Liberty Hill

by StoryTimeWithSquiggles

Summary:

When the ninja find a picture that brings up questions about Jay's past, the ninja learn a little bit more than they bargained for
or
Jay's birth mom is the worst person ever

Chapter 1: Chapter One

“There’s something I haven’t told you.”

It was an excuse, and an overused one at that. A throwaway explanation for any number of things that should have been brought to light much, much sooner.

This wasn’t how he would have chosen for everyone to find out. It’s not how he wanted to find out.

Discovering the old picture in the attic had been cool, at first. A group of old elemental masters, smiling outside the monastery. The ninja had gathered ‘round as soon as Lloyd uncovered it, calling them over to look. They recognized many of the people - Mya, Ray, Lilly. Garmadon and Wu. A handful of old masters whose descendants they had met. Even Dr. Julien, which was news in and of itself. It made sense, really, but it had never crossed Jay’s mind. Zane doesn’t seem surprised - merely comments that it checks out, and moves on with his life.

But then there was the other one. The one smiling between Lilly and Mya. She was shorter than them, smiling widely. Her red hair was a frizzy mess with the potential for curls. She had bright blue eyes, and a million freckles.

Jay reached into the box Lloyd was digging through and pulled out a stack of photos. Various groups comprised of the people from the first picture. In some, she looks the same. Others, she was older. She’d bleached her hair and was wearing makeup to hide her incriminating freckles, but it was still her. She seemed close with Mya and Lilly. And more alarming than that, more hurtful than that, she seemed close to Wu.

“Jay?” Kai asked in concern. He’d noticed that something was off, and Jay couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a cover story.

He looked to Nya. She looked at him. She looked back at the picture, and everything seemed to click. “Oh my gosh,” she breathed, reaching out and snatching the picture from Lloyd. She looked at it closer, then back at Jay, and back at the picture. “Is that her?”

“Is what who?” Cole tried to crowd over her shoulder, and Nya didn’t shoo him away.

“I um…” Jay started. He laughed nervously, and considered forgetting it all together. They didn’t really need to know - it didn’t affect them in any way. But they’re basically family, and they might as well. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he chuckled ominously, and the joke didn’t really land.

Zane took the picture from Nya and studied it for a moment. “Is this in reference to the Walkers not being your true ancestors? I have been aware of this for some time. You do not share many physical attributes - nor did either of them wield an elemental power before you. I had assumed this was common knowledge.”

A beat of silence. “What!?” Kai demanded at last. “But Zane, they’re practically the same! He’s just like them!”

Jay sighed. Sure, he’d admit it, he came by his personality honest. As overbearing as the Walkers could be, he loves them, and he’s no longer embarrassed to admit that yes - he’s very much like his parents. But physically? He’s barely passable as a native from the sands. His parents, in their younger days, had both sported dark hair. Their eyes are brown, and their skin heavily tanned from living in the desert sun. Jay, for his part, ran the risk of rotisserie cooking if he even thought about staying outside too long. And that was barely scratching the surface.

“Jay…” Lloyd started, gentler than Kai. “Is that true?”

Nya gave him a supportive smile, and he braced himself. “Yeah,” he said at last. “It’s…yeah, I’m adopted. Ma and Pa found me in a stack of tires in the trash. I’m not…completely sure how legal it was to keep me, but I’m glad they did. It doesn’t matter, guys, really - don’t look at me like that. I have great parents. That’s all that matters. And it’s more than most of y’all can say, which is why I’ve never mentioned it.”

Kai stared. “Jay, they literally threw you in the garbage!”

Jay flinched, and Nya glared daggers at her brother. “Kai!”

“…I’m sorry,” the fire ninja crossed his arms and sat down on the floor.

Cole scooted closer to Jay. “How long have you known?”

Jay shrugged. “Officially? Few years. I think I subconsciously kinda suspected it for a long time before that, but…they never mentioned it, so I didn’t ask. Not like knowing changes anything.” He took the picture back from Zane, fingers brushing over the image of who he’s about 90% sure is his birth mom. He swallowed thickly and shoved the picture at Nya. “Doesn’t matter. I have good parents. End of story.”

The other ninja exchanged glances, and Lloyd stepped up. “We know you love the Walkers, Jay. We do too - they’re great people. And I know that some of us have…complicated relationships with our parents, to say the least. But that doesn’t negate anything you’re feeling. You can be…I dunno, whatever you need to be about it. Curious, confused, hurt, happy, doesn’t matter. It matters, if it matters to you.”

Jay snatched the picture back from Nya and stared. It did matter, to him - always had. Even if he’d never wanted to drag the others into it. Who abandons a baby in a pile of trash? Who does that? Who doesn’t want their baby bad enough to go to that extreme? And why had Wu said ‘no’ when he’d asked if he had known the previous master of lightning?

He stared, and he couldn’t stop seeing himself in this stranger from years long past. Like he had never done, with the Walkers. They had a lot of the same quirks, sure, but he’d never looked at them and seen himself reflected back. It was honestly kind of disorienting to be experiencing that now.

“Why didn’t Master Wu say anything?” He said, mortified when his voice cracked. His hand flew to his mouth and he tried to play it off. It’s fine, he’s fine, everything about the whole situation is fine.

Most of the ninja had the common decency to busy themselves looking in boxes, giving their brother space to be devastated if that’s what he needed to do. They would tease each other ruthlessly for things that didn’t matter, but at the end of the day, they shut up when it counted. They’d all been through a lot. Some moments don’t need snarky comments.

“We’ll ask him,” Nya scooted closer and grabbed his hand. “If you want to know, then we’ll ask - okay? I’ll go with you. Unless you don’t want me to, then just say so. No hard feelings - promise. I’m here for you. Whatever you need me to do.”

He dropped his head onto her shoulder and she took the hint that at this specific point in time, what he needed was a hug. Kai took it upon himself to turn it into a group hug, and by the time they break apart, Jay had steeled himself to confront Wu.

He grabbed the picture in one hand and Nya’s hand in the other, dragging her after him out of the attic, across the momentary, and straight to Wu’s door. He didn’t bother to knock. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew my mother?”

Wu opened his eyes from where he had been meditating amongst a sea of candles. “I assumed you knew. We’re all quite fond of Edna.” He closed his eyes, and Jay growled in frustration.

“Not Ma, my real…I don’t know what to call her!” He slammed the picture down in front of Wu, but careful enough not to break the glass. It was a nice picture. All he had of her, really.

Wu studied the picture for a moment. “Ah. So I see you have become aware of your true heritage.”

Jay glared. “Why didn’t you tell me? I asked ages ago, you knew I knew I had to get my powers from somewhere!”

Wu sighed, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “You’re right. There’s something I haven’t told you.”

Jay waited. “Well? Go ahead!”

Wu shook his head. “It is my judgment that this is not something I should share. Forget about her, Jay. Masters of years past are irrelevant in our time. Drop it.”

Jay stared. “Irrelev…Master, she’s my mother! She can’t be irrelevant!”

“I said drop it, Jay.”

Jay stared at him for a moment that seemed to last forever. Surely the Sensei would cave, would admit that it’s not his right to withhold information like this. The Sensei stared back. When Jay felt tears of...frustration, maybe? Burning behind his eyes, he turned on his heel and left. He didn’t want to give Wu the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to him.

Nya had the presence of mind to grab the picture before she followed him, across the training grounds, into the monastery, and up to his room. They passed the others on their way by, and Nya gave them a thumbs up to assure them that she’s got this, and they don’t need to follow.

Jay let her follow him, but closed and locked the door as soon as she was inside. He sat on the floor, back against his bed rather than sitting on the bed like a normal person. He sniffed and scrubbed at his eyes before forcing a laugh. “I don’t know why I’m so upset. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about her, I don’t, I don’t, I...”

Nya moved to sit beside him, grabbing his hands when they moved up to tug at his hair. “Okay,” she agreed, because it feels like the thing to do. She didn’t actually think what he’s saying is the truth, but they could talk about that later. When he stopped trying to get his hands back, she tugged him into a hug. He practically melted into her hold, and she let the silence be for a moment while she rocked slightly and hummed a random tune she remembered Kai singing to her when she was little. It made her feel better, and she hoped it did the same for Jay. “That wasn’t fair of Master Wu,” she said when it seemed like he’d more or less calmed down. Jay stiffened, but she didn’t let that stop her. “He should have told you the first time he asked. And he shouldn’t have yelled at you the second. It’s normal to be curious, Jay. It’s okay to want answers, no matter how you feel about her. And he should have given them to you.”

Jay pulled away and swiped his sleeve under his nose, Nya forcing herself not to mention how gross that was. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated, and every time he said it it got a little less convincing. It mattered a whole lot, and he was realizing that more and more as he tried to shove it aside and convince himself that Wu was right in that he doesn’t need to know. Ancient history - how much could it matter? But it’s his ancient history.

“...Do you want to ask my mom about it?” Nya offered softly, and Jay blinked in surprise. Sure, he’d recognized Maya in the picture. Had acknowledged with a detached sort of interest that she was there. But now, he realized what that meant. She was there. She was there with his mother, smiling and happy, arm slung around the shorter ninja’s shoulders. She hadn’t just been there - they had been close. Maya would know something, and she would likely be nicer about it than Wu.

Maya and Ray had taken a little while to warm up to Jay, and he had understood. The last they had seen of their children, they were practically toddlers. They came back to adults, grown and independent. Nya was engaged, and introduced them happily to Jay as if they weren’t still reeling from everything else they had learned. As far as they were concerned, Nya was still that little girl they were forced to leave. But eventually, time passed. They adjusted to the present, and as they did, they welcomed Jay into the family with open arms. They supported the relationship, and they were happy to call Jay their honorary son, even if he technically wasn’t just yet. They thought him odd, like most did, but much like Kai they learned to look past it.

They would have answers. And even if they weren’t in a particularly sharing mood either, they would be nicer about it than Wu had been.

“...Do you think she’d mind?” He asked carefully. He really didn’t want to ruin his relationship with them. He hadn’t expected them to like him, had been downright terrified they’d disapprove and Nya would listen to them, and he didn’t want to lose what he’d built with them. What if his mother was terrible, and Maya didn’t realize who he was yet? She could be the living worst, and when Maya realized the connection, she may tell Nya never to speak to him again. Would Nya listen? Maybe not, but it wasn’t a chance he wanted to take.

“Of course not,” Nya squeezed his hands and smiled. “She loves you, Jay. I’m sure she’d be happy to help. Pack some stuff for us, wouldya? I’ll go tell the others where we’re going. You okay with it if Kai wants to come? It’s okay if not, he’ll respect it.”

Jay shook his head. “Yeah, no, that’s...that’s fine, he can come.” He sniffed once more for good measure and stood, going to his dresser to find some clothes that weren’t ninja clothes and also didn’t have snot on them.

Nya nodded and left, returning shortly with Kai in tow. Jay was sitting on his bed, now, three bags beside him. He’d gone ahead and grabbed an overnight bag for Kai, too, while he was at it.

Kai offered to drive, and the trip to the Smiths’ house passed quickly in companionable silence. Kai tried to strike up a conversation a few times, but Jay wasn’t interested. That was more than a little concerning, but Kai didn’t press the issue.

Chapter 2: Chapter Two

They hadn’t called ahead, but Ray and Maya met them at the door with wide smiles and warm hugs. Jay held back, initially, until Maya stepped forward and tugged him into her arms. “C’mon, don’t be shy, you’re practically one of us,” she pulled away and winked, dragging him over to the cluster of Smiths.

“Heh, thanks Mrs. Smith,” he said a little awkwardly.

Maya rolled her eyes fondly. “Maya, please,” she chuckled. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation, and it won’t be the last.

“What brings you all the way out here?” Ray asked amicably. It is, in all truth, not all that far from the monastery. It’s a day trip, easy, even if they usually set out with the intent to stay at least one night.

Nya wished she could say it was just a social call, because that would mean nothing was wrong and that she visits her parents for fun. Truth is, she’d not been very good about that. They come calling when they need something.

“You okay, dear?” Maya regarded Jay skeptically, and he nodded harshly. Yes, of course, he’s absolutely fine. They’re just here to visit and leave. No special reason.

Nya grabbed Jay’s hand, threading her fingers between his and giving it a squeeze. “Actually, Mom, there’s something we were wanting to ask you about.” No sense stalling, really. They could visit after they got the unpleasant questions over with. Then, maybe, Jay would relax and stop looking like he’s moments away from stressing himself into non-existence.

“...Of course,” Maya said, and she sounded a little bit worried. Fair enough - they hadn’t exactly been as open as they could be with their intentions. She held the door open and waved them inside. The door led to the living room, and she gestured for them to take a seat before sitting on the loveseat with Ray. Across from the couch, where Nya sits on one end with Jay in the middle and Kai on the other.

“What’s on your mind?” Ray asked casually, but he’s got that same concerned look in his eyes. They probably thought it was ninja business, some disaster that they needed help with. That was historically what brought their children to their door, looking for advice from ninja of the past.

Maya glanced at Jay, who waved for her to take the lead. She steeled herself and nodded, pulling the picture out of her bag and holding it out to her parents. Maya took it, studying it intently with a very odd look on her face. “Who’s this?” Nya tapped the incriminating ninja, and Maya swallowed thickly.

“Oh, her,” Maya nodded, and she couldn’t have looked more guilty if she tried. “That’s my old friend Libber. Ex-ninja. ...Why?” She knew why, she definitely knew why, but she asked anyway.

Nya took a deep breath, almost annoyed that her mom was playing dumb. “What do you guys know about Jay’s birth parents?”

“...Ah,” Ray said softly, nodding slightly in understanding. “I didn’t realize you were...aware, of the situation.”

Jay shrugged, finally getting involved in the conversation. “More or less. I don’t know...anything about them. Just that they exist.”

Maya nodded in understanding. “Well. As I’m sure you’re aware, the previous elemental masters trained under Master Wu the same way you guys have. We were close - especially Lily, Libber, and myself. That’s her name, by the way. Liberty Thatcher, later Gordon. We were the very best of friends, for a long time. She was...an incredible ninja, and an even better friend. She was the life of every party, always trying to make us smile. But she was fierce, too. Kind and dangerous, the ultimate package. She was always looking out for us, checking in during battles and after, making sure everyone was okay. She made us better; and I miss her dearly.”

Jay stared at his hands, folded in his lap. Uncharacteristically still. He swallowed with some effort, and didn’t look up. “How’d she die?”

“We don’t know that she did,” Ray answered when Maya hesitated. “We know she was alive...seven, maybe eight years ago. I’m not positive anymore. We’ve...fallen out of touch.”

Jay nodded in half-understanding. Of course she wasn’t dead, she was a ninja and those are pretty hard to take out. He hated that he kind of wished she was, because that would make everything easier. It would make everything make sense, kind of. But she was alive - or had been, for a while after he’d come into the picture. It hurt more than he expected to know that. “Then why...” His voice cracked and he chomped down on his bottom lip, bound and determined not to fall apart in front of all these people. He was still waiting for Ray and Maya to realize Nya was too good for him, and he didn’t need to give them any more reasons than they already had. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, pulled himself together. “Why’d they leave me in the junkyard?” That was better, than what he’d almost said. ‘Why’d they abandon me’ had been on the tip of his tongue, right beside ‘Why’d they throw me away?’. This was less pitiful, less accusing, sounded like he was more or less casual about the whole situation.

