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Contrary to popular belief, Lloyd isn’t stupid. Sure, he’s a supposedly highly-trained ninja who has somehow been captured in enough cages that he can rank them, and he and the guys have been known to run-head first into pretty obvious traps with high enthusiasm, and he definitely missed everything going on with the whole Harumi situation like some kind of idiot, but he’s not stupid.
So he knows that Zane and Kai and Nya are all probably right when they tell him that sleep is important and that he maybe needs to stop pushing himself so hard if he’s going to be of any help to the team. The series of long nights, of punching dummies in the early morning like that’s going to help him punch back the nightmares, are starting to catch up to him. His reactions have gotten slower, obvious connections keep slipping through his fingers like water, and his eyes keep fluttering closed in crucial moments—you know, like trying to fly the Bounty five thousand feet in the air without immediately killing everyone.
Lloyd would swallow his own teeth before he admitted that he was in trouble, but these night terrors have been getting a bit ridiculous, even for him.
The issue is that, even if he could sleep, he'd have no time. Rontu and Egalt had been training them at a breakneck pace that rivaled Master Wu’s worst conditioning and now they’ve turned to stone and it’s up to the Ninja to get to Ras and stop him from releasing the Forbidden Five, and the stupid Blood Moon is glaring down at him with an evil glint that reminds him of red eyes and pain from Kryptarium—
Lloyd wheezes in another breath as he leaps over an upturned root, coming into step with Nya again. She pants as they race through the woods, swiping branches out of her way.
“We got so turned around in that storm,” she grits out. The dirt slides under their feet as they move in practiced unison. “I have no idea how far out we are.”
Lloyd’s head is spinning a bit in a way that leaves him stumbling along two steps for what should be one, and the extra steps are only worsening things. Every time his feet pound against the earth there’s an equally strong jolt through his skull, like someone just swung a wrecking ball behind his eyes. He takes another hard step and swallows back a gasp as the pain makes red lights flash in front of his eyes.
Stupid brain, he curses numbly. Stupid storm. The forecast couldn’t have been a slightly less evil moon?
He’s also tempted to blame the twenty different tree boughs that dropped them down the forest floor. His nose still stings from being whacked by a particularly vengeful branch. Lloyd wipes a stray pine needle from beneath his hood.
“I know,” Lloyd says, voice strained. “But we got to get to the ritual of the Blood Moon before—”
The red lights dance in front of his eyes again. A snarling stone wolf face with a striking resemblance to a gargoyle erupts into his vision. The red moon bears down on him.
No. No, no, no he doesn’t have time for this.
Lloyd pauses in his next step, gasps. He barely catches Nya slowing down as he groans, knees pressed to the ground. When did that happen? The world is spinning and warping and red light is shining on everything. Bile burns against the back of his throat.
‘Not…now!” Lloyd bites out. It feels like twenty swords are stabbing into his eye sockets. Maybe the acidic green that has overtaken his eyes is actually as laser-like as people keep saying and now his brain is going to wither away when they melt through his skull and kill him. The echo of that horrible gong is pounding in his ears. Or maybe it’s his heartbeat, he decides, as it picks up speed, pulsing throughout his whole body like a timer. I guess this is what kills the Legendary Green Ninja, it seems to say. Should have taken your grandfather’s hand when you had the chance.
A weight on his arm grounds him. Nya gently presses her hand on his shoulder as he braces himself against the dirt.
“More visions?” she asks, a note of panic buried behind the surface calm. She glances to the red moon hovering over the mountains, then back to Lloyd.
They don’t have time for this and they both know it. The ritual could start any second. People could die any second. Lloyd’s used to pain—he’s good with it! All he needs to do is push it away and keep moving.
All he needs to do it push it—
He just needs to—
He needs—
A cry escapes Lloyd’s grit teeth as he violently curls in on himself. Nya’s hand slips off his shoulder. He can barely hear himself over the pounding in his head, the red light threatening to spill from the mental cage where he usually keeps this kind of stuff until he can pretend to process it at three in the morning, but from what little he can hear his voice sounds hoarse and strained.
“I can’t let them come…have to…force them to go away!”
