Part of the wingfic!verse! Hope ya'll enjoy!
Kai can't remember a time when he didn't have Nya's warm maroon blanketing his wings.
Her heart-color has been with him through the snakes. Through the ghosts. Through the oni. It's what got him through the First Realm when they were separated, and he had no other way of knowing she was okay. It's carried him through the Never-Realm, and Prime Empire, and the dungeons of Shintaro. After every fight, after every enemy or situation or devastation, her color stays bright. She's always had his back in the most literal and figurative way possible.
Up until now.
Nya stands across from him on the roof of the building, except it's not Nya, it's someone else, someone who wears his sister's face but none of her expressions. Their skin shifts like molten glass and their hair flows like waves in the ocean. Their eyes glow with unnatural light, like the beam of a lighthouse stranded out at sea.
And their wings, if you can call the large, tapering fins rippling from their sides wings, are smooth and sleek and completely bare of heart-colors.
Kai feels a bit like he's underwater himself. He watches with waterlogged eyes as Jay pleads with Nya, with a pounding pressure in his head as Nya leaps from the side of the building, with limbs that feel entirely too heavy for his body as they lower the sea from the city, sun glowing through their translucent body, drowning the city in the pattern of the ocean.
Drowning a part of him along with it.
The world reacts around him. Time flows on without a single apology. Kai goes through the motions of taking care of his family, because that's what he knows, that's what he does. He comforts his mother and reassures his father and tries to cheer up Jay and the others. It's what he's been doing since he was three, since half of his world disappeared and he had to protect the rest of it, except now this time it's the other way around and it hurts worse.
He makes it through the ceremony. He stays around long enough to support his mother, to see her and his father off back to their little home and shop. He uses the last of his fracturing composure to fly up, fly off, fly to a place where no one can see him break.
And he does.
Kai weeps, and wails, and sobs. He screams raw and wild, claws red into the skin of his arms and legs, wipes snot and tears indiscriminate into his shirt.
Nobody comes for him. He's grateful. He's gutted.
Nya's always had his back. Always been his protector. She would have been here beside him, sharing his grief, holding him tight, letting him cry into her shoulder.
But she can't, because she's gone, and Kai's never felt so horribly alone in all his life.
Hours pass. The sun dims in the sky. Kai watches it go, tear tracks mostly dry now against his cheeks. This stolen time of his is running out of sand, and he knows he can't stay much longer. Sooner or later the others will come looking for him, and now that his grief is exhausted, he can't bear the thought of them seeing him this way.
He pastes his bravest smile on his face and begins the trip back. He can be strong now. He can be what this team needs. He can be the protector again.
It goes okay, until it doesn't.
His feathers start falling out.
Kai doesn't notice at first. His wings are itchy, but not more than usual, and the state of them is the last thing on his mind on a good day. It's only after he runs hand through his wings and comes back with clumps of feathers that he starts to realize that something is wrong.
Upsettingly: he's not due for a molt. There's no reason for his feathers to be falling out.
More upsettingly: the feathers that are falling out are Nya's.
Kai stares at the feathers in his fingers. The familiar maroon is just as dark as it has always been, and there's no reason for them to be falling out. She's not dead, she's not. (She's only gone and left him.) And even if she were, this should not be happening. Heart-colors don't fall. They only ever fade.
This shouldn't be happening, but it is, and terror seizes him at the thought that this one thing he was so sure would never be taken from him is now disappearing through his fingers.
He asks to be sent out. He doesn't care where. He doesn't care why. He only wants to be away, and by himself, where he can't upset the others and he doesn't have to hold his mask together for their sake.
Master Wu gives him a pitying look when he asks. But he doesn't deny him, which is good, because Kai's not sure what he would do if he did.
The mission itself is simple. It's a drug-trafficking ring that preys on the poorest members of the community, one that's been growing steadily for a while but exploded after their number dropped from six to five. It's something they've been seeing a lot of. Criminals have been crawling out of the woodwork, eager now that their team is in such disarray.
It sickens Kai. But right now, it's exactly the type of thing he needs.
His wings are disguised. They have to be. As such a public figure, oftentimes his wings are the first thing that identifies him, even over the gi or the group. There's whole sub-reddits dedicated to pictures of his heart-colors and theories as to who they might be. He and Jay used to have a field day, scrolling through the comments and laughing at the insane theories their fans would come up with.
