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Autumn, Lloyd Garmadon’s birthday, first day of an annual fair.
To commemorate their teammate’s birthday, Zane, Cole, Jay, Kai and Nya planned to bake a cake. A cake needs ingredients, and so they had gone to buy some. In the tight-packed car the bag fell over due to a speedbump and caused sprinkles to fly all over the place, leaving Nya and Kai to clean the mess.
“Who would’ve known that you’re such a bad driver, Nya,” Kai said with a smile over the sound of the vacuum cleaner.
“How dare you blame me for the fact that this car can’t handle rough terrain.”
“I’m sure there would’ve been a road that wasn’t blocked by the festival that you could’ve taken instead of the shortcut.”
“ Mhm. I might’ve thought of that if you weren’t all backseating so loudly over each other the whole time,” Nya said and picked up the small sprinkle-covered carpet from the floor of the car. “I think it’ll be all worth it though, making that cake for Lloyd.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen Lloyd all day,” Kai said half to himself while trying to vacuum the inside of the seatbelt lock.
Nya was shaking the carpet. “I think he just wants some alone time.”
“On his birthday? And I’d hardly call helping at his history teacher’s bee being alone. ”
“Well, I doubt that the people sweeping leaves, picking rotten apples and painting warehouses with him are thinking about and reminding him of the loss of his father.”
Kai tried to stand up but hit his head on the ceiling of the car. “Ow… You think it’s about Garmadon?”
“Well, it’s his first birthday since… you know. Probably other things too. Best just leave him be.”
Kai’s vacuum cleaner ran out of charge and he sighed.
“I feel like he’s always weird about his birthdays, though.”
Nya didn’t look at her brother. It wasn’t like they were particularly normal about their birthdays either. Everything that was related to their parents was like a deep labyrinth that neither wanted to explore. They just stood at the entrance of it together. Perhaps Lloyd was the same.
***
The siblings came in. Jay was sitting on the sofa, passionately explaining something to Lloyd, who was stretching on the floor. Misako was helping Zane and Cole put everything in the fridge. Lloyd’s birthday cake would be made later into the day.
“What’s up, birthday boy?” Kai said.
“Kai, Nya! There you are,” Lloyd greeted them.
Sitting there, his clothes were completely paint-stained. He noticed that Nya was amused by it and stood up.
“Oh yeah. I’ll be right back, and then we can go see the fair,” he said and was on his way.
Misako watched Lloyd slip from the doorway and shut the fridge door.
“When he came from the bee, he fell right asleep on top his bedspread without even changing his clothes. He’s lucky the paint had already dried, because otherwise we would’ve had to have a little talk.”
“He’s that tired, huh?” Cole said and leaned against the counter. “Must’ve been a lot of painting.”
“He probably has trouble sleeping at night,” Zane stated.
***
The street was filled with stands of people selling handmade crafts, playing music, performing magic and hosting games. There were even some carnival rides in the distance. Some kids had balloon animals and elaborate paper hats, while older people had masks and face paint.
“So, where to first?” Nya asked.
“Not gonna lie, I’m kind of hungry,” Lloyd said. “It’s been a while since I last ate.”
“Same here,” Jay said while inhaling before letting out a sigh.
“There should be places to eat if we just keep walking,” Zane chimed in and got agreement.
It was not long until they found something that piqued their interest, although it wasn’t food. There was a woman with her face painted doing dramatic expressions and performing magic tricks. She had a couple of parrots as her assistants that she made appear and disappear.
“I tried to learn magic tricks at one point,” Jay said. “I did it for years, I’ll have you know, but I always failed at every trick, quit, and then tried to learn again, but with a different trick.”
“Kai once learned a few for our school’s talent show—”
“Nya, please.”
“A few weeks before the talent show was actually supposed to be, he quit practicing, saying I already got it! ” (From Kai’s expression it seemed that Nya’s impression was painfully accurate of how he used to speak). “And then he forgot what he was supposed to do.”
“Ugh. Talent shows, don’t remind me…” Cole said.
Nya raised a curious eyebrow, but turned then to Lloyd and asked him what his experience with talent shows was.
