with a moth-eaten sheet. His father had clearly hidden it from view. Cole sincerely doubts that whatever is in this box is ‘nothing of worth,’ and his curiosity far outweighs any guilt he feels from going against his dad’s wishes.
He takes it with him.
“Where are you going?” Cliff looks up from the book he’s reading and gives Libber a weird look.
Libber, wearing rain boots and zipping up a rain coat, grins back at him like she’s doing something normal. “Oh, you know! Just going out for a stroll!”
A peal of thunder seems to rattle the room, as the rain pounds against the windows. Cliff’s expression of incredulousness increases. “In this weather?”
“Yeah!” If she stands there grinning at him stupidly for long enough, he’ll roll his eyes and let it go.
This is, indeed, what happens. Cliff rolls his eyes, adjusts his reading glasses, and mutters, “Suit yourself.”
Adrenaline pumping through her veins, Libber steps outside onto the porch.
She pauses for a moment. Is she really going to do this? Because she had a dream that her reflection told her to? Maybe she should take Lilly’s advice and talk to Wu first before she tries to-
“Libs! Close the damn door, you’re letting the cold air in!” Cliff hollers.
“Sorry!”
No. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. She’s the master of lightning! Yeah! She can handle this! Libber takes a deep breath and starts walking further out into the forest.
There’s an abandoned building out here somewhere with a lightning rod on top. That’s probably the best place to be if she’s going to try the lightning trick.
It’s been a while since she’s been out here. Once, when they were younger, Libber had come out here with Lilly and they’d pried the lock off the door. They were very disappointed that instead of some ancient secret or a magical portal or anything exciting like that, it was just a bunch of empty rooms full of dust and a few pieces of furniture covered with sheets.
For a little bit, Libber had been dead-set on refurbishing it and turning it into a secret hideout. Then she realized that that would include a lot of cleaning. That project didn’t go very far.
She does wonder why this building needed a lightning rod of this size, though.
Libber cranes her neck to look at the top of it. It peeks out above the trees. She supposes it probably wouldn’t be very effective if it didn’t, because the lightning would probably just hit the trees, but still…it’s weird.
She presses her sleeve against the bottom half of her face when she walks inside the building in an attempt to keep the dust out of her lungs, and climbs up the stairs to the hatch in the ceiling of the top floor that leads to the roof.
There’s no ladder, which would pose an issue to anyone who wasn’t a trained ninja. Libber jumps off the wall into spinjitzu and then grabs onto the ledge at the last second, hauling herself onto the roof.
(When she goes to close the hatch she realizes there was a stepstool she could have used. She pretends she knew it was there and just wanted to get to the roof the fun way.)
“Okay…what’s the best way to do this?” Libber muses to herself. The roof isn’t a flat surface so she has to be very careful so as not to slip, which would be a risk even if it was flat. Slowly, she walks towards the lightning rod, as the harsh wind whips at her hair and loud peals of thunder sound out from above.
Libber’s redirected lightning before, so she supposes this can’t be too much different. It’s basically the same thing, it’s just that she’s redirecting it into her.
Wait…wouldn’t it just strike her? How is she supposed to absorb it?
There’s not enough time to think. A bolt of lightning shoots down from the sky, and with her equally quick reflexes, Libber reaches out and changes its direction to herself.
She feels it touch her hand, little red-hot pinpricks dancing across her fingertips. And then it goes under her skin.
Libber gasps, caught off-guard, and loses her grip on the lightning rod. She slips, and tumbles off the roof as she feels it spreading through her nervous system, electrifying her bloodstream and seeping into every cell in her body. It feels like she’s burning alive from the inside, being torn apart and put back together over and over at incredible speed. She can’t breathe; there’s too much electricity buzzing in her lungs. Her heartbeat is so fast she honest-to-god thinks it might beat out of her chest.
Normally when Libber falls off of buildings she screams on the way down, but she can’t make a sound. She’s dying. She’s being attacked from the inside and she’s either going to crumple apart or combust, and…
She hits the ground, and at that same instant all the lightning stored up within her is released through both hands.
