Country's not my thing, but I do love that song.
"Mannnnnnnn, I'm bored . . . " Jay slid off the sofa, upside-down, and sighed blissfully. "I love it."
Nya grumbled drowsily and felt around for the blanket Jay had dragged with him. They'd mostly been sleeping in so far, or just snuggling into random comfortable corners of the living room. PIXAL and Zane were playing a lazy game of cat's cradle. Cole was burrowed into an armchair sleeping so hard it made you exhausted just looking at him.
It wasn't all just relaxation, though: every now and then they got more calls about criminal flare-ups, and a couple of them would duck out to handle it.
Speak of the devil, the phone rang.
"Bells, bells, who's got 'em, I want 'em," growled Kai sleepily, clambering over the back of the sofa and fumbling the phone off the receiver. "Yeah, ninja HQ, 'sup? Oh. Nuh-huh. Sure, we'll send someone." He hung up and turned to the others with a sigh. "Heist at the coffee place on Wilford. Nose goes."
He was already poking himself firmly between the eyes. Zane and PIXAL hurried to touch their noses as well, yanking the cat's-cradle game into a Gordian knot around their wrists. Jay and Nya had been whapping each other with sofa cushions, but Jay caught on fast and followed suit. Nya's natural aggression became her undoing, as she opted to clobber Jay now that he was unprotected before touching her own nose. Glances shifted to Lloyd and Cole. Lloyd shrugged.
"Ah, I'll go."
Now everyone turned to Cole. He was still violently asleep, and snoring.
"You're on call, Dirtclod," said Jay, to no effect.
"Oh, let him sleep." Nya sighed, getting to her feet. "I guess that makes me the last one. Goin' with ya, Lloyd."
"Awwwww, Nya . . . " said Jay plaintively.
"You can come with us too, if you want."
Jay knit his brows, considering, and looked at the cold blue sky outside the window. Then he sighed resignedly and pulled the nearest blanket over his head.
"Oh, fine then." Nya shook her head fondly. "Guess it's just you and me, Lloyd."
Lloyd was already halfway out the door. He gave Kai a significant look as he left, and Kai shook his head in exasperation. Lloyd hadn't been enjoying the relaxation much; he was constantly on-edge, always vigilant, twitching, fidgeting. He had volunteered for almost every call so far, seemingly preferring work to just sitting and thinking about stuff. Kai had been worried enough about him to put off inviting Skylor over, despite Lloyd's vehement protests.
Nya gave him an unreadable smile as they took off for Wilford Boulevard. He gave a nod and a smile back. He was only hazily aware of it, but honestly, these days he felt more comfortable around Nya than he did around any of his other teammates. He respected PIXAL deeply, but she was still a little mysterious, a little emotionally detached. And the guys . . . they had fallen out of sync, just a little. He and they had such intense separate experiences now. A whole batch of troubling memories they couldn't fully share, a lot of new mental scars they didn't understand the origins of.
Not like he felt fully alienated, or anything. And not like he was any less overjoyed to have them back. But still . . . at least with Nya, they were perfectly on the same page. They'd shared the exact same pattern of despair, exhaustion, white-knuckled will to live. There were no gaps in their shared memory.
On patrol with her like this, it all felt familiar; it was the closest he felt to being at peace.
They took care of the situation on Wilford quickly, bringing back the stolen contents of several cash registers and helping to tidy up the ransacked coffee shop. They got free lattes for their troubles.
Sipping gratefully at the warm drinks, they took a breather and wandered through the streets. There were a few strands of Christmas lights in shop windows here and there, but it was much more subdued than most years. Most of the people bustling back and forth still wore tired, harrowed expressions. A few of them smiled when they saw the ninja, though.
"Hey. What the . . . ?" Nya suddenly pointed down the street. Lloyd followed her hand and saw a family coming their way, dragging a Christmas tree. But it was the most horrifically disfigured Christmas tree he'd ever seen: half the branches were missing, and the rest were smushed.
Lloyd and Nya tried not to stare. Looking back to where the family had come from, they saw a significant bustle, and more families dragging battered trees to and fro. Sharing a puzzled look, they trotted over to see what was up.
The parking lot of the community center was full of ghoulish evergreens. It was also swarming with Ninjago citizens, rummaging around trying to pick out the least-ghoulish. The smell of oozing pine sap was overpowering.
"The tree farm!" said Lloyd suddenly. "These are all the trees that got wrecked while we were fighting Garmadon!"
They went looking for the tree farm owner. Sure enough, he was perched on a stool and working the till, selling a tree every five to ten minutes. He smiled and waved when he saw the ninja, then handed the money belt over to his tweenaged daughter and came over to chat.
"You're selling all the broken trees?" said Nya, gesturing at the lot.
"Yep. They were going to dry out anyway, so I figured, why waste them? I'm selling them for two to four bucks a pop, since they're such a mess."