“Uhh… I guess the closest things we had were Dark Ritual Days hosted by the dark ritual class teacher, where people had to make their own rituals and perform them,” Lloyd said.
“The what now? Did you guys sacrifice other students or what?” Jay asked.
“To be honest, nobody really knew what we were supposed to do. The teacher of dark rituals class had been on leave for years and the foreign languages teacher filled in, which meant that nobody ever really understood what we were being instructed,” Lloyd explained. “In the end they ended up combining cooking class and DaRi, so we were just making food in overly complicated and messy ways. I still have a scar on my hand from when we had to make a pathway out of kitchen utensils and my classmate pushed me on top of a steak knife.”
Everyone’s eyes were on Lloyd and some slowly started to drift away as the moment was becoming too awkward. Zane was among the last to still look at Lloyd.
“I’ve never been to school myself, but that does not seem right,” he said.
“Gee, that’s rough buddy. Is that why it took you so long to learn to co… I mean, uh,” Cole tried.
Lloyd only laughed. “C’mon, we’re blocking the way. Let’s keep going.”
***
Having found a place to sit, five of them (Jay had gone to find a toilet and probably gotten distracted again) sat on benches around an outdoor table. It was tucked away nicely next to a bushy fence. Food brought from vendors at the festival was placed on the table.
“Damn, it must’ve rained. The table’s all wet,” Kai said.
“The benches are as well,” Zane added.
“Zane, why couldn’t your power include controlling water?” said Cole as he tried to wipe away the water with his knee. “Ice is basically just water anyway.”
The ninja settled down and started eating. The air was a little bit cold and smelled like rain, but after all the walking Lloyd was not cold at all. Everyone was so loud that Jay would probably find them from a mile away once he was done in the bathroom.
Lloyd did his best to drown out the voice telling him that even tomorrow these laughs might fall silent forever. It was not too likely, but with the amount of people that seemed to threaten this land on a regular basis, it was not crazy to imagine that some villain had slipped past their radar and would decimate this city in an instant.
Just when Zane seemed to start noticing something bothering Lloyd, someone brought up some old children’s movie called Shovelshoe everyone remembered fondly that was in theaters… about ten years before Lloyd was born.
As the older ninja started recounting their memories, Lloyd faded into the background. It was like he was 8 again and the others were talking about “things Lloyd would understand once he got older”. He understood the gist of things again, just like he would often as a kid, but he was still too young to connect to the conversation.
He tried comforting himself with the thought that it wasn’t like he would have ever seen such a movie anyway, with how his childhood was in the boarding school, but strangely it didn’t help much.
As he was thinking this, Lloyd saw a less than menacing figure approach from behind Cole. He was wearing a hand-made mask. He went to lean over Cole’s shoulder. The figure let out a screech.
Cole jumped and squeezed his drink with excessive strength, shredding the container.
“Shit,” he said and looked at Lloyd next to him. “Sorry.”
Hissing between his teeth, Cole took off his hoodie and started trying to wipe away the strong-coloured liquid that hadn’t been absorbed yet.
“Why’d you have to do that, Jay? Now it’s gonna be stained forever.”
Jay scratched the back of his head.
“If you washed it with cold water quickly, it could still be cleaned,” Zane said.
“Where would w— Wha—”
Jay promptly emptied the can of water on top of Cole’s hoodie.
“Dude!” Cole could only say.
The hoodie dripped with diluted red droplets. Lloyd was covering his mouth and trying not to laugh. Zane was simply staring a little wide-eyes, not stopping his automatic blinking. Nya leaned on the table with her hand on her forehead. Kai uttered a small uhh…
Jay had realized his fault and laughed awkwardly.
“Congrats, you just volunteered to carry this for the rest of the day,” Cole said and threw the soaked hoodie at Jay.
“Aw man.”
***
By this time, the six of them had explored basically the entire place. They had even painted their faces, or more precisely each other’s faces. Well, Nya insisted on painting her own face, which is why her paint was the only one that looked decent.
