Work Text:
Soft snores fill the air in the stables as Zane looks up at the portal gate, the crescent moon shining high in the sky.
It was late, but Zane wanted to work on the portal gate. He had a basic idea on how it worked, but he liked understanding things in depth.
In the corner of his eye he can see Wyldefyre lying against Heatwave snoring louder than the dragon. Zane gives a small smile at that, their ninja family was growing so quickly. First Arin and Sora, then Wyldefyre and Heatwave, not to mention Zanth and Jiro.
But that just made the people missing hurt even more.
With a sigh, Zane finds his eyes drawn to that broom that lays against the wall, Pixal’s green eyes staring back at him.
“I miss you Pixal.”
He says quietly into the air, careful not to wake any of the sleeping dragons or ninja.
Behind him he hears light shuffling, and at first he’s worried he’d woken someone, but he realizes that it’s a ninja by the silence that follows.
It had to be either Kai, Lloyd, or Nya, as Cole was in the Land of Lost Things, and Arin and Sora were too new to all this to be that sneaky, not to mention they were much less likely to be awake at this hour.
A quiet, familiar voice meets the silence in the air, heavy and tired.
“You always talk to brooms?”
It’s Nya.
Zane turns around to find her sitting up in one of the lofts, her knees pulled to her chest and hair messy. She has large eye bags and a weary expression, like life had just been too much lately.
Zane senses that a conversation is going to occur, so he climbs up to the loft to join her, wanting to minimize their chances of waking the others.
He gives one last look to Pixal’s picture on the broom before he sits down beside his sister.
“Only when I cannot contain how much melancholy I feel inside me anymore.”
He answers, looking out at the portal gate. In reality, he wanted to understand it because he was hoping it would lead him to her, in the same way it had lead Nya and Kai to him.
Nya looks at him with a bit of sadness in her eyes.
“It’s hard without him.”
Zane knows who she means. Zane missed him as well. He was Nya’s yang. He was Zane’s brother. And he was missing.
He was Jay.
“I understand.”
Zane answers, trying to empathize with the water ninja. Nya wasn’t great at sharing her feelings, often much more likely to attack whatever she was feeling or whatever was happening with anger instead.
As Zane fears though, that’s what she begins to do here.
“How could you possibly understand.”
It’s not even a question, it’s simply a statement. There’s only slight anger behind her voice currently, her volume still quiet enough to not wake anyone, but emotionally charged all the same.
“It’s been years for me Zane. Years.”
Her voice cracks on the last word, allowing him to see the full scope of her sadness.
“I haven’t seen him since the merge. That was five years ago. You were shut off. You don’t know what it’s like laying awake night after night wondering where the person you care about most in the world is, wondering if they’re okay, wondering if they’re looking for you, wondering if you’ll ever find them.”
She looks him straight in the eyes and even though her words carry vitriol, her eyes convey no rage or anger, only brokenness.
“You’ve only lost her for a few months. I’ve lost him for five years. God. Five years.”
Her words crack again and she puts her head in her hands, the true weight of how long it’s been weighing down on her.
“I just miss him so much. I feel so alone without him.”
Zane ever so cautiously puts a hand around her shoulders, pulling his sister to his side as tears start to fall out of her eyes. Nya sobbed. Something she very rarely did, and Zane knew because of it, that this loneliness was something that had been weighing on her for far too long.
As they sit in the quiet, Zane allows Nya’s words to wash over him. They sting a bit, he won’t deny that, but they hold truth to them as well. Zane hadn’t been missing Pixal as long as Nya had been missing Jay. But he knew what it was like to do all those things she said, he himself had barely gotten any sleep since the mergequakes had been stopped, devoting himself to finding Pixal.
Even if it had only been a few months, it hurt so much and he felt lost without his green eyed, silver haired companion, and he knew how lonely being lost felt because after all,
“…This isn’t the first time I have lost Pixal.”
The words cut sharp across the silence, the only noise in the stables other than Nya’s soft sobs and the echoing snores of the dragons.
Though she’s still crying, Nya turns to him, confusion in her eyes, before understanding blooms in them.
“You mean-“ She pauses every few words to wipe tears off her cheeks, “-like all those years ago at the power plant?”
Zane nods solemnly, looking half down at Nya and half almost through her, like his brain is somewhere else entirely, reliving memories none of the others went through.
“Then again on Chen’s island, when I found her disassembled in the cell next to mine, still attempting to help guide me and encourage me as she was reduced to simply code.”
There’s anger in his voice, though not pointed at Nya, more pointed at the world itself.
“Then again when we were fighting the vermilion warriors and she disappeared from my head entirely.”
Nya remembers that, remembers the panicked voice her nindroid brother had held when he’d jumped in her car, his calling of “Pixal! Pixal are you there!?” that made her sad because she’d seen how much Zane cared for Pixal.
“And now..”
His eyes brighten and then dim quickly, as he shakes himself out of the memories.
“…I’ve lost her again. Except this time I have no idea where she’s gone or even if she’s okay.”
And as Nya looks at Zane, at that broken expression he wears, one that she’s seen herself sporting many times in the mirror, she realizes that maybe their pain isn’t so different after all.
Nya takes a deep breath, and says,
“Yknow. Being lonely is hard. Like really hard. But it might be a little bit easier if we tried…”
Zane looks down at her, confusion in his face.
“…being lonely together.”
Zane gives her a small smile, a bit of warmth breaking through the sadness, like the sun rising on a foggy morning.
“I think that would help.”
He says finally, and with a smile of her own, Nya begins talking about Jay.
“I remember our first actual date.” She says with a halfhearted laugh, “Gosh we were so awkward. It was the day he got his true potential, remember? He had this stupid idea that he had to lie to me to get me to like him. God I miss when going on an awkward date was the worst thing that could happen to us.”
Zane chuckles at that. He remembers that day as well, Jays ridiculous getup and his overconfidence that everything would be perfect.
Nya lapses into silence for a moment, but Zane picks up where she left off.
“I remember the way Pixal helped talk me through the identity crisis that plagued me after I rebuilt myself. Her kind tones and understanding words were what got me through. Since then her voice has been a beacon of sorts to me.”
Nya smiles at that, glad that her brother with the most internalized issues had someone he could trust guiding him through.
The two go back and forth like that, talking and laughing and remembering. Remembering good times, remembering bad times, and remembering all the times in between. They talk about their partners and how wonderful they are, and they share this deep loneliness that has plagued the two for so long, making the load lighter.
They talk as the moon rises in the sky, they talk as it sets, and they talk until Nya simply cannot keep her eyes open anymore. She falls asleep with her head on Zane’s metallic shoulder, her eyes closing and allowing that weary expression she constantly wears to slip for a while.
Zane falls asleep with his head gently laid on top on Nya’s, his eyes dim and his mind quiet for the first time in a while. He doesn’t even look towards Pixal’s broom as he falls asleep, because Nya and his talk have made the two feel like their partners are just on the other side of a wall, not somewhere in the merged lands.
And that’s a good feeling for the siblings to have.
They fall asleep in the loft, allowing their loneliness to sleep with them.
And that’s where Kai finds them the next morning