"Aren't you . . . losing a lot of money on that?" said Lloyd awkwardly.
"Yeah . . . " The farmer shrugged and gave a rueful laugh. "I guess it serves me right. I should've just lowered the prices to something folks could afford in the first place. Then at least people could've had normal trees instead of this, and I'd have probably done better than this anyway. But since I didn't, I guess this is the good ending. More people get to have at least some kind of tree, and I can still earn back a little of what it took to grow them."
"What are you going to do next year?" asked Nya quietly.
"Ahhh . . . I'll think of something." The farmer waved abstractly, then shook his head and offered a game smile. "Don't worry about it, Miss. We'll be all right. Do you guys want a tree? They're not much to look at, but after everything you've done for Ninjago, I'll give you one on the house—"
"Maybe later," said Lloyd. "We'll bring the others so they can help pick one. But thanks . . . "
Lloyd and Nya left the community center, expressions somewhat downcast. It was always sobering to see how random citizens sometimes had their lives bulldozed by forces of evil, no matter how hard the ninja all tried to protect Ninjago.
The others were also disheartened once they heard the story.
"There were barely any trees left standing in that farm," said Cole. "He's not gonna have enough to sell next year. And there's no way he can make enough money to pull through until new trees grow."
"I know," said Lloyd, folding his arms unhappily. "You guys have any ideas on how we can help?"
Some mumbling. Disappointed shaking of heads.
"Well . . . I guess we can start by paying full price for our tree," said Kai. "We have some money squirrelled away somewhere, right?"
"I have a little under my mattress," said Zane. "I'll go get it."
"I think I have some birthday money left over," said Cole.
"And there's the 'mad money' in the sugar bowl," said Nya. "Might as well use that too. These days, everyone's just mad all the time anyway."
They went to get the sugar bowl, then came up short.
"Riiiiiiiight," sighed Nya. The kitchen still hadn't been cleared of popcorn.
"I think it's time we did something about this," said Lloyd wearily.
For a while they just stood there, unsure of how to even start. Eventually they got some cardboard boxes and began to scoop popcorn into them, to at least get it out of the way.
"Man, we're gonna be eating popcorn for every meal for the rest of our lives," groaned Kai. "Can we just use it for packing peanuts or something?"
"Maybe we could feed birds with it," said Jay.
"Oh, sure." Kai snorted. "And start Ninjago's largest bird zoo. We could feed it for years."
"Or we could open seven hundred movie theaters and give free admission as long as you buy popcorn," joked Lloyd bleakly.
"Or stuff mattresses with it."
"Or make nine THOUSAND miles of popcorn garlands."
"Or a couple million popcorn balls, and then we could sell 'em to raise money for the tree farm," said Jay. Then he blinked and shook his head violently. "Wait."
The others were staring at him. After a moment Kai poked his head out into the hallway.
"Zaaaaaaaaaane, where can we find a thousand pounds of sugar and like . . . at least three industrial-sized barrels of corn syrup?"
Soon the kitchen was buzzing. They had cleared enough of the popcorn to reach the oven, and Zane was already preparing popcorn-ball syrup with whatever ingredients they had. Meanwhile Cole was placing an order for more ingredients in bulk.
"This is perfect!" said Zane. "Now people won't have to choose between food or decorations. These are both!"
"We can sell them next to the tree lot, so people can get trees and popcorn balls at the same time. Really cheap, but with this many of 'em it'll add up!"
"Will people be willing to buy them, though?" said PIXAL. "They might not fancy how much of this popcorn has been on the floor."
"Who says we're going to tell 'em?" Jay was assiduously preparing lengths of ribbon to hang the popcorn balls from. "We have a really clean floor. What they don't know won't hurt 'em."
He glanced up, then flinched at the look PIXAL was giving him.
"Well, what? It is a really clean floor. You know how tidy Zane likes the kitchen."
PIXAL glared harder.
"All right, all right, we'll put a disclaimer on them! Full disclosure," groaned Jay. Under his breath he added, "Ms. Food Safety Commission."
PIXAL, who had Nindroid-excellent hearing, narrowed her eyes at him. After a moment she cut an interrogative glance over to Zane, who shook his head placatingly and mouthed, "he's joking." PIXAL nodded slightly and said nothing more. Like Zane long before her, she had a little difficulty getting along with Jay sometimes. He was a hard person to get along with if you didn't have a funny switch.
"I haven't made popcorn balls in forever," said Nya contentedly. "This is going to be fun!"
"I've never, actually," ventured Lloyd.
"Oh, you're going to love this," said Jay.
"Just don't eat too many. You'd be surprised how fast you get sick off these things."
"Also Cole, Nya, Jay, hair nets. All of you."