Lloyd had drawn something on Zane’s forehead, but before he could even finish, Zane already blankly guessed:
“You’re drawing a penis, aren’t you?”
“Damn, you’re too good at guessing!” Lloyd said.
“It’s pretty obvious from the way your hand moved.”
The paint didn’t stick too well to Zane’s surface, though, so in the end they just ended up smudging a rainbow across his face. Some colours were in the wrong order though, because Jay was possibly colorblind.
Cole had an entire handprint on his face, because Jay pressed his whole palm against it. To this Cole threatened to leave his footprint on Jay’s face in turn, but settled for painting a severed fish head to remind Jay of the library incident.
Kai’s face Cole turned into what he described as “supermodel face”. It mostly entailed him outlining everything from Kai’s cheekbones to his nose to his chin, and exaggerating his eyebrows and mouth into a bizarre expression. He assured Kai that the latter would surely get all the girls if he looked like this.
Lloyd had agreed to let Nya paint his face on the condition that she “wouldn’t make him look like a girl”, to which she chuckled and made his face look like a budget version of a female stageplay character. In the end, he laughed it off with a light-hearted “ Hey, what did I tell you!”
Zane ended up filling in details of Jay and Cole’s face paints, drawing a face for the handprint on Cole’s face and giving Jay an incredible mustache.
On their walk, it seemed that Lloyd had been looking a little too hard at the glow of the elaborately decorated carousel, because Cole took note of it:
“A carousel, huh. Reminds me of my childhood neighbour who was deadly scared of sitting on the horse in front of a zebra, because he’d heard that when a zebra bites, it doesn’t let go until it’s ripped off your flesh. So I went on the carousel a second time and sat in front of the zebra to prove he was being silly, but then I didn’t have enough money later to buy cotton candy with the others.”
“When I was a kid I was scared of ant eaters, because ants are gross and I didn’t want them to kiss me with their gross ant-mouths,” Jay said.
“The chances of that happening seem exceedingly low,” Zane noted. “You don’t seem to have a problem petting stray cats either, despite of how dir—”
“I said when I was a kid! And that was when I still read books about cats that thought like humans, which gave me room to imagine anteaters doing that! And it wasn’t like I actually thought they’d do that, but the possibility was still there!”
“You thought Cat Fights was real??” Cole said, not trying to hide his amusement.
“Not what I said!”
Lloyd was laughing, but his mind was still on the previous topic.
“I’ve never even been on a carousel. I did sneak out once as a kid and try going to the fair, but apparently the money I had found was not in use anymore so they wouldn’t let me on. In the end I got detention for sneaking out and wasn’t allowed to go on the next field trip.”
“I’m sorry it was like that for you,” Cole said.
“What? The field trips were all lame anyway. They rarely found places that were evil enough to visit, so they would often just take us to the forest and make us cut down endangered trees. Another time we just broke into some politician’s house to observe government corruption, but the teachers weren’t too eager to repeat that one.”
“No, I mean, in general… Your…”
“Well, there’s a carousel right there. You can go now,” Zane suggested.
“No, I wasn’t saying I want to go now—” Lloyd said.
“Oh come on, you totally should!” Kai said.
Nya glanced at Kai knowingly. “You should go too, Kai.”
“Huh?”
“Go on, show him how it’s done!” Nya insisted and pushed Kai towards the line.
“Hey!”
“Kai won’t make it unless you go be his emotional support, Lloyd,” Cole said and put his hands on his hips.
And so Lloyd got coaxed into awkwardly standing in line with Kai who dramatically noted that they had a reputation to uphold, but then tried to salvage it all by saying that the decoration of the carousel was actually quite cool.
They didn’t quite stand out as much as they could’ve, since parents were going with their children, but it didn’t stop Lloyd from feeling too tall next to the children and too short next to Kai. Lloyd had much appreciated when Kai had told him that he’d look after him now that his father was gone, more than he would admit out loud, but this felt a little like babysitting.
There was a kid in front of them that had the same light hair as Lloyd. He tried to not look at the kid. They were holding an older woman’s hand — likely their mother — who was telling them something in a soft tone.
