Chapter Text
It took a long time for the blanket of noise in the unfamiliar house to settle that night, though with this many people in such a small space, there were bound to be wrinkles. For one, the infuriating snores resounding through the crack beneath the door opposite the living room, where the sensei and Lloyd's mother had retired for the night. For another, the next door down, Kai and the elemental master of amber were still up by the light of a single candle.
It flickered through the space where they had left the door ajar, molding itself around their shadows as they moved. From the sound of it, they were bickering in whispers, so as not to wake whoever else had been unfortunate enough to be squashed into the tiny bedroom for the night - Cole, she thought, and the goody-goody daughter of that renegade Vangelis.
The amber girl - Skylor, that was her name - was very clearly reprimanding Kai for something. Then came the unmistakable sound of tearing bandages and Skylor's harried, "You've got to tell me these things!" and that answered that.
She couldn't help but wonder, briefly, if hiding grievous injuries was built into the ninja training curriculum. Because the moment their feet were back on solid ground, when the ninja had asked Lloyd if he had been injured in any way, there had been no waver to the confidence in his voice when he had told them he hadn't. So even she had to admit to being a little surprised when they had reconvened here to find that three of his ribs were broken and his chest was marred with dark lightning burns. Apparently Lloyd was a freakishly smooth liar, at least when it came to his own wellbeing. She wasn't quite sure what to make of that.
Not that she had any right to judge. The hypocrisy. Her wrist still ached from the force of the blow that had sheared the monster's hand clear from its body, but she had told Lloyd that she was fine. How could she have told him anything besides? Looking down at the streets from the paper warehouse rooftop, she had seen the crystal curse fall away from the minds of the citizens. The way the infected had crumpled to their knees and shuddered as their sentience was returned to them. The sentience she had so coldly taken from them. Those innocents. Her citizens. The blind admirers of a monarchy that had never lifted a finger for them. A monarchy whom had placed their legacy in the hands of a girl who would so unflinchingly do this.
I know you don't want innocent people hurt, Lloyd had told her some years ago, and the venom that had torn through her veins at the words had almost shocked her in its intensity. The nerve that he might dare to understand her. The spite that she might have been so willing to destroy so many lives for the sole purpose of proving him wrong.
The ache in her wrist was primal. But the innocent souls she had deadened with a crystal plague, the heartless collateral she had authorised - they were sure to be aching all the more. Lloyd couldn't understand. She needed the ache. The pain was her penance.
Much in all as she knew that was true, it was one thing to believe it and entirely another to endure it. Even as she clawed her way toward the moral high ground, the rhythmic, sickening pulse kept jarring her awake. But the pain did nothing to soothe the cold that had needled its way into her chest, sewing guilt across the places where stone had long torn through the cavity of her heart. It did nothing to soften the razor edge of the memories in her mind, of crystal viruses and smoking skylines. Of smouldering thrones and agonised green eyes.
The pain was her penance but, bone-weary as the day had made her, she couldn't help but resent it. At least, she kept telling herself it was the pain that was keeping her alert. It couldn't be the fact that she was once again co-habitating with the ninja after years spent plotting every gruelling detail of their demise. It couldn't be the fact that her mere presence in their space carried with it a tension so thick it rendered the air unbreathable. And it definitely couldn't be the fact that Lloyd was asleep just down the hall.
At least, she figured he was asleep. There was a clock somewhere across the room, but she was helpless to do anything beyond counting each solemn tick in the dark. She almost had to stifle a derisive laugh at the thought of it. The irony. Because wasn't that all she had been doing? Watching from the darkness as the years ticked by, counting each one as she allowed the shadow of her own death to swallow her entirely. As she submerged herself in the bitterness she had bought for the price of a second chance. As she watched the stark black letters of her story flake from the memory of the world, as if they were no more substantial than a watermark. As she heard the name of the Jade Princess Harumi disintegrate from a curse to a memory, to dust long forgotten.
And it had hurt. To awaken in the wrenched skeleton of that building, reborn to the night. To blink back the pain and the dark spots in the vain search for light. To take the first breath of her second life, choked with concrete dust and despair.
Awake in spite of the crushing debris. Alive in spite of all logic. Alone, without a speck of light to be seen.
She had a complicated relationship with the dark.
As a very small child, it had been easy to hate. A perpetual foe. A solid force that came each night to separate her from her parents, to steal the clarity from the world, to distort and disfigure the lines of what was good and safe. A painted canvas from which the monstrous imaginings of her overactive mind could emerge. She'd had a nightlight, then. A jaunty thing of green plastic, a cartoon ninja bearing a lantern. It had been a spur-of-the-moment gift from her father, a dented secondhand relic that gave off a dim, stuttering light. But all the same, it was a shield to throw against the dark, a heartwarming comfort for her troubled mind and a catalyst for a typical dad's idea of wit.
