Chapter Text
“You all have to promise that you won’t freak out,” was the first thing Kai said as he set his mech down at their base.
Every member of the Secret Ninja Force knew that if Kai was willing to admit he’d messed up then whatever this was was serious.
Kai could be determined and quick witted and strong, but was often almost recklessly impulsive. There was always a fire behind his eyes, bright and almost as sharp as the perpetually gelled spikes of his hair.
“What did you do?” Jay shouted, quickly scrambling out of his mech and up to Kai’s, careful to maintain a relatively safe distance from it. None of them had forgotten about what was referred to as the ‘Shark Rabies Incident’, as much as they had all tried. Zane had literally deleted it from his memory files, but still woke up shouting about ‘the teeth’ some nights.
Jay could also be determined and quick witted and strong, but in small, relatively rare bursts, like the freckles that dotted his nose. He had a lot of energy, but it tended to bounce around and eventually ball up into anxiety. He argued, following events such as the aforementioned ‘Shark Rabies Incident’, and presumably whatever mess Kai had made now, that his nervousness was not undue. “Kai?”
Kai didn’t answer, too busy trying to think up an excuse that didn’t make things sound as bad as they were.
“There appears to be someone in your mech.” Zane commented, pulling off his mask. Underneath, the ninja had quite sharp features, (somewhat literally with metal muscles hiding behind his facial tissue), and if he wasn’t smiling his face occasionally took on an uncanny quality. Somehow this didn’t take away from his occasionally odd but always charming demeanour. Zane’s eyes lit up a faint blue as he stared at the mech. “Scans indicate that they are not conscious.”
“What did you do?” Jay demanded again, voice getting louder the more panicked he became.
“Yeah, Kai. Care to share with the class?” Nya teased, well aware of what he had done. He glared, knowing she was just trying to separate herself from any blame that could come from this.
Nya could be easygoing or as rough as rapids, flowing with the situation and getting the job done. There was somewhat of an untouchably cool quality about her, despite the fact that she was an open book to the other ninja. She was the kind of person you saw at school and wished you could be friends with, but never bought up the courage to do more than compliment the blue streaks in her hair, or her piercings.
Kai and Nya were siblings. It was clear enough in the warm tan in their skin and the almost identical slopes of their noses, but even without seeing their faces you could hear it in how they spoke to each other. That was why, despite having secret identities, the whole city knew that the Red and Cyan ninja were related.
“What,” Jay was shouting even louder now, almost hysterical, “did you do?”
It seemed that this was loud enough to actually make Cole notice something was happening, and he finally pulled off his headphones, jumping down from his vehicle. Everyone gathered around Kai, eyeing his mech’s cockpit suspiciously.
Cole also shared that unspeakably cool quality, but more so because, to people who didn’t put in the effort to know him, he could come across as aloof and uncaring. It was probably the headphones he wore almost constantly, or the dark sharp lines of his eyebrows. In reality, he was tough and strong, with fierce morals and a soft heart. He could be very dependable when he wanted to be, which was usually only for his fellow Ninja.
In this instance, though, he had not been paying any attention to the conversation, and couldn’t really be bothered to piece it together through social cues. He was a recovering theatre kid, after all.
Kai knew he was running out of time for excuses.
Cole briefly tried to gauge the situation simply by staring, before giving up. “What’s happening, exactly?”
“I swear you’re gonna lose your hearing one day,” Kai retorted.
“You can’t change the conversation that easily,” Nya retorted. FSM, Kai seriously regretted inviting his sister to join the team.
Cole, apparently completely oblivious to the situation - and to his teammates’ shouts of ‘no!’, proving Kai’s point about his hearing - climbed up to the cockpit and yanked it open.
“Uhhhh, Kai?”
“Yes…?”
“There’s a guy in here.”
“I know that.”
“A guy with fangs!”
Everyone else stared at Kai.
“You didn’t,” Jay’s eyes were wider than Kai thought possible. “Please tell me you didn’t!”
