He wasn't a prisoner, yet not quite forgiven of his crimes.
He was free to roam, yet the team still eyed him warily.
It was as if they were waiting on baited breath, expecting him to explode.
To shatter the content, though not-quite-peaceful life he'd lead for the better part of three months. To prove that his idle mornings with a cup of tea, his nonchalant, nuggets of wisdom, the tiny hints of warmth were all but a long-winded sham. To prove all of their fears right and all of their hopes wrong.
To take their trust and wring it dry and broken, to gloat his power in front of them, to break their hearts.
Perhaps they were.
Perhaps they were smart to.
Lord Garmadon truly walked a blurred line.
When he returned to life as Lord Garmadon, his mind was nothing but a dark chasm of power hungry misery. Gone was any lick of remorse. Gone was sympathy. Gone were his memories and gone was his empathy.
He was but a husk for an embodiment of pure evil.
After being defeated in battle by the green ninja, and then imprisoned, and then fighting side by side with the team for the betterment of Ninjago from the Onis, Garmadon was just...
Allowed to leave.
Nobody stopped him.
So he walked.
And walked.
He took in the sights of Ninjago that his previous self knew well but were entirely new to him. He climbed the tall mountains of the Wailing Alps. He trudged through the Toxic Bogs, redundant to his thick demon hide. He strolled through the Sea of Sand and bridged his way around the outskirts of cities like Nom and Ignacia and Jamanakai.
He pondered and thought and he spent half a year in contemplative silence, in his very own purgatory as he wandered. He did not get ill, nor sore or hungry.
He was a timeless, animated corpse, lost in his thoughts.
He had the entire world to travel. He had no obligations, nor desires or plans. Nothing held him back, nothing tied him down.
But he still returned to the monastery.
The slack look of shock on the blond ninja's face when he opened the heavy doors and spotted his demon father amused Garmadon for a flicker of a second, though he would never care to admit it. It was followed by a stammer and a stutter of barely coherent words, dumbly spilling from his mouth like water.
Lord Garmadon simply pushed the green ninja aside and strode on in as if he had always lived there.
The shock was less amusing on the old sensei. In fact, he wasn't shocked at all to see the evil overlord kicking it in the ninja's living room while watching the birds flit on the maple tree outside. The sensei simply took a seat beside his brother and watched with him.
The shock of the old woman was even less amusing than the Sensei. In fact, he felt a flicker of agony strike through his chest upon seeing her face once again.
It was weathered, having clearly been places and lived a long, active life, but it was beautiful. There was a certain grace to her that had Garmadon faltering like a school kid. She was strong, even as she dropped her scrolls upon seeing him. He could tell that she was a ferocious warrior in the skin of a caring mother.
If there was anyone to not underestimate, it was the old woman.
'Misako,' a small voice whispered in the back of his head. With it came a burst of warmth in his chest and a flicker of forgotten memories, fading too fast for him to make sense of anything.
He squashed it all and tossed it aside. He didn't care.
He didn't.
There were things that he was relearning. Slowly, albeit, but he was definitely intaking every little bit of information his brain could handle and more.
Like how the blue one would squeak when startled, or how the water mistress would hum to herself while cleaning her weapons and blush an angry red when caught. How the nindroid was wary but comfortable around him, how the one wearing red was not. The master of earth liked working out to video game soundtracks. The girl robot was always working on new designs for mechs.
The green ninja was a quiet soul, which was honestly not what he could have ever expected.
The girl he hung around the most with was frighteningly protective over him.
