eyyyyyyYYYYYYYYYY—

Hey fellas. No, I'm not dead. Not biologically, anyway. In other respects I did become a vengeful ghost long ago and my corporeal form has continued functioning as an empty husk, so that's been interesting. But it's been so freaking long since I've watched any Ninjago, read any fanwork, or written anything for the show, I'm almost scared to try now . . . worried the magic left while I wasn't looking.

But! JustRandom! For months I was feeling bad because I said I would try to write you the thing you requested, about Lloyd finding the mint. You were always so nice with your reviews and you took that one scene in "Father Always Liked You Best" so hard, I felt like I kinda owed ya. And just when I was thinking, "well, for sure they've given up on Ninjago and left the fandom by now anyway," out of nowhere you reviewed again!

. . . And then it still took me this long to finally write this thing. Sorry for the long wait, and sorry that this is yet again a massively depressing one. Hope you're still out there now and this isn't too disappointing. Here's your request!

Nya had been gone for a month now. It felt like yesterday and ten years ago, simultaneously.

The initial shock had worn off, just a little. Lloyd could have said that they'd persevered and found ways to begin healing—but then, he'd always been a bad liar. They were in shambles. As was often the case, they were great at holding each other up, until things got really bad; then they became precision-tuned to destroy each other.

Each of them found his own way to contribute misery. Zane seemed at a loss, unsure what to say, how to help. Shaken, he spent a lot more time with PIXAL, but at the same time clearly tried to hide that fact from Jay. He didn't want to rub it in. Jay was probably not fooled.

Cole hunkered down and became the team's rock, as he often did. He was there for Jay with seemingly endless patience. Nothing he could fix. No advice he could give. Yet he stayed, listened, held his friend together on the many nights he came unglued.

Kai became cruel. Hotly, incisively cruel. Everyone had noticed that he'd gotten a good bit meaner towards Jay after Nya had become his Yang—but as far as Lloyd could ever tell, that had just been Kai's way of showing special affection to the brother-in-name who was now technically his brother-in-law, for real. A kind of "we're related, I can get away with anything" sort of game, without any real harm intended.

Now, though, Lloyd began to wonder how much of Kai's ribbing had concealed a steel edge; how much of it he had secretly meant. Kai wasted no pity. As soon as the initial shock of losing his sister wore off, his wrath billowed up like smoke and came to rest upon Jay.

He never said anything aloud. He only began to regard Jay with eyes full of contempt; refuse to speak to him; snap when he did speak. He didn't need to say anything; his message was clear. He blamed Jay for Nya's loss. He and Cole began to skirt constantly around the edges of a quarrel, as Kai directed all his energy towards despising Jay and Cole directed all his energy towards protecting him.

Jay was a silent, broken, haunted chess piece in the middle of all of this. He no longer put much work towards existing.

And then Lloyd himself—Lloyd wasn't sure how he fit in here. He was ashamed of it, because he was the leader and you'd kind of expect him to take the most initiative on fixing the team, but he was just completely lost. Forget helping the others through their feelings, he wasn't even sure how to feel himself. He missed Nya, of course he did. He had always felt a special bond with her, ever since he had been either "too small" or "too important" and they had commiserated over being the ones always left behind. But in a sick way, he'd almost gotten used to losing loved ones; almost grown numb to it. To be honest, missing Nya didn't hurt nearly as much as watching everyone else miss her.

He didn't know who he sided with anymore. Sometimes he would ache with sympathy for Jay; other times he thought he knew how Kai must feel. Sometimes, to his shame, he only felt angry with everyone, sick and tired of the grief and rage. What would they all think if they knew he sometimes wished they'd just . . . get over it already? What did that say about him?

There were other selfish thoughts too. Thoughts that he felt horrible for even having. Most of them centered on self-pity, and its associated resentment. A horrible heartless little part of him seemed to be angry that everyone was this devastated over Nya when nobody had ever expended that much misery for him.

Inadvertently he began to keep a mental list of grudges. When he had to fight his own father, to the death, nobody had wasted much time on his inner turmoil. Nobody had cared how much it destroyed him to fight someone he loved; everyone just pressured him with his duty to save the world. He had felt like he should be ashamed for finding it hard to kill his own father.

When Zane had died and the team had fallen apart, nobody had cared how much it tore Lloyd apart as well, watching his family splinter. He had only just started to trust, to believe that family could be real and love no matter what. And just at that moment, psych! News flash, one tragedy and even the most loving family couldn't hold. And of course it had been up to Lloyd to swallow his grief, to be the grown-up and beg everyone else to put aside their selfishness and come together again. Even then they only came back together for Zane. Not for him.

And when he had lost his first girlfriend—not just lost, been mulched by—nobody could afford a sympathetic word. Nobody, except briefly Misako, had bothered to step aside with him and say anything like, "Hey, I know you're having a rough time, but you'll bounce back, keep the faith." Nobody had wasted any pity on his struggle with seeing a corrupted version of his father, or grappling with two people he loved now being his mortal enemies.

Then for good measure he'd had almost everybody taken away from him, everybody except—come to think of it—Nya. And while Lloyd understood the cold, vicious determination she had lapsed into, while he didn't blame her . . . well, no. Maybe in a way he did. Nya's hard-driving personality had been like salt on Lloyd's already-wounded soul, and a part of him really was angry that everyone was now here to comfort Jay, when nobody had been there to comfort him. When he had been at his lowest, he had only had Nya, yelling at him to stop feeling and do his job.

Honestly, that was what everything boiled down to, in the end. He had spent so much of his life being expected to put aside his feelings and be everyone else's savior, he no longer had any patience for letting others feel.