Maya took a deep breath and exchanged a look with Ray. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and Maya braced herself. “I don’t know.”

She was lying - every ninja on the couch could tell. Kai narrowed his eyes, almost challengingly. Jai shrunk back, accepting yet another defeat on his quest for information. Nya took action - stood and grabbed her parents each by an arm, dragging them after her into the kitchen.

She closed the door and turned to them, arms crossed and eyes hard. “Why are you lying?”

Ray sighed. “Look, Nya, it’s not...that simple. We care about Jay - we really do. He doesn’t need to know.”

“He wants to!” Nya argued, forcing herself to keep it down so the others wouldn’t hear. They were probably in the hallway, ears pressed to the door anyway. But she could at least try to make this as least dramatic as possible.

“It’s not good, Nya,” Maya insisted. “It’s only going to make things worse. I know he’s curious, I get it - I’d want answers too. But the answers are going to hurt him. Do you want that?”

Nya shook her head - of course not. She wanted to wrap him up in bubble wrap and stash him somewhere safe, where nothing could hurt him ever again. But she couldn’t do that, and wouldn’t even if it was possible. She didn’t have the right to shield him from the world, and her parents didn’t have the right to withhold information about his own past - even if he was better off not knowing. “No, Mom, of course I don’t want that,” she huffed. “But he’s hurting anyway. Sensei made it worse, and now...at least if he knows we can start coming to terms with it. It’s better than whatever he’s probably come up with in his head. He’s kind of a fan of worst case scenario.”

“Well he’s gonna love this, then,” Ray said darkly, and Nya crossed her arms tighter against a shudder.

“Nya...” Maya took a step forward, grabbing her daughter’s arms and forcing her to meet her eyes. “They threw him away, honey. On purpose. Do you really think he wants to hear that?”

“...I think that’s what he’s going to believe anyway, if you don’t confirm it,” she admitted.

Ray and Maya exchanged a look, and Maya finally sighed. “Okay. If you really think that’s for the best, then...you know him best. We just want what’s best for him, honey. You know that, don’t you?”

Nya nodded. Of course, her parents loved her weird fiance. They weren’t being selfish and difficult like the sensei, they were trying to protect him like any decent future parents-in-law would.

She led them back to the living room, and resumed her place beside Jay. She grabbed his hand prophylactically, holding it in her lap and reaching her other arm across his shoulders. Kai glanced at her, her actions clearly making him concerned

“Should I...” He pointed to the door, and Jay shook his head harshly at his invitation to leave. He was surprised that Jay apparently wanted him to stay, but settled in to stick around for the long-haul.

Maya sat on the edge of the loveseat, hands clasped in her lap. “Are you sure you want to know?” She asked gently, and Jay only nodded. “Okay,” she agreed quietly, and finally set into the story. “Libber wasn’t happy when Lily and I had Cole and Kai. We were the first of our generation to have kids, and for whatever reason, it irritated her. She didn’t understand why we would want to, why we would ever want to sign up to lose our powers. We knew she was just mad that we’d be leaving the team, soon. Ninjas typically stop being ninjas, when they have kids. We didn’t - not for a while, at least. But it’s a given that one day your powers will disappear, and you will no longer be an elemental master. We had time, of course - elemental masters typically gain their powers in their early teens, at which point their parents will lose their powers. Her concerns never made sense to me. Sure, I knew that I could lose my powers somewhere down the line. Either Ray or I would forfeit our power and Kai would gain it, but it’s not like I ever intended to be a ninja forever. I was a ninja second, and a mom first. I never resented that my powers may one day leave me. Later that same year, Dr. Julien made Zane with the intention of gifting him with his powers when the time was right. Libber didn’t understand that, either. She was always an incredible ninja, and she knew that.

“Fast forward two years and a bit, I’m pregnant with Nya, and Libber’s expecting you,” she nodded toward Jay, like she could be talking about anyone else. “She wasn’t...happy. There was always a chance you wouldn’t turn out to be an elemental master, even if it was a slim one. Cliff was a regular guy, and as such, there was a small chance you’d take after him. She worried about it for months. She wouldn’t shut up about how this was never supposed to happen, and she never wanted to have a baby and run the risk of losing her powers.

“She changed, during that time. She went from being our happy bubbly friend to a quiet, bitter stranger. I tried to be there for her, when you were born. She was inconsolable, said she could see it in your eyes. Those giant, bright blue eyes - same as every master of lightning’s had in the past. It was as much confirmation as she could get at that time, and it destroyed her. She wouldn’t stop crying, saying how she wished things were different.”

Nya winced when Jay’s grip on her hand tightened to the point of being painful, and she wished she’d been more specific when she told her parents to go ahead. He needed to know the truth, not the details.

“I never should have left, that night,” Maya said regretfully. “I knew she wasn’t okay, and I didn’t feel good about leaving. But I needed to get back to Kai, and I was six months pregnant and tired. So I decided to be selfish, and left her with nobody but Cliff. Stupid, distracted, self-absorbed Cliff.

“I never thought she’d act on her fears. I knew she was upset, resentful, I knew. But I didn’t...” She took a deep breath, forcing her voice to steady. “She told me, later. Lilly and I saw her two days after that - went to check on her, try and cheer her up. We even left Kai and Cole at home, knowing how much kids could upset her. You weren’t there, and we assumed Cliff had you somewhere. But then she told us, and she seemed...proud. Like she thought we’d be happy with what she’d done.

“I’ll never forget what she said. I’ll never be able to unsee that look, that glint in her eyes like she’d had the greatest idea. ‘I fixed it, guys’, she said it so proud. She said ‘I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t make myself do it with my own hands. But I put him in the desert, nobody will find him there. He won’t last long in the sun’.

“As soon as we realized what she was talking about, Lilly and I ran. But the desert’s a big place. We didn’t find you until four days later, and we’d all but given up hope at that point. When we finally did find you, you were already at the junkyard. We stopped to ask if they’d seen anything, and they told us about the baby they’d found in the stack of tires. They let us come inside, showed us their freshly acquired baby with the big blue eyes. They were so happy. And Lilly and I decided that the safest thing to do was leave you there. Ed and Edna loved you already, the stray tire baby was their absolute pride and joy. And as long as Libber believed she’d succeeded, then she wouldn’t try to find you and finish the job. You were safest in the desert. So we left, and we went home, and we never spoke of it again. We couldn’t risk Libber finding out that we knew.

“She left the group, not long after that. We only saw her once after that, eight years ago. Saw her in Ninjago City, and hid so we wouldn’t have to talk to her. She looks so different now. I guess she’s figured it out by now. Her powers have to be gone. But that...that’s all I know. I’m sorry.”

Jay had been very determined to listen to her story, thank her for her time, and move on. He was going to accept her words with dignity, and be glad to know whatever she had to share. But that was before she’d started talking. Before she’d grabbed his heart and ripped it into shreds with every word she spoke.

She had tried to kill him - plain and simple. She had dumped her child in the desert hoping he’d die, all because she couldn’t bear to lose her powers. Her powers, that were more important to her than anything else in the world. The same powers he had now, stolen from her no matter what she’d done to stop it. He felt sick - he didn’t want the stupid powers, the horrible reminder that buzzed under his skin like a constant hum of electricity. He wished he could get rid of them himself, give them to anybody else, strip himself of the reminder that he had something she thought was worth killing him over.

He choked on a horribly mortifying sob that wasn’t quiet at all and clamped a hand over his mouth, curling up to make himself smaller and less noticeable. As if everyone wasn’t watching him anyway, waiting for a reaction to Maya’s words. He was hyperventilating, and he couldn’t stop, and he wanted to get away from the horrible static feeling of his own skin.

Nya was there, steady and warm, hanging onto him in the only way she knew how to help. And then Kai was there, pressed against his other side like a personal little heater, completely out of his depth but he couldn’t not try.

Jay was entirely too aware of the lightning thrumming inside him - it was always there, he could always feel it, he was used to it by now. But now it felt like torture, an unbearable reminder of everything, and that awful feeling combine with the fact that he was crying harder than he thought he was capable of slammed him with a horrible gut-punch of nausea.

He untangled himself from the Smith siblings and autopilot propelled him down the hall, to the bathroom, and onto his knees where he hugged the toilet and retched helplessly.

Nya followed him, the others having the common courtesy to stay behind. She knelt beside him, a hand on his back as she whispered soothing words that he definitely couldn’t make out. She draped a cool washcloth across his neck and waited, rubbing soothing circles into his back while he dry-heaved until he was finally exhausted and slumped back against the wall.

He tried to take a deep breath, tried to get a hold of himself and calm down, face the situation like the literal ninja that he was. But he couldn’t - he was breathing too fast, and felt much too lightheaded because of it. He couldn’t focus. It was an odd thing to have a panic attack over, he thought distantly. There were a handful of things that could set him off, things that made sense, even if he hated it. They were ninja - it was a hazard of their work. They all had their personal collection of issues, the only thing none of them would tease the others over. He didn’t want to add anything else to his pile. But this was...a lot.

“Hey, honey, breathe for me, okay?” Nya said softly, tucking his hand against her chest and taking an exaggerated breath. “In for four, hold for four, out for four,” she coached quietly, demonstrating as he tried to follow along.

It felt like an eternity before he sucked in a breath that actually felt like it worked. When his lungs finally filled with sweet sweet oxygen, he slumped forward against Nya and cried. Quietly and without the edge of panic that wouldn’t let him go earlier.

“There you go, good, you’re okay,” Nya soothed, rocking a little. The bathroom floor was not the ideal place for this, but she was playing with the cards she’d been dealt. “I’ve gotcha. I love you,” she pressed a kiss to the top of his head and that only made him cry harder. There was a very real possibility she was doing the wrong thing, but she didn’t know what else to do.

Nya dropped her head back against the wall, squeezing her eyes closed against the tears that tried to overflow. She could fall apart later - right now, she needed to be there for Jay. It wasn’t her turn yet.

Jay was finally starting to calm down, his sobs turning to ragged breaths and almighty sniffles. He didn’t emerge from where he’d set up camp against Nya’s shoulder, and Nya resolved herself to be patient. The floor was hard and she’d stopped being able to feel her butt a long time ago, but she could wait.

Jay shivered, and Nya tightened her hold. He was always cold - an unfortunate side effect of being thrown away to grow up in the desert. She shrugged her shoulder to swipe a tear off her cheek, taking a deep breath and shoving her feelings deep deep down into the darkest recesses of her heart.

Kai appeared a moment later, inviting himself to sit across from them. He pressed his back against the cabinet under the sink and pulled his knees up to his chest, arms wrapped around them and chin propped on top.

Jay turned his head just enough to peek a single eye at the newcomer, and Kai gave him a strained smile. “I fixed up your room, Nya,” he offered quietly. “Made a blanket nest and hot chocolate.”

Nya smiled, tears overflowing as her heart swelled with affection for her stupid idiot brother. He never knew what to do, and was also somehow the most thoughtful person she knew. He couldn’t help, not really, so he’d done the only thing he could think of. She loved him for it - and a million other little things he did every day. He wasn’t one to express verbal affection - she hadn’t been, either; Jay had to train her for years before she was able to say she loved him. Kai was no better, but he showed he cared in his own way.

He pulled them both to their feet, and gave Jay a cup of water and a spare toothbrush. He led them to Nya’s old bedroom and gave Jay some of his old pajamas that were just a little too small, now. He set his computer on the dresser, opened to an app full of old movies, in case they wanted distraction. Proudly showed them the sloppy blanket nest he’d created, and handed them each a mug of hot chocolate. He ruffled Jay’s already disastrous hair and tugged Nya into a brief side hug. He offered them a tight smile. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ was reflected in his eyes, even if he never spoke.

He left them alone, retreating to his own childhood bedroom where he was free to hide under the covers and bury his head under his pillow, pretending to be entirely unaffected by anything he’d heard earlier. It was fine - he was fine. Hearing that his brother’s mother had tried to kill him with sunlight meant nothing to him. Watching this news break his brother, just a little, meant nothing. He was fine, he was fine, he was fine. And if he bit his pillow to keep from making any sound as tears soaked into his sheets, then nobody had to know. He was the big bad fire ninja, after all - he had a reputation to uphold.

He heard Nya’s muffled voice from next door, but didn’t try to focus on what she was saying. It wasn’t his business. Jay rarely answered, voice high and shaky when he did. They both sounded terrible. It made Kai hope the ex-lightning-ninja was alive, just so he could find her and give her a piece of his mind.

None of the ninja had the best of relationships with their parents. He would have said ‘aside from Jay’ that morning, but things change. Lloyd’s dad was an evil overlord sometimes, and his mother was somehow worse. Cole’s relationship with his dad was rocky at best, even if they were on the mend. Zane’s dad was dead, and he knew the ice ninja had mixed feelings over Dr. Julien’s parting act of giving him amnesia. Kai himself would never be quite convinced that his parents couldn’t have tried harder, and he knew Nya felt the same. Ray and Maya had their reasons, and maybe they really couldn’t have done anything to get back to their kids. But Kai would be lying if he claimed not to resent them, just a little. He’d had to grow up too quickly, forced to raise Nya with nobody else around to do it. Complicated familiar relations came with the territory of being a ninja. But this? This felt different. Even Garmadon had cared for Lloyd, in his own way. He’d known he could grow up to defeat him, and he hadn’t tried to kill him about it.

Kai eventually drifted off to sleep, head sandwiched between two pillows where he had hidden himself away from the world.

He woke up to Maya knocking on his door, calling through the wood that dinner was ready if he was interested. She sounded guilty, even saying that much. He needed to fix that.

Kai slid out of bed, straightening his clothes and pausing at his mirror to make his hair presentable and ensure that he didn’t look like he’d been hiding and crying for an undefined length of time.

“Hey, Mom,” he swung open his door and offered her a smile. The one she returned was weak and fake, and he was quick to reassure her. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mom,” he said softly, bringing a hand to her shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. “We asked. He needed to know. Not your fault.”

Maya didn’t look like she believed him, but she nodded anyway. “Will you tell them?” She inclined her head toward Nya’s door, and Kai nodded. She didn’t need to avoid them - he seriously doubted they were mad at her. But, he wasn’t the person who could confirm that. There was a decent chance Nya was mad. Strictly speaking, Maya had gone into more detail than she really had to, and he could definitely see Nya being less than pleased about that.

Kai knocked on Nya’s door, and didn’t receive an answer. He knocked again, louder, giving them plenty of chance to yell at him to get lost before he opened the door. When they still didn’t answer, he took his chances and invited himself in.

They were fast asleep, Jay curled up and tucked against Nya’s chest. He looked very small, in that position - absolutely engulfed under Nya’s arms and a big fluffy blanket. Kai smiled despite himself - it was kind of adorable. He reminded himself that he was supposed to be disgruntled over the cuddling, and cleared his throat before grabbing a stray pillow and whacking Nya with it. “Wakey wakey sleepy heads, dinner time.”