Lloyd was mostly comfortable around the ninja, had always been, unlike in school. He was able to express emotions without being ridiculed for it, usually. But that still didn’t mean he always wanted to. He didn’t have the energy to deal with ruining a celebration by acting immature and holding on to the past. Still, it did take energy to maintain this face, and Lloyd was getting tired.
When they finally got there in the carousel, Kai and Lloyd sat down inside a teacup, as it felt more natural than sitting on top of the animals.
“This is awkward,” Lloyd said.
It seemed to make Kai relax a little bit, but not Lloyd himself. Seeing the others in the crowd made him feel stupid.
What was turning however-old-he-was-supposed-to-be going to affect his life? Would this be the year he would stop being shaken by the movies that the others watched and lying that he was fine with them? Would he finally “act his age”, whatever that was supposed to look like?
The carousel started spinning. The lights flickered in steady patterns and small children started expressing their excitement and even fright.
The others had been treating him almost like he was their age for a while now. It hadn’t taken them long to start swearing freely in front of Lloyd after that had happened. Yet it felt wrong sometimes. Like he was masquerading as an adult while being a kid, like he was seeing into a world he wasn’t really allowed to see.
Kai was fiddling with a loose string on his sleeve and looking up at the decorations.
Back in the day, Lloyd had felt small because he felt like he was being treated like a kid when he was more mature than the others thought. Now it was like he was barely meeting what was expected of him. Things that he used to do better than people his age, and that didn’t quite reach the eyes of people older than him back then, were now unimpressive and the bare minimum.
Lloyd didn’t want to go back to being a kid, not a chance. He didn’t want to admit to anyone that he was not what they thought he was. By all means, he wanted to be an adult. It was almost like he had achieved that image too. He was considered to be responsible as a leader. He was the green ninja. Wu would use him as a good example to the others at times.
Despite that…
“Was it fun?” Cole said as they got out.
“You think?! We just sat there for a whole minute!” Lloyd said. Jay slapped him on the back, laughing a bit, and they continued their walk.
…Despite that, he sometimes wished someone had somehow stopped him on that day. But it would have been no use. They’d all have been eaten, probably, and Lloyd would’ve just had to save the world while being a little kid. It had been his choice. People said it was a heroic choice. It was a necessary choice. But was it really a choice he should have been allowed to make?
No matter, the past was in the past. At present, he was with his friends and showered in warm colors from all around him. The faces of strangers seemed happy, and Lloyd had to… wanted to keep protecting them.
***
When they all got back, Lloyd plopped onto the sofa and smeared his face paint all over it. He could hear Misako trying to scold him, but he could only bury his face in the pillows further. The others were joking about him, too. At last he had gotten a second away from their faces, not needing to look them in the eye. Various things had been grating at the back of his neck today, trying to get to him.
He still had cake to eat and a night to spend, he couldn’t start crying now. And he certainly couldn’t fall asleep yet, letting the day end and the nightmares to take over his mind.
Zane sat next to him on the sofa. Every time he sat down, he seemed to sit in the same few poses. He would turn to whoever spoke and look them in the eye until someone else took voice or it became silent. Lloyd had concluded that Zane only did things he thought to be a necessary next step, so it was all the more significant when Zane made physical contact. Pat, pat. Zane’s hand tapped Lloyd’s shoulder slightly.
Lloyd looked up.
“You’re tired. You can take a nap while we bake.”
Zane’s smiling face was still painted rainbow, but he didn’t mind.
“Actually, what if Cole also takes a nap? He seems really tired, doesn’t he?” Jay said from the other side of the room, filling a glass of water.
“You think I’m gonna let you have all the fun? Don’t even dream of it!”
Kai leaned on the wall next to where Cole was sitting and chuckled. “But you should still ‘let’ Lloyd have an edible cake.”
“Woah, Kai, you’re not one to speak. You can have pretty crazy whims too when you’re cooking,” Lloyd said, still laying limp on the sofa.
