A/N: It's my birthday tomorrow, so I whipped up this self-indulgent angst fic! Sorry~

Each ninja's POV is in chronological order, starting from a little bit before S3, and goes until about 7 months after the season finale.

Another Call Home

Description: Ashes, ashes, everything falls around,

ashes, ashes, the home goes down.

Kai didn't start with a home. So he kept his family, he found a home, he made one. He kept close to Nya, he built alongside her, and did everything with a fiery passion.

Then other people blasted their way into his heart.

Four other ninja, of green, blue, black, and white, slammed their feet on the gas and catapulted themselves right into it. Maybe each one didn't have that exact way of doing it, but a unique one, each original for them. Kai learns that each of them are so wonderfully unique and special, and it's those little things that he learns that make him so sure.

Cole waits until the very last second before they're going off to a fight to brush his teeth. Jay combs his hair rapidly, faster than what would be normal. Lloyd rocks back and forward on his feet when he's nervously talking. Zane can dance tap like a master.

It's not even the big things, like how Zane is somehow about to speak around 11 languages fluently for no reason, or how Jay is a master engineer. Not the giant, life changing things about his team. Just the small tidbits he runs into during their everyday life.

Every single thing makes Kai more sure that his family won't break apart.

At least, before the blackout.

After every single thing, after every single stupid battle they'd jumped into without a second thought, this is the one that they lose someone in. A horrible, quick fight that barely lasted minutes but seemed like hours while they watched, helpless and grounded, while their friend did so much in the air.

Cole had been the one to find it, even though his vision started blurring with spots and tears that seemed to make everything seem like a hazy nightmare, he had spotted the face in the snow. Looking so mechanical at the time, more unreal than it had ever been while on Zane.

It was just half. After the shock had worn off, they'd started to scream, looking through the city, looking for the rest of Zane. But no- all they'd found was the corpse of the Overlord, frozen in one of the giant blocks of ice.

'He can wait,' Cole remembered Lloyd saying, voice choked as he stared at the creature. 'we need to find… we need to find Zane.'

They had. Little bits and pieces- burnt wires, an arm barely clinging together with only the melted metal, a scorched hand with fingers all bent out of place. Every small, miniscule reminder they had of Zane was horrifically disfigured. The thing they reminded them of, each time they dug one out of the ice, wasn't Zane- their kind, smiling Zane, who fought with them, who was graceful and unique- it was the sacrifice. The moment when Zane floated high about them, body surrounded with a blizzard that was all his own but not.

Cole remembered collapsing on the ground when he had seen a fragment of a smile, far below the ice.

Jay had no clue why he was staring, empty-eyed, at his toolbox. It had been a few weeks after Zane had made his stupid, heroic sacrifice, and it had seemed as though every person in Ninjago was trying to swarm the ninja, trying to take away their right to grieve.

But they couldn't. Interviews were pushed away, run from, reporters were knocked aside violently with small, barely-controlled earthquakes, cameras were melted and short-circuited. The Destiny's Bounty took flight into the sky again, barely fixed by the two mechanics who had tears streaming down their faces. The TV, after running it's first segment on Zane, had been kicked by himself until the screen shattered.

Elemental powers ran rampant across the decks and rooms of the ship. Crackles of electricity flew across the scratched wood. The earth shook beneath them, even as the Bounty flew high above. More often than not, the smell of smoke trailed after Kai. There was no ice.

Jay kept looking at his toolbox.

He wanted to do something, but he couldn't figure out what.

Everything was hazy in the months following Zane's death. Jay was locked up in his workshop, working on a project while he was trying to cope. To the others, it seemed like he was trying to drown himself in his work, but they didn't know for certain.

On the other hand, Cole's way of grieving was subtle, but obvious. He would stop at things that reminded him of who they had lost, even small things. In the first few weeks that they had returned to the Bounty, he couldn't even go near the kitchen or in their shared bedroom. He had avoided sleep for a long time before finally passing out on the deck of the Bounty, right in the middle of the cold floorboards.

But this seemed to be the opposite of Kai's mourning. Who had been doing absolutely everything to remind himself of Zane, and what he did. He stayed up, watching the dawn break, alone, just like the Ice Ninja often did. Tried to pick up cooking, cleaning, and quiet reading at night. Yet nothing seemed right. The others would watch Kai speed around the ship, something that might've broken the desolate air a long time ago but now just seemed to add to it, as he panicked over misplacing his wallet, which held a picture of them all smiling. Kai, at almost every turn, tried to remind himself that there was still family, there was still Zane, even though he was gone.

Lloyd, he didn't know what to do at all. Zane was gone. Nothing could bring him back. Lloyd knew it, but all of the mourning and coping, just passed right by him. Everything inside of him told him to mourn, though. He wanted to feel the urge to cry, but couldn't muster up the tears or the sorrow. Even a feeling he had to repress, even violent anger he kept in clenched fists at his side, he wanted to have. But there was absolutely nothing. Not even numbness. He wanted to feel, he wanted it so badly, he even though he wouldn't have expressed it anyway. Because it just felt so wrong, to feel like nothing had happened.

And it wasn't as though he denied it had. The blackout had happened, and the lights in Ninjago had all gone out, Zane among them. There was no point in refusing it.

...and yet, it felt like nothing to Lloyd.

Nya waited, day after day, month after month, for it to be a dream. A horrific nightmare, because families don't break apart like that twice, right? It was a terrible dream, something she would wake up from and sob and scream in her bed, waiting for her brother to come and hear her and comfort her. They'd stay up all night for no reason than they could, and only get out of bed when the dawn came and Zane's footsteps began to move quietly across the floorboards, then Kai would spin into his clothes and Nya would shove Kai out so she could change, and because he had made a giant mess on the floor with his tornado.

That's what would happen. Exactly. She's wake up, and she might have some emotional pain from the dream, but everything would go away.

Nya checked clocks, waiting for the time to change, in seconds, from 3:34 to 7:28. Dreams did that, she remembered, but had that information been fabricated inside her nightmare? It was probably a lie from her mind.

Since they never did, it was definitely a lie inside her dream.

It had to be, because Cole kept fighting with and screaming at Kai, which never happened. It had to be, because she could hear Jay wailing from his workshop. It had to be, because she never even saw Lloyd around anymore.

All fake. Just wake up, silly, wake up.

...but she can't, because that's not how the waking world works.