There’s a moment where Lloyd thinks he may have succeeded, half a second where he praises his stubbornness for lifting the anxiety from his body so he can move again. The blobby shape in front of him that he’s ninety percent sure is his sister and not some random tree is starting to come into focus again. Nya’s expression looks pinched, hand outstretched. He owes her, like, twenty thank you cards for being there during these horrible visions, Lloyd considers groggily. Or a box of cookies or something. Maybe he can get Arin to bake her a pie. That last part sounds like a great idea, so he opens his mouth to tell her.
Then the dread plummets back into his bones and he drops to the ground like lead.
A snarling stone face claws its way into his vision. The ground rattles. Masked wolf warriors shake the earth with each step, each row revealing more and more and more and more. There’s so many of them. There’s too many of them—
The bricks of Cloud Kingdom are cracking. A horrible groaning noise rumbles through the sky. The air grows heavy. The top of the tower collapses—slowly first, like the bricks are trying to catch themself, then faster, more chaotic, the stones slamming against each other and tumbling further and further into pieces as the lightning cracks behind it. The stones keep falling, they’re closing him in—it’s getting dark, he’s trapped—
The red vortex swirls, howls with a hunger so fierce that Lloyd feels his hair stand on end. Euphrasia is facing the portal—she looks young, she’s much too young. Euphrasia, Wyldfire, Arin, Sora, they’re all too young—as Ras looms behind her. His smile is punctuated with a sadistic growl, the low roar just as hungry as the portal in front of him. Euphrasia turns back to face him, eyes wide and panicked, and before Lloyd can scream out a warning Ras’s hammer slams into her with a stomach-turning crunch. He still can’t move, he’s still trapped, can’t reach out an arm as Euphrasia tumbles back into the screaming winds and is swallowed whole by the void. She vanishes.
Slowly, like the darkness it’s pushing through is something solid and viscous, an arm reaches from the other side. It claws at the air in front of it, seems to shudder as the brim of a hat slowly follows, then a torso, then a snarling, cruel face that makes Lloyd shiver. He can only see the mouth, the sharp fangs that curl into a smile and make his heart feel compressed inside his chest, the same hollow feeling of failure as when the Oni stood from the Mist with smoke roiling off their shoulders—
They’re going to lose, they’re going to lose, they’re going to lose, they’re going to lose—
The pain is tearing Lloyd apart. His heart or soul or whatever the First Master deemed worthy to save is being ripped from his body and he’s going to be lost inside of these visions forever.
Vaguely, Lloyd tastes something gritty on his tongue, feels his cheek dig deeper into the dirt as his—his?—body writhes. He doesn’t think he’s in control of it. There’s something—maybe it’s hands, maybe it's the rocks crumbling from Cloud Kingdom—pressing against his temple, the pressure building until it feels like it’s going to break the skin and gouge straight into his brain.
There’s cries echoing around him, following Euphrasia even after she falls, digging into his ears and bones and head why won’t it all just stop—
“—oyd?”
There's a presence over him. Hands—not his hands. Are they his hands? What’s trying to scoop out his brains then?—grab onto his body like they’re trying to push his soul back in.
“Lloyd!”
Nya.
That’s Nya. She sounds desperate. Lloyd hates to make her worried. What kind of savior is he if he can’t even save his big sister from panicking?
He curls into her body, feels her scoop his shaking limbs someplace warm—her lap? The stabbing pain continues. His eyes bleed red light all over his vision.
Wolf mask.
Tower.
Lloyd tries to focus on Nya’s calming presence, tries to catch the low rumble of waves sliding over the sand.
Euphrasia.
Ras.
Portal.
PORTAL.
Lloyd’s drowning. The beach, the waves, they’re too far away. The red light is infecting his head and he’s drowning. He wants his sister. He wants her the same way he did when he was a snot-nosed brat with nightmares of fighting his dad, leagues before he realized what it meant to lose. He wants her the same way he did when he really knew what it was like to lose, when he lost everything and she was the only thing he had left, the last stable ground in a storm that threatened to take what was left of Lloyd and bury him in the same rubble that took his brothers. He wants her the same way he did when she merged with the sea and saved everyone at the cost of leaving them behind, the same way he did when he’d wash the windows and see the reflection of the ocean behind him and slam the sponge into the bucket and back onto the glass until the suds blocked the view.