“A guy who I’m pretty sure is Lord Garmadon’s son!” Cole slammed the cockpit shut again, spinning back around to face Kai, eyebrows set in angry lines.
(To answer Jay: He had.)
“It was an accident!” He cried. He was never going to live this down. “I didn’t realise he was his son until too late!”
“So you were willing to kidnap an ordinary person?” Zane quizzed, tilting his head. “This is highly illegal, and not within my perimeters for ninja-like behaviour.”
“It’s not kidnapping-“
“It looks like kidnapping,” Zane argued.
“Kai, you literally kidnapped him,” Nya said. “I watched it happen.”
“You- what? And yet you did nothing? I thought he was just some injured guy! I was gonna take him to the hospital! Before I noticed the, uh, you know...”
“Fangs and glowing red eyes?” Nya’s voice was deadpan. Kai thought she was awfully calm for someone who had apparently noticed him kidnapping the guy but hadn’t stopped him.
“I panicked, ok?”
“I can’t go to jail!” Jay fretted, pacing. “My parents would kill me! Do they have comics in jail? I can’t miss the next issue of Starfire! The last one ended on a cliffhanger!”
“Most prisons will allow soft cover books like comics or magazines. However, you would be unlikely to get them up to date, as there would be delays in shipping due to security protocols.” Zane tried to reassure him. It didn’t work, as Jay looked even more alarmed.
“Delayed?!”
“Maybe we can just return him?” Nya suggested. She seemed a little too amused with the whole situation, and Kai was seriously considering rearranging her perfect rainbow-ordered watercolours when they got home. Maybe switching the lids of her felt-tips around. Putting the green on the red would really mess with her, because they were opposite colours that didn’t go together.
“Return Jay? Or the guy I accidentally kidnapped?”
“Obviously the guy!”
“Right,” Kai’s jokes were unappreciated in his time. “If we’re, like, really fast, maybe no one will have noticed that he was gone?” He looked to Zane as the well-known holder of the brain cell, hoping he might help to convince the others.
No such luck.
“That seems unlikely.”
“He’s the son of Lord Garmadon!” Jay shouted. “Do you really think-”
“Students,” a voice came out from behind the warehouse door. Everybody froze, eyes flickering towards it, then back to Kai. He frantically shook his head, pleading silently with them not to say anything.
“Act natural!” He hissed, and, because they all cared about him when it came down to it (even if he had done something excessively stupid), they all scrambled to do such ordinary, unsuspicious things as reading a comic upside down, inspecting a plastic house-plant, tying the laces on the sandled feet of their gi and stirring an empty bowl with a hairbrush, all with forced grins on their faces. Really, the only person who looked remotely ‘natural’ was Cole, who had pulled his headphones back on, but the effect was rather taken away by the fact that he was inexplicably on top of Kai’s mech.
The warehouse door opened slowly enough for Wu to stare at them for ten whole seconds, the only sound that of grating metal that Jay was supposed to have oiled three weeks ago. Said ninja awkwardly turned a page of his upside down comic to avoid Wu’s eye contact. He was in too deep to flip it back around.
“Ninja,” Wu greeted. He seemed to debate whether to mention their strange behaviour. Maybe Kai had suddenly become uncharacteristically lucky, and Wu was so old that he had forgotten what teenagers did and might assume their forced smiles and odd choices of pastimes were normal. “You should be training.”
Thank the First Spinjitzu Master.
“Yes!”
“Of course!”
“On it!”
They all scrambled to the centre of the warehouse and immediately started warm-up stretches.
Master Wu eyed them suspiciously. “I appreciate your newfound enthusiasm. However, I am concerned that it is not being fostered for the right reasons.”
“What makes you say that?” Kai asked, making sure his stretches were edging him closer to the left and further away from where his mech was parked. Wu’s eyes tracked his movements very precisely.
“I am a ninja master, Kai. I can tell when something is off.”
