ninjago imagines

someday, i will lose you to the stars and the moon | harumi j.

a/n: includes heavy Harumi and Lloyd friendship interactions, don't read it if you don't like that and/or feel strongly against any type of Harumi+Lloyd friendship. follows the last episode of crystallized, mostly canon compliant until the end of that episode.

tw: death, blood, malnourishment, hospitalized scenes, mind control, ptsd [flashbacks].

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There's a day where Harumi wakes up, and realizes she can't remember her own name.

There's a second of sleep filled panic and adrenaline rushing through her mind as all the breath is dragged out of her lungs, but it's back in less than a second like it never even happened. Harumi. How could she forget?

She perches on her thin makeshift bed, and forces herself to inhale until she can hold some semblance of calm down. Harumi inches towards the edge of the room, and her purple- yes, purple, she'll never get used to the different shade that glares back at her everytime she looks in a mirror- gaze falls to the small window carved into the wall, and the stifling dark city anchored below, crystals shining and flickering steadily as the overtaken stumble through the streets in a bleary haze.

It does nothing to help.

(She'd always loved watching the city at night, when it was empty and quiet and illuminated a bright fluorescent splatter of light with steady rows of street lamps and the occasional lone car driving down highways, headlights navigating through the thick darkness. Seeing it like this hurt, especially knowing she'd helped cause it.)

She reaches across the small room and flicks a few buttons on a radio, the static sounds of audio buzzing to life before it switches to a quiet tinny stream of music. She'd picked up the old radio sometime in between her travels to Shintaro and Ninjago, and she can remember a few quiet nights picking through scattered trash for supplies to last her to the Oni temple.

Maybe that's where, although it feels a little too good to be thrown away and picked up away. Stolen, maybe, but that's a pretty low worry on her list right now.

It helps drown out the constant droning hum in her ears, the one Harumi never likes to think too hard about, the one that seems to get louder and louder everyday until she's pressing her hands too tight over her ears, digging fingers into her hair like she can force the sound out.

It plays a old song, one of the abandoned radio stations looping it over and over, and Harumi thinks she might have listened to it sometime, sometime before her parents left her, before she meets a boy dressed in green and loses herself in sickening revenge and hate.

A faint memory of her mother's smile drifts across her eyelids, and she blinks away the tears that come up at her eyes, dangerously close to falling. This is no time to be weak, not time to dredge up old memories when there's no safe corner anywhere to curl up in and cry.

(There are gaps in her memory, filled in with even if she tells herself she just zoned out or fell asleep or simply forgot, left somewhere on the tightrope of excitement and danger she's been so, so close to falling off.)

The Overlord talks over parts of the plan she doesn't remember hearing before, but Harumi keeps her mouth shut and nods along with the foreign words. It's not like she can do anything to stop it by herself, and even if she wanted to, she's sure she'd never be able to tell the ninja.

It's a while— she loses track of the minutes, and they meld into hours before she realizes it, and the battle begins. And it's worse than she expects. The Overlord is stronger then she remembers, with his hordes of crystallized zombies sweeping through the city, picking off any stray citizen that hasn't managed to escape into their houses yet, and the stiff Vengestone soldiers marching around with whichever new villain appears to lead them towards empty leads.