Transgender Jay : A Ninjago Story

1 - Observations

Jay stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, looking himself up and down, focussing on every flaw, every tiny thing that flooded his system with discomfort.

His hips, his face, his cheekbones, the shape of his mouth and nose, other tiny things that nobody else would ever notice, but Jay noticed. It was his face after all. His form. Something he saw every day without fail.

Nothing was enough.

He dragged his eyes away from the glass, telling himself over and over that focussing on everything that made him uncomfortable would only make him feel worse, as it always did without fail, but that was near impossible. Everything screamed out to be inspected and thoroughly critiqued every day, just in case there was a change - bad or good. Just in case something needed addressing.

It wasn't healthy. He knew that.

Instead of glaring at himself any longer, he took a deep breath and took a less than comfortable seat against the bathroom wall, and flipped to an empty page in the record he had been keeping for a few months now.

A bad thoughts diary if you would.

Last time he'd seen his therapist before their sessions were over, it was something that they had recommended as a method of letting things out. A harmless coping mechanism to try whenever he felt like it, much less destructive than anything else utilised in the past for sure. He was willing to see how it felt, and it had done him some good, dragged his mind away from the poisonous thoughts about his body and identity that aimed to destroy him at his core.

The bathroom was silent, other than the tiny tapping sounds of a ballpoint pen neatly printing the date at the top of the page. There was something lovely about a neat diary entry, yet not quite lovely enough to spend time making every letter perfectly uniform. As long as he could understand it, Jay didn't care what his handwriting looked like, and he rushed to put all the things he was thinking on paper and let them momentarily escape the whirling mass of ideas in his head.

How he felt about his body, his situation, the tiny details and the large overarching problems, some things that would seem insignificant yet meant the world and other things that felt huge but weren't too bad to deal with, the fear of not being accepted or being outcast. Perhaps some of it was irrational, though that didn't matter. Anything that came to mind was written down in a long paragraph of spidery text.

Jay wasn't meticulous about his diary. He didn't keep a strict routine with it, just whenever he felt down in the dumps or had a particularly bad day, he'd collect the book, find a solitary spot, and make another entry. The bathroom was good, there was no chance of anybody bursting in and demanding to see what he was doing due to the lock on the door.

It wasn't that he didn't trust his friends would understand privacy and stop asking after a while, he simply didn't want to have to think about that at all. He didn't want to risk someone reading it over his shoulder before announcing their presence, or jokingly snatching it out of his hands and inadvertently reading a sentence before giving it back. It wasn't worth it. He'd gone into detail in his book, details that very clearly spelled out various personal problems that he wasn't comfortable sharing.

Better safe than sorry.

Recording all his bad thoughts didn't fix his problems - obviously - yet even though the pages weren't sentient, and couldn't offer him any support, it felt good to write everything down. It was like a break from everything going on up there.

When he was content with what he'd written, Jay took another deep breath, briefly closing his eyes and calming down a little. He skimmed over the lines to make sure everything was right, then almost jumped out of his skin when somebody knocked on the bathroom door.

"Just a second!" Jay exclaimed, shoving his notebook up the front of his shirt, unlocking the door and allowing Kai to enter the room instead, who quickly slammed the door and re-locked it, squeaking out a 'thank you!' that was barely audible.

The spike of adrenaline dissipated quickly into the cold air.

He made his way quickly to the ninja's shared room, pulling out a box from under his bunk - conveniently the bottom bunk - and placed his book inside, looking around before shoving it back under and standing up, walking away as if nothing had happened.

His fellow ninja hadn't quite noticed what he'd been hiding from the rest of them, and quite luckily too. He wasn't ready to come out yet. Even though he knew that they would probably all be fine with it, some things needed time.

Well... maybe Kai wouldn't be fine. He'd expressed some questionable beliefs from time to time, and while he often apologised after a threatening glare from Nya or a slap on the wrist from Zane, even knowing that he thought those things was enough to keep Jay firmly locked in at the back of the closet.

Kai wasn't the only problem though. Nya brought forward an entirely different issue.

She was his girlfriend, and he loved her very dearly, and he couldn't imagine losing her. He didn't know what her stance was when it came to her sexuality.

It's just... they were a couple, and at some point or another. Nya was bound to find out.

He knew it was probably paranoia, she was a huge ally to all sorts of communities and barely stopped talking about the newest events and processes made, but paranoia like that never really went away, no matter how much he told himself it would all be ok.

Jay walked out onto the deck of the Bounty and found Zane doing afternoon stretches, Cole doing weight training, and Lloyd flicking tiny balls of green energy at a couple of pigeons that had landed on the railing.

"Oh, hey Jay! How come you aren't in your suit?" Cole asked, a genuine expression of worry on his face as he turned to face him.

"I just feel a bit sick. I'll get back to training tomorrow."

It wasn't exactly a complete lie. He felt sick because of the steady lingering anxiety in the pit of his stomach.

Of course, he could tell somebody, but he was too scared, too worried, too anxious. He was too afraid of rejection, scared that his friends would treat him differently.

Jay turned around and headed back inside, intending to go back to his bunk and rest his eyes for a little while. To try and make sense of the mess that was his mental state.

If he'd known this would be as calm and quiet as his life would be for a long while... maybe he would have stopped, and filled his lungs with the evening air, felt the wind on his fingertips and the lightness in his chest, as everything felt soft and safe and harmless - at least on a surface level. Appreciated the tranquility and peace of that moment. He didn't, though. How could he have known.

Fate always had a strange way of doing things.