They all held their breaths (even Zane, who technically did not need to breathe, though he quite enjoyed it. ‘Breathing’ had even been listed on his CV when he applied to be a ninja, despite the fact that it is, in fact, not a hobby or even really a qualification, and that Master Wu had never asked for any such documents.)
“You are all supposed to be at school now that the attack is over.” Everyone let out a collective sigh of relief. A ‘knowledge is power and school is good for you’ lecture was far preferable to whatever it was that might happen after he found out that they’d kidnapped the son of their sworn enemy. Even if it was an accident. “Mental strength is just as important as physical strength, students. There may come a time when you cannot beat an opponent in a physical battle, and must outwit them.”
Then again, was this all really worth it? Kai glanced at Cole, who was discreetly checking the time on his phone. If this speech was even half as long as the one post Shark-Rabies incident then there was no way they’d be back at school on time anyway.
“Knowledge comes in many forms. Knowledge of history, current events, fighting techniques; they all matter. As does emotional intelligence. As you all know, the best way to defeat an enemy is-” he gave them all a look. Even Zane was forced to shrug, lost, and Kai was pretty sure the guy had near constant access to Google. Wu sighed, pressing a hand to his temple under his trademark hat. “...To make them your friend. Which takes great emotional intelligence. You must be able to empathise with another’s point of view.”
None of this meant much to Kai. Why would Wu train them all to kick butt if he wanted them to give Garmadon a hug, or whatever? He didn’t think he would ever care about any villain, be it Garmadon, his son, anyone.
Not that he’d say that to Wu’s face. He did not want to be stuck on gutter duty again. The ninja master’s voice faded in and out of Kai’s attention as he droned on.
“-matter if they see things differently to you, everyone has something in common. You ninja all seem very different. Lightning, water, earth, ice, fire and green?”
“Green?” Jay blurted, confused. Wu ignored him.
“They are all so different-”
“Water and ice are, like, the same thing,” Nya whispered. Wu ignored her too.
“- but all fit together perfectly. It took more than one kind of strength to form this team.”
There was a sound, quiet but distinct during Wu’s dramatic trademarked ‘let that wisdom sink in’ pause. It was the sound of someone moving around in a mech, clothes scuffing against the metal floor behind the seat.
Wu spun back around from where he’d started looking off into the distance very wisely and dramatically.
Kai let out a loud cough, hoping to cover it in a way that wasn’t suspicious. It might have worked, if his teammates hadn’t had the exact same idea.
“Wow, there must be something in the air here, huh?” Nya offered after a solid three seconds of awkward silence.
“Oh yeah, wow,” Kai agreed, while Cole nodded enthusiastically and Jay added another cough for good measure.
“I do not sense anything-“ began Zane.
“Anything safe!” Kai offered, knowing Zane meant the best but also that they could not, under any circumstance, let Wu see the guy they had just kidnapped. “You should really leave so we can, uh, air the place out.”
Wu did not look very convinced, but eventually the team managed to guide him out the door. Master Wu often complained about their ability to work as a team, but there was nothing like the threat of his wrath to get them all to collaborate.
“I need to make a trip,” Wu told them as they accompanied him to his boat. “It is urgent. I trust you will keep up your training while I am gone. Nya is in charge.”
“What?” Kai shouted, forgetting that they didn’t exactly have time to argue. “But she’s the youngest!”
“And the smartest,” Nya countered.
“No way she’s smarter than Zane,” Jay pointed out.
“There is more than one way to be intelligent-” Wu began again, and all of the Ninja were quick to shut up and accept Nya’s temporary leadership. They waved at the boat from the deck for as long as Zane approximated he could still see them, before all rushing back into the warehouse and to the red mech.
It was still shut, thank the First Spinjitzu Master, but they had all heard something move earlier, and who knew how long it would continue to hold the son of Lord Garmadon?
“Ok, who’s gonna check?” Kai asked, and then startled when he realised all of his teammates were looking at him expectantly. “What? Why me?”
“Because it’s your turn,” said Jay, who was roped into this sort of thing too often.