Wolf mask.
Tower.
“Lloyd, Lloyd I’m right here. You’re okay, I'm right here.” Nya’s whispering in his ear. Her arms curl around his body, her voice trembling with concern. She sounds a bit like she’s trying to convince herself.
Euphrasia.
Ras.
Portal.
“I’m here,” she repeats. Lloyd desperately tries to absorb the mantra. Nya’s here.
Portal.
Hand.
Portal hand portalportal.
WolfmasktowerEuphrasiaRas—
But he isn’t here, Lloyd thinks. He’s not here at all.
Lloyd’s still trapped in the nightmares, horribly, utterly certain that they are going to lose—as powerless to change destiny as he is in stopping the visions.
Lloyd’s gotten pretty used to being exhausted, bone-tired in the way that even after-battle adrenaline can never seem to mask, but now that the last of the action has died down he feels like he might sleep for a week before dealing with all the conflicting emotions running through his mind.
On one hand he finally managed to work through the visions that had been plaguing him and figured out Rising Dragon technique. And he’s proud—like unbelievably so—of the kids. Arin did object spinjitzu! The ritual was stopped before all of the Forbidden Five could get out!
Of course, one of them managed to get out. And they stole away Kai to do that.
Lloyd leans against the wall, running his hand over his face. There’s still that buzzing pressure behind his eyes, the quiet warning of the visions’ return and, more importantly, their truth. The Ninja did lose. A member of the Forbidden Five did escape. And Kai’s…
Not gone, Lloyd decides, because he can’t handle that answer right now. ‘Trapped’ sounds better. ‘Trapped’ sounds like something they can save him from, not something a few thousand years and a sacrifice away.
There's noise down the hall. Arin and Sora are long asleep—or at least long sent to bed—but Nya’s been talking with Wyldfyre ever since they got back. Lloyd feels shame trickle like cool water down his spine. The one person Wyldfyre opened up to, the one person closest to him and Nya in the world, and Lloyd went and lost him in Netherspace.
Lloyd stays slumped against the wall, debating the merits of closing his eyes and going to sleep right there, when the shoji slides open and Nya steps out of Wyldfyre’s room, gently closing the door behind her. She braces her hands against the frame, takes several deep breaths like she’s trying to hold back tears, and raises her head with a rough shake, only to jerk back when she finds herself looking right at Lloyd. They stare at each other, Lloyd leaned to the side with his fingers pulling at his eyelids and Nya still hunched over with her hands on the wall.
There’s a brief moment where Lloyd considers what to say—“Sorry that I let your brother get sacrificed, I’ll probably do better next time; Crazy battle, right? Sucks that we kinda lost; Are you ready to go to sleep cause I haven’t slept in like three days.”—before he finally settles on: “Do you need a hug Nee?”
Nya’s running forward and digging her head into his arms before he can even take a step forward.
Maybe half an hour later, when Nya’s made her horrible coffee and Lloyd has finally decided he’s had enough of swirling his teacup to no avail, he tries to broach a conversation.
“How are you holding up?” he says, then winces. His voice still hasn’t quite recovered from the forest, and yelling during the battle certainly didn’t help. He coughs lightly and downs a bit more of the tea. Nya sips at her coffee, glaring morosely across the table, but her eyes look like they’re staring far away.
“I don’t think it’s quite set in yet,” she says tightly. ‘I don’t…I keep expecting him to walk in through the door.”
Lloyd hums in agreement, watching the tea swirl in his cup. There’s a sort of familiarity to the conversation. It’s not the first time they’ve lost someone. The cup’s dark liquid twists around and around in a tiny whirlpool, the kitchen lights creating lines of amber-red until the tea resembles a vortex. Lloyd swallows and sets the cup down, away from him. It’s the first time he should have known it was coming, though.
“He’s not dead,” he says, determined but quiet.
“No. We're just a few millennia away from restarting the ritual.”
“But that’s not dead.”
“Are you kidding me, Lloyd? What chance do we have of getting him back? Maybe if we’re lucky you or Zane could live that long but me…the rest of us,” Nya trails off.