Nya groaned and pulled her arms away from Jay, rubbing at her eyes before cracking them open to glare at Kai. “You’re a jerk,” she said, grabbing the pillow and throwing it back at him.

“Well if you want me to eat all of Mom’s cooking myself,” Kai said dramatically, turning to leave

Nya rolled her eyes fondly and shook Jay until he mumbled something unintelligible to show he was more or less awake. “Wakey wakey,” Nya hummed, tugging him into a gentle kiss when his eyes finally flicked open, mostly to bother Kai.

It worked - Kai made a dramatic gagging sound and spun on his heel to leave, calling something about revoking supper privileges over his shoulder as he left.

Nya laughed, sitting up and stealing Jay’s covers as she did so. He grumbled indignantly and sat up with her to follow the blankets, snatching them back and wrapping them around his shoulders like a cape. Nya dropped her head against his shoulder and pulled the blanket around herself, too. “You feel up to dinner with our folks?”

Jay shrugged. Truthfully, probably not. But he couldn’t avoid them forever, and he hadn’t really left with any sense of dignity earlier. He needed to talk to them again, and make sure they knew he was glad they’d told him, even if he’d not given them any reason to believe that thus far. “Yeah,” he agreed after a moment. He stood and dug his hoodie out of his bag, pulling it on over Kai’s pajamas. He didn’t really have it in him to care about changing into clothes.

Nya followed his example, staying in her comfy pajamas and grabbing his hand to tug him with her into the kitchen.

Maya and Ray greeted them with strained smiles and worried eyes. They didn’t get to keep those faces long - Jay pulled away from Nya and tackled them both in a group hug. “Thanks for telling me,” he said, and his voice sounded dangerously shaky, but he held his ground.

“Of course, dear,” Maya said, giving him a surprised smile when he pulled away. “We’re here if you need anything, or just wanna...know anything else. There’s fun stories too.”

Jay thanked them but knew he wasn’t likely to take them up on that. Nothing they could say would change anything. It didn’t matter if she used to be the coolest person in the world; not when he already knew how things ended.

They stayed at the Smiths’ that night, and returned to the monastery in the morning. Jay thanked Ray and Maya profusely, both for their hospitality and their honesty. He probably went a little overboard, but he couldn’t help it. He’d had exactly two people to go to for answers, and when Wu had rudely shut him down, the Smiths had delivered. It mattered less that he wished he didn’t know, and more that they had respected him enough to tell him anyway.

Chapter 3: Chapter Three

Wu was waiting for them when they got back, standing at the entrance to the monastery with crossed arms. “You went behind my back,” he stated blankly.

“Cool it Sensei, we just went to visit my parents,” Kai assured quickly, and it wasn’t a lie.

Wu gave him a hard look. “You went to obtain information I explicitly told you to leave alone.” He pinned Jay with a hard stare.

Jay shrank under his glare, wrapping himself in a self-hug and pointing his eyes at the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get why you didn’t want me to know, Sensei, but...” He steeled himself. “I still don’t really think that was your choice to make.”

Wu crossed his arms. “It is my job to keep you all safe. I hope you realize how dangerous it could be for you if you decide to take any action with this new knowledge. Liberty is a very powerful individual, Jay. She is not to be messed with.”

Jay jerked his head up, finally meeting the sensei’s eyes. “So she is alive?”

Wu snapped his mouth closed, turned, and left.

“That’s a yes for sure,” Kai stated. Wu was a big fan of keeping secrets, considering how bad he was at lying. “...But he’s not wrong, Jay. You’re not going to like...look for her, are you?”

Jay shook his head harshly. “I’m not stupid, Kai. She wanted me dead when I was an adorable baby. Can’t imagine what she’d do to me now that I’m grown and annoying.”

Kai nodded in satisfaction, waving at Lloyd, Cole, and Zane when they emerged from the monastery. “How’d it go?” Lloyd asked, and Kai waved his hand in a ‘so-so’ motion.

“You can tell them,” Jay said, eyes returning to the ground. “I’m gonna go...train.” He left, leaving Kai and Nya to fill in the others if they wanted to. It wasn’t fair, really, to leave that detestable task to them but he knew he couldn’t do it himself. He didn’t even want to think about it, let alone rehash it all to three inquisitive ninja who didn’t know when to quit.

He went to the training room, uncaring that he was still dressed in street clothes. He didn’t want to wear his gi - didn’t want to be the blue ninja - not when she used to hold that title. She was wearing a blue gi in every picture they had found, and it was almost cruel that Wu had decided he should follow in her footsteps. He hadn’t chosen his color - just taken the clothes the sensei had handed him and rolled with it. He hated it, now. Hated that he was supposed to match her, supposed to become the brand new lightning ninja, barely distinguishable from the old one. It wasn’t fair.

He dropped his bag by the door, not bothering to take a detour to put his stuff in his room. He was entirely too wound up, and turned instead to the row of training dummies. He stretched habitually, both to warm up and to test how well he could move in jeans of all things. Not great, but he’d made due with worse. He landed a swift kick to one of the dummy’s chest, and smiled in satisfaction when it rocked on impact. He kicked it again, and again, landing a punch to its face and a kick to its neck. Any person would be downed by now - he didn’t need his powers. He was still a ninja, still could take down anybody he needed to, didn’t have to zap them to win. He didn’t have to use his powers.

The dummy tore, sand spilling out of its mutilated stomach onto the floor. He knew he should clean it up, but he moved instead to the next one. Kick to the chest, punch to the stomach, elbow to the face. He panted roughly and grabbed some nunchucks off the weapons rack. He screamed, and it felt more like pain than a battle cry, but he didn’t dwell on it. Just attacked the dummy, more sand spilling to the ground.

A hand landed on his shoulder and he wheeled around, fully prepared to fight for his life against whoever had the audacity to interrupt him. He raised his nunchucks, and froze when his eyes met Cole’s.

The earth ninja smiled, tight and strained. He had a scythe in one hand - not his elemental weapon, just a regular one to match Jay’s factory nunchucks. He assumed a fighting stance, and jerked his head in a ‘c’mon’ motion.

Jay didn’t have to be told twice. The dummies were great and all, but they were hardly a challenge. Cole was interactive, and won about 60% of their sparring matches. He was stronger, Jay was faster, they were practically an even match.

Jay launched himself at his friend, dodging Cole’s swinging weapon by ducking under it, popping up behind Cole and jumping onto his back. He’d been trained to use his size and speed to his advantage, and he’d taken down many enemies with the same move. Climbing an opponent always leads to a brief moment of surprise - knocks them off-center and throws them off-balance. He held on and threw his weight backwards, pulling Cole onto the ground with him. He straddled him, fish raised before he remembered that he didn’t actually want to hurt Cole.

He let his hand drop to his side, getting off of Cole and flopping onto the ground beside him, panting harshly from untold time spent beating up on dummies and his friend. He swiped at his face, too wet to pass as sweat, and took a deep shaky breath.

“You okay?” Cole asked without looking at him. His eyes were trained on the ceiling, giving Jay the opening to be honest without being watched.

“...No,” Jay shook his head, then stood and gathered his nunchucks up off the floor. “C’mon, get up. Let’s go again.”

Cole nodded and stood, bracing himself against the onslaught of attacks. There was no real method or rhythm behind the random punches and kicks that Jay hurled his way, and he dodged some and blocked others. He took the obvious openings that he saw, fighting back just enough to give the illusion of a proper spar. But this wasn’t a proper spar - he wasn’t here to train, he was here to help. Right now, that amounted to helping Jay blow off steam by being an interactive training dummy.

They kept at it for a while. Long enough for the others to come check on them, and decided that it was time to take turns. Cole tapped out, and Zane tapped in. Lloyd went next, and unlike the others, he did not hold himself back. He’d never gone easy on the others during training, and he wasn’t about to start now. He hit Jay with everything he had - but he took the hint when he went in with spinjitzu and nearly tossed Jay clear across the room. This was a no-element spar, for whatever reason, and he would adhere to those terms.

Jay worked his way through the entire team before he finally exhausted himself, and left without a word to retreat to his room. The others let him go, hoping that he would tell them if he wanted anything from them. They would all drop everything to do what they could, but until they knew what that was, they were going to leave him alone.

He didn’t go down to dinner when the others called, and they didn’t make him. He just stayed in his room, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his floor trying his very best to meditate and center himself. He’d never been the best at that - his attention span was short, and there were much more interesting things to spend his time on. His mind wandered, whenever he tried to silence it. He thought of his parents - the ones that mattered, the ones that found a baby in a pile of tires and decided they might as well keep it and love it and give it a home. He thought of Libber, who had been so scared of becoming powerless that she made an attempt on the life of a baby. He thought of Wu, who had been willing to test their rocky relationship in order to keep him in the dark. He thought of the others, who had stopped milling around the monastery some time ago and retired to their own quarters. They were so eager to help, so willing to do anything, and he wasn’t giving them a lot to work with.

Finally, he thought of how Libber was still alive. She was still out there, somewhere, and she hated him. Somewhere in Ninjago, an ex-elemental master was living out her worst fear. Powerless and alone in a world that no longer had any use for her. He wanted to hate her, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. She was still his mother, still the reason he had a chance to be alive at all, even if she’d tried to take that from him. He wondered where she was, and if she still wanted to kill him.

That thought caused his heart to jump into his throat, thudding rapidly as he shot to his feet, yanking his door open and stumbling down the hall. He wasn’t sure where he was going until he ended up at Zane’s door, hand hovering inches away from the silver door. It was decorated with pictures of the ninja, some of Dr. Julien and even a couple of that ridiculous falcon. Jay wondered what had become of that bird. He hoped it was doing okay.

He knocked, because he didn’t know what else to do with the awful fear that was clawing at his insides, making it so hard to think about anything other than the possibility that Libber was out there, somewhere, maybe even here.

Zane swung open his door and smiled. “Hello friend,” he greeted happily. His eyes flicked up and down, taking in the appearance of his midnight visitor. He didn’t look great, but Zan refrained from scanning him without consent. “Would you like to come in?” He stepped aside and waved for Jay to come inside.

Jay nodded and stepped inside, inviting himself to hop onto Zane’s bed and hug his knees to his chest. His eyes flicked across the room once, twice, five times before he seemed satisfied that he had significantly cataloged its contents.

Zane moved to sit beside him, dropping a cold hand onto Jay’s back in an attempt to comfort his brother. Jay was shaking, almost imperceptibly, and Zane decided not to wait long enough for him to feel like talking. “How can I help?” He asked with forced cheer. He was tempted to flip his feelings switch - it would be easier than being subjected to the confusing mess that his emotions had become. He’d felt little more than rage, when Kai and Nya had rehashed what Maya had told them. That rage had turned to an empty sort of melancholy, and it was far from Zane’s favorite feeling.

Jay swallowed, dropping his legs down to kick against the mattress a few times. He was absolutely atrocious at holding still for any real length of time. “Can you tell how many people are in the monastery?” He asked at last, quiet and almost as if he were ashamed of the question.

Zane nodded - he was typically hesitant to scan the monastery. The others were entitled to their privacy, but he got the feeling they would understand. “Of course,” he agreed, doing as asked. “There are seven. You, myself, Kai, Nya, Lloyd, Cole, and Master Wu.”

Jay nodded, grabbing a shuriken off the side table and spinning it around like a fidget spinner. That was far from safe, but Zane forced himself not to comment. “Can you...” He hesitated. “...It’s kind of stupid.”

“Nonsense,” Zane shook his head. “You are not stupid, Jay. As a consequence, nothing you have to say could be.” That was a lie - Jay said plenty of stupid things, regularly, every single day. He could ask a stupid question better than anyone in any realm. But this was not the time or place for integrity.

Jay gave him a funny look, he definitely knew that was a load of nonsense, but he continued anyway. “What kind of security do we have, here?”

Zane frowned. “You helped to design our security system, I would think that...”

“I know,” Jay interrupted, flicking the shuriken and watching it spin. “I just...can you talk through it? Please?”

Zane nodded, eyes trained on the shuriken as it spun far too close to his friend’s skin. “Of course,” he agreed, starting in on the long list of security measures they had designed for the monastery. Jay and himself had been responsible for most of them - they were the builders, the tinkerers, the masterminds behind the alarms and booby traps that were activated when the ninja were away or sleeping. They may be a match for anything that would want to hurt them, but it never hurt to take precautions so they could let their guards down sometimes.

By the time he finished going through the list, Jay was slumped against his shoulder and his incessant shuriken-spinning had slowed down to a lazy twirl. He went a little rigid when Zane finished, and Zane did the only thing he could think of and started over. When he finished the second time, Jay had nodded off against his shoulder and Zane smiled in satisfaction. He maneuvered carefully until they were both laying down, and flicked off his lamp.

Chapter 4: Chapter Four

The next morning, Jay woke up well before the sun. His face was mashed into Zane’s cold arm, an indication that he had passed out in the nindroid’s room, and Zane had been content to let him stay.

Zane was still beside him, eyes wide open but dull - he was powered off, recharging in his version of sleep. He wouldn’t be easy to wake up before his internal alarm went off, but Jay slipped away carefully anyway. He couldn’t risk him waking up and asking questions.

He had said yesterday that he was going to leave it alone. There was no sense in digging into information he didn’t want to know. But he also didn’t think he’d be able to rest until he did know. But he couldn’t do it here without everyone figuring him out.

He retrieved a small bag of supplies from his room, and scrawled a quick note which he left in the kitchen.

I’ve gone to visit my parents (Ed and Edna, dw). I’ll be back soon. I don’t care what you tell Sensei. I just wanted to see them.
Love you guys,
J

It wasn’t a lie - he was going to the junkyard, and he did want to see his parents. Everything was spiraling, and nothing made sense, and there was nobody he wanted to see more than them. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the only reason he was leaving.

The trip to the Sea of Sands was far from short, and the drive gave him plenty of time to think through his decision and second-guess himself. He needed to leave it alone, he tried to reason with himself. He was curious, he countered. He could create a huge problem if he didn’t stop, but he wouldn’t feel safe until he knew.

By the time he arrived at the junkyard, he had talked himself around and around in so many circles that he didn’t even know which side his points were supporting anymore. He didn’t know what he wanted to do.

He scaled the steps up to the trailer and reached his hand to knock, hesitating. He should just go in - it’s what he’s always done in the past. He was welcome here, he reminded himself forcefully. Everything else was complicated, but this wasn’t. This was his home. The people inside were his parents. He could just...open the door.

He knocked.

Edna slung open the door, mouth open to say something, probably a declaration that business hours were over and he should come back tomorrow. Her face broke into a huge grin when she saw him, arms opening to tackle him in a huge hug.

He returned it easily, squeezing her probably a little too tightly and a little too long.

“Jay, honey, you know you can just come in,” she said happily, finally wiggling away and meeting his eyes. Her face fell, at whatever she found there. “You okay, sweetheart?”