“Because we all looked at you,” said Zane, who had spent a long time studying such social interactions and was glad to put his observations to use.
“Because you’re the one who caused this mess,” said Cole, who could actually be quite sensible if and when Zane relinquished the brain cell.
“Because I’m in charge,” said Nya, who was in charge.
“… Doesn’t seem very fair.”
“Why don’t we put it to a vote?” Zane suggested.
Cole decided to take a less democratic approach, shouting “Bags not it!” Quickly followed by the rest of the team before Kai had a chance to even blink.
“Traitors.”
Carefully, Kai made his way up his mech, hesitating at the cockpit.
He could barely believe he’d thought he was just some injured guy when he’d caught sight of him, even in the heat of battle. Sure, he looked quite peaceful now, what with his rather small frame, a probably misleadingly young-looking face and hair that looked like it got in his eyes too much.
But the guy had fangs, for FSM’s sake! And his clothes looked weird, with an armoured chest-plate with Garmadon’s symbol on the back, nothing a civilian would wear. And, before he’d hit his head, his eyes had been a bright, burning red, a perfect replica of his father’s.
That was how Kai had known who he was, once his brain actually caught up with him halfway to Ninjago City Hospital.
For the last decade or so there had been rumours about Garmadon’s son constantly floating around. Though, now that Kai thought about it, very few people claimed to have actually seen him. It was always heard from a friend of a friend. Supposedly was all too important to the Dark Lord to go out and fight in battle most of the time. He’d apparently joined Garmadon’s ranks years ago, and was his right hand man. Some rumours said he was the brains of the whole operation, and as someone who had actually met and spoken to Lord Garmadon… let’s just as Kai could well believe that he wasn’t able to come up with half the stuff he did alone. Others said he simply carried out his father’s every will like a robot, or that he was a spoiled brat who reaped the benefits of Lord Garmadon's many thieving trips. One rumour even circulated that he wasn’t Lord Garmadon’s son, but his clone instead, trained to become just like his older self so that Lord Garmadon could keep trying to take over the city even after he died of old age.
Even if the rumours changed a lot depending on who you asked, everyone knew the man was probably just as ruthless as his father, if not more so. Apparently the whole three arms and horns thing wasn’t true, and Kai wasn’t about to get close enough to move his hair and check if he had pointed ears, but no one could mistake those red eyes and sharp canines as belonging to anyone else.
(Except Kai, apparently.)
“He’s still knocked out,” Kai whispered, as if Jay’s shouting earlier wouldn’t have woken him up if it was possible.
“He was knocked out?” Zane asked. “Perhaps I should provide medical attention.”
“What? You can’t go near him!” Jay panicked. “Haven’t you heard all the rumours? What if he’s faking?”
“I was built to protect others when they cannot protect themselves. If he is injured, I must help him, even if he is our enemy.”
Reluctantly, they all agreed, although Jay did not look happy about it. In all honesty, Kai wasn’t either, but even he didn’t want the guy to die or something. If nothing else, Lord Garmadon would be sure to enact his revenge for that.
Eventually, they managed to get Cole, as the strongest of the group, to carry and restrain him simultaneously as they carried him into the little dorm-style room they had tucked away in the warehouse. There was a little kitchen downstairs, in addition to enough bunk beds for each of them upstairs. They’d set it up after they first became ninjas the year prior and realised they might be spending a lot of time at their new base. They thought the rooms had maybe been an office overlooking the warehouse before that, but none of them were sure because Wu had been unclear about the building’s origins.
(As he was with most things until they sprung out of the shadows to kill them, or whatever.)
They even had a bathroom with a shower, and Wu gave them money to keep the kitchen well stocked, which all of them were grateful for after training or a particularly bad battle. Shopping usually fell to Zane, who could be trusted with both money and food.
Thankfully, because bunks came in pairs, they had a bed spare, the one with the green bed sheets. They used a set of chains that were supposed to keep Nya’s motorbike safe from thieves or really bad weather to keep him restrained by one of his wrists while Zane examined his head, peeling back his eyelids and shining a light in them.