“Don’t say that,” Lloyd snaps, hiding his scowl behind his cup. “We’ll find a way. We have to. We’re not allowed to just give up!”
They’re both quiet for a little bit. Lloyd takes another angry slurp of his tea, eyebrows scrunched together. He savors the tea blend in the back of his mouth before swallowing it. It’s the same blend Master Wu used to leave out when the team had gone through a tough mission, the kind where he knew they’d all stay up together to ward off the nightmares and find comfort in all of them being alive. Lloyd wonders if he took it out earlier by instinct or if Zane brought it out before he went to hide away in his room. Maybe Mr. Frohickey thought it smelled nice and just left it out by coincidence.
With the tea warming his chest, it’s hard to hold onto the bite of anger. Lloyd’s not really upset, anyway. Not at Nya, at least. He’s just tired, he realizes. Not tired in the way he’s been since he stopped sleeping, but tired of the endless fights. Tired of the faith in the eyes of the citizens that he just can’t seem to save. Tired of watching people disappear through portals. Tired of wondering whether the next time he saves his siblings they come back wrong. Tired of prophecies and greater purposes and power. He just wants his family safe.
There’s an itch, almost, a paranoia fueled by the buzzing in his head. He needs to go check that Cole is still sleeping on the couch by the remaining Finders. He wants to knock on Zane’s door until he comes out, irritated and upset, but unharmed. He needs Arin and Sora and Wyldfyre to talk a little louder so he can hear the imprint of their voices through the wall. He needs to…what, make sure none of them fell into portals while he wasn’t looking?
Lloyd snorts bitterly into his tea. Nya glances up at him with an almost bemused gaze, then sighs heavily and downs her horrid coffee in one go.
“Not allowed to give up,” she repeats quietly. She takes a deep breath in through her nose and places her elbows on the table so her hands are resting half-way between the two of them.
“Is this what it was like when I merged with the sea?” she asks. Lloyd rubs the back of his neck with a nervous chuckle.
“Well, uh, there was a tad-bit of giving up involved,” he sputters. “Window-washing and all that. But!” Lloyd copies Nya, grabbing her hands in the middle of the table. “We found a way, didn’t we?”
“An impossible solution to an impossible problem.”
“Those do tend to happen around us.”
Nya snorts. Her eyes crinkle, almost like she’s about to smile, before her face falls again. Her grip on Lloyd’s hands tighten. “I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s just that first I’m all alone in strange realms, and then just when I start finding you guys again I find out Jay’s still missing and the world’s falling apart again and now my big brother’s missing too. It just feels like it’s all stacking against us.”
Nya’s lip quivers, but she doesn't cry. Lloyd gently extracts his hands from Nya’s grip and moves his chair to sit next to her. She leans her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes as she bites her lip.
“I’m not used to doing it alone,” she whispers. “I tried so hard to be independent, to prove that I didn’t need anyone else, but I don’t really want to do it alone.”
Lloyd swallows back the tears and continues rubbing circles on her back. Nya was all alone in the Kingdom of Madness for years. He wonders if it was anything like his own isolation, going through the motions and sewing gis and fixing up the Bounty to ignore the way the Monastery got so quiet at night. Lloyd can’t help but imagine a tiny Nya, all alone in the vastness of the mountains, trying to climb her way back to them.
Nya sits up suddenly, so fast that Lloyd has to flinch back to avoid cracking her skull with his chin.
“You better not go anywhere,” she says seriously, grasping his arm like a last life-line. Lloyd nods on instinct.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
There’s a memory of a vision, though, one where Beatrix charges at him with a sword, that makes his voice waver a bit on the last word. Nya spears him with a look that turns his insides to puddles.
“I’m serious,” she mutters, “No more of that ‘being consumed by visions’ shit. You know I’d give those Source Dragons a good beating if you asked me to.”
Lloyd winces as her muttering devolves into something that sounds suspiciously like “stop fourth dimensional beings from terrorizing my little brother” and “killed a realm, how hard can it be?” He tries to change the subject before any Source Dragons decide to listen in and turn them inside-out for their insolence or something.