"One other thing, guys, all our tree money is gonna go towards the ingredients," said Cole. "So I guess we might not have a tree this year after all . . . "
"No big deal," said Jay. "We can just hang ornaments on Lloyd."
"Har har." Lloyd rolled his eyes, while the others muffled giggles.
"That works," said Kai. "He's even as prickly as a real pine."
"I am not," sputtered Lloyd, indignant.
"No pine smell, though," said Cole glumly.
"If you spring for one of those little car air fresheners, I'll wear it," deadpanned Lloyd. He felt a familiar burst of warmth when the others laughed. For a second he got a hazy sense of deja vu, a flickering memory that he'd felt this way before. Safe, at peace, joking about stupid stuff—they used to be like this all the time, didn't they? Boy, he'd gone out of practice.
He snatched for the feeling, desperate to keep it, but it slipped through his fingers and holed up in some distant recess of his mind. The contemporary emptiness took over again.
"Lloyd?" Cole was snapping his fingers inches away from Lloyd's face now. "Lloyyyyyd, do you read me? Yoo-hoo."
"Ah!" Lloyd snapped out of his thoughts, realizing that he'd started spacing out again. He gave Cole a guilty look and began to apologize, but Cole interrupted.
"So, you want lessons or what? Popcorn balls are harder than they look."
"I, uh . . . " Lloyd collected himself, then nodded. "Sure."
"Okayyyyyy, what do you call a penguin at the North Pole?" Jay had the attention span of a bumblebee. He'd gotten bored long ago, so now he was propped upside-down in the corner of the kitchen, drumming his heels against the wall and torturing the others with a book of Christmas jokes.
"Just a penguin?" said Kai, having figured out how these jokes went.
"No, lost!"
It was an absolutely terrible joke book. That kind of didn't matter, though. They were all sugar-high out of their minds from sneaking handfuls of syrupy popcorn, and the atmosphere had been getting nuttier by the quarter-hour. By now most of them had reached the point where they were laughing just because an attempt at humor had been made.
"How is Christmas like a dragon in the desert?"
"Oh, I know this one! I know!" Nya waved her hand. "They both have Sandy Claws."
"You got it," agreed Jay, over the general groaning and laughter. "Oh hey, hey, how much did Santa pay for his sleigh? Nothing, it was on the house."
The kitchen was crowded. Kai had finally convinced Skylor to leave her noodle shop. Dareth was on his way over. Misako and Wu had both joined long ago, although Wu had been forced to put his beard in a hair net. By PIXAL, of course, who was by now wearing a name tag of unknown origins that read "Ms. Food Safety Commission." She took her office seriously.
It was nice. The kitchen was really warm by now, almost stuffy, but nobody minded. It was also thick with the caramel scent of warming syrup, and most of the counters were stacked twenty deep with popcorn balls. Everyone was more relaxed than they had been in weeks, lulled by the pleasant routine of shaping popcorn, adding ribbons, and wrapping them up nicely to sell. Well, and also distracted by Jay's gauntlet of puns.
"Why does Santa have three gardens?"
"Oh no—"
"Somebody stop him!"
"Don't you dare say it, Jay!"
Jay was giggling too hard to read the punchline by now. Cole tried to separate him from the book. Jay switched to employing the book as a weapon. It was a 25-page paperback. Not really clear what he planned to achieve with it.
Lloyd had turned out to be pretty terrible at making popcorn balls. His always turned out misshapen, and he was basically wearing gloves of sticky popcorn by now, which he didn't dare lick off because Ms. Food Safety Commission was always watching. He didn't mind any of it, though. The others kept trying to give him advice or improve his technique, and it was nice trying to learn from them, arms tangled over each other's as they tried to adjust his hands into the right configuration, laughing together when he somehow only managed to get worse.
He'd recaptured that feeling from earlier, the elusive warm-fuzzy sensation. It wasn't steady—every now and then the thought of impending doom would burst into his mind, like an airhorn interrupting a pretty song. But it got rarer and rarer as the afternoon wore on. Everyone was here. Nothing bad was happening, nobody was hurt or missing.
He hadn't fully realized (though he'd already realized much too much) how lonely he'd been over that entire year when his friends were scattered around Ninjago. Then as soon as they got back together they'd been thrust into disaster, then he'd thought they were dead, then they'd been stuck in the First Realm, and since then they'd all been running around trying to fix the city and slap patches over the spewing holes in their sanity. It had been literally forever since they got to just hang out and goof off. He had to admit, the others had been right—this was so much better than checking off boxes on traditional Christmas stuff.
The sugar high just got more and more pronounced, though. When you got a solid ten minutes of entertainment out of switching different vowels into the word "grinch," it was really time to stop.
A/N: Huh. I usually try not to post on weekdays, but I might over the coming week. Gotta crank this monstrosity down to a finish, finally. Two, maybe three more chapters?