Most of the ninja ended up getting shooed out of the kitchen and started playing board games. The games that involved lying to one’s teammates reassured Lloyd that if they tried to lie to him for real, it would be fairly easy to tell. He knew that Zane was good at lying in board games, but he was in the kitchen, which left Lloyd as the best liar. Jay talked way too much when he was in a pinch, Kai got offended easily and just a little too long thinking of excuses, Nya was pretty good but showed stress in subtle ways at first until she got very snappy by the end, Cole was also fairly good with his words but whenever he slipped up it was easy to tell from his expression. Wu though… Wu didn’t seem to try much, but the fact that he always sounded like he was lying made it hard to tell when he was actually speaking the truth.
As the cake got put together by Zane and Misako, people slowly started circling around the kitchen, observing the process. Zane didn’t mind until he bumped into Kai and dropped a cup of eggs, which made him shoo everyone out of the kitchen and close the sliding door separating it from the living room.
By the time that the cake was ready, everyone was already incredibly tired. Lloyd was a few blinks away from falling asleep when he finished eating.
Jay yawned. “I think I’m gonna go to bed. See ya.”
He got up and slapped Lloyd on the shoulder on his way out. It was sudden, but the day was coming to an end. Lloyd would have to go to sleep, to surrender to the nightmares again. If only there was something else he could do to keep the day going. Some others stretched and pulled their dishes closer, as if to pick them up.
“Maybe we should all do the same,” Wu said.
“Yeah, I don’t think Lloyd can keep himself awake much longer,” Cole noted.
“Before any of you leave,” Nya said. “The dishes need to be done.”
“Aww what? Can’t we do them tomorrow?” Kai whined.
“I’ll do it,” Lloyd said.
“No, Lloyd, it’s your birthday. You don’t need to,” Nya said.
“Just let me do it. Unless you want to do it? Didn’t think so.”
***
The others slowly made their out of the room, but Kai and Misako stayed.
“I’ll help with the dishes. There are some in the living room, I’ll get them,” Kai said.
Lloyd let out a deep sigh.
“Is something wrong?” Misako said and put her hand on Lloyd’s shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure? I doubt you volunteered only out of the goodness of your heart.”
Lloyd looked away remorsefully. He’d mentioned the nightmares to his mom before, a couple of times in passing. He’d never specified how deep they truly reached. The things that his trusted friends and family members would do to him in them seemed almost blasphemous to even come up with. The things that mom did to him in some of them… One repetitive theme, though, that maybe wasn’t quite as unutterable was the ones where everyone left him for dead, or the ones where he walked into a room full of the dead bodies of his friends: the ones that he would wake up from frantically having to convince himself that the people surrounding him were, in fact, still there and alive.
Sleeping meant that when he woke up, everyone could be gone. Once he fell asleep, he could wake up anywhere.
It was so lonely at the end of the day. The hallways were all hollow, the footsteps of people fading away until they wouldn’t be heard with any measures. All the empty air around Lloyd. All the sounds of the ship that would get drowned out under people’s noises in the day.
Warm tears ran down his cheeks.
No matter all of Lloyd’s stalling to keep every conversation going for as long as possible, everyone had slipped out of the door anyway.
Misako wrapped her arms around Lloyd. But the warmth of her body didn’t quite pierce the layer of something that enveloped Lloyd. Closure from his mother always felt distant, as if it was not truly him in her arms. It was someone who looked like him, that he was observing. It was as if mom was hissing faintly and pressing scales against Lloyd’s back. Her hair felt coarse and unwashed against his cheek. Still, he wanted to stay there for the entire night. To surrender all defenses and wait until it started to feel comfortable, even if it would never feel so.
It would have been better than mom’s arms sliding off his back and Lloyd being left on his own again.
On his own. Carrying his weight alone. Even though she was right there.
Mom smiled, but her gaze didn’t quite make it through Lloyd’s glassy eyes.
He’d just started to get used to father being in his life. Then he’d left again. Of course Lloyd knew that father had to leave. What kind of man would he have been if he put one person over stopping a war? Lloyd had acted like a child when he got upset, he knew that. It was just that he’d worked so hard to be able to trust his father again. He’d gone through all that, been vulnerable, laid down his defenses despite being afraid, and for what?
