Lloyd's leg never did heal up quite right. It had snapped cleanly when he hit the ground, and Julien had patched it up pretty well, but it's never advisable to run up a skyscraper's worth of stairs on a leg held together with cloth and concentrated power of will. Even years afterwards, the leg sent twinges up his leg when he tried to copy the feats of athletics that the other ninja could do.
And after the power of the First Spinjitzu Master had been torn out of him, Lloyd's endurance had never quite been the same. Luckily, it had slowed Morro enough for the ninja to get the upper hand, even if it almost killed Lloyd.
Lloyd was glad that he hadn't died, because then he wouldn't have been able to see his dad one last time.
After the sinking of the Preeminent, after all of the weeks of guilt- I could have done something, it's my job to save people, why didn't I just stay- had slowly sunken away, Lloyd felt... sort of empty. He kept waking up at night and going onto the deck of the Bounty, just to look at the sky for hours. There wasn't much else to do.
Everything he ever did had been for his dad. And for the first time, late one night, Lloyd realized how much he'd given up, and he started to sob. He stayed up for hours, until the tears that had been waiting to pour out were spent.
In the morning, Lloyd came down to breakfast as usual with a smile on his face and threw a bowl of oatmeal at Kai during the inevitable food fight, before he was overwhelmed by tiny breakfast pastries (why did Zane have a pastry gun in his arm anyway?)
"Get off, Jay!" Lloyd laughed as he pushed Jay away, sending the skinny boy sprawling across the floor.
"These are actually really good," Jay said as he caught a bite-sized danish in his mouth. "Zane, I bet I can fit ten of these into my mouth at once!"
As he cleaned the crumbs out of his hair, Cole replied, "I can fit twenty, easy." As Jay replied with something that made all the others burst out laughing, Lloyd wandered away, grabbing a few sugar cubes from the bowl on the table. Nobody noticed him leave, not even Kai.
Munching on the sugar cubes, Lloyd headed into the training room. His leg began to ache after only one round of the obstacle course, and instead he went to the punching bags. Lloyd slipped into a familiar rhythm, punching over and over again. When his knuckles began to chafe, Lloyd bandaged them and kept going, faster.
He imagined for a second that the punching bag was the Overlord- Kai said that imagining an enemy would give you more power, at least for a little while- but it didn't really work. Instead, Lloyd kept punching because he'd almost forgotten how to stop, hammering away at the bag until it finally split, sand spilling across the wood floor. Lloyd realized that his knuckles were bleeding heavily, and he went to wash them off before anyone else could see.
Later, he went out to run a few errands for his mom and a little girl asked him for his autograph. Her mother, apologizing profusely, pulled her away.
"I'm so sorry, it's just that she really looks up to you. You are sort of famous, beacon of hope and all that but I'm really sorry," said the woman as she left. Someone else recognized him a few minutes later and Lloyd distractedly scrawled his name onto the brochure they were waving at him.
A beacon of hope, he thought. "Sorry, I didn't get your name," he told the person with the brochure as they started to walk away. It was a youngish woman, her golden-brown eyes shining brightly. Lloyd had the feeling that he'd seen her somewhere before.
"Sir, it's Meifen," she said. "You know, you're still awfully young to be doing all this, if you'll pardon my saying so."
"Oh. Yeah, I guess," Lloyd answered with a chuckle. "I mean, I barely even remember before this whole green ninja thing."
"Tomorrow's Tea," Meifen mumbled. "It's a powerful catalyst, I've never seen it react with such a strong elemental power before."
"What?"
"Oh, it's nothing, sir!" Meifen squeaked as she hurried away. Lloyd still couldn't quite figure out where he'd seen her before.
Two more people- an old man and another, harried-looking mother who had four kids that Lloyd could see and probably a few more wandering around through the mall- told him how proud they were of him, how they'd expected he'd be older, how much responsibility he'd taken and the old man mentioned that it seems only a few years ago you were trying to invade Jamakai village.
"Sorry about that," Lloyd replied with an awkward laugh as he started heading home.
"And his voice kept cracking for the next eleven months," Nya finished triumphantly from on top of the bookshelf, out of Kai's reach.
"Nya!" hissed her brother as Jay and Cole laughed. Zane didn't seem to be paying much attention, and Lloyd was only catching the end of the story as he walked in. Jay twisted around and pointed at Lloyd.
"Hey, your voice should be changing pretty soon, right?"
Shrugging, Lloyd sat down on the floor. "I dunno."
"I agree," Zane spoke up, "I estimated your physical age at around fifteen, but that was two years ago. Your voice has only deepened slightly since you were ten."
"Maybe I have to wait for my real age to catch up," Lloyd answered, and the other ninja forgot about it.
After an hour of laughter and storytelling, Lloyd was beginning to feel hollowed out again. Quietly, he went onto the main deck of the Bounty and instead of looking up at the bright infinity of the night sky, he stared down at the lands drifting below them. A beacon of hope, for all of Ninjago. For all of the Realms, maybe, Lloyd thought.
I can never stop being that for them.