Roots of Earth ~ A Ninjago Fanfiction

Chapter 56: The Awakening

Little Leaf shivered and pressed herself closer to Nya. Ever since that fight she and Talon had, Leaf had been avoiding her brother a bit. Nya felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for the younger girl, and she took her hand and squeezed it.

"Don't mind them," she murmured quietly. "They won't hurt you."

Leaf gave a feeble smile in return.

The pace of the group would have been faster if it weren't for Cole. He was carrying a support stick and tapping it unsteadily as he walked. The messy bandages were still wrapped around his head; nobody had had time to change them before they arrived at the hospital.

Some bystanders voiced low gasps when they saw it was Cole the Earth Ninja who trailed behind, tapping a support stick and his eyes covered from the sight of the world. Nya knew he must have heard the gasps, but with half his face wrapped up, there was no way to tell how he was reacting. Despite the support stick, the majority of Cole's guidance came from Liana, who had one arm wrapped around his and was gently leading him down the corridor.

They ascended up to a different floor in an elevator and took several turns in different hallways. After several minutes, Nya realized something. "This isn't the place where Jay was last. Wasn't he downstairs?"

"He was, but we moved him to a... different apartment. We had to make room for other patients, you see." Dr. Wesley didn't look at her.

Nya felt a flash of unease. She glanced around their surroundings, and she realized that there was something decidedly... different about this floor. Some of the apartment doors were open, allowing the ninja team to glance in as they passed by. Unlike the patients downstairs, most of whom were in wheelchairs or lay listlessly in bed, these people could be seen mumbling incoherently, or rocking back and forth. Some just sat in their cots with blank expressions. Others yelled and screamed wildly and fought back when frantic nurses and doctors struggled to shove them back into bed.

Some even had restraints that kept them to the cot—Nya caught sight of one young woman kept in such a way, thick black bands around her arms and legs strapping her down on her back. She was laughing and sobbing uncontrollably, and occasionally kicked feebly against her constraints. Nya suppressed a shiver.

Suddenly, a man burst out of one of the rooms, he too wearing the uniform of a patient. (The said uniform, an ugly, sickly-green gown, did an excellent job at looking excessively ugly and useless, but it failed rather poorly in its job in covering the man's backside, revealing his bare rear end to anyone unfortunate enough to face him from behind.) Dr. Wesley voiced a started exclamation at the sight, and everyone else stopped in their tracks.

The patient didn't seem to see the traffic he was blocking in the hall. Instead, he was staring rather wildly at a pomegranate he held in his hand—and yelling at it.

"I love you!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. Then he proceeded to take an enormous bite out of the pomegranate that he loved—without peeling it.

At that moment, another man burst out of the same room, shouting hysterically, "Bro! Are you serious?!"

"Wha'?!?" The first man glared up at him, his mouth full of pomegranate mush and peel.

"YOU KILLED MY POMEGRANATE! AND YOU YELLED AT HIM!" the second man cried.

The first man swallowed, smiled, and shrugged. "He was so cute!"

A doctor and two assistants quickly caught up to the two patients. "All right, Steven." One physician grabbed the pomegranate-killer and hastily led him away. "It's time for your medicine."