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Chilling winds broke against the Tower’s north side as Harumi’s fingertips gripped the cold ledge. She kicked her legs like a child at the high table as she watched ambulance lights cut through the settling dust of the razed Ninjago City. Harumi fixed her gaze on one rooftop, then the other, half-paranoid that the bright flash of Spinjitzu would burst across her vision and steal away her victory. Her victory. She had laid Ninjago City back at the feet of her rightful Emperor, but she hadn’t won yet. So long as Lloyd’s heart beat with hope, she would never have won.
His hopeful naïveté rang like monastery bells through Harumi’s mind as she shifted through her memories of that carefully-curated damsel in distress that she had been for him. Lloyd had fallen for her act so perfectly that it was as if he had a script as well and was playing a part. She parsed through their final act in the Oni temple. In the early days of the new Emperor’s instatement, she had cherished the anguish and betrayal, though those memories felt heavy and numb, now, as she watched the city crumble with the legendary Green Ninja fleeing like a rat. Years upon years of deliberation and care gave rise to her plan, yet it had become empty so fast.
Ultra Violet’s heavy boots announced her arrival as she sat, carefree, along the edge and swung her legs to hang next to Harumi’s. Harumi herself placed one hand on the Mask of Hatred by her side. She could feel its terrible pulse by that alone. It whispered vindication into her mind. Its whispering taunts riled her and she thought of leaping from the air and donning the mask in free-fall to have either the thrill of its power surging through her veins as its strength lent her body the power to break the pavement beneath her feet, or the gentle embrace of death, whichever destiny would have her take.
“Grand,” Ultra Violet chuckled. Harumi snapped from her fantasy. Her compatriot’s hands were spread to frame the horizon between her forefinger and her thumb. “So what’s the plan? We’ll burn Lloyd and that resistance out of hiding?”
“Exactly,” murmured the Quiet One. Ultra Violet threw her head back to laugh and leaned back on one hand as she pointed out towards the wreckage of the city. She shook her head and held her fingers as if an invisible pistol rested in her hand.
“Bang.”
Ultra Violet laughed again and Harumi guided her hand towards a specific point on the horizon.
“Establish checkpoints there and block all other roadways in,” Harumi instructed. She kept her voice level, measured, careful. “Then we’ll burn them out from below. He is in the city somewhere.”
“How do you know?”
“He is,” snapped Harumi. Ultra Violet let the jab ricochet away from her sensitivities and hummed lightheartedly. “Make it seem like we’re fortifying the city to keep him out. We’re preventing him from leaving. Him and his allies.”
“You got it.” Ultra Violet swayed forward with the wind. “We’ve won.”
“Not yet.”
“We’ve won something,” Ultra Violet insisted incredulously. “Look at it! Ninjago City bows to you.”
“Ninjago City bows to the Emperor.”
Ultra Violet scoffed. Harumi’s vision flared and she wondered, for just a moment, what it would feel like to push her comrade from the edge, to know that she wished she had held on more carefully to the edge, and to watch her body plummet and contemplate for herself whether she ought to don the Mask of Hatred to catch her or to experience death alongside her.
“Of course.”
Harumi felt the dust rising around her as it seeped into her lungs in the dark of the collapsed rubble. She tried to fill her lungs to cough and expel the sharp debris that lacerated every inch of her throat, but her back couldn’t rise against the weight of a concrete slab. The collapsed building shook and settled. She forced the burning air from her lungs as the slab on her back pressed greedily down to steal every inch it could and press Harumi’s chest against the ground below. Her mind returned to the rooftop. She had been an orphan, a daughter, a damsel in distress, and a conqueror, yet it was Lloyd’s brokenhearted gaze that had come to her both then, on the rooftop, and now, as she lay in the dark between the weight of the building and its cracking foundations.
If she had had the space to take another breath, she would have chuckled at the futility of it all.
Oh, I’m sorry, Lloyd.