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Kai is no stranger to rude awakenings. None of them are, really, at this point, between middle-of-the-night emergencies and nightmares and just like, general idiocy, like that one time Jay was up late modifying his bike’s engine abovedeck and somehow managed to drop the entire thing through the floor into their bedroom, but over the past few weeks, sleeping through the night has become an almost-forgotten luxury. There's not much time for peaceful sleep when you’re stranded in a foreign realm full of dragons and people desperately hunting you down for your elemental powers, turns out, and even now that they’re all back in Ninjago, nights haven’t exactly been… restful.
Point is, Kai isn’t really that surprised when he wakes up in the dead middle of the night, again. What does surprise him is that he can’t immediately tell why he’s awake.
He sits up in bed, and squints across the room at the two mattresses opposite him—they’ve been staying in a tiny, barren, one bedroom apartment the city scrounged up for them, which makes for some tight living arrangements, but they’re hardly in a position to complain— trying to see if either of his roommates are awake and could have woken him. Lloyd is curled up on his mattress under a pile of blankets, for all appearances peacefully asleep. Nya, meanwhile…
Kai does a double take, peering through the dark, and… yep, the only thing left on Nya’s mattress is a crumpled blanket, kicked halfway on the floor.
Kai stares at the empty space where his sister should be, and something uneasy twists in his stomach. He knows she’s probably fine. Chances are she’s just going to the bathroom, or maybe couldn’t sleep and got tired of being cooped up in their room. Nya’s always had a tendency to stay up through the little hours of the night, and normally Kai would let her do her thing and go back to sleep.
But… it’s only been a few days since they got back from the First Realm, since their family was reunited and Garmadon was defeated. And as safe as Nya probably is, he really doesn’t like the idea of her being alone and out of his sight right now.
So with a groan and a quick stretch to ease his sore muscles, Kai gets up to find his sister.
It doesn’t take long. Even before he enters the kitchen, he can hear the soft clatter of someone shifting around, opening cabinets and running the sink, and when he walks through the doorway, the first thing he sees is Nya, illuminated just barely by the moonlight shining in through the window. She’s standing by the sink, and steam is softly spiraling upwards from the mug grasped in her left hand.
“That better not be coffee,” he says.
Nya flinches and whirls around, and for two seconds Kai is sure he’s about to get a cup of hot liquid to the face, but then her face fills with recognition and she visibly deflates.
“Kai!” she snaps quietly, though he doesn’t miss the relief in her voice. “What are you doing awake?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he says. He steals her mug, ignoring her protests, and takes a sip. Yep, definitely coffee. He raises his eyebrows at her. “You know, it’s two in the morning.”
Nya swipes the mug back from him. “I knew that,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep, lay off.”
“Yeah,” Kai says, “the coffee’s probably not helping much with that.”
Nya flips him off and takes a long sip from her mug, and Kai decides to accept the argument as a lost cause. He knows when to pick his battles, especially when it comes to his sister.
“So, what’s the plan?” he asks instead.
Nya stops glaring at him from over her mug and blinks in confusion. “Huh?”
“I mean, clearly you weren’t planning on going back to sleep. You must have had something in mind to do until morning, right? I’ll hang with you.”
Nya hesitates. “I… I don’t know. I didn’t really have anything in mind.”
Kai stares at Nya, suspicious. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” Nya says, sounding exasperated, but she doesn’t look at Kai when she says it, and that seals it for him.
“You’re lying,” he accuses.
“No, I’m not!”
Kai glares. “Yes, you are. What were you going to do? Tell me.”
Nya wavers for a moment longer before she groans. “I was kind of thinking of…going to the warehouse where we stored our bikes and stuff to get some work done.”
Kai’s pretty sure that rushing noise he’s hearing is the sound of his blood pressure rising through the roof. “What?”
“I realized it was a bad idea as soon as you came out here, okay?”
