ninjago imagines

half hearted boy, maybe we'll have more connection || lloyd g. // harumi j.

a/n: something something angst i whipped up at 3 in the morning two months ago and just remembered to finish today <3 

tw: death & blood. 

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Lloyd doesn't cry when he sees Harumi die, swallowed by a swirling tsunami of bricks and dust. There's too much adrenaline rushing through his blood, too many teammates that need him and too many stakes at hand to consider what he just lost.

The tears come later, in heavy shaking sobs, when he's alone and alive and okay— as okay as he can be in the empty cold hospital room. It hits him like a brick to the chest, when he's turning at the end of the battle to look for her face through the crowd, maybe exchange a few last sentences before she was gone again.

But she's gone for real, now, and he doesn't want to believe it.

So he doesn't. He hauls himself out of bed, ignoring shaking limbs and burning cuts, fresh stitches that are tearing open as he walks through the abandoned broken city streets, hood pulled over his stuff form to hide any unwanted attention.

Lloyd's still wearing his green gi underneath, blood stained and torn to scraps in a few places. (He had the chance to take it off, to change into clothes that aren't carrying a decade's worth of bad memories, but he doesn't because it reminds him of being powerless again, and he can't be.)

He searches the streets, unfamiliar after so long of ducking away from them in fear of discovery, eyes sweeping over piles of rubble and dirt until he finds what he's looking for.

Then he digs. He digs until his hands are a bloody tearing mess of blisters and scrapes and cuts, until his knees are burning and his gi is soaked with sweat, because she. Can't. Be. Dead.

Not when he hasn't said sorry for not saving her fast enough, for killing letting her family die so many years ago (for every ounce of pain he ever caused her unknowingly because she didn't deserve it and neither did he, even if he was ten and it was an accident and)

He digs and screams her name until his throat is hoarse and he's pretty sure the sun is rising and someone will have noticed he's gone (till soft golden rays are falling over the dust just right so it looks like her brown eyes in the sunset) and he can't look anymore because everything hurts.

Harumi doesn't cry when her parents die, swept away in a flood of dust and crumbling walls (and something red and sticky that pours down her forehead that she can't think too hard about), because there are too many people screaming, too much smoke curling in her lungs like a murky hand closing around her throat, too many questions buzzing in her mind to face the biggest one she has.

She cries later, when the nurses are gone and she's sitting in a terribly empty waiting room alone, waiting waiting waiting (still waiting) for parents who will never come. Quiet, ugly, sobs slip through her lips and she drinks in the tears (and pretends that her mother will come wipe her tears if she cries for long enough. She doesn't.)

When she's finally been in the waiting room for long enough, Harumi stands up and walks out the door, quietly enough that the receptionist doesn't look up and offer her yet another cup of water, like that's going to solve any of her problems. (They called her the Quiet One, so she will be.)

She walks through the rubbled streets, past the noodle shop her mother loved (it's doors has caved into a unbreakable wall and she knows there's a metaphor there but she's too tired to find it,) till she reaches home.

Or home as she remembered it, because now there's nothing there but a pile of terrible bloodstained dirty cement.

She breaks her nails against sharp edges and finds her old toys, buried in a mound of dust and glass that she thinks used to be their coffee table, and hugs them to her chest, a last shard of the fragile, broken thing she used to have.

(People whisper things about how she was too young for this, too small and too innocent for something so terrible to happen to her, but Harumi doesn't think tragedy has an age limit.)

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