He no longer had any will to be the savior, either. Every now and then he would prickle with guilt that he wasn't doing more to help the others. He still stumbled under the knowledge that he was the leader, he was supposed to step up and fix things, he should be strong and put the team first.

The guilt wasn't enough to spur action, though. He was fresh out of sympathy, out of generosity, out of hope. Dried up. For once he left his teammates in the cold and drew into himself, nursing his own wounds instead.

For days it had felt like today things must come to a head. The tension crackled in the air constantly. Kai's glaring at Jay and Cole's glaring at Kai had gotten nearly suffocating to anyone watching, and everyone was watching. Except Jay, who still barely noticed much of anything.

Finally things did escalate. Lloyd caught most of it, but it was anticlimactic.

Jay had been drifting across the courtyard, and Kai had purposely knocked shoulders with him as he passed by. Jay had lifted hollow eyes to Kai's face, and for a moment he seemed about to say something, but then he only lowered his head and drifted onward silently. Kai glowered back at him, angry that he hadn't been able to start something, and was already turning around to pursue Jay and most likely lay into him for real.

Abruptly Cole was there, snatching Kai's wrist and wrenching it up to eye level, forcing him back around. It must have hurt, because it got Kai's full attention. He turned to Cole with eyes blazing. Lloyd watched from a doorway, holding his breath, waiting for the pressure cooker to blow.

Cole said something sharp, too quiet for Lloyd to hear. He did hear Kai spit, "Lay off me!", though. The fire ninja yanked his hand out of Cole's grip and took a step back, seething.

"You don't get to talk, Cole. My sister is dead because that useless little wimp had to inhale a bunch of water like the loser he is."

"It's not like he meant to—" began Cole.

"I don't care!"

Cole didn't move or respond, for a second. Kai glowered at him a moment more, his eyes bright with tears, then spun around and stormed off. Cole let him go.

Lloyd swallowed, miserable, but forced himself to drift up to stand beside Cole. The earth ninja's shoulders were sagging. Lloyd tried to think of what he could say. It felt like nothing was right.

"She would have done it anyway," he said at last. "If not for Jay, then to save the city."

"I know," said Cole.

He didn't look at Lloyd. After a minute he walked away without any further acknowledgement. Lloyd let him go, in turn.

And that was all. No catharsis, no resolution. Just misery in words instead of silence, for a change.

Lloyd no longer felt like trying. He toyed with the idea of talking to some of his teammates, maybe try encourage them to talk to each other. He could never muster up the will to do it; a part of him knew that it would only end in grief. Any attempts to fix this would only blow the embers into a full-out fire.

He thought of playing the "Nya wouldn't have wanted this" card, but he knew that wouldn't work either. This wasn't about Nya anymore, this was about each of his teammates' own personal pain. They could ask Lloyd to push through his own misery for others, but they wouldn't do it themselves.

Lloyd was tired. He was tired of Kai's anger, Zane's helplessness, Cole's dogged fixation on protecting Jay. He was even tired of Jay's grief, FSM forgive him. He felt it but he couldn't fix it. He could see Jay being sucked slowly down into oblivion, and he knew that if he reached out too hard or held on too tight the oblivion would only swallow them both. Lord knew it had room.

He went to bed early. What else was there to do? Drift around the monastery and watch everyone else festering?

On his way to the bedroom he passed Kai in the hall. He hesitated, chilled by the cruelty he'd witnessed spilling from Kai's mouth, but also trapped by the kindness Kai had showed him so many times in the past. He felt like he owed Kai more loyalty than that.

Kai brushed past him though, unseeing. Flinching, Lloyd turned back to his room and slipped inside.

It wasn't even fully dark yet. He felt the queasy prickle of guilt again. Running from his problems, wasn't he? Giving up. Quitting. But he had long ago stopped seeing the heroism in beating yourself against a brick wall, battering open your knuckles against problems that never got solved. His teammates didn't want his help. For the first time in his life he didn't want to help them, either.

He shed his outer robes, hanging them on a chair. Even this numb, he had been drilled too strictly to just toss them on the floor. Pulling back the covers, he crawled into bed, sinking his hands under his pillow to better bury his head in it.

His fingers met something hard and crinkly. Confused, he heaved his head back up and pulled the object out. It was a single mint, the striped peppermint disk variety, wrapped in a twist of cellophane.

Admittedly his first impulse was to go stiff, and he nearly chucked the mint off across the room. He was pretty sure he'd heard something about this, some kind of rules about prison or something?

After a few seconds, though, his mind cleared a little, and he managed to hear his neurons over the sudden racing of his heart. What was he even thinking? He was pretty sure he owed his life to every person in this monastery at least three times over. The idea that they would need a puny mint to make him feel indebted was bordering on hysterical.

He sat back slowly, easing the tension from his shoulders. Not a trap. Honest, really truly probably not a trap. There was just a mint here under his pillow, for . . . some reason?

Back when they'd shared a bunkroom, he would have thought it was an accident. Somebody being flippant about bed ownership while eating candy, just lost track of one. But in the monastery they had separate rooms, so there was really no waving this away. Somebody had deliberately, intentionally come in here and slipped a mint underneath his pillow.

It occurred to Lloyd that the mint was blurring in his palm. He set his teeth and swallowed hard. What was he getting drippy for? It was a stupid piece of candy. It would have taken five seconds for someone to walk in, leave this here, and walk out.

But somebody had bothered. In this nest of misery somebody had reached out and tried to make things better for someone else. It felt like so long since that had happened, even a mint suddenly seemed overwhelming.

He knew he'd lost his excuse to be selfish. He'd pay it forward. Gladly. But for a few more minutes he sat alone in the dark, tasting peppermint and salt.