“He does not appear to have sustained major injuries, but he will likely have a severe headache when he wakes up, and should avoid bright lights, sudden movement and caffeine, as they could exacerbate the issue.”
“No worries, he’ll be out of here by then, and we can forget this ever happened!” Cole said, far too optimistically.
“Like the [REDACTED] incident?” Zane clarified.
Everyone shuddered, knowing exactly what the nindroid was trying to refer to.
“…Yeah. So, where are we gonna dump him?”
They all turned to Kai, who appeared deep in thought.
“Kai?”
“Huh?”
“Kai, you have that look on your face,” Nya remarked, “The one you make when you’re about to do something really stupid.”
“I was just thinking-”
“That’s new!”
“Kai? Thinking?”
“I wasn’t aware that was within your skillset, Kai.”
“Hey!” Kai wished his friends weren’t such comedians. “Just… Well, what if we… didn’t return him?”
“What?!”
“Ok, hear me out! He’s the son of Lord Garmadon, right?”
They all nodded in agreement, with varying levels of distrust and confusion.
“So he’ll want him back,” Kai explained, “if we play our cards right, he might even agree to stop the attacks, even hand himself over!”
Everyone mulled that over. As was often the case, Zane organised his thoughts first. It probably helped that he could literally put them in folders.
“It’s one thing to accidentally kidnap someone,” Zane began, “but quite another to hold them for ransom. This could cause him undue harm and stress, and seems like a dangerous course of action.”
“Plus, he could be, like, super dangerous!” Jay reminded them, glancing in the guy’s direction suspiciously as if he might wake up, break through his chain and start attacking them at any moment, in spite of how suspiciously small and peaceful he looked.
“But think of the good it could do for Ninjago! One tiny bit of very minor kidnapping for the safety of an entire city! Cole, you’re with me on this, right?”
“I mean…” Cole looked conflicted. “It would save a lot of people from being hurt. And, you know, our time. And rebuilding.”
“See! Less construction! Imagine the drive to school not being redirected due to construction every day! Imagine your favourite noodle stand not having to relocate every other week!”
“Master Wu did say we needed to start fighting smarter, not harder…” Nya mused, still looking not entirely convinced. Kai pounced in it, counting it as a win.
“Nya agrees! Three against two! And she’s in charge, so…”
“Sure, it’s fine that I’m the one in charge when it helps win your argument,” Nya grumbled.
“He said we needed to use physical, mental and emotional intelligence to fight. We do not want to hurt this person in any way. We also strive to maintain our anonymity. This course of action does not seem intelligent at all, Kai.”
“We’d wear our masks, obviously,” Kai said, though in all honesty he hadn’t thought about that before Zane had mentioned it. Everyone quickly pulled their cowls up. “And we wouldn’t hurt him! I can understand why you don’t want to do this, but this isn't just some random guy. This is the son of the evil dictator-to-be! His right hand man! Maybe even his evil-er clone!”
This seemed to be enough for Zane, who, although he still looked hesitant, nodded in agreement. Everyone turned to Jay.
“No! Absolutely not! What if he, like, escapes and steals all our mechs while we’re at school?”
“We’ll take turns watching him! Besides, it’s basically the weekend. It won’t take Garmadon long to notice he’s gone, this should all be over by Monday,” Kai spoke with the conviction of someone who had done all this before with zero consequences, despite the fact that this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Jay scowled, but Kai could tell that he was scared, rather than angry. “… Promise I won’t have to watch him alone.”
“Deal!” He said, glad when Jay finally smiled. He gave him a good natured shove. “Wasn’t so hard!”
“Alright… I might as well start packing my bags for prison right now…”
“Hey! Like I said, this isn’t even a proper kidnapping. For all we know, Garmadon will have already noticed that his son is gone and will already be finding a way to contact us.”
(If only things were that simple.)