The Silent Man's Whisper [ninjago]

10 | captured

"Can you, like, stop doing that?" Kai asked Lloyd when he began to mindlessly click his tongue.

The Green Ninja stopped for a second. "Doing what?" He clicked his tongue once more.

Kai's nostrils flared. "That."

"Hm..." Lloyd seemed to think about it. "No."

Kai was ready to viciously attack his friend but refrained from doing so because everyone else was asleep, and drawing unwanted attention to them was not very smart.

Both of them were lying in their beds and trying to sleep, but none of them seemed to be able to obtain it. Lloyd was on the top bunk and Kai on the lower one.

"Kai," the younger whispered. There was a sudden edge to his voice that Kai immediately detected, frowning.

"Yeah?" he whispered back.

"Do you think... Do you think we'll really be in here for five years?"

The Fire Ninja sighed. He pressed his head harder into his fresh pillow (at least that was regularly washed so it smelled like lavender) and thought about Lloyd's question.

In the perspective of any other criminal, five years would have been like a dream coming true, but for the ninja? It was torture knowing that they'd waste away their precious lives while other, more dangerous villains were out on the streets, living their lives carelessly.

Kai himself was still conflicted about it all. But no matter how angry he was with his circumstances, he knew it was worth having his sister back in his life.

"Kai?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I know what to do!"

"What are you talking about?"

"I think I know where they might be! All I need to do is just-"

"Nya. It's too late for them to come back."

"But-"

"I was once like you, in denial and hoping to see them walk in here again and raise us like normal parents would do. But we are not normal and they are not coming back. It's time for you to accept that, because I have. Don't cry, sis, I'm sorry. Look, I promise that whatever happens, I'll be here. I won't leave you and I won't let you go either, okay? You'll always be my baby sister and I'll always be your big brother. We'll always be Kai and Nya, the best siblings there are. Okay?"

"Okay."

"There's the smile again! Now come on. We still need to open the shop."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

He smiled at the small fraction of memory he just relived. He'd been eleven years old when it happened, and his sister had just turned nine.

"Kai?"

"Uh, what?" He snapped out of his little trip down memory lane and remembered he still had a question to answer to.

"Do you think we'll be-"

"Yes," Kai answered honestly, feeling both uneasy and accomplished. "I think we need to accept it, Lloyd, and go through with it."

He couldn't help but feel the same way he had when he'd told Nya that their parents would never return to them. Lloyd was like his younger brother from another set of parents, and Kai's must-comfort-distressed-sibling senses came up.

"But what we did wasn't all that wrong, was it? Yeah, we unleashed Aspheera and all, but we didn't kill a guy, so it couldn't have been any worse... right?"