yooo here's the chapter we've all been... waiting for? dreading? idk
Anyway the writing music for this one was Youth, by Daughter. Enjoy! (Also I feel like Cyrus would totally name his daughter Cynthia because bad cyborg jokes abound)
Jay was the first of the ninja to die, at a relatively young age.
Killed in a tragic laboratory accident, the obituary read, Dr. Jay Walker will be given all the honors that Ninjago can bestow for his role in the protection of the-
Lloyd stopped reading there, because his eyes had filled up with tears. He suddenly understood that he was going to have to go through this again, and again, and again. His mother and his uncle died years before, and the story- to keep the knowlege of the Tomorrow's Tea secret- was that Lloyd had died shortly afterwards. He hadn't even been able to attend his own funeral, but Kai had recorded the entire procedure on one of the new Agent cameras, invented by Cyrus Borg. The Agents were amazing- they could fit on a coin, and they streamed instantly to anywhere.
Lloyd thought his funeral had been quite nice, and according to Cole the reception had good food. (Kai and Nya hadn't been as impressed with the food.)
At Jay's funeral, Lloyd kept a hood pulled over his head. People didn't even show flickers of recognition anymore, over thirty years after his "death", but at the funeral of one of the Four you couldn't be too careful.
And then Kai's funeral, and then Cole's, and then Nya's. Nya had lived to be a hundred and seventeen, and Zane estimated that she was 67% robotic by the time she gave in.
"I'd wanted to stay around as long as I could," Nya said sadly. "But you know what, now that all of us are gone you don't have to worry anymore. You can… go back and be a kid, for a while. A weird kid, I guess, but you've really earned that much."
And then she was gone.
Lloyd tried, he did try. He'd adjusted well, and he could understand the new Cynthia Borg technology just as well as Zane and PIXAL could (which wasn't saying too much.) He was friends with Cynthia, who was one of the few people in the world who did know who he was.
"What year is it now?" Lloyd would ask sometimes, half as a joke. And Cynthia would tell him the right answer. She taught him some more stuff that he hadn't had time to learn, what with saving the world and all, and figured out a way to use his energy powers to fuel small robotic creations. They spent hours, tinkering with the little robots, giving them spidery legs and spinning wings and lights that flashed in different colors depending on what Lloyd was feeling.
But, Lloyd just couldn't pretend to be a real kid. He could pretend to be an adult, rather than a very old, old man, but he hadn't been able to be a kid, since, well, he was a kid. He kept an eye on Cole's descendants (Nya and Jay hadn't had any kids, in the end, even though they'd wanted to- so Lloyd wasn't really sure if those elements would crop up again anytime soon), but eventually the Earth powers skipped a couple generations and Lloyd lost track of who was supposed to be getting the powers.
Zane tried to help, as much as he could, but his voice reminded Lloyd of the times when everything- or almost everything- had been all right.
Then again, nothing had ever been all right for Lloyd. Even since he'd been a little boy, barely old enough to form memories, he'd been in the savage atmosphere of Darkley's. And then he'd run away, failed miserably at living by himself, and been given a prophecy that he could barely understand.
He'd saved his father instead of killing him, and then a year later he'd read him into the Cursed Realm. He'd gained more power than he knew what to do with, and as soon as he stopped wishing that it would go to someone else, the power of the First Spinjitzu Master had been torn out of his being.
And his leg still hurt, a constant reminder of the battles against the Overlord.
After Cynthia died, Lloyd stopped talking to Zane and ignored the series of messages from both Zane and PIXAL left in his outdated CyBorg phone. He kept the phone, even though after many, many years went by, nobody could even call him anymore. Cynthia had updated it so that it was charged by his personal elemental energy, and he still had a few games he could play on it when the long dark nights started to eat away at him.
He helped out, where he could. Nobody recognized him as Lloyd Garmadon, the ancient hero, but they did recognize him. Lloyd never gave out his name, he called himself Dragon instead. The dragons were all dead now.
Dragon walked across the whole world, helping out those who would accept his help. His bank account- under many names- had been gathering interest for centuries, and his old CyBorg phone could access his funds to give money where it was needed. And there were still people to be fought- Dragon supposed that that never changed.
People told him that there wasn't anything left on Ninjago, that he should hop onboard one of the new spacetime distortion cruisers and head offworld.
"This is my home," Dragon replied. "And as long as there's still people here, I'm staying."
Hundreds at a time, the people started to ship offworld, and eventually there were only a million or so people left on Ninjago.
One day, Dragon walked into a coffee shop that he liked, with glass walls so clear it felt like he was flying, and the holographic screen above the counter showed what looked like a battle. The reporter's voiceover explained that there was a vigilante group of elemental masters on Sundara Seven, fighting off the Winter Court.
Dragon stared at the screen for a long time, until a motherly woman with cybernetic implants in her forehead said to him, "Aren't they amazing! And so young. They must be such an inspiration to you," she prattled on, not noticing that her listener had left the room.
For the last time, Lloyd went to the Temple of Light- roped off from public view, but still almost the same as he remembered it. Then again, it had stood for thousands of years before the ninja had come there, and he supposed that it would continue to stand for another thousand years or so.
He visited a museum that had preserved the figurehead of the Destiny's Bounty- gifted to the Ninjago City Museum by Jay and Nya a millennium before- and stared at it for a long time. Then, he turned around and walked out, and he didn't stop walking until he boarded a distortion cruiser and headed to Sundara Seven.