“That’s–that’s a terrible idea, Nya,” Kai says, barely even noticing that she just said the same thing. “It’s two in the morning–what were you going to do, walk across half the city? None of us even have phones, you still have a broken arm–”
“I know, Kai!” Nya snaps. “I’m sorry, I know it was stupid, I just–I wasn’t thinking straight, okay?” She leans back against the counter and brushes her hair out of her face with a shaking hand, and the pure exhaustion in the movement is enough to snap Kai out of it. For a moment, he stops and really examines his sister.
Even in the dim lighting of the kitchen, it’s obvious how tired she is. There are heavy shadows under her eyes, and a pinched, worn look to her expression, like she hasn’t rested properly even since everything finally stopped blowing up in their faces nonstop. Suddenly, Kai feels a bit like shit for yelling at her.
“Nya,” he says slowly, trying to make his voice gentle, “maybe you should try going back to sleep.”
Nya jerks away, like the idea of rest physically repels her. “No!” she says, then winces. “Sorry,” she apologizes again. “I just…” She doesn’t finish the sentence, and she won’t quite look at Kai. “I can’t,” she whispers finally, like it’s a secret. “I can’t.”
And… again. Kai knows when to pick his battles. If Nya’s set on staying up all night and depriving herself of some clearly much-needed sleep, the best thing he can do at this point is stay up with her and make sure she’s okay, like she clearly isn’t right now. “Okay,” he says. “That’s okay. But you really shouldn’t be doing heavy machinery work right now.”
Nya doesn’t even try to refute him, luckily. She does ask, borderline crabbily, “Then what am I supposed to do?”
Kai looks at his sister, trying to think of something that will lift her mood, or at the very least, get her to talk to him. “Come on,” he decides eventually. “Let’s go out.”
After leaving a note, picking their way through all the mattresses set up in the main room of their apartment (thankfully, populated with the heavy sleepers of the team, otherwise there would have been quite a few angry ninja in the aftermath of Kai and Nya’s argument), and spending a chilly half hour wandering through the near-empty streets of Ninjago City, they find themselves squeezed into the same booth of an all-night tea house, being served by a waitress who for all appearances is the only employee there and looks like she’d rather be in bed almost as much as Kai would. She brings them their drinks then disappears, leaving them to the quiet, dimly-lit parlor.
“You know, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when you said we should go out,” Nya says, halfheartedly stirring her drink–another coffee, which had earned her a very poorly-hid look of disapproval from the waitress when she’d ordered it.
“I mean, I said I wasn’t about to let you operate any heavy machinery, remember?” Kai says.
“Yeah, but–” Nya scowls and cuts herself off. “Whatever,” she mumbles, and takes a drink.
Okay, time to start pushing. “So, why were you up?” Kai asks.
Nya shoots him a look. “Seriously, Kai?” she demands.
“What?” Kai says. “I’m just asking! Am I not allowed to be worried?”
Nya scowls and looks away.
“Was it a nightmare?” Kai keeps pressing. “If it was, you know you don’t have to deal with it alone–”
“It wasn’t a nightmare!” Nya snaps. “I just–I couldn’t sleep! Like I said to you literally the moment you first saw me, okay? You don’t need to keep making a big deal out of it!”
“Okay, okay!” Kai says quickly, before Nya can get angrier. “Not a nightmare. But it was something, wasn’t it?” Nya doesn’t respond. “I can tell you’re upset,” he continues, voice low. “You don’t have to pretend you’re okay, you know?”
Next to him, Nya glares down into her drink–or, at least, he thinks she’s glaring. Her hair hides her expression, but he can see her hand shaking where it’s gripped around her cup. “You don’t understand,” she says quietly.
“I…what?”
“You don’t understand,” Nya repeats, shaking her head. “You don’t understand what it was like when you guys were gone.”
Kai tries to pretend like that doesn’t hurt, like it doesn’t stab him deep in the same place his protective instinct resides. “Okay,” he says, and makes sure to keep his voice even. “Then… can you tell me?”
Nya doesn’t answer. She keeps staring down, keeps shaking, and that stabbing feeling in Kai’s chest burrows deeper. “Nya,” he says quietly.
Nya shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, and something in his chest cracks.
“Nya, please,” he says, not even sure why he’s begging. “Please, just…” he trails off, almost reconsidering. But he needs to know.