"The dark cannot hurt you, Mimi," she recalled her father's soft, jovial voice, his careful hands affixing a battery in place. With a lopsided grin, he had pressed it into her tiny hands and added, "And it won't dare to try with a ninja on your side."
Harumi pushed the thought harshly away, the memory of her father's voice the only shard of glass that might scrape past the stone in her chest. It echoed in her ears all the same.
The dark cannot hurt you, Mimi.
It had been an omniscient force in the orphanage, a nest of living tendrils that sprawled across her corner of the dorm like the legs of a monstrous spider. It seemed to favour her corner, drawn to the sobs she could only muffle in the unfamiliar sleeve of too-big pyjamas, to the smoke stains, long washed away but clinging to her skin like cobwebs regardless. Once, it would have terrified her. That creature of blackness and cold. Once, she would have cowered from it, but what would be the point? Fear had no purpose here. All she had ever feared from it had already come to pass. There was no clarity left to her world. There was nothing good. There was nothing safe.
Her parents were not coming back.
The dark cannot hurt you, Mimi.
There had been no nightlight in the dorm, no windows large enough to accommodate the daylight - nothing but a stout line of buzzing fluorescents. A place long forgotten, even by sunlight. The weeks went by and the creature remained, the only constant in a life uprooted. By day it had protected her, wrapping the shadowy tendrils of its legs around her, a cloak against the slings and arrows of her new world. The snide comments about her ratty hair, her too-small frame. The laughter spurned forth by the tears she had cried. The hands that shoved her shoulders in the hallways, just to watch her fall. By night, the creature skittered ever closer, helped along by each cold feat of the day. It would creep into her bones as she filled her mind with the memory of her family. It would cling to the images, curling the edges but never touching their faces. It would burrow through her veins, tunneling an icy path toward her heart. It would delve deep into her soul, gathering each elusive strand of bitterness and pain. Night by night it would twine them together, until the pits of her soul were webbed beyond recognition.
It was difficult to hate the dark, when it became a part of you.
In the Royal Palace, it had been hard to come by. The Emperor and Empress craved light like sacred jewels. Sunlight perpetually graced the hallowed halls, an attempt to invite life into the shell of a place that had long ago lost it. What light they had seen in Harumi, she could not imagine, and had not bothered to ask. She, who had carried that creature from the orphanage like a second heartbeat. She, who had saturated her room in shadow to keep it nurtured. She, who had stalked through the palace snapping each of the shutters closed, in spite of the fact that the servants would inevitably throw them wide minutes later.
In the end, the dark had not saved her. The creature that had strung her hatred together saw her buried far beneath the light she had wrenched apart. A place that light had never seen. The terror she had wrought in the darkness had turned her heart to stone, but had done nothing to heal the existing gashes.
She had heard it said, once, that even the weeds would seek the sunlight in the harsh winter frosts. Even the most hopeless of souls were drawn to light. It was solace. It was life. Instinct and inevitable. So was it really any wonder, that when she awakened from the harsh frost of death, it was the first thing she truly sought?
And the cold weight of disappointment, when that instinctive search for light was unfounded.
The dark may not have saved her. But at least it was there.
And so the years had passed. The clock had ticked by and she had let it. She had let each tick strike at her heart, a metronomic stalactite to harden the stone, to glaze it in a web that would fuse the writhing darkness ever further to the blood within. A stone so twisted with cobwebs that no one could recall its exact shape. A relic so fiercely protected no light could hope to reach it.
At least, that was the spider's design.
She certainly hadn't intended to let anyone close enough to scrape the cobwebs back, strand by strand, layer by layer. To uncover the cracks veining the stone. And she certainly hadn't expected it of him.
The light she had sought in those cruel waking moments. The light she had so fleetingly craved. The hope long dashed before it had truly been given the chance to take root.
Why didn't you come for me?
Those words, so utterly pointless, so juvenile. Because why would he have come for her? She, who had tamed that creature of blackness to covet his heart. She, who had let it infect him, let it slink through his bones with every touch of their skin. She, who had urged it to strangle his heart, to spin the web so cruelly around it that he had barely flinched when the world caved in beneath her.
She, who had done all in her power to suffocate that still-beating heart.
Every bitter strand, every clinging shadow and still -
I did!
The shock of cold that had swept through her at the cry. The strands that had lost some of their static resolve.
The light she had so fleetingly craved. It had scraped the corners of the rubble far above her. It had clawed through the mound brick by brick, and she had never known it was there.
I searched through that rubble with my bare hands.