“Yeah, Ma, I’m fine,” he said hoarsely, and it sounded like a lie even to himself. He wasn’t about to convince her, but she let it drop because she was the best.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him inside. “Ed!” She called, loud and jovial - it was the way of the Walkers. “Jay’s home!”

“Jay’s home!” Ed reacted happily from the other side of the house, quick footsteps preceding his arrival and the tackle hug he brought with him. “How ya doin’, son?” He asked as he pulled away, concern clouding his eyes the same way it had Edna’s. They knew him to well.

He opened his mouth to repeat his earlier words, to assure his dad that he was fine, and he didn’t need to worry. He looked at his parents, their worried brown eyes looking at him as if he were the entire world. Tears sprung to his eyes and tumbled onto his cheeks before he could even try to stop them.

Edna gasped and surged forward, pulling him back into a hug that did not improve his ability to get a grip. “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” She asked worriedly, one hand swiping the tears away while the other rubbed up and down his back.

He was so tired of crying. Absolutely exhausted with caring about this, ready to move on to some new horror to focus on instead. But he was stuck, and try as he might, he couldn’t help it. He clung to her as a lifeline, guilty for not answering her question but also not ready to talk about it and relive it all over again. She didn’t seem to mind - just tightened her hold and mumbled nonsense platitudes.

Ed joined the hug, gathering them both in his arms and sinking down with them when Jay’s knees made the executive decision that they should be on the floor. They didn’t ask questions, didn’t demand answers he wasn't ready to give, just held him and waited.

Finally, he pulled away and stood, pulling his parents up and leading them to the couch. Their poor old joints did not need to stay in the floor for this conversation.

Jay sat between them, holding a throw pillow bordered with a million tassels that were perfect for fiddling. He braided seven sets of them before he was able to bring himself to say anything to start to explain himself. He cleared his throat, willed his voice to stay steady. “I found out Nya’s parents knew my birth mom,” he says, and it's shaky and the way Edna gasps doesn’t really help. “I was curious, y’know? I honestly thought she was probably dead, so I...I asked them.” He sniffed, fingers shaking as he twisted the tassels together. “She was an elemental master,” he continued, voice uncharacteristically hollow. “Lightning, um...obviously. She um...it’s genetic, I guess you know, like...when Nya got her water powers, Maya lost hers. That’s just...the way it works. And my...Liberty, that’s her name, she didn’t want to lose her powers. So when I was born, she threw me in a pile of trash in the desert. Bragged about it, to her friends. Told them like it was some great idea, the perfect solution so she wouldn’t lose her powers. If I died in the desert, she would get to keep her powers. But I didn’t, y’all found me, and...I can’t stop thinking about how she’s still out there. Wu wouldn’t answer when I asked, so I know she’s still alive, and she hates me. And I don’t care, I don’t care about her, she’s the worst, I don’t...there’s no excuse to try to murder a baby with heatstroke. But what if she still wants me dead?” He can’t stop now that he’s started, rabling as he moves onto the second edge of the pillow. “What if lightning just...corrupts people? Why would she do that, y’know? I don’t even want these powers, if I could choose, she could just have them, it’s not worth it, but I can’t...and what if I’m just awful? I want kids one day, what if I flip and decide to throw them in a pile of garbage? Ah what am I talking about, I could never do that, I just...it doesn’t make sense! And what happens if you kill an elemental master? People take our powers all the time, what if she’s out there right now trying to figure out how to do that, how to get her powers back? What if she just shows up, and stabs me with some magic spear to suck out my lightning and leaves me for dead?” He laughed, horrible and manic, letting go of the pillow to slump forward and grab at his hair.

He tugged, and Edna’s hands shot forward to grab his and tug gently at his fingers until he let go. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” she said softly, tugging him back into a hug. He didn’t cling back, this time - just slumped forward and fell against her, all the fight leaving him as he cried over the situation for what he swore would be the last time. It was nice to be held, comforted by a mother who didn’t want him dead. She was the best mother he could have asked for - the best in the world, he was pretty sure. It almost made up for the fact that he had a secret second mother who was the worst person in the world.

“Is there anything we can do?” Ed asked, not really addressing any of what he’d said. That was fair enough - there wasn’t really anything to say. He didn’t know how he would respond, if he were the one expected to react to that. Probably the same thing Ed did - offer support, and hope for the best.

Jay shrugged against Edna, reaching up to scrub at his eyes before he pulled away and grabbed the pillow back, hugging it tightly to his chest. “Sensei told me to leave it alone,” he said at last, eyes flicking to his travel bag where his computer was stashed, all but begging him to disobey his master. “I think the others agreed with him. They were a lot nicer about it, but...they don’t think I should dig and try to find anything out. But I want...I need to. I can’t stop thinking about it, and wondering if she’s still out there, planning on coming back to finish the job or even...what if she goes after the others?” He knew it was too early to decide if this really was haunting him as much as he thought it was. It was day three of having this information - of course he couldn’t get it off his mind. But it felt like the sort of thing that would still be bothering him a week, a month, six years from now.

Ed and Edna exchanged a look, and Ed was ultimately elected to be the one to speak. “I don’t really disagree that you might not want to get mixed up in this,” he said carefully. “She’s dangerous, and my personal number one priority is your safety. But it sounds like you’re not going to feel safe either way, so...we’re with you, of course. I trust you - you’ll make the right decision, and we’ll be here for you, whatever you decide.”

Of course they would be - they always were. They had always stood by him, supporting his wild ideas up to and including running off with some mysterious sensei to become a ninja. He’d been through so many absolutely insane things, and while he’d spared them from the worst of it, he came home with plenty of wild stories. And they took it as much in stride as they could, continuing to support his decision to be a ninja, even as he questioned that decision himself.

He got up and retrieved his computer form his bag, returning to sit between them before he pulled up the search bar and started small: ‘Liberty Thatcher’ turned up a long list of results about the previous lightning ninja - the ninja may try to maintain private lives, but who they were was no secret. Nothing truly remarkable turned up; just articles about battles she had been in, fights she had played any significant role in.

‘Liberty Gordon’ turned up more results - articles about her marriage to Cliff, a few about her ninja days. She hadn’t remained a ninja long under that name. The most recent was from two years ago, a brief statement within Cliff’s obituary sharing that she was still alive and living in Ninjago City. That was uncomfortably close to the monastery.

Cliff’s obituary did not mention any children that survived him, and Jay breathed a little easier at the answer to a question he hadn’t consciously been asking. It was not outside the realm of possibility for him to have a sibling out there, somewhere. Of course, it still wasn’t - there could have been any number of babies abandoned in tires all around the world.

On impulse, Jay clicked away and typed in: ‘Jay Walker’. As expected, there was no shortage of ninja-related articles. He’d been busy, for the past several years. It was on the third page of speed-scrolling through results that he stopped. ‘Is Our Beloved Lightning Ninja Hiding a Dark Secret?’. He couldn’t help it - he clicked.

Immediately, he was hit with a picture of himself alongside a picture of Liberty. The resemblance was undeniable - not to mention the identical elemental powers. The article addressed a very fair question: was the lightning ninja who he claimed to be? Ed and Edna hadn’t avoided the spotlight, what with their junkyard being destroyed every five to seven days by some villain or the next. But many of Ninjago’s citizens remembered the previous master of lightning, and theories were being made. He stared at the closing statement: ‘The previous master of lightning disappeared and left us when we needed the ninja the most. It’s truly no surprise that the new one would cover up any connection they share’.

He should have researched himself earlier - it’d taken him all of fifteen seconds to find a conspiracy theory that included the name of his birth mom. He hadn’t needed to ask the sensei at all. But, it was too late now.

A little more research, and it became clear: Liberty had not left the ninja spotlight on good terms with the good people of Ninjago. In the midst of an active threat, she had vanished. It was a horrible, nauseating thought. Not only had Liberty had her powers taken against her will, but she lost her reputation while she still had them. She was probably ticked.

None of this told him anything - except that the world had figured out who he was before he did, and that Liberty wasn’t well-loved by much of anybody anymore. He felt a horrible sort of satisfaction at that thought, and immediately felt guilty for it. She deserved every bit of disdain she received, of course, but she was still his mother. Sort of.

He growled in frustration and shoved the computer away, Ed intercepting its path to the floor and dropping it onto the coffee table, instead. “It’s useless,” Jay groaned, dropping his head into his hands. “I don’t know what I thought I was going to find, did I think people were making websites about where she is and whether or not she’s planning to show up and finish the job?”

“Jay, sweetie, you’ve been looking for four minutes,” Edna soothes, which may be a slight under-exaggeration, but not by much. She smiles fondly, nudging him playfully with an elbow. “I know patience isn’t really your strong-suit, but maybe wait until double-digit minutes to give up, yeah?”

Jay sighed, and finally nodded. They were right - he was admitting defeat much too easily. “Can I stay here, for a couple days?” He asked, instead of retrieving his computer and continuing his research.

“Of course, Jay, this is your home,” Edna reminded him. She stood and grabbed his hand, pulling him up after her. “C’mon, get away from it for a little while. Help me make your favorite soup - you’re much faster at chopping carrots.”

He nodded and followed her, falling into the familiar routine of home. He should come visit more often - it always relaxed him, to be here. It was like being a kid again, carefree with his biggest problem of the day being to assist his mom in making soup. He was better at carrot-chopping than he had been, then. But she’d praised him all the same back then, congratulating his pile of horribly misshapen carrot chunks as if they’d been prepared by a professional chef.

Ed and Edna both did that, over every little thing. They encouraged him, and supported him, and acted as if he were the greatest thing in the world. It had felt suffocating, at times, as a child. It hadn’t been cool to be the kid with parents as involved as his. Now? He wouldn’t trade them for the world - and not just because he’d gotten a glimpse of what he could have grown up with.

He dropped his knife halfway through his third carrot and tackled Edna from behind, careful not to startle her since she was peeling potatoes with a huge knife. “I love you, Ma,” he said softly, propping his chin on her shoulder and wrapping his arms around her stomach, breathing in her familiar scent and finally starting to relax.

Edna laughed, warm and happy. She reached a hand up to grab whatever she could get ahold of, and ended patting the side of his face. “I love you too, silly bean.”

And there, in that moment, it was enough. Liberty didn’t matter - what she had done, what her motives had been, if she was still out there harboring hard feelings. None of it mattered, right now. Not when he was cooking soup with his mom, surrounded by love and old tires.

Chapter 5: Chapter Five

Jay stayed at the junkyard for five days. He spent very little of that time doing what he’d come to do - his computer went back in his bag, and he didn’t get it back out. He spent the rest of the time with his parents - helping them in the junkyard, hauling tires, chatting with customers, and fixing the ‘S’ in their sign. He had missed them, more than he’d let himself admit. And every hug they gave, every carrot he peeled, every scrap of trash he sold to some customer who didn’t really need it, felt like healing.

He headed back to the monastery feeling lighter than he had in two years. Ever since he’d received the letter that altered the way he saw his family. He hated to admit it, wanted to yell at his past self for having the audacity to think anything could change how he thought of his parents, but...it had changed. He had some answers, now. He knew where he’d come from. And he felt closer than ever to the Walkers. It was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders - tossed away and replaced with the warm fuzzy feeling of home.

The monastery was on fire when he got back. Literal flames leaping from the rooftops, the sounds of four different ninja screaming in the distance. A red dot flew overhead, Kai’s scream fading as he was flung over the monastery wall and clear down the stairs.

“What is going on!?” Jay screamed, panic gripping his heart as he ran through the doors, toward the fire, like any sane ninja would do.

“Jay!” Lloyd was the first to spot him, jumping up from where he was sprawled on the ground to wave excitedly. “Welcome back, how was your trip?”

Jay almost said ‘it was nice, thanks’ but a giant fireball fell from above and he screamed and rolled away instead.

“Beware attacks from above, Jay!” Zane called from across the grounds, and Jay waved a thumbs-up in the air, rolling further away from the fire before getting to his feet.

“Is Nya okay!?” Is all Jay can think to ask.

“We’re all fine,” Cole confirms, running over and clapping him on the shoulder. “Welcome back, buddy. Nice trip?”

Jay nodded helplessly. “Yeah, it was great, what’s going on?”

Lloyd appeared beside them, breathless and his hair slightly charred. “Your guess is as good as ours. It started raining fire about ten minutes ago.”

Jay squinted up to the sky, shielding his eyes past the afternoon sun. There was a flying ship, much like the bounty, but a little bit smaller. Giant balls of fire were being flung over the sides, crashing down onto the monastery.

Nya ran over, water pouring onto the nearest fire. “Jay!” She said happily, running over and tackling him in a brief hug before turning her attention back to the flames. “Why didn’t you answer your phone!?” She demanded.

Jay frowned and tugged his phone out of his pocket. Seventeen total missed calls, at least one from each ninja and the rest from Nya, all since he’d left the junkyard. “Oh, my bad,” he chuckled uncomfortably. “I guess I had my music too loud.”
Another fireball landed beside him and he screamed, scrambling away as fast as he could and seeking shelter under a patch of roof that somehow wasn’t on fire.

Zane gave Nya a boost onto the roof, and she balanced on a pillar and aimed a gush of water at one of the biggest patches of fire. Cole boosted Zane up after her, and he started firing ice at every flame he saw.

“Where did Kai go?” Lloyd demanded.

Jay pointed to the door. “Got flung that way.” He frowned, because now, knowing what he did, that didn’t make sense. The ninja weren’t fighting anybody - they were literally putting out fires. Nobody was there to fling them. “Wait, did he go up there?” He pointed up at the flying ship, eyes wide as he yelped at another close call with a ball of fire.

“He went to investigate the source of the fire!” Zane called from the roof.

Lloyd groaned and rubbed his hands down his face, eyes wide as he clutched at his hair. “Why am I just now hearing about this!?” He demanded, shooting a blast of green at a fireball as it fell. Nothing happened, but Nya intercepted before it could catch yet more of the monastery on fire.

“I’m back!” Kai panted as he jogged through the doors. “Don’t worry, guys, nobody panic, I have returned!”

Nya growled, flinging water at a fireball. “I don’t think your particular skill set is what’s going to save the day this time, Kai!”

“I don’t think your particu...oh, hey Jay!” Kai waved happily, abandoning his poor impersonation of Nya to greet the newcomer.

“Zane, can you tell anything?” Lloyd asked. “Who’s on that ship?”

Zane looked thoughtfully at the sky for a moment. “There is one person aboard. They are not the source of the fire, they have...a canon?”

“One person?” Kai asked, already running toward the inside of the monastery. “Hold them off, I’m going back up there!”

“Kai, wait-” Lloyd started.

“It’s one guy, Lloyd! I can take ‘em!” Kai called over his shoulder, jogging inside. A moment later he returned with Zane’s mech, which he used to easily fly up to the ship. His own had already been abandoned on his previous attempt. He dodged most of the fireballs, but dove out of the way too late for the last one.

The mech crashed onto the deck, Kai tumbling out as it started to smoke. It was fireproof, but not immune to crash-landing.

The person, whoever they were, was standing in the middle of the deck. He had her attention, now, and she froze with one hand poised over a button that would, presumably, launch a ball of fire.

