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They build Lloyd a statue afterwards, just like they did for Zane.
Kai hates it. Of course he does, because they all do. It stands tall and high and different, a blank look in his eyes and dull, bland features that stand-in awkwardly because none of the sculptors ever really met the Green Ninja, not in real life, or certainly not close enough to scope out his features underneath the mask.
Still, he attends the memorial. It’s public, not like the stiflingly small one they held in their own monastery (just as awkward, just as quiet, if Kai’s willing to admit it), held for the citizens and the people who never really knew him, not the way they did. Afterwards, he finds a rooftop closest to the square and watches people crowd up against each another, slow and antsy. They wear bits of green on pinned against their clothes and hats, a piece of respect for the savior of Ninjago City, once again, and peer up at the statue with a sense of morbid curiosity in their eyes.
“I don’t think it looks that bad,” Lloyd says, peeking at the statue from behind him. His clothes flutter in the wind, in and out of the edges of his vision. “They got my nose right, maybe.”
Kai smiles for half a second and bites it back immediately, bitter in his throat. “Zane’s looked worse.” He tells the figure beside him. “He didn’t even have a face, just the hair.”
Lloyd considers this, sitting down on the edge of the roof. Kai wonders if he still has to tell him to be careful, if hallucinations can fall and shatter to pieces from thirty stories in the air. He sits down next to him, pushing dust and debris away carefully.
"Well,” Lloyd declares, “They have to make mine better, because I was more famous.”
Kai really laughs at this, the sound loud and sharp in the wind. “You—no, I think they just have more marble now, so.”
Lloyd sticks his tongue out at him and kicks his heels against the rooftop, the familiar sound drumming against his ears. Kai looks at Lloyd, all sharp angles and burning green eyes and blonde hair shining white in the sunlight. He looks exactly like he did before he died, died scared and screaming, died from the power of the Weapon of Desolation and whatever fuck else the Source Dragons gave him in the Ritual of Unrooting, from the gods always looking to dump their withering responsibilties on Lloyd's all too willing shoulders. On his brother.
Too much for any one mortal to handle, Zane guesses, voice thick from days of unuse, even if they had Oni blood. Though Lloyd wasn't exactly mortal towards the end, not really.
In the days after, everyone avoids the words Lloyd and death with all the tact of a bull in a china shop. The missing name lies thick in the room whenever they talk, filling their throats like cotton, heavy and smooth. Kai stares at him until his vision blurs and blackens, trying to burn the image into his memory.
“You’re dead,” he tells Lloyd, blinking back the wet in his eyes, and the blonde doesn’t look up at him, fiddling with a piece of grimy broken brick in his hands.
“I know I am.” His voice sounds younger than ever, now that Kai doesn’t get to hear it as often. He thinks about Tomorrow’s Tea and if you can carry the burden of the years you never got the chance to live. “You always tell me.”
“So why are you still—why are you still here?” Kai isn’t sure why he’s asking him this. Lloyd (the hallucinations, he tells himself, but a part of him doesn’t believe it anyway, so why bother?) didn’t show up during his own funeral, didn’t show up in the lingering, disorientating days after his own death where they couldn’t quite remember who died, or couldn’t believe it, not yet.
No, he shows up in the middle of one of Kai’s painfully pathetic attempts to shop grocery shopping for dinner when he couldn’t pry anybody else out of the monastery to go with him, hoodie drawn low over his hair, turning to see a heart-wrenchingly familiar figure between the cereal aisles. Kai gapes at him, unsure if he’d dropped dead and joined the land of the ghosts in the middle of the Walmart discount shelves, and Lloyd laughs at his expression and tells him the Fruit Loops are on sale. He turns up whenever Kai turns a corner, chatting about the newest villains in Ninjago and asking what Dareth is up to these days, and disappears at the next turn , regardless of who he’s with or where, but most often when he’s alone.
“Maybe I’m a remnant of, yknow, my energy on Ninjago? Or maybe ghosts are real, and and I’m just a ghost, now.” Lloyd offers, and the wind sends his curls flickering in the air, soft and unfocused, both real and not at the same time. “Maybe I’m here to make sure they built my statue right. So I can rest in peace, or whatever.”
Kai nods his agreement with this last bit. “I’m sorry they didn’t.” He says, forcing his voice to sound steady and put-together. Below them, people are starting to slip away into the streets, picking up with slow-bustling activity. Everyone else has somewhere else to go, somebody else to find. Everyone but Kai. A piece of bright green cloth flits in the wind, disappearing with the rest into the horizon, no doubt to be found littering the roads the next day.
Lloyd finally looks at him, eyes sad and far-away. He’s dressed back in his dark green gi now, dragon scales flickering across his skin, soft and fading. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Kai.”
Kai blinks at his words and thinks about how much it is like exactly what Lloyd would tell him, and he hates himself for trying to lessen the guilt. He is sorry, he’s sorry for not protecting Lloyd, he’s sorry for letting him die, he’s sorry he couldn’t keep him safe, he’s sorry couldn’t be the one to give the sacrifice instead like he’d promised to do so many years ago in that volcano. Lloyd never lets him say it though, disappears before he can ever get the sentence out.
He looks over, swallowing the sour feeling in his throat, and the rooftops are empty. The wind rustles back his empty apologies, cold and biting against his skin.