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Lloyd should have gone to bed hours ago but he fell down the 1 a.m. rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and then, as he's about to put down his phone and finally go to sleep, he comes across a news article. It’s about a new area that has recently opened at Mega Monster Amusement Park that is entirely dedicated to Starfarer.
It's so late at night when he finds the article, which is lucky because it being this late means that no one else is awake to hear the embarrassing excited squeak that escapes him when he reads the headline.
He skims through the article so as not to spoil it for himself (as if he is even going to go to Mega Monster any time soon), given that it mentions a few of the rides in the area and its overall theming.
Lloyd almost drops his phone in excitement when he finishes reading through the whole thing.
The new area sounds so cool.
There isn’t just a couple of Starfarer decorations scattered around, the whole place is themed to the franchise, even the walking paths are. They’d even remembered some of the less popular characters from the older issues of the comic that had been last sold when he was seven years old.
Lloyd falls asleep while he's scrolling through photos of the new area.
As soon as he wakes up the next morning, he knows it’s going to be a bad day. It's going to be bad because he's woken up on the edge of headspace for the first time since the Merge happened.
It has to have been that article about the Starfarer area at Mega Monster Amusement Park he was reading.
He should have put his phone down before he could actually read anything about it. But he didn’t, and this has to be the universe paying him back for it.
If he can just stay big until bedtime tonight, when he doesn't have to interact with anyone or do anything responsible, everything will be fine.
But then, when he walks into the kitchen for breakfast not much later, any hope Lloyd has for that going even remotely well goes right out the window with the question that Nya asks him.
“Hey, Lloyd. What do you think about going to Mega Monster Amusement Park? Just you, me, and Kai,”
Lloyd’s stomach bottoms out at the mention of the amusement park.
Nya has to know about the new Starfarer area. Why else would she be asking this?
“Today?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you give your students the day off today?” Kai asks.
They both know about the new area, he’s sure of it.
...Oh. Right.
He's forgotten that the four of them had asked for today off from training. There was some competition or festival going on in the Crossroads that Sora and Arin really wanted to go to and they had taken Frak and Wyldfyre with them.
“Right, yeah,” he says. “But why Mega Monster?”
“Why not? You don’t have anyone to be training today, and Kai and I have nothing else to do, so why don't we go do something fun?” Nya asks.
Her phrasing makes the fuzz in his mind get even fuzzier.
But as much as he’s simultaneously excited for and dreading the rest of the day, Lloyd hears himself say, “Sure,”
So here the three of them are now, walking into the Starfarer area. With Lloyd trying his hardest to stay big, even if he’s tipping closer and closer to little than big.
As he tracks a rollercoaster car as it shoots through a track soaring overhead and pointedly not looking at anything else, Lloyd’s hands are clenched so tight in his hoodie pockets that his nails are already cutting half moons into his palms.
Even if doing that really hurts and— no, the pain is good. It keeps him from thinking about what it would be like to be on that rollercoaster he just saw.
He needs to stay big otherwise he’s gonna something stupid that absolutely will embarrass both himself and his siblings.
It used to be okay for him to regress before the Merge, back when it was just him and his family. But things are so much more intense now, and he’s got students. His kids would never respect him again if they found out he became a baby to relax from stress. He hasn’t regressed since before the Merge. He doesn’t need to do that anymore. He doesn’t.
It's so hard for him to stay big right now, though, as the three of them walk through an area dedicated to and themed to his favourite comic ever.
But he tries anyway. He has got to.
Lloyd makes sure to walk at a normal, adult pace and very carefully doesn’t look at the really awesome merch stands when they walk past them and bites down on his tongue hard enough he tastes blood every time he goes to open his mouth to ramble. Even if he really, really wants to run around and try every single one of the awesomely cool interactive exhibits and point out the things that interests him to his siblings.
It works.
For all of two hours.
For two hours, Lloyd swallows back happy screeches on the particularly loopy parts of rides and excited yaps about this specific bit of the area design or that particular exhibit and definitely doesn’t stare in awe at cool merch. Adults don’t do that and Lloyd’s an adult (even if he really doesn’t feel like he’s twenty-three right now).
He tastes blood for a second time that day as the three of them walk through an exhibit about the behind the scenes of some of the most recent movie adaptations.
And then a group of kids run past them. Lloyd barely manages to stop himself from bolting off in the same way. Staying still sends a pang through him.
It's jealousy, he realises distantly as his eyes follow the group. He’s jealous of children (even if they are doing what he wants to. Why can’t he get to do that?).
He really, really hopes that his siblings didn’t see how he just faltered in the middle of taking a step just then. Hopes neither of them see how he watched the group of kids the whole time they were in view.
His siblings don’t comment so they must not have noticed, and instead they head toward the next ride, one that was somehow both a water rollercoaster and a spinning rollercoaster at the same time.