“Stop right there!” Kai called, drawing his katana and pointing it at the stranger. “Who are you? Why are you trying to barbeque us?”

The stranger didn’t answer, just shrugged and pushed the button.

“Hey!” Kai challenged, running forward and aiming a swift kick at the stranger. With a little luck she’d fall down, he’d get her contained, and the problem would be resolved.

She dodged. Jumped perfectly to the side, coming back with a kick of her own that caught Kai’s arm. “Ow!” He complained, grabbing his arm. “That’s it!” He jumped back, kicking off into a spinjitzu tornado and spinning wildly off to the side in shock when the stranger did the same.

He landed against a box, quickly sitting up and pointing his sword back at her. “Who are you!?”

“Get out, my quarrel’s not with you!” She raged. She jumped toward him, tackling him to the ground before he could react.

“What the heck, woman, what’d I do to you!?” Kai demanded, rolling them over until he had her pinned to the deck. “Who is your quarrel with!?”

“Not you!” She repeated, and Kai had had enough. He grabbed her hood and yanked it off, determined to at the very least figure out who had the audacity to try to burn down their monastery. That poor place has been through enough.

A fluffy mass of red curls streaked with white was released from the hood, and Kai’s eyes widened as he stared. She stared right back, fury in her bright blue eyes.

His guard slipped, because he recognized her. And in that fateful moment, that single lapse, she got the upper hand. Slid out from under him, grabbed his arms, dragged him to the rail, and chunked him over.

Kai screamed, the surprise from moments earlier being replaced by terror as he rapidly approached the ground. He’d already been tossed from the ship once today, and he really didn’t think his poor bones could handle another crash landing.

“Kai incoming!” He heard Lloyd yell from below, and his fall was broken slightly by five waiting ninja.

“Kai!” Nya called, quickly looking him over as soon as he was safely on the ground. “Are you okay? Who was it?”

“I’m fine,” Kai nodded, sitting up and avoiding the second part of her question. He looked up, and wasn’t sure if he was glad or not when he saw the ship leaving.

“Kai,” Lloyd repeated, recapturing his attention. “Why are they leaving? Did you learn anything?”

“I um...” Kai looked around, his eyes landing on the lightning ninja who was staring at him expectantly. His eyes were huge, still terrified from the fire balls, and Kai did not want to be the person to tell him what he’d seen. Who he’d seen. Who had been hurling fire balls at the monastery moments earlier.

“Kai?” Jay asked worriedly, shrinking back a little under his stare.

Kai tore his eyes away and looked around until he found Lloyd. “Can I talk to you, for a minute?” He asked, struggling to his feet. “Alone?”

Lloyd frowned but nodded, following him behind a pillar on the opposite side of the monastery from the others. Nya and Zane moved to put out the last of the fires, and luckily, the others stayed put where they were.

On impulse, Kai grabbed Nya when she passed them to go to a fire and pulled her along with them. He could tell her first, and she could be the one to tell Jay. She’d signed up to put up with him forever, and she could suffer the consequences.

Nya frowned but followed him, clustering with Kai and Lloyd behind the pillar and looking expectantly at her brother. “Well?” She asked. “Why couldn’t you share with the group?”

“That was Jay’s mom,” Kai pointed up, and both Nya and Lloyd paled.

“Edna!?” Lloyd sputtered in disbelief.

“No!” Kai huffed indignantly. That was ridiculous - Edna would never. “The other one! L...L...Lorraine? Lizbeth?”

“Liberty,” Nya corrected, and her eyes widened as she seemed to finally process what he’d said. “Wait, Liberty was up there!?” She demanded, then glanced back at the others when it hit her that they’d have to tell them too, for sure. Kai was just playing dirty and making somebody else be the one to do it. “Lloyd’s the leader,” she blurted quickly, pointing shamelessly at the green ninja.

Lloyd groaned and buried his head in his hands, accepting his place under the bus where the Smith siblings had thrown him. “Are you sure?” He asked quietly.

Kai nodded regretfully. “Yeah, I mean...she knew spinjitzu, and then I took her mask off, and she...she looked like the lady in the picture. Heck, she looked like Jay. If the lady in the picture was Leslie, then so was the lady on the boat.”

“Oh First Spinjitzu Master,” Nya groaned, leaning against the pillar and wringing her hands anxiously. “Do we have to tell them?” Lloyd gave her a look, because she already knew the answer. She sighed. “Yeah, I know, of course we do. I just...you saw him, he looks so much better! I don’t wanna...” she squeezed her hands together. “Crush his little heart. And it will, Lloyd, you weren’t there when Mom...”

“I know,” Lloyd agreed softly. “I know, Nya, I get it. But if this is going to be a problem, he’s going to find out, and it will be worse if we kept it from him. I’ll call a team meeting, and I’ll take one for the team and break the news. If you’re one hundred percent sure, Kai.”

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure,” Kai nodded.

Lloyd sighed. “Good enough,” he stepped out from behind the pillar and waved his arms to get the others’ attention. “Alright everybody, team meeting! Let’s go...living room.” He took the lead inside, picking his way through the rubble that the fire balls had made. Inside the monastery was charred in places, and the roof had caved in where the fire had hit, but the couch was more or less unscathed. He sat down and waved for the others to join him, the tension growing palpable as the others got more and more anxious about whatever news Kai had brought back that was worth calling a mysterious team meeting over.

Jay looked around at the damage, the parts of roof laying around, and the distinct lack of a sensei. “Wait,” he frowned, realizing he hadn’t seen him since he got back. “Where’s Wu?”

“He went on a ‘soul searching’ journey to ‘search his soul’ and ‘reflect on past events’,” Cole explained mysteriously, and shrugged when Jay frowned at him. “I dunno, that’s what he said. I think he was guilty over how he handled...literally everything, really.”

“Okay team,” Lloyd smiled once everyone was sitting, and it was strained and fake, and Jay narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously. “Kai made an...interesting discovery, while up on the ship. He fought the person on the ship, and um...” He hesitated, closed his eyes when Jay leaned forward eagerly, always excited for whatever juicy details someone uncovered. “The person on the ship was Liberty Gordon,” he said in one rush of air, eyes screwed closed until he finished. He not only spilled the Liberty beans, but he was pretty sure he gave away the research he had done on the side because he was almost positive nobody had told him her last name. He carefully opened one eye, glancing at the others to see their reactions.

Zane’s expression was blank, which was typical enough. Cole’s eyes were huge, giving away that he’d probably done research too, because nobody should have known her name.

Jay squeaked. “Up there?” He pointed at the roof. “With the fire balls?”

Lloyd nodded reluctantly. “Up there with the fireballs.”

Chapter 6: Chapter Six

Jay bolted - he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t bring himself to stick around, to listen to the other ninja as they debated amongst themselves, making wild accusations and coming up with insane theories about motives and how her timing could be so good.

He intended to go to his room and hide. He would emerge later, once the others exhausted themselves, and pretend like nothing had happened. That was the plan. He was over it - he’d had five days to come to terms with everything, and he was bound and determined for his new found indifference toward the ninja in question to stick.

He kicked his door closed harder than strictly necessary - there was no way the others hadn’t heard him slamming the door like an angry child. He didn’t really care what they thought about it, or what they were talking about now, or the fact that they were probably definitely talking about him.

He made it halfway across the room on his mission to lay face-down on his bed and pout when panic slammed into him and he scrambled back to the door, yanking it open and sticking his head out in the hall. Nobody was there, but his heart still hammered painfully against his ribs. He wasn’t safe. Liberty had no real reason to be after the ninja as a group - she had to be after him. She was back to finish what she started, and she wouldn’t stop until she got what she wanted. He was sure of it.

He almost went back to the others. He could show back up, less than two minutes after leaving, and act like nothing had happened. The others were walking around the whole situation on tip-toe, so they wouldn’t mention it. He could go back, force himself into the middle of his ninja friends, and comfort himself with the knowledge that they would always have his back - even if he was related to the maniac in the sky.

They would notice, though. Ninja were observant, and even if they didn’t say anything, they would somehow figure out that he was scared for his life. So he did the next best thing - slammed his door closed again, slid his dresser in front of it, and painstakingly heaved at his bed until it was blocking the door, too. That left the window, and he had plenty of scars laying around to nail it closed. He had long since forgotten what he intended to build, some middle-of-the-night inspiration that he’d grown bored with and abandoned weeks ago. The wood would be much more useful if it were nailed to the wall.

He should have known the others would hear the hammering and come to investigate.

“Jay?” Cole called through the door. He had lost rock, paper, clamp, and was thus elected to host the inevitable intervention. “Whatcha doin’, buddy?” He jiggled the door knob, frowning when it didn’t open. It wasn’t like Jay to lock his door - but then again, it wasn’t like Jay to be chased by a fireball-wielding maniac either. Jay kept hammering, and Cole swallowed down his ever-growing concern. “Can I come in?”

“Hang on!” Jay called, hammering more frantically for a few minutes longer before sliding his furniture away from the door and opening the door just wide enough to put an eye up to the crack. He looked Cole up and down, and apparently satisfied with whatever he found, stepped aside to let him inside.

Cole entered and looked around. Jay’s furniture was all moved in front of the door, moved away just enough to allow entry. There were a bunch of stray two-by-fours hammered haphazardly across the window, and a sizable pile of weapons piled in the middle of the bed. “...You’ve redecorated,” he observed.

Jay grinned broadly and nodded. “Yep,” he popped the ‘p’ and jumped up onto his bed, grabbing a bladed flail and kicking his legs absently as he inspected the blade. He patted the bed beside him, and Cole carefully scooted aside some weapons so he could sit. “What’d you need?” Jay turned toward Cole expectantly, either playing dumb or honestly having no idea what this was about.

Cole raised an eyebrow, thinking over his next words carefully. “Well uh...” He gestured vaguely. “Your birth mom threw fireballs at us and now you’ve locked yourself away and boarded up your room like a haunted house. Those two things wouldn’t happen to be connected, would they?”

Jay’s too-wide grin slipped, for just a moment. His eyes looked haunted, and the look didn’t quite fade when he plastered back on a smile. “Now what could those possibly have to do with each other?”

Cole shrugged. “You tell me.” He waited, patiently, until it became apparent that Jay would be doing no such thing. Instead, he got up and locked his door before sliding the dresser back in front of it. Cole hopped off the bed and helped him push it, next, because he didn’t know what else to do.

Jay crawled back onto the bed closer to him, leaning just enough to knock their shoulders together. Cole took the hint and wrapped an arm around him, offering whatever comfort he could since apparently, in some strange and unsettling twist of fate, Jay didn’t want to talk.

Jay picked at a loose thread in Cole’s gi until it started to unravel, then pulled his hands away in guilt and tucked them under his legs. “What do you think happens to your powers if you die?”

Cole blinked in surprise. “Um...I dunno,” he shrugged, forcing his voice to remain casual. “I guess they die with you. Like Morro, y’know?”

Jay didn’t look convinced. “Do you think that if an old elemental master killed a current elemental master that the old elemental master could find a way to keep the new elemental master’s powers for themself?”

That was a very roundabout way to ask that question, as if Cole wouldn’t immediately catch onto what he was actually getting at.

Truthfully, Cole hadn’t thought about that until now. He’d heard the abridged version of Liberty’s story from Kai and Nya, and he’d been plenty mad about it, but he hadn’t really been worried. Liberty hadn’t gotten what she’d wanted, and he was happy to let her live out the rest of her miserable days alone, wandering the city with plenty of time to think about what she’d done. It didn’t make sense for her to show up now, with some wild scheme to steal her powers back through violence. But, it wasn’t like people hadn’t found ways to steal their powers before. And even if that wasn’t the case, good old fashioned revenge was always on the table.

Cole cleared his throat, and forced himself to answer. “I think that if a previous elemental master was after a current elemental master, for any reason and with any intentions, then the other current elemental masters would make sure that the current elemental master in question was safe. Because current elemental masters never quit, and as a side note, they also look out for each other.”

Jay frowned, taking a moment to sort through that jumbled mess of words. “We’re not gonna let her get you, Jay,” Cole rephrased.

“...I wasn’t talking about anybody in particular,” Jay grumbled, crossing his arms in indignation, as if he could be any more obvious about his concerns. He jumped off the bed and rechecked the locks, starting to pace rather than rejoin Cole on the bed. He grabbed a rubber ball from a pile of stuff on the floor and tossed it between his hands as he walked. Back, and forth. Back, and forth. “Hey Cole?” He asked at last, and Cole hummed for him to go ahead. Jay threw the ball against the wall, catching it when it bounced off the floor and back to him. “I think I hate her a little,” he reported blankly - bounce, catch. bounce, catch. He laughed. “Ain’t that messed up?” Toss, catch. “Not very ninja of me.” He squeezed the ball, threw it down and replaced it with a stress ball shaped like a dolphin. Nya had gotten it for him, sometime last year. A souvenir from a mission that had ended up trashing some shops. She’d probably stolen it from the rubble. He loved it.

Cole took long enough to answer that Jay turned to look at him, heart squeezing painfully because his friend couldn’t think of anything to say. He hadn’t really been intendeding to listen to his argument, but...he’d kind of been counting on Cole to have an argument. Some empty assurance, a list of lies that of course it didn’t matter, of course Jay was still a good ninja, still a good person, even if he was harboring an unhealthy level of resentment toward his birth mom.

His eyes flicked to the ground, arms moving around himself in a poor attempt at comfort.

Cole hopped off the bed, coming closer and ducking to force Jay to meet his eyes. “Hey,” he said gently, hand landing firmly on Jay’s shoulder before pulling him into a tight hug. “She threw you away, Jay. Nobody’s expecting you to feel warm and fuzzy about that.”

Jay grabbed the front of his shirt, clutching it tightly in his fists in a futile attempt to make them stop shaking. “I just don’t get it, Cole,” he said, higher and more hysterical that he intended. “Who does that!? She has to have had a reason, something better than what Mrs. Smith said, there had to have been something more than not wanting to lose her powers years later. I was barely even a baby, I can’t possibly have done anything yet. Now, sure, but she didn’t even give me a chance. If Ma can find a way to love a random tire baby then why couldn’t she?”

Cole swallowed thickly, taking a deep breath and giving it a moment to make sure his voice would come out steady. “I don’t know, Jay,” he said quietly. “But I do know it’s her own fault she missed out on having a pretty great son.”

Jay choked on a sound that sounded suspiciously like a sob, but he forced it to turn into a laugh. “You’re sappier than a pine forest you goof,” he pulled away and shoved Cole’s shoulder playfully, scrubbing his sleeves across his eyes. “I think I’m allergic to your soap,” he sniffed and wiped at his nose.

Cole chuckled. “Ah yes, your infamous soap allergy.”

Jay nodded, tugging at the strings of his hoodie. “I wouldn’t change it, y’know?” He said softly. “I love my parents, they’re the best people in the world, I wouldn’t want...I just don’t get it, y’know?”