It’s so blindingly bright she can’t see a thing. It’s quickly muffled by the ground, but it remains crackling in the mud for a moment or two more, while Libber gasps for breath, unable to move.
“Holy shit.”
She lies there for a minute or two, trying to process what just happened.
Finally, she drags herself to her feet, feeling totally depleted of energy. She catches a glance of her faint reflection in the dirty windows of the building—it looks kind of off, like it’s not really her.
But when she blinks, it looks normal again.
Cole opens the box. Because of the way his dad was behaving, he half-expected it to be something terrible, but what he finds, at first glance, is rather mundane. A notebook, a training weapon, clothing…Cole blinks, narrowing his eyes, and takes a closer look.
Water-damaged composition notebook. Nunchucks. Blue lightning patterned gi. This looks like Jay’s stuff. That wouldn’t make sense; this box has been in his dad’s attic for well over a decade. And, wait, actually, come to think of it, Jay has never had a gi like that. Cole flips the composition notebook over to reveal the front cover, on which the name ‘Libber Gordon’ is scrawled out in red marker.
Gordon. Gordon like…Cliff Gordon? Who Jay claimed his real dad was?
It takes a second for it to register in his mind.
This stuff belonged to the previous elemental master of lightning.
What the heck was it doing in his dad’s attic, hidden in a secret compartment underneath the floor, nonetheless?
…And why didn’t his dad want him to see it?
Cole pauses for a moment before sifting through the rest of the contents of the box. There isn’t much else here, just a tiny music box and a couple of necklaces.
Something inside the music box rattles around when Cole picks it up. There’s no lid, so he can’t look inside to see the prongs of the comb hit against the bumps on the cylinder, which is the whole point of music boxes in Cole’s opinion. It doesn’t work anyway—he winds it up and nothing happens. This is not entirely unsurprising, given the fact that it sounds like there are broken components loose on the inside. He checks again for a way to open it, to see if it’s fixable. There doesn’t seem to be. He sets it aside.
Cole examines the necklaces. They’re little stones, one blue and one black, smooth on one side with a carving of a dragon on the other. There’s an onyx eye on the blue one and a sapphire eye on the black one. They’re incredibly intricate and detailed; Cole marvels at the craftsmanship. He can count every individual scale, just like…
He freezes. Just like the stone figurines his mother had made.
He opens the other box he’d taken back to the monastery with him and fishes the container holding the stone figurines. Holding the mourning dove up next to one of the dragons, Cole has no doubt his mother must have made these matching necklaces too.
The revelation sets in his mind softly as he runs his thumb over the sapphire eye of the black dragon.
These are friendship necklaces. Not only did his mother know the previous master of lightning, but they were best friends.
But…if they were…then why doesn’t Cole remember her?
“Probably for the same reason Jay doesn’t,” he mutters to himself. She must’ve died when Cole was too young to remember her. Why else would Jay have ended up with the Walkers?
It still feels unsatisfying. He never knew anything about her. Or about his mother’s powers, or about his powers…
“I was just trying to protect you,” Lou had said, when Cole had confronted him about having known he would inherit the title of the elemental master of Earth. “I’m sorry. It was naive of me to believe I could shield you from that world. It’s just…with what happened to…I just, I didn’t like how dangerous it was for your mother. I didn’t want you getting hurt.”
Okay. No use getting mad about that again. Cole has long since forgiven him. He understands why his dad kept things secret from him.
But…the way his dad was acting, like there was something terrible in here…
That was weird. Cole can’t shake the feeling there’s something else going on here.
“Oh, hey, Cole, you’re back.” Jay comes into Cole’s room without knocking. Jay has never knocked before he enters rooms. It’s still sort of annoying. “Did you find anything interesting i-...” Jay trails off mid-word. He’s noticed the box. “What’s…what’s that?”
“Oh, it’s, uh…it’s the interesting thing I found.” Cole blinks. “I think you’d better come check it out.”