So they paint his wings white, and they spray on fake heart-colors, and they set the dyes so they won't fade or rub off. When they're finished, his wings are unrecognizable. Gone is Cole's umber, and Zane's periwinkle, and Jay's blue and Lloyd's green. Gone is Nya's maroon, feathers still fluttering off even as they're erased white.
The night before he's set to leave, Lloyd steals into his bedroom. He's a small, green-shaped lump, buried beneath a giant hoodie, loopy blonde hair poking out from under his hood and a riot of kaleidoscopic feathers poking out from his back. He sits at the edge of Kai's bed and watches Kai pack as he plays Animal Crossing on his Switch, glancing up every now and then when he feels the stillness has stretched on too long. When Kai has packed his last thing and zipped up his bag, he sets the game to the side.
He doesn't say you don't have to go like Cole did. He doesn't snap so what, you're leaving us now too? like Jay did. He doesn't ask are you sure this is what's best? in a soft voice like Zane did.
All he says is "you better be coming back. I need you too."
And Kai knows that he gets it.
None of the other ninja have a mantle color so prominent, so dominated by one person. Not many people do. But Kai and Nya, who had only the other to rely on for the longest time, cover each other's backs entirely.
And Lloyd, who also gets attached way too easily, carries Kai's sienna across his back in the same way.
Kai sits down on the bed beside him. "I will," he promises. "I am."
"Okay," Lloyd says quietly, and snuggles into Kai's side.
The mission goes according to plan. Kai finds the evidence he needs, works with the police, and takes down the ring all in a little under two weeks. The work distracts him, just as he hoped. More importantly, he's able to channel his energy, his worries, his stress into something productive. It helps that he's not able to see his wings. The feathers have finally stopped falling, and the itchiness of new growth has begun between his shoulder blades. He's afraid to look, but even more afraid to put it off for too long.
He wraps up his mission and heads home.
It's not until the middle of the night that he gets back to the monastery. Most of the building is dark, but a lone light shines from the kitchen window. When Kai slips inside, Cole is asleep at the table, gently snoring over his papers and notes. Kai smoothes his bangs and turns off the lights for him. He checks in on Lloyd and Jay and finds them both asleep in their beds. Zane isn't in his room, but the door to the cave is open and Kai can hear the murmuring of voices coming up from down below.
Kai hesitates with his hand on the doorframe. He could go down, could begin his debrief of his mission so that Zane can put it into the system. Or he could go back to his own room, empty and still, and try to catch some sleep before the morning.
They're the smart options. But Kai- well, he's never cared for the smart option, has he?
He steps back into the courtyard, spreads his wings, and takes off.
Kai hasn't been down to the sea for a long time. He hasn't been near water in a long time, not since the oceans rose and Nya left. Now he toes off his shoes and walks along the shoreline, sand squishing beneath his feet, the glitter of the full moon lighting up his path. He walks, and walks, and eventually stops at a small pier abandoned and alone in the moonlight. Kai climbs up onto it and sits at the edge.
His wings itch. The paint is starting to flake away, had started flaking as he flew down to the beach. Now, he steels himself with a deep breath and wraps one wing towards his front. He scrapes at the fake colors over his primary coverts. Cole's warm umber reappears, and then Zane's periwinkle and Jay's bright blue and Lloyd's green. He moves his hands up, farther and farther, revealing more and more of the colors.
But the sight of a new color makes his heart freeze.
Kai's hands hover above his mantle feathers, caught somewhere between hope and horror. Gingerly, hesitantly, his fingers brush away paint. A sob lodges in his throat.
Gone are the maroon feathers so familiar to him. In their place is a shifting wave of blue and green and white. Kai twists. The new feathers spill across his back, blanketing his mantle and scapulars. Their color never seems to stay the same, one second dark, the next light, shifting and shifting again. They ripple like the pattern of the ocean.
Kai spins in a circle, wings outstretched, laughing. Crying. Salt spills down his cheeks and taint his mouth with the taste of the sea.
She's still here. She's still with him.
He's wrapped up by the ocean, and he's never been more relieved in his life.