Cole nodded. He kind of understood, sort of, in his own way. For years, he’d struggled with the knowledge that his father was never going to approve of what he did. Lou had...a very different measure of success than Cole could achieve. He had wondered, many times, why his dad couldn’t just accept him for who he was without trying to mold him into who he wanted him to be. Now, they had a pretty solid relationship, and they’d worked out their differences as time went on. But it had been hard - even if it wasn’t really comparable to Jay’s situation. His dad loved him in his own way, he just said it in ways that had taken Cole a long time to understand. It wasn’t really comparable to being left for dead in a stack of old tires, so he didn’t say anything.

Jay plopped back onto his bed, and Cole took that as his cue that their conversation was over and he had done an acceptable job of offering comforty. Mediocre, at worst, and he could live with that. “The others want to debrief when you’re ready,” he reported dutifully, the secondary reason they’d elected a spokesman to check on Jay. “They think we should make a plan, in case she comes back.”

Jay nodded. That made sense - she would definitely be back, and they couldn’t be caught off guard again. Half of the monastery was torched, and Kai had been thrown out of a flying ship twice. They needed to be ready. “Okay. Let’s do it.” He drug the dresser away from the door again, and Cole took the initiative to relocate the bed.

They walked together toward the voices of the others, Cole half a step behind Jay when he notices him glancing over his shoulder every two steps or so. He relaxed a bit, at that; soothed by the quiet promise that the earth ninja was watching his back. He was glad Cole didn’t say anything - he felt stupid enough being this jumpy in his own home.

The others were in the kitchen, gathered around the table. They had a large sheet of paper spread across the table, and Lloyd was sitting cross-legged in the middle of it doodling something with a quill.

“...Y’all nullified the ‘no sitting on the table’ rule without me!?” Jay asked with mock indignance,

Lloyd looked up and grinned at him, patting the spot on the table beside him. “C’mon, we’re compiling a list of her strengths and weaknesses based on our research.” he gestured to his handiwork:

WEAKNESSES
Long-range weapons (seven sources)
Fire probably???

There was a little drawing beside each, the first of Zane throwing a shuriken, and the second of Kai engulfed in an inferno.

“Very detailed,” Cole hummed, taking a seat at the end of the table beside Zane. “I’d put fire as a strength, though, what with the whole fireball incident of like...fifteen minutes ago.”

Jay grabbed a quill and scrawled:

STRENGTHS
Flying boat
No morals
Fireballs
Probably money rich

Kai hummed in approval. He dipped his quill into the shared ink well and started sketching a poor rendition of her boat.

A timer beeped, and Zane stood to retrieve something from the oven. He returned shortly with a plate of cookies, which he set on the table beside Lloyd. “I have prepared refreshments,” he reported. “The occasion seemed to need them. I have combined everyone’s favorite flavors into a single cookie.”

“Oooh, don’t mind if I do,” Cole snatched a cookie and chomped into it, his face going blank as he froze. “Oh. Oh, Zane, that is...really something.”

“Let me try,” Kai grabbed one, and his teeth had barely sunk into it before he jumped up and ran across the kitchen, spitting the mouthful of cookie into the trash can with an overly-dramatic gagging sound. “First Spinjitzu Master it’s still on my tongue,” he whined, grabbing a paper towel and scrubbing it down his tongue. He shuddered, panting as he returned to the table. He gave Zane a smile that was definitely a poorly-concealed grimace. “Great cookies, Zane.”

Zane frowned and picked up one of the cookies. “Perhaps combining so many flavors was a lapse in judgment on my part. I will make replacement cookies.” He smiled and shuffled back over to the stove, pulling some baking supplies out of the cabinet.

Kai leaned across the table to add ‘probably these cookies’ to the weakness column.

Chapter 7: Chapter Seven

It was Nya’s idea to recruit her and Kai’s parents to help them prepare. They had known Liberty best, once upon a time, which was more than anyone else could say. Sensei Wu may have had something helpful to add, if he were in fact present, or prone to saying helpful things in general. He would more than likely have told them to leave it alone and wait - all things run their course, and this threat too would likely resolve itself when the time was right.

But Wu wasn’t there.

Maya and Ray were reluctant to team up with the ninja and essentially ‘get back in the game’ without at least consulting the sensei, but they caved in the end. Six ninja is a lot of ninja to argue with and win.

Maya was convinced, thoroughly, that the best defense is always a good offense. If they could catch her off guard, then there would simply be no way for her to get the upper hand against that many ninja.

Jay didn’t ask what they intended to do upon obtaining this ‘upper hand’ they were all so desperately after. The question sat uncomfortably lodged in his throat for most of the conversation, forcing him into silence because he was too afraid to ask. He wasn’t even sure they had a plan, and if not, they should probably make one - but somebody else was going to have to be the one to bring that up.

“Back in the day, she lived here,” Ray pointed to a spot on the giant map of Ninjago City that Lloyd had helpfully rolled out in the living room floor. “When she married Cliff, she moved in with him here,” he tapped another spot.

Nya shook her head. “It’s no good - we’ve been there. It’s empty.”

Cole frowned. “When did you go to her old house? Why?”

Nya looked guiltily to Jay, and he waved for her to go ahead. He didn’t care who knew what at this point. It’d been ridiculous to keep it all from them in the first place. “Jay inherited the house when Cliff died,” she explained uncomfortably. “The mailman brought a letter - apparently it was in his will.”

“First Spinjitzu Master, that giant house is ours?” Kai peered closer at the map, as if anything she’d said implied any of this had anything to do with him. “Why don’t we live there!?”

“Kai!” Nya huffed, shaking her head warningly when he looked at her in indignation.

Jay crossed his arms and curled in on himself, trying not to feel guilty about the fact that he did actually own a veritable mansion, and the ninja were currently housed in a half-burnt monastery. He wasn’t ready to go back to Cliff’s house. He may never be, truthfully, and that was a big part of why he hadn’t told them. They would ask questions he didn’t know how to answer, and make arguments that made so much sense. They really should be using that house. He just didn’t want to.

“It’s not your house, Kai,” Lloyd chided.

Kai huffed and gestured dramatically to Jay. “Um, excuse me, this is my future brother-in-law, remember? I’m special.”

“Still not your house, Kai,” Nya shook her head, and tried her best to reign the conversation back in. “Should we check the first place?”

Maya shrugged. “The last I knew, there was an elderly woman living there with ten to twelve cats. I would save yourselves the time and check here, first,” she tapped the map toward the edge, on the outskirts of Ninjago.

Kai lifted her finger to look under it. “A hill?”

“We used to call it ‘Liberty Hill’,” Maya shared, as if that were a particularly clever title they’d come up with. “She always used to go there - clear her mind, meditate, get away from everybody. She was a people-person through and through, but she was pretty high strung. Whenever she wanted to get away, she’d go to that hill.”

Kai’s frown deepened. “She’d just go sit on a hill in the middle of nowhere?”

Ray shrugged. “It’s a stormy region, and she always liked being near lightning. She built a little cabin there - loved tinkering and building things. You can count on a daily storm, and she used to drag us out there all the time just to sit and watch the lightning.” He smiled wistfully, then shook himself when he remembered that they weren’t friends anymore.

Jay stared at the hill, gnawing on his lip as he forced himself, once again, not to ask his burning question. Liberty was starting to sound...very human, the more they talked. Before she’d gone off the deep-end, before she’d had a baby she didn’t want, she had been the Smiths’ friend. A ninja, who had a favorite hill where she would sit and watch the storms. Jay had done the same thing many times, from the roof of the monastery or the deck of the balcony. He loved it. He fondly remembered the storms that had blown up during his time locked up on a pirate ship. They had been a bright spot in a very bleak stretch of time. He felt better, when it stormed. The tingle of electricity in the air felt like hope. He remembered staring at the sky and trying to use a bolt of lightning, of all things, to convince himself that somehow things were going to turn out okay.

He wondered if he’d think of her, now. He didn’t know if he could enjoy a storm anymore, past the knowledge that she used to do the same. That thought hurt more than he thought it should.

Nya moved to sit beside him, grabbing his hand under the table and giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’ll check there, then,” she decided, and Jay felt a horrible weight lift off his shoulders when she didn’t ask. He had been expecting it - the whole team, looking at him and waiting for him to make the final call about what they did. He didn’t know how much he didn’t want that until Nya handled it for him.

She was an actual lifesaver, the best thing that ever happened to him, the embodiment of everything good and perfect in the world. He dropped his head against his shoulder and breathed deeply, finally speaking past the awful questions that still milled around in his mind. “I love you so much, Nya.” He winced at the terrible sound of his own voice.

Nya didn’t mind. “Love you big as the ocean.”

Jay smiled. “Love you big as the sky.”

Kai groaned. “Not that I don’t want to throw up today, but haven’t we got a hill to get to?”

Nya slammed her hand onto the table. “You know I have to have the last word, Kai!”

Kai whined and dropped his head into his hands, waving for her to get it over with.

Nya nodded in satisfaction, turning back to Jay. “Love you bigger than Kai’s ego.” She beamed when he giggled at her latest comeback.

Unfortunately, Kai was right - they had a hill to get to. So she stood and led the way to the Bounty, pulling Jay after her because she knew he’d probably stall for as long as he could possibly get away with if she didn’t.

She waited until the others were on board, and stopped Jay before he could jump up and join them. “You okay?” She asked, earning an honest shrug. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Nobody would say anything if you chose to sit this one out. You can call P.I.X.A.L., have a nice chat about...wires, or something, whatever it is you two talk about. I’m sure she’d love to take a break from her assignment with Borg.”

Jay sighed - it was tempting. Very tempting, actually - the thought of staying home, barricading himself in his room, and distracting himself by catching up with P.I.X.A.L. and whatever in the world she’d been up to since she left on a solo mission, was a difficult proposition to turn down; especially when faced with the alternative. “I’m fine, Nya,” he said instead, and he knew she saw right through him. She always did. “I need to do this, I think. Closure, or something, I don’t...”

Lloyd dropped down beside them, effectively interrupting his nonsensical ramble. He smiled, a horrible gentle little thing, and Jay couldn’t help but know what was coming. “I think you should stay here.”

“What!?” Jay demanded, instantly defensive because Lloyd’s tone was so different from Nya’s. She was worried about him - Lloyd was worried about the mission. “You can’t do that, Lloyd, I...”

“Listen, Jay, it’s not...” Lloyd started, huffing in frustration when he fumbled over his words. He still wasn’t used to being the leader, not very good at telling the others what to do. “It’s not just that you’d be a liability. You’re emotionally invested in the mission - that’s a very basic no-no. And I’m not saying it’s your fault, or that you shouldn’t be, I’m just saying that it complicates things. It’s just...like...for example, Cole’s not going to feel comfortable throwing a boulder at her if you’re watching. And what if he needs to throw a boulder at her? Not to mention you’re kinda...” he gestured vaguely. “You need a break. Nya, back me up here.”

Nya glanced back and forth between them, not able to stop herself from glaring at Lloyd a little for having the audacity to put her in this position. She wasn’t supposed to have to take sides.

She agreed, objectively, with Lloyd. Everything he was saying was true, and she couldn’t really deny that. But she couldn’t bring herself to join his side of the argument. It wasn’t just that she wanted to avoid getting in a fight with Jay, although she very much did want to avoid that, it was also that she respected him and trusted that he knew his own limits. If he really believed that he needed to do this, then she wasn’t going to stop him. “If he feels like he’s pushing himself, I think he should stay,” she said at last. “But I’ll support him if he wants to come. I am personally very comfortable hitting her with all the water in Ninjago. I don’t care who’s watching.”

Lloyd clearly didn’t like that answer, but he backed down and jumped back onto the boat.

Jay smiled and wrapped his arms around her from behind, propping his chin on his shoulder. “Have I mentioned I love you?”

“It’s come up once or twice,” she hummed, spinning around to tug him into a kiss. “But I don’t mind being reminded.” She pressed their foreheads together and took a deep breath, hanging tight for a few more when he tried to copy her and didn’t quite succeed. They breathed like that for a minute, until his breaths deepend and slowed and she started to feel less like she was walking straight into a giant mess. When she pulled away, his smile almost made it all the way to his eyes. She squeezed his hand and tugged him toward the ship. “You ready to do this thing?”

A shaky laugh was his only response to that frankly ridiculous question, but she counted it as a win and jumped up into the ship.

Kai was waiting for them, scowling with his arms crossed. “Took you guys long enough, I can actually feel myself getting old. What’s the hold up, you aren’t even saying goodbye.”

Nya poked her tongue out at him, never afraid to stoop to childish measures to torment her brother. “You’re just sad because you haven’t seen Skylor in so long.”

Kai harrumphed and walked away, grumbling something under his breath that she couldn’t make out. It was as clear an indication as any that she had won.

“To the hill!” Cole called happily, marking the location on the much bigger map on the Bounty.

“I have brought fresh refreshments for the trip,” Zane appeared and held out two brown paper bags to Nya and Jay. “I have improved the recipe - they should no longer resemble the flavor of trash.”

“Hey now, sometimes pretty great stuff ends up in the trash,” Jay forced a laugh and the joke definitely didn’t land, but at least he was trying to joke about it.

“You’re the best, Zane,” Nya accepted the bag and sniffed it cautiously, fully prepared to toss the snacks overboard after the earlier incident. Up until today, she had been convinced that Zane could cook just about anything.

“Mm, cornbread,” Jay mumbled happily through a mouthful of cookie.

Nya frowned, but decided against getting rid of them yet. If nothing else, she could always add them to the suspiciously smelly bag that Kai had packed. She had no doubt that it was filled with the previous batch of cookies, transformed into emergency backup weapons. She could think of a few ways to turn a cookie into a long-range weapon.

“We should be to the hill in about three hours,” Lloyd reported. “Jay, you did bring a ninja suit, right?”

Jay looked down at himself, the jeans and sweater he’d put on that morning, and shrugged. “Nah.”

Lloyd started to say something about it, but glanced at Nya and bit his tongue. He may be the leader, but somehow, nobody thought this was his business. “You can borrow one of mine,” he said instead.

“That’d be perfect, thanks,” Jay beamed and clapped him on the shoulder before waving to them all and disappearing into the cabin. He went to the ninja’s shared room and closed the door, hopping onto his bed where he intended to lurk until they arrived at their destination. Staying up top and socializing with the others felt like a lot, and he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Unfortunately, Lloyd had other ideas. He showed up about twenty minutes later, and invited himself to sit beside Jay. He allowed the silence to continue for a few glorious seconds longer before he ruined it. “Do you want to change colors?”

Jay frowned. The answer was a confident unequivocal yes, but he didn’t understand how Lloyd knew that. “What?”

Lloyd shrugged too casually. “I dunno, I just thought the timing was kind of suspicious. We find out your...Liberty used to be the blue ninja, and you start sparring in street clothes. Basically immediately.”