“Where do you want to go now?” Kai asks as the three of them leave what Lloyd’s decided is the best rollercoaster in the Merged Lands.
The blond's eyes catch on the spinning teacup-like ride (it has clear ball-like pod cars instead of the usual teacups) they pass with its bright colours for a long moment before he forces himself to look at the exhibit that must have something to do with illuma swords judging by the giant replicas on the sign.
“Let’s go there,”
“You sure?” Kai asks, which Lloyd finds weird because he hasn’t questioned his choice of where they’re doing at all until now.
“Yeah,”
He definitely doesn’t look at the pod-teacup ride one last time.
“I know what you’re doing,” Lloyd blurts out embarrassingly tearily instead of answering him, halfway to the illuma swords exhibit.
No. The part of him that’s still desperately trying to retain control snaps. You don’t want them to know you still do need this. You’re supposed to have more control than this.
“What are we doing?” Nya asks innocently as she pulls them all to a stop just inside the building.
His older sister says it like she actually doesn’t know what she and Kai have been doing all day.
Suddenly Lloyd can’t look at his siblings. Either of them.
This was a mistake, he should have just kept his mouth shut. He shouldn’t have even come here.
“You took me here to a Starfarer-themed area, so I’d act li’l ‘n be all embarrassing ‘n then you’d both make fun of me and—”
He furiously blinks back tears as he stares at the concrete under his shoes.
No. No. No! His speech is already slipping.
Nya immediately protests. “No! We didn’t take you here to make fun of you. We would never do that—”
She and Kai briefly share a look over his head, he knows they do. But he’s too exhausted to try deciphering it. He can’t find it in himself to care.
“Lloyd, it’s been ages since we’ve had time to have fun, and we knew you'd love the Starfarer area. So we came here, both for you and for us,” his older sister says carefully.
“And we knew that you’d love the Starfarer area,” Kai adds. "We don't care if you regress or not while we're here, as long as you have fun,”
Despite everything, he starts to be hopeful that they're actually telling the truth because what if they’re telling the truth? What if it really is fine if he regresses while they’re here? Even though he knows neither of those can be true.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Lloyd frowns.
“But I can’t,” he insists.
“Why not?” Kai challenges.
Lloyd plays with his hoodie strings to distract himself.
“‘cause I just can’t, alright?” he repeats. “I’m the Green Ninja. Kai, I’ve got students now. Too much is happening for me to be wasting time acting like a child,” Lloyd snaps.
Why can’t they just understand that?!
He wants to ignore what he just admitted out loud and keep going with the next exhibit like he never said anything at all.
He wants to storm off dramatically, childish or not. But then that would mean that he’d be leaving his siblings and would have to find them again later. What if they left Mega Monster while he stormed off and didn’t tell him then he’d be left alone again and—
He does neither of those things. Instead, to his horror, Lloyd bursts into tears. Everything's all fuzzy and he feels like he’s going to drown in it.
He clamps his hands over his mouth in an attempt to silence the sobs. It doesn’t help.
The feeling of his siblings’ arms around him only makes him sob harder, even if he quietly loves it. He hasn’t been hugged in…a long time.
“Lloyd—”
The blond rubs desperately at his eyes, trying to make the tears stop running down his cheeks. They just keep coming.
Nya’s going to tell him to shut up, act his age, and enjoy the park like an adult like she and Kai have been all day.
“We’ve been here for the past few hours and nothing has happened, right?”
“Well yeah, but that—”
Nya cuts him off. “No buts. Like Kai said, it doesn’t matter if you regress or not as long as you're having fun. And you won't be ‘wasting time’ by regressing, alright?”
A part of him wants to keep protesting, but he’s so close to getting exactly what he’s wanted since he found that news article last night (ever since he had been reunited with his siblings again after the Merge, really), so he doesn’t.
The fuzz is back but it’s good fuzz this time, making Lloyd feel tiny.
“...I guess?”
“Come on, green bean, there’s a stall outside that looks really cool,” Kai says, taking his hand.
Lloyd looks up when they get outside to where Kai’s just pointed. Across the path from the building they've just come out of is another one of the merch stands like the one he had been eying earlier. It’s got all the same stuff as the other one too.
Kai leads him towards it and Nya follows behind them.
Now that he’s actually standing in front of it and not just walking past, he’s able to see what it's selling.
Then he sees it.
“Kai! Look!”
Lloyd points at the stuffed plush toy that’s caught his eye.
"It's Fritz Donnegan’s spaceship!" he gushes. "That's the old design! It was only in the comics ages ago before they changed it for the first movie—”
Lloyd waits for someone to tell him to shut up. No one does.
By the time that the three of them leave the amusement park to head home for the day, they've seen almost everything the area has, Lloyd has that stuffed plush tucked in his arms, and he feels calmer than he has in a long time, since before the Merge.