“Hopefully it won’t be too much of a problem anymore,” Lloyd says, “Rontu’s advice really worked. I let the visions run their course and it was more manageable. At least, I didn’t feel like I was going to ascend to the Departed Realm anymore.”
He pauses, head tilting, then continues: “You know, I should really thank you for that.”
“For what?”
“For helping me. In the forest. And before that.”
Nya scoffs, eyes boring into the bird on the stupid cuckoo clock that Jay insisted they needed when they were rebuilding the Monastery. “I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and watched while my little brother was in pain.”
“You did help,” Lloyd insists. “I need you, Nee. Now that Kai…all these bad things are coming and I can’t stop it alone.”
His fingers twist into his gi, green flashing shades of yellow and blue as he folds it in and out of the light. “I don’t feel like I can trust myself anymore. I mean, these visions are practically telling me what’s going to happen and I can’t get it out of my head. I knew that one of the Forbidden Five was going to get out, I should have known someone was going to fall through.”
“That wasn’t your fault–” Nya starts, but Lloyd cuts her off.
“I’m responsible for you guys, Nya. And now, as conduit or whatever that means, I’m responsible for everyone. I need you, to make sure that I don’t screw up again.”
Nya strikes him with a side-eye before sighing, reluctantly releasing one of her hands from their vise grip on Lloyd’s arm to inspect the remains of her coffee cup. She almost looks a bit queasy. “I don’t know if I’m the one you want to ask for that,” she mumbles quietly, before clearing her throat and saying, “I’ll try my best. I guess I did make you a promise, remember?”
Lloyd does remember. He remembers because that promise was the only thing that kept him going in the dark nights when Ultra Violet’s messages flickered on the screens, remembers because Nya was already protecting him way before the Sons of Garmadon showed up and she hasn’t stopped since, remembers because she was there in the forest when no one else could be.
Nya’s always been there. She’s exactly who Lloyd wants to ask for this.
“I know you can do this Nya,” he says passionately, leaning in to meet her eyes. “You’re determined. You’re amazing! You took out that Forbidden Five member with Rising Dragon!”
Nya deflates into herself, her face wavering. Jay’s cuckoo clock ticks on in the background.
“Kai gave me Rising Dragon,” she says finally, rushing all the words out like she’s scared she might lose them if she doesn’t. Her eyebrows furrow. “That wasn’t me.”
“What are you talking about?” Lloyd presses, incredulous. “Of course it was.”
Nya slouches back against her seat, blowing her bangs out of her eyes.
“When he got sacrificed I just got all these memories. This game we used to play as kids, nothing really important. But I got this feeling,” she says. “My brother’s always been there for me. How could they just try to take him away? He’s the only reason I could stop Shatterspin.” Her face starts to screw up with something that looks like a mix of anger and complete devastation.
“Which is stupid, right? I only get my big power-up after our big brother gets tossed through a death portal? What kind of cosmic timing is that?”
Nya’s breaths are coming fast, her fist slamming against the table to punctuate her sentence. The faucet starts to rattle, little drops of water falling into the sink. They start gaining speed as Nya suddenly stands up, her chair toppling over.
Lloyd feels a bit at loss for words. “Nya, everyone’s asleep—” he starts.
“You have all this faith in me, and Kai was the first person to have every belief in me and to push me to be better and to look at me like he was so proud, and I just don’t get why!”
“You all just expect me to help you and I keep failing,” she says, seemingly oblivious to Lloyd’s growing horror. “I should be able to protect everyone. I was the ocean, for FSM's sake. Would the ocean have lost her brother? Would the ocean keep losing these fights? Cause Nya is!”
The pipes in the walls creak as the moisture in the air starts to condense into little spheres of water, coagulating around Nya like a strange shell. Her hands dig through her hair, her eyes getting a sort of shine that looks part manic, part close to tears. Lloyd jumps up from his seat, his own tears lifting from his face as the water continues to rise.
“If I had still been the ocean,” Nya cries out, her voice guttural, “would we have kept losing everyone?”
The water explodes outwards, knocking Lloyd back. His elbows slam into the wood as Nya is surrounded, the water’s movement a roar as it crashes around her.