Lloyd was being bitter again. He smiled at his mom, actively holding up the corners of his mouth so they wouldn’t fall limp. Mom probably missed father too. Probably.
Whether the other people on the team cared, whether anyone really cared for a bad man like Lloyd’s father, that he couldn’t say.
“Lloyd…”
She. Her presence felt weird. She had left him when he was just a child. She hadn’t bothered to care for him, or even contact him during all those years. Lloyd was sure he’d forgiven her, after she’d… apologized? No, as he remembered it, she’d only given her reason. Maybe it was a good reason, a reason he’d “understand when he was older.” But all these years of trying not to be immature, trying to understand, he never got any reward for them. There were only empty faces he didn’t quite manage to trust, giving hollow words of acknowledgement to him for doing what was merely the bare minimum to them.
Misako did it to save the world. Garmadon did it to save the world. Lloyd did it to save the world.
Lloyd existed to save the world. The prophecy decided his role long ago, and there was no fighting it. How Lloyd was treated depended on how it would affect the fate of the world. Anything to make sure Lloyd was safe as long as he was the key to everything. Anything to make sure the world was safe, even if Lloyd was the sacrifice. It made sense, of course the fate of everyone was more important than that of one person. Of course.
“If you’re having nightmares again…”
He didn’t want Misako’s comfort. It was empty. If it wasn’t, she would at least have contacted Lloyd, left him a message, something, anything. And she wouldn’t have moved on and pretended like she was a normal mother.
Kai walked into the room with a dangerously large pile of dishes.
“Let’s talk later. Kai and I will handle the dishes. Good night,” Lloyd said and turned to help Kai put the dishes in the sink.
After some seconds of uncomfortable silence, Misako’s footsteps sounded and then faded away. Lloyd put the plug in the sink and started filling it with water. The steady sizzle took all of his attention, and he took a moment to realize Kai was staring at him.
“You okay?” Lloyd said, turning off the tap.
“I was going to ask you that, Mr."
“...It’s probably no secret that my father is dead and I’m not really sure about my ‘real’ age,” Lloyd stated and put the first dishes in the sink. He had forgotten to roll up his sleeves and got them wet, a mistake which he quickly corrected.
“Even if it’s not a secret, you can still talk about it,” Kai said and filled the other side of the sink too.
“I appreciate it, Kai, but…” he said and sighed.
Kai dried the first plates. His eyes were still on Lloyd.
“I mean, I don’t want to go to sleep,” Lloyd admitted.
“Are you sad the day is over?”
“More like scared . Once I close my eyes, the nightmares won’t leave me alone, and I’m starting to believe they might become true.”
Lloyd scrubbed the spoon in his hand. Then he continued:
“I used to wake up at night having to convince myself that my parents wouldn’t just leave me again, but then, you know… I mean, I know he had to, but…”
“What do you usually have nightmares about, then? Besides the one you just mentioned.”
Lloyd told Kai his latest nightmare. When he turned to look at Kai, the latter’s eyes were wide, brows furrowed. The towel was barely moving along the wet plate. If that was Kai’s reaction, Lloyd could only imagine what kind of lecture he’d get from others if they heard. Please, Kai, don’t go and tell them. And say something, would you?
“It’s really not as bad as it sounds. I think I just have an active imagination.”
“Well, it’s pretty bad if you can’t sleep and are afraid that that could become true,” Kai said warily.
“No! No, no, I didn’t mean that would come true. I meant other dreams. Jeez, I’m not that paranoid.”
The words were sticky in Lloyd’s throat. The ripples of the water hit his hand in the sink. The silence was cutting too deep, so he sighed and picked up the last of the forks and knives.
“Maybe you should talk to master Wu,” Kai threw a suggestion to clear the atmosphere.
No, not uncle, Lloyd thought. As much as he respected Wu’s wisdom, the man’s words were only that — words. Advice and life lessons had never quite eased the weight that pushed Lloyd down in quiet moments. In fact, they had only added to it.
“Good idea. Thank you, Kai. I’ll talk to him.”