If she hadn't fallen so very far, maybe it would have found her. And maybe she would have let it.
Maybe that would have been better.
Harumi tossed again. She had long lost count of the ticking clock, but she thought it was quite late. Not that it mattered much. The moment the adrenaline had ebbed out of his system, Lloyd had quickly faded into quiet exhaustion and ultimately fallen asleep on Jay's shoulder partway through a meagre dinner. Which was probably for the best, really. Though, as the only person in the room who didn't actively despise her, his untimely collapse into oblivion had left her in a rather awkward position. The rest of the ninja had been too tired to even attempt any semblance of conversation, let alone begin to assemble their disdain for her into anything resembling a coherent assault. But the looks they had consistently sent in her direction had said more than enough.
She turned over on the sofa, trying to cultivate some comfort in the flimsy cushions. It was no use. For a safe house, the furniture didn't feel particularly safe. Hard wooden slats and springs reared up through the fabric, and she couldn't escape them no matter how she tossed. She had a hard time believing that this three-bedroom shoe box was really the best the city could offer the ninja in consolation for the loss of their Monastery. The one she had flooded with crystal spiders. The one she had so callously taken from them in cold retribution.
Come to think of it, the springs would do just fine.
She tossed again. Her wrist protested sharply and she bit down on her lip to stifle a cry. The last thing she wanted to do was wake any of the severely sleep-deprived ninja. It wasn't as if they didn't already have enough reason to oppose her.
Kicking the blankets back, she drew her arms around herself in the vain hope for a sliver of comfort. It was an old habit, ingrained nonetheless. The way she would curl into herself in the creature's cold embrace in the corner of the dormitory. The way she would pull her knees up to her chest beneath the embroidered silk covers of a too-soft bed. It was a staple of her childhood, a lesson learned too young - the only comfort she would ever know, because no one else would ever care enough to provide it for her.
At least, that was what she had told herself.
Like flashes of a lightning storm, she recalled it all. Images too broken and fleeting to comprehend, edges too bright for the cobwebs to shadow. The cool phantom touch of his fingers around her wrist on the edge of the oni temple. The weight of his body against hers, his arms around her, holding her close as the wind whipped through them in the free fall. The solid warmth of his shoulder, when fear drilled through a heart long turned to stone, and she had pressed her face against it. And the tightening of his grip, when she had cried out from the force of that terror.
She forced the thought aside.
Thinking was dangerous. It was a catalyst, an opening for all those other thoughts, the spun gold she had been so desperately trying to pry free from the contours of her mind. Gold like the warmth that had glazed her stone heart when he had broken her fall from the quicksand debacle. Gold like the clawed hand that had squeezed that stone inside her chest when the Overlord had ordered him destroyed. Gold like the guilt that had flooded her veins, when the web that encased his heart erupted outward in a blaze of rage, gold like the monstrous face he had raked with his talons in agony of what he had become. The monster she had made him. Gold, like the note of terror in her cry when he had fallen from the temple. Gold, like the way her webbed, crumbling heart had stuttered painfully that very night, when he had just about collapsed upon stepping foot in the door.
Even through the rest of dinner, the sound of his wheezing breaths had kept her on the edge of a knife she didn't understand. Even now, her chest rose and fell quicker to the thought of it. His breathing had sounded awful when Kai had finally risen to put him to bed. What if he was hurt worse than he had let on? What if it was more serious than the other ninja had realised? Broken ribs were no joke. What if he had punctured a lung?
So what? You don't care, the still-clinging cobwebs told her, and urged her to go back to sleep. To curl up in the darkness, to let it harden and protect whatever remained of that crumbling stone. To re-embrace that creature of blackness and despair.
A resolve which lasted exactly fifteen seconds.
It was difficult to scrape away the light, when it had finally wedged its way into that tattered mess of silk thread and stone.
But it was impossible to love the darkness, when the one who created it had murdered your family.
She was on her feet before she had really processed her own movement, acting on an instinct she didn't understand, and shivering by way of poorly insulated floorboards. Just making sure, she told the cobwebs as she crept past the pull-out sofa where the two nindroids had powered down for the night. That was the only reason. It wasn't like she was just trying to escape the creature, the one that clung to every fibre of the night air. She wasn't bothered by the torn remnants of silk that still tickled her rib cage. And she definitely wasn't gravitating toward him in the dead of night because he was the only light that had ever cared enough to find her.
Nothing so foolish as that. It was because if he died overnight, she wasn't ignorant of where the blame would land.
She didn't think it was a coincidence that the ninja had put Lloyd up in the room at the very end of the hall - the bedroom the most conceivable distance away from the living room sofa she had been offered for the night. A hint if ever she had seen one.
Joke's on them.
She never had been very good at taking hints.