Lloyd shakily extends his hand. The water swirls like a mini whirlpool, batting his hand to the side and leaving it stinging from impact. The mass of water is too thick and moving too fast for Lloyd to see clearly, but he can still make out his big sister within the vortex. Her breaths are coming out fast and heaving, her fingers against her temples as she stares, increasingly empty-eyed, at the ground.
Lloyd’s never seen Nya like this before, not at Zane’s memorial, not even when they thought the Colossus killed their brothers. She was always the one comforting him, the one taking the losses in stride a bit too easily, too practiced. Lloyd feels guilt creep up his chest, twisting and sickening but more familiar than the wrong-footed feeling of watching Nya crumble.
Get over yourself, Lloyd scolds himself. You can sulk later, she needs you right now. He takes a deep breath, readies himself, then shoves against the wall of water. The water is unyielding, his body straining against the current, his slippered feet sliding to the side, until his fingers brush against Nya’s shoulder.
She looks up, startled, at the contact. The water stops all at once, hanging suspended around them. Lloyd’s drowning again, he’s pretty sure, because the water is dense and heavy and, FSM, how sad would it be to choke on water with his own tears in it? Nya’s in there, though, so he opens his mouth anyway.
“I’m here Nee,” he says. Water rushes in and bubbles rise out of his mouth and he has to fight to not gag and cough, but even though his voice comes out garbled and distant, Nya doesn’t look away from him. “I’m here, and so are you. You don’t need to do this alone. Let’s go back together.”
The water floods his lungs and Lloyd feels his anxiety spike. Nya looks frozen, transfixed, staring at him like he’s dropped from some other realm. Her arm twitches forward, like she can’t decide whether she should reach for him. The world is starting to get a bit hazy. With no oxygen left, Lloyd surges forward.
His arms wrap around Nya, squeezing her as tight as he can. He hopes, in case he doesn't get the chance to say it, that it tells her how sorry he is, that it tells her how proud he is and how much he loves her and how he would do anything for her.
She returns the hug, and the bubble of water bursts.
Lloyd sinks to his chair, hacking up a lung. Out of the corner of his eye, Nya’s still standing, her arms out where she was grabbing Lloyd, face upturned. Her eyes are closed, rimmed with red, lashes crusted with salt and droplets, but some of the water from the bubble is resting on her cheeks, running down her face like tears.
She slowly sits back down, dropping her face into her hands.
“I’m sorry.”
"Don’t be. You’ve always been there for me,” Lloyd pants. He pauses, thinking, then leans in so his head is level with hers.
“As long as I have my power,” he begins. Nya snorts wetly, breathes out something shaky that may almost be a laugh. “I’m serious,” Lloyd continues, but there's already a fond smile on his face. “As long as I have my power, and breath in my body, I’m going to protect you.”
His face turns serious. “I promise I’m going to protect you. It’s not all on you Nya. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. I’ve just always felt safer with my big sister.”
Nya sniffles and curses softly under her breath, but it sounds affectionate. Lloyd waits patiently.
“We’ve always been better as a team anyway,” she says, dropping one of her hands from her face.
Her arm reaches out blindly for Lloyd’s shoulder. He grabs it and moves it there, his hand resting on hers. They sit there, soaking wet with red eyes and noses and failing to clear tear-clogged throats, until the first rays of sunlight shine from under the blinds, making patterns on the kitchen floor. They should probably leave, Lloyd considers, or at least clean up the water before Zane walks out and has a heart attack and scolds them. Or maybe he'd just rush them to their beds and trap them there in the sheets.
Lloyd can’t find it in himself to leave though. For a moment, he couldn’t care less about visions and unstoppable futures. He just wants his sister, here. It gives him hope that his brothers will come back, that his team can be whole again, that he isn’t doomed to watch his family tear itself apart over and over again.
Then, because he didn’t die in that water vortex, he whispers, “I love you Nya.”
There are noises coming from the other rooms in the Monastery, undoubtedly the rest of the household starting to stir. Zane’s steady monotone is talking to some of the kids. Cole’s careful steps rumble through the floor of the Monastery. Nya’s hand is steady on his shoulder.
“I love you too,” she says.