Oh Lloyd was good. Better than Jay had expected from him, which he felt kind of bad about. It’s not like he’d been subtle. Of course the others had noticed. He sighed. “I can’t change much of anything,” he finally said quietly, picking at a loose thread in his blanket. “I can’t help being the new lightning ninja, and I can’t stop looking like a stupid clone of her, but I don’t...” He trailed off, sliding his finger under the thread loop he had created and tugging, watching the material bunch up around the problem he’d made. “I don’t want to be the new Liberty. I don’t want to be like her. What if I...” he hesitated, snapped the thread in half and smoothed the blanket back out. “What if I don’t want to be a ninja at all?”

Lloyd tried his very best to keep a neutral expression, but he knew it didn’t work. Jay was talking nonsense, and he really didn’t feel like he was the person who needed to be dealing with this. Nya would be better, maybe Cole, literally anybody else. But it was Lloyd’s turn, and he didn’t know what to say. “That’s ridiculous.” He knew as soon as he said it that it was the wrong thing to say, and the way Jay pressed himself up against the wall and brought his legs up to his chest, curling up in the smallest possible way just confirmed that Lloyd was kind of the worst at this kind of thing.

“I know,” Jay agreed. “It’s all I’ve done, for a lot of years, but if you think about it...I’m not even that good at it. I’m the worst ninja - you can ask anybody. I’m not the strongest one, or the smartest one, or the coolest one, or...just look at any online poll of us and I’m going to lose unless it’s like...most likely to be killed in battle, or something.”

“That’s not true,” Lloyd argued.

Jay glared at him, and Lloyd didn’t press it because he knew Jay would turn to the internet to cite his source. “I could go into the junkyard business - it’s not cool, but it’s honest work. And people could be like ‘aw look, another Walker joins the tash industry’ instead of talking about how there’s another blue ninja who looks too much like the last one.” He hesitated, and continued so quietly that Lloyd had to strain to hear. “I think I’m ashamed - of who I am, and where I came from. I know people have figured it out, there’s whole articles about it. People aren’t stupid. They have to know.”

Lloyd nodded, because he didn’t really doubt that. He’d grown up hearing about the elemental masters, had seen Sensei Wu’s extensive list of them, had never thought for a minute that the long lines of elemental masters had always basically been a family tree with all the current ninja at the bottom of it. All but one. Even Zane was listed under Dr. Julien, no real reference to the fact that he’d been built by the old ice master. He honestly felt a little dumb for not connecting any of the dots that had been right in front of his face for years. He’d spent his early years in a group home - he was very aware that people weren’t always raised by their birth parents. But he just...hadn’t thought about it.

“Well,” Lloyd finally ventured. “What’s your mom’s favorite color? Edna, I mean, of course.”

Jay uncurled, just a little. “Yellow.”

Lloyd smiled and nodded decisively. “Then be the yellow ninja.” He tried not to think about how that would look, what a bright atrocity that would be, any possibility of stealth absolutely ruined. But it’s not like Jay was the master of stealth anyway.

Jay wrinkled his nose in thought. “Yellow ninja? Come on, Lloyd, that’s horrible.”

Lloyd shrugged. “Okay, well, what’s Ed like?”

Jay shuddered. “Magenta.”

“Yellow’s better,” Lloyd said decisively. “It’s basically discount gold, and everybody knows gold’s cool. Plus, lightning’s usually depicted as yellow.”

Jay frowned thoughtfully for a moment, and finally shrugged. “I don’t hate it. But I don’t want to use my element anymore either. I know, it’s stupid, I just...”

Lloyd shook his head. “No, I get it. For a long time, I felt like my powers were evil. I mean, if I got them from Dad then they had to be, right? He got corrupted in a bad way, even if he turned out okay in the end. I didn’t want his powers, because he was no good. I felt like they were bad, evil powers. Of course, being descendents of the First Spinjitzu Master, we both got to have powers at the same time. But...all of that to say, I get it, I think. I decided to use my powers for good, even if they have the potential for bad. And you can decide to use your powers to help people for exactly as long as they’re yours, and let them go when they’re not anymore. If you even want kids, I dunno.”

“I thought I did, before this whole mess,” Jay shrugged. “Now, I don’t know. What if I get corrupted and go all...” he made a vague stabbing motion.

Lloyd raised an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be you stabbing your kid?” Jay nodded. “...Do you even know yourself, dude? You’re not going to stab any kid. You apologize when you punch bad guys!”

Jay shrugged, because he was right, but that didn’t make the thought any less terrifying.

“Plus, Nya would definitely stab you if you tried,” Lloyd pointed out. “So I think you’re set, even if you do completely lose your mind.”

Jay laughed, just a little, because he was pretty sure that Lloyd was right. Nya wouldn’t hesitate. It was a nice thought - not being stabbed by Nya, but the kid thing. Nya was a little more skeptical about whether or not kids were a good idea, but she was open enough to the idea. One day, far in the future - she had placed a very heavy emphasis on the word ‘far’. She would be an excellent mother - he was sure of it. “Maybe you’re right,” he said quietly, reaching out to ruffle Lloyd’s hair just to watch him squirm. He wasn’t a tiny little menace anymore, but he would always be the baby brother of the team. “Maybe nurture wins and nature doesn’t matter. Maybe these awful feelings will find their place and stop feeling so bad, eventually. Maybe the world needs a mediocre yellow ninja.”

“You’re not a mediocre ninja, Jay,” Lloyd shook his head firmly. “There’s more to being a good ninja than beating people up. You’ve gotta have heart, too. And you bring plenty of that to the table.” He didn’t give Jay a chance to argue, and just stood and rummaged through his bag until he found a backup gi. “Here,” he tossed it to Jay, who caught it with his face. “Get dressed, honorary green ninja. We’ll be there soon.”

Chapter 8: Chapter Eight

Maya crossed her arms over the railing and gazed out at the storm, not caring that she was getting absolutely soaked, nor that there was lightning everywhere and her chances of being struck weren’t as low as she would typically like. She’d been here often enough, back in the day, and she’d never been electrocuted before. There was no real reason to start now.

“You okay?” Ray asked, coming up beside her and joining her to watch the storm.

Maya shrugged. “I’ve been better,” she admitted softly, watching a bolt of lightning streak across the sky and trying to ignore how much it made her heart ache. It was ridiculous, all these years later, for a storm to break her heart. She hadn’t been to the mountains since Lilly died, and she’d barely been able to watch the rain since Liberty went off the rails.

She thought she’d done a decent job of hiding how she felt the day she’d met Jay. When she was finally released from being captive, finally got to reunite with her children, only to find them grown. It was expected, but it still hurt. And then she met her daughter’s fiance, and she’d known who he was - had hugged him immediately despite being barely acquaintances. He reminded her so much of Libber, back when she was bright and sweet and loving.

He had hugged her back, not caring that he barely knew her, and Maya had ached for the days long past when she had two incredible friends to turn to. She could really have used them, that day, when everything was so overwhelming and confusing.

She’d cried when she met Cole, and she had actually explained why. Cole knew of her, had heard the stories from his mother. He knew she knew Lilly, and had apologized for reminding Maya of her. It was an odd thing to apologize for, and Maya had insisted that she was just happy to see that Lilly’s son had grown up well.

She felt the same way about Libber’s, but she hadn’t been able to say it. It was very obvious pretty quickly that he had no idea, and she wasn’t going to be the one to ruin that innocent ignorance. But she had, in the end. She’d uttered the words that crushed the heart of her best friend’s son, and she hated it. She hated even more that they were going to find her, now. Going to confront her, to stop her, because even all these years later she was still causing problems. It was hard to think that this homicidal maniac was her big-hearted friend from another lifetime.

Ray wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer, dropping his head onto hers with a sigh. “Yeah, me too,” he admitted softly. “It’s crazy to think that the last time we were here, the whole gang was still together. Lilly was alive, Libber was...sane. I miss those days.”

Maya nodded, trying to fight back tears that fell anyway, mixing with the rain that fell down her face. “We should have been there for them, Ray,” she muttered brokenly. “For all of them. I know we couldn’t help it, I know it’s not our fault, but...that was always the deal - at least with Lilly. We were always meant to take care of each other’s kids, if anything happened. We should have been there to train them, to teach them, Lilly and Libber were like sisters to us. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”

“I know,” Ray soothed softly, hand rubbing up and down her back against her sopping wet gi. “I know, Maya, I hate it too. But we’re here now, right?”

Maya nodded, choking on a small sob when a bolt of lightning struck a little too close for comfort. “I hate the weather,” she said honestly, and Ray nodded even if neither of them moved to go inside.

Maya nearly jumped out of her skin when somebody leaned against the railing beside her, right beside her, but relaxed when she glanced over and it was just Jay. No sense of personal space, just like...she shut down that train of thought, because it wasn’t fair to anybody, and forced a smile. “Hey.”

Jay waved half-heartedly and stared straight ahead, a small shudder passing through him when thunder rumbled. He reached out a hand, unflinching when lightning immediately snaked down from the sky to dance across his fingertips. “What are y’all doing out here?”

Maya shrugged. “Watching the storm.”

Jay hummed in understanding, and Maya couldn’t resist backing away from the railing and raising her arms. A clear invitation for a hug, selfishly taking advantage of the touchy ninja who didn’t know how to say no.

She expected him to reciprocate, not really counting on much enthusiasm. But he tackled her, hanging on tightly and not letting go. They stayed like that for awhile, drenched in rain that somehow made the entire situation feel less awkward. She really shouldn’t be seeking comfort from Jay of all people, but she couldn’t help it - and the rain promised secrecy, a shroud of promises that none of it would be spoken of in the sunlight.

“Thanks for coming,” Jay mumbled at last. He still didn’t pull away, just buried his face deeper into her shoulder. “I know this is probably hard for you, and I’m sure you didn’t want to come, and I’m really sorry for dragging you into this, but I’m glad you’re here.”

Maya swallowed thickly, promising herself that she wouldn’t start crying again. “Of course we came.” They hadn’t really had a choice - Liberty needed to be stopped before she torched somewhere else, and aside front he sensei, they were the only ones left who knew her. Even if Maya really felt like she didn’t anymore.

Jay finally pulled away, staring at the sky. He hesitated, and finally asked: “Did y’all know Cliff?”

“Kind of,” Ray said, less hesitant to tell this story because while Cliff was far from the best, he wasn’t really the worse, either. “We tried to get him to hang out, rope him into the ‘boys club’, I guess. But he was always so busy, famous as he was. Making money was more important than making friends, I guess. He was nice enough, though. He was good to Libber, always cheered us on from the sidelines while we saved the world. We didn’t see him again, after you were born. I don’t really know his whole take on that situation.”

Jay swallowed, blinking rain out of his eyes. “He had like a...blue ninja shrine, in his house,” he said. “I like to believe he didn’t hate me, but I dunno. It could have been him stalking me so he could find and kill me. I’d have to go back and investigate, but I don’t really want to. I like thinking that he didn’t know she was going to throw me away and then didn’t know what to do when he found out. By the time I was a ninja and he figured out who I was, which honestly wouldn’t be hard to do, it was way too late for him to just...show up. Then he died, not long after. I’m kind of glad I never met him. It’s easier hoping for the best than finding out he was just as bad as Liberty.”

If that was truly the case, then Maya doubted he would have asked. He did want to know, even if he didn’t want to want to. “I’m sorry we don’t know,” she said, and Jay just shrugged.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” he reported, abruptly changing the subject. “Feel free to hide in the cabin if she does end up being here. I get it if you’d rather stay out of it.”

“Yeah we won’t be doing that,” Ray clapped him on the shoulder. “I, personally, have a piece of my mind to give her.”

“Ray!” Maya scolded, but Jay just laughed, as stable as his laughs ever were.

“Get in line,” he chuckled. “She seems to have joined ‘Ninja’s Most Wanted’. Zane has a poster.” He stretched his arm apart. “Real big. Garmy’s at the top.”

Chapter 9: Chapter Nine

The cabin was small and empty. It barely fit the ninja, crammed inside like so many sardines. It was cute, built out of wood and furnished with a small table and a cot. It was the perfect place for a single person to stay for a couple of nights, as long as they intended to spend most of their time outside.

 

“Oh-ho-ho, we’ve got a box,” Kai peered under the bed, sliding out a long, slim wooden box.

He dropped it on the table, and Zane wasted no time whipping out some bolt cutters to cut the lock off. It fell to the table with a ‘clunk’, and Zane flipped open the lid.

Everyone gathered around to look, and Cole scowled in disappointment when it was just a pile of broken weapons. “What kind of thing is this to lock up?” He reached inside and withdrew two short metal rods, about six inches long. They were plain and unremarkable, and Maya grabbed them in excitement.

“It’s her lightning rods!” She said happily, holding one in each hand and stretching her arms apart. “They’re conductive, or something, I think, and she could make a lightning bolt as big as she wanted to connect the two. If she was hanging onto one, she could stash the second anywhere and zap! Took out a lot of baddies that way. Stupid ones will catch anything you throw at them.”

Jay cocked his head and held out a hand. “May I?”

Maya nodded eagerly and handed them over. They sparked on contact, and Jay twirled one experimentally. “I don’t get it,” he admitted, tossing one into the air and zapping it. The two connected as promised, and he shrugged. “Why not just zap something normally, was she stupid?”

“Well we know that,” Kai rolled his eyes and pulled another weapon out of the box. This one was like nunchucks with about three yards of chain between them. “Hey, cool,” Kai said appreciatively, flinging it to test it out and whacking Lloyd. “Sorry.”

“This is why we have the no nunchucks in the house rule!” Lloyd yelped, snatching the weapon away from Kai and dropping it back into the box. “Let’s just go, she’s obviously not here.”

Jay dropped the lightning rods back into the box, and Maya closed it and picked it up. She obviously intended to bring it with them, and nobody argued. If she wanted to steal her old friend’s weapon stash, then they weren’t going to stop her.

It was still pouring rain outside, and most of the ninja made a break for the bounty, eager to get back into the cabin and decide on their next course of action once they were safely tucked away in the warm, dry indoors.

Jay started to follow them, was half a second away from breaking into a run and legging it for dear life, but something shiny caught his eyes. He knew better than to investigate - it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten into trouble for getting distracted. But nobody was here, and it wouldn’t take but a few seconds to double back and see what was laying in the grass. It could be something cool, like a shiny rock or a piece of metal engraved with Libber’s exact location. He couldn’t resist.

He backtracked and scrubbed the rain away from his eyes, squinting down at the shiny thing in the grass. “Huh,” he mumbled to himself, scooping up what was, in fact, a shiny rock. “Cool, Cole’s gonna love this.” He tucked it in his pocket, turned to leave, and immediately found himself face-to-face with a ninja.

She was wearing a blue gi, and staring at him with icy blue eyes. “Hello, blue ninja,” she said lowly, and Jay screamed.

He tried to run, like an absolutely terrible ninja, but she caught the back of his gi and stopped him. “I’m not the blue ninja!” He insisted when he couldn’t break away. “I’m the green ninja, see? The chosen one and all that!”

She laughed, high and irritating. “Green ninja’s got green eyes, sunshine. It’s a terrible disguise.”

“Let me go!” Jay yelled, trying to pry her hands away. Surely the others had ot hear him - they would be here in half a second, coming to save him.