So he asks: “How bad was it,” he whispers. "Please. Just tell me."
He knows the answer, on some level. He can see it in the haunted look in Lloyd’s eyes, in the dark bags under Nya’s, in the way the two of them have been clinging to each other since he and the guys got back, like if they let go for even a moment they’ll both be lost. But he needs to hear her say it. He needs to know how badly he and the others failed them by disappearing.
He’s still not prepared for what Nya says next.
“We thought you were dead,” she whispers.
He feels himself still, feels his blood freeze in his veins.
“We thought you were dead,” Nya repeats, and then the words come pouring out, like a river undammed, like she couldn’t stop if she wanted to. “We saw–everyone saw the Bounty get crushed, and Lloyd was falling apart and I wanted to too but I couldn’t, and even after–even after we found the ship, and the tea leaves, and Mystake told us, we were still–we were still all alone, and you guys were gone, and it was everything we could do just to stay alive and together, and I thought–” a choked noise comes out of Nya, and she cuts herself off. Kai reaches a hand out to her, but she shakes it off.
“It seemed–it seemed impossible that we were ever going to see you again,” she whispers, and hugs her arm to her chest. “It seemed like nothing we did mattered, and something new went wrong with every plan we made, and we just had to–keep going.” She sniffs and shakes her head harshly. “It was the only thing we could do.”
Kai looks at his sister, sitting with her good arm wrapped around her chest, taking harsh breaths and barely holding back tears. There’s a heavy, leaden feeling in his chest, pressing him down into the bench until he feels like he’s going to sink into it and then keep falling, keep going down until he’s buried in the earth. I’m sorry, he wants to say. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. But he knows that won’t do anything.
“I’m here now,” he says instead. “We’re all here, we’re all safe, and you guys won. You can relax now.”
Nya gives a choked laugh. “It doesn’t feel like it,” she says. She stops hugging herself, goes back to clutching the cup of coffee. Kai watches her swirl it around, observing the soft waves with an absent-minded stare. “It feels… wrong,” she murmurs. “Being here. Being able to rest. It feels like I need to be doing something.”
And… Kai hates this. He hates this so much. It feels like every time some new, stupid, villain-of-the-week shows up to ruin their lives, he’s a step too late to prevent the damage. All he can do is watch his sister, his friends–his family–get hurt, again and again, and it’s only once the damage’s been done that he can step in and try to make things better.
It’s not enough. It never feels like enough, and it certainly doesn’t now, as he watches Nya cling to her coffee like a lifeline because she can’t convince herself that the world will stay safe long enough for her to close her eyes.
I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you, he thinks. He can’t say it; he knows it will only irritate Nya—she’ll snap at him, he’ll argue back, and then they’ll both be upset. But he can think it. He can promise to try harder next time, swear not to let his family get hurt again, swear that next time things will be different. Maybe, if he keeps trying, one day they will be.
Then again, maybe they won’t.
Kai locks away those thoughts—banishes them to a far-back corner of his mind, to be dealt with later. “Is this helping?” he asks.
Nya shoots Kai a confused glance. “Huh?”
“Being here,” Kai clarifies. “You said you felt like you needed to be doing something. Is it at all better now?”
Nya hesitates. “I don’t know,” she says, in that tone that she only uses when she’s lying. “Maybe a little.”
Well, great. So much for helping out.
Then, Nya surprises him. “Thanks for coming out with me, though,” she says quietly. “You do help.” She bumps his shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Kai thinks back on all the times they’ve been here before: sitting in the aftermath, doing their best to patch each other up, hoping that this will be the last time they have to do it while also knowing on some level that it won’t be. He wonders how many times they’ll be here again in the future.
“It’ll get better,” he decides to tell her. “For all of us. We’ll all be fine.”
Nya hmms. She lets go of the coffee, and leans back. “You think?”
“I do,” Kai says. He projects confidence with his voice. “It’ll just take time.”
Nya snorts and leans into him, and the gesture relieves him more than he can say. “Time, huh?” she says. “We’ve never been short on that before.”