She clicked her tongue, shaking her head sadly. “Is that any way to talk to your mother?” She demanded, and Jay could swear he felt his heart stop. He’d known who she was, logically, as soon as he’d seen her. They’d come looking for her - who else would it be? But still, hearing her actually say it made it all suddenly very real and very scary. He needed the others - they should have realized he was missing ages ago. Surely somebody had to be doing a headcount right about now, and they would notice, and everything would be fine.
“Come on,” Liberty said, dragging him forcefully back toward the cabin. “I’ve got plans for us! We have so much to catch up on!”

Jay scrambled helplessly against the mud, and he didn’t understand how she was managing to drag him - he should have been able to get away, to hold his ground at the very least. But here she was, manhandling him in the rain, like he wasn’t an active ninja who was bigger than her. She hadn’t been a ninja in over twenty years, she should not be this strong.

“Nya!” He yelled, hoping desperately that literally anybody would somehow hear him over the rain. “Kai! Anyb-” She cut him off with a swift punch to the jaw, and then she was hauling him through the door and shoving him to the floor. She locked the cabin, barricading the door with a chair.

“Well well well, it’s about time you came to visit me,” Libber shoved off her hood and smiled. Jay tried to dive for the door, but she blocked him.

He almost tackled her - he should be able to get the upper hand. But he couldn’t make himself do it. Maybe this is what Lloyd had been talking about, when he’d suggested that Jay stay home. He had thought he’d be able to beat her up like any other villain, until he was looking at her.

“What do you want?” He demanded, like he didn’t already know. She either wanted to kill him or steal his powers, he was sure of it, but he asked anyway.

“Do I have to want something?” Libber asked, and she sounded genuinely hurt. “I just want to talk to you! I feel like we’ve missed so much time, I barely know you! I figured it was time to fix that.” She stepped forward, her eyes big and sad. “I can’t believe the stories my old friends are spreading. Making me out to be the villain! They’re lying to you,” she reached out a hand, gently grabbing Jay’s arm and looking at him pleadingly. “You know I would never do what they said I did, right? It wasn’t like that, not at all, I was just scared. Life is very dangerous for ninja, you know. I didn’t want you to grow up like that. It was for the best, letting that lovely old couple raise you instead. You understand that, I know you do!”

Jay swallowed. Sure, he could kind of twist it around to understand that. If that was the story, then sure. She was scared for his safety, so gave him up so that he would be safe. Except she hadn’t done that - she’d hidden him in a stack of tires on the far end of the junkyard; and he’d had his parents verify as much. It’s not like she knocked on the door and kindly asked if they were interested in a free baby.

But he wanted to believe it. “Why would they lie?” He demanded.

“They were jealous,” she didn’t miss a beat - she sounded so confident. “We’ve got the best element, you know. The most powerful.”

Jay shook his head. “No, that’s...that’s the green ninja. The element of green, or whatever.”

Libber laughed. “That’s what they want you to believe. The sensei’s always been so fond of his green ninja - searched for years. They had to get rid of me - can’t have a blue ninja more powerful than the green one, now can they?”

She was grasping at straws, weaving a tale that didn’t even make sense. Everything she was saying was like she was making it up on the spot, like she hadn’t had a veritable lifetime to come up with what she would tell him if they ever met.

There was a banging on the door, and Libber jerked toward it, eyes wide. “Hey!” Kai called in irritation. “Open up, what are you doing, Jay? This is ridiculous, you can sulk in the Bounty!”

“Kai!” Jay yelled, and Libber immediately leaped forward. She grabbed his shoulders and tackled him to the ground, a hand moving to cover his mouth.

“Shut up!” She hissed. She leaned in close, he eyes looking absolutely insane from Jay’s new vantage point of the floor. “They can’t know I’m here - not yet. I’m not finished with you yet.”

Jay grabbed her arms and tried to pull them away. He couldn’t breathe - this was not an ideal time to freak out, but he couldn’t help it. He was locked in a tiny cabin with his mother who hated his guts, and nobody knew what was happening, and they couldn’t even get inside if they did. This was very, very bad. He whined behind her hand, and did the only thing in the world he could think of to do. Poked out his tongue, and licked her hand.

Libber squawked indignantly, yanking her hand away in disgust. “Kai! HELP!” Jay had exactly enough time you yell before she grabbed his shoulders and lifted him just enough to slam him back down. His head cracked against the floor and everything went a little fuzzy. He could distantly hear Kai’s voice, knew he was yelling something through the door, but he couldn’t focus on what it was. Everything sounded very distant, and he tried to calculate how many head injuries this would be. He had a collection of them. He didn’t think that was a good thing.

The banging on the door got louder, and Libber screamed. She said something, he didn’t know what it was, and then his entire body jerked when he was zapped.

He screamed. It hurt, a lot, and he suddenly felt very bad for all the times he had zapped his friends. It wasn’t on purpose, but it had still happened a handful of times.

Jay stared up at Libber through his blurry vision. She had something metal in her hands - metal with little spikes on one side. She slammed it down onto his chest, and Jay screamed. He could swear he felt the little spikes grinding against his ribs, and blood trickled from the collection of small holes and oozed down his sides. He convulsed, electricity slamming into him with force. No, not into him - out of him. It traveled through the metal and up Libber’s arm, and she screamed but didn’t let go.

The door was on fire, and that was an oddly comforting thought. The others were coming, and they would do something. He didn’t know what they could do, but hopefully they would make it stop.

What was left of the door flew off its hinges, and Kai ran inside. With one more horribly jarring shock, the onslaught of seemingly never ending volts stopped. Libber pulled away, and she laughed.

“Get away from him!” Kai yelled, and Libber laughed some more.

She got to her feet, kicking at Jay’s leg when she stood. He couldn’t bring himself to react. “Oh, ninja,” she chuckled, clenching her fists. They sparked - lightning dancing around her fingers as she assumed a fighting stance. “Bring it on.”

Kai swore, but held his ground. “What!?” He demanded. “Jay, what happened?” He insisted, but when Jay tried to answer, he couldn’t get his voice to work. He felt absolutely drained - he could no longer feel the hum of electricity coursing through his veins. It had long been a comforting feeling, even if he’d resented it in recent days. Now, it was gone - and it felt like it had taken every ounce of his energy with it. “Oh First Spinjitzu Master, you killed Jay!” Kai yelled, and Jay wanted to say anything to tip him off to the fact that he was still alive, but Kai hurled himself at Libber before he could.

His fists were balls of fire, but he never stood a chance. Libber hit him with a chestfull of lightning, and he fell to the ground. He moaned and twitched, trying to push himself back up with shaking arms.

“Kai? Jay?” Nya called from outside, and Libber growled in frustration. The rest of the ninja were outside, and she knew she was no match for that many ninja. She could take any of them, but not all of them.

Libber raised a hand and summoned a massive bolt of lightning. It fried a hole through the roof, and Libber hastily retreated through it.

Nya hit the door running, and gasped when she took in the scene. The two most important people in her life, sprawled on the floor. Kai sparked and jerked, residual aftershocks still haunting him. Jay was still and bleeding, and Nya didn’t know what to do first.

Luckily, Lloyd was right no her heels. “Help Jay, I’ve got Kai,” he decided immediately - he was better under pressure than not, always able to come up with a plan on the spot like he struggled to do when they actually had time. He dropped to his knees beside Kai, and Nya finally spurred herself into action.

She ran across the tiny cabin, hitting the ground beside Jay hard enough to rattle her teeth. “Jay!” She called, hand scrambling to open his gi and assess the damage underneath.

“N-nya,” Jay gasped, gritting his teeth and knocking his head back against the floor. “I couldn’t...she...”

“Shhh, it’s okay, we’ve got you,” Nya soothed, even as her heart thundered against her ribs and she questioned if she did, in fact, have him.

There was a cluster of shallow holes on his chest, oozing blood. They weren’t deep enough to really hurt anything important, and he wasn’t losing much blood, either. It obviously wasn’t ideal, but it could definitely be worse. He was going to be fine. He’d been through worse, several times, so...why was he just laying there?

Zane joined them, digging through his first aid kit and setting to work cleaning the wound. Nya took that as her invitation to tap out and focus on other problems, so she grabbed his hand and moved to prop his head in her lap. “Jay?” She asked, smoothing his wet hair away from his eyes. They fluttered open, and he gave her a weak smile. “There you are,” she tried to return the smile, but she knew it fell flat. “What happened?”

“She...she had a...” Jay panted, waving a hand vaguely through the air. “A stabby thing. She...stabby’d,” he gestured to his chest, taking a deep breath that seemed to take entirely too much out of him. “She...” He held his hand in front of his face, flipping it over a few times before growling and frustration and slamming it back to the floor.

Kai sat up with some help from Lloyd. He put a hand to his head and squinted toward Jay. “How did she get your powers?”

Jay shrugged miserably, and Nya gasped. “She got your powers!?”

Kai nodded. “Zapped the heck out of me,” he mumbled.

“Sorry,” Jay whined.

Kai frowned. “What for? You didn’t zap me. This time, anyway. And never that bad, for the record. You don’t seem to be in the habit of tossing around enough electricity to power Ninjago City for the rest of our lives.”

Nya gave him a sympathetic look. He would definitely be dead if he’d actually been hit with that much power, but she didn’t point that out. She’d been zapped by accident probably even more than the others, and could verify that it wasn’t any fun. She couldn’t imagine being hit by someone actually trying to hurt her.

“...So what do we do now?” Cole asked, after checking on both Jay and Kai and seeming satisfied that they were more or less okay.

“Let her go,” Jay decided, as if he was completely at peace with that idea, and didn’t think the others could possibly have a valid argument against it. “I don’t care. I don’t need my powers, nor do I particularly want them. She can keep ‘em.”

Nya’s eyes widened. “Jay, you can’t...She’s dangerous! She’s even more dangerous, now!”

Jay shook his head firmly. “No, she was dangerous specifically to me, because she wanted her powers back. She’s got ‘em now.”

Lloyd waved Cole over and propped Kai up against him before standing and moving to Jay. “You can’t just let her keep your powers,” he insisted. “They’re yours!”

“They were hers first!”

“That’s not...” Lloyd started, and dropped his head into his hands with a tired sigh. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s get them back to the monastery. We can talk about this once they’ve had time to recover.”

Jay glared at him, clearly having no intention whatsoever of revisiting the subject, but allowed Nya and Zane to help him to his feet. He felt much too shaky, and he didn’t know if it was from being electrocuted or if people without elemental powers just...felt like this. Maybe regular people were just tired and shaky all the time. No wonder Libber hadn’t wanted to lose hers. He swayed dangerously, but Nya and Zane dutifully kept him upright.

The walk to the Bounty felt like it took forever. Ray and Maya were there waiting for them, and they were adequately concerned when they got a look at the two injured ninja. They were even more concerned when they heard what had happened to land them in this stated. They wanted to go back immediately and hunt down Libber, but they dropped it when Lloyd promised they’d talk about it later. Once Kai and Jay were a little less dead on their feet.

Chapter 10: Chapter Ten

Lloyd knocked hesitantly at Jay’s door, waiting for the quiet ‘come in’. He squeaked it open, and waited for his eyes to adjust rather than flipping on the light. Jay had been ‘recovering’ for six days, and everyone knew that it had switched to ‘sulking’ some time ago. But nobody knew how to address the issue, or what they could possibly do to cheer him up. The situation didn’t exactly lend itself to cheer.

“Hey, Kiwi,” Jay greeted hoarsely.

“Hey Starfruit,” Lloyd smiled, crossing the room and inviting himself to sit on the foot of the bed. Jay was buried under the covers, just his eyeballs poking up.

“...What?” Jay frowned, sitting up at the weird new nickname.

“Starfruit,” Lloyd repeated, holding out his hands and presenting Jay with the project he’d been working on for the past week.

Jay stared at the yellow gi in Lloyd’s hands, and he couldn’t quite put a name to the feelings that it sparked in his chest. He had been pretty clear when he’d told the others, a few days ago when they’d tried to drag him out of his room, that he didn’t want to be a ninja. He was tired, and he was powerless, and there wasn’t any point. It irritated him that the others hadn’t let it drop. But he couldn’t bring himself to be irritated now. Not when it was so obvious that Lloyd had made this for him.

It was surprisingly well done, if a little sloppy in places. Lloyd wasn’t the master of tailoring, but he had done his best. It was stitched neatly, with his initials embroidered in the front.

He carefully took it, pretending like his hands were shaking because he’d been electrocuted a week ago. He held it up and turned it around, breath catching painfully in his throat when he saw the back. Lloyd had definitely gotten help, because he wasn’t that crafty, and it looked incredible. Intricately stitched in a tasteful shade of orange - a perfect depiction of the junkyard.

“You shouldn’t be ashamed of who you are, Jay,” Lloyd said quietly, and Jay bit his lip harshly and forcefully blinked back tears. “And I think you should be downright proud of where you came from.”

Jay didn’t look at Lloyd - kept staring at his gift, not caring that much when he lost the battle and tears sprung from his eyes at light speed.

“You don’t need powers to be a ninja,” Lloyd continued. “You’re a whole lot more than your ability to zap people. You’re good at what you do, powers or no. And I know we all really, really want you to stay and keep doing it. But, we want you to be happy. If it’ll make you happy to leave, and go open a junkyard, then...we’re with you. But Ninjago would miss you. You were voted first place in the ‘best squishy cinnamon roll contest’, afterall.”

Jay blinked. “The what?”

“I don’t know, I saw it online,” Lloyd shrugged, scooting up to sit beside Jay and knock their shoulders together. “Whaddaya say? Wanna be the best dang yellow ninja to ever live?”

Jay laughed, weak and watery. “Fine,” he agreed, trying to sound more annoyed than he was. “Can’t have you do all this for nothing. I’ll give it a week.”

Lloyd beamed, and Jay reached over to ruffle his hair. “Thanks, Greenie. It really means a lot.”

“Of course,” Lloyd grinned. “Us villain spawn gotta stick together, y’know.”

Jay snorted, and finally relaxed against Lloyd. If Lloyd could be the son of Garmadon and still turn out to be the best Ninja Ninjago had ever known, then maybe -just maybe- Jay could turn out pretty okay too.

He smiled softly and gently traced the outline of the junkyard. He was proud to be a Walker. And maybe, at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered. Not Libber, not some duty to be the next blue ninja, not some overrated lightning powers that he didn’t even have anymore. Maybe it was enough, to be the boy from the junkyard who looked at a hurting world and decided to help it, however he could. He was doing his best - and maybe that’s what all of them were doing. Even Lloyd, the fabled Green Ninja. They were just kids, when all of this started. Just a handful of kids against a world that was far too cruel to them. But they had each other. And right here, right now, that was enough.

Notes:

There is a very real possibility that I will continue this, but it might be awhile. There are obviously some loose ends to tie up, and Libber running around zapping stuff is less than ideal. But I felt like this was a decent place to end this particular story. Until then, lovely readers :)

Notes:

Thank you so so much for reading! I love comments, and would be delighted to chat! I wrote this in three days, feel free to tell me if there's any glaring mistakes. I cannot thank y'all enough for reading, and I hope you have a lovely day <3