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Someone was haunting Nya.
Just in the barest threads of her vision, in the thick lining between the inky black that the edge of her eyes reached. Sometimes it was a full face, other times a pair of eyes, a pair of hands, a carcass following her as she ate and slept and dreamt. It’d be gone the moment she looked.
But she didn’t need to look to know who it was. Even as the dream-ghost, or hallucination, or guilt, whatever it may be— held no features, blurry around the edges as though it did not fit into the world, she would recognize him anywhere. It could only be one person. Nya had forgotten him so many times that remembering him felt like breathing.
Even as she sat on the steps of the Monastery, flush with power once more, her hand felt foreign to her. For a little while, she had his power. That suffocating, jolting feeling of electricity, jumping from vein to vein. She didn’t know how he dealt with it constantly— but somehow, having his power made her feel closer to him than she had been in a long, long time.
Even though it made her sick.
Maybe the silver lining was that she got to see him again. In the arena, he was no longer a hallucination then, but a bioluminescent bay of sleek purples and ultraviolet red, covering ground that belonged to her. Maybe this was her punishment.
She had committed a sin. A grave one. Nya was a ninja, echoes upon echoes of ricocheting light, of profane delay; she saved the world countless times before, and sometimes shed herself to do it.
“Lloyd— we have to save him!”
Lloyd answered after a suffocating pause, as if saying the words no one wanted to say out loud. “We do. But… this tournament is a threat to the Source Dragons– to the Merged Lands themselves.”
“If our world is destroyed,” Zane shifted, “there will be no Jay to save.”
She knew that. She also knew she would have, maybe for a tiny, flickering will-o-the-wisp moment, not cared. The stakes of the world was something she would always have to fight with, water pushed back against a cold front, mist burrowing into her sheets. But she would not always have Jay.
We saved this land countless times, she thought, watching Lloyd embrace a freshly-rescued Kai, why can’t we find a better way to do it? It was, she supposed, like battling a hydra—cut one head off and two more would take its place.
Would Jay have gone for her? Maybe he would have. Nya sits under the blazing wrath of the sun, hearing the dragging click of turnstiles. It was the sound that had raised her well, held her through rainy nights, shuddering masses of lullabies.
“Alright, everyone,” Lloyd called out now, and Nya looked up. “Back to the Monastery. We’ll think of our next game plan after we take a well deserved—“
“Jay,” Nya’s words go tumbling out, before the steady drone of fatigue catches up to her, “we have to look for Jay.”
“And we will,” Cole places a steady hand on her shoulder. “But we need–”
“Arin, too.” Sora looks down, swallowing thickly as if Arin’s betrayal was something that rested on her shoulders like weights. “He– he also… needs to be found.”
Nya knows she’s ignoring the worse question: whether or not Arin wanted to be found.
Jay certainly didn’t, not by her at least. He didn’t remember her, but she knew him. Every part of him; his hands, the curl of his hair, the concealer that’s gone unused for years. He knew her as the girl who caused him to disappoint Ras.
How could Jay have forgotten what he was supposed to love? How could he have forgotten the rough snakeskin leather of his gloves, full and curvaceous? She preserves every memory of him, careful not to let them be tainted by the newly flashing viridian and crimson strobe of his shattered soul, melding and meshing into a milan staccato knife that cuts the very fiber of his being.
What had that felt like? And what was it all for, to fail, to be thrown away?
“Sis,” Kai nudges, a lilt to his voice that Nya could have cried at. She cranes her neck up, seeing the others shuffle tiredly into the door that led to Ninjago. Kai is holding his stomach, clearly wound up and breathing heavily. The others are dwindling few and far now, casting her concerned looks.
“I told them to leave us,” Kai shrugs, seeing Nya cast a look at the empty place. “Thought you could use some downtime… I dunno.”
“Kai,” Nya says thickly.
Nothing survives the winter, but Kai always does. He’s warm and dependable, standing with her in the cold front; and there, just past Kai’s shoulder, at the edge of the door, peeking in, was the dream-ghost again. Jay had never looked more beautiful.
“Nya,” Kai replies firmly, grasping her shoulders tightly. “We’ll find him. I told you I would knock some sense into him, didn’t I? Huh?”
Nya smiles weakly. The temperature fluxes between them as he takes a seat next to him, stretching his legs. “Wyldfyre already left?”
“Yeah. Took a lot of bribing, so you better appreciate it. You won’t get a second chance at this kind of silence when we all go back.”
Nya knows. She knows better than anyone. Jay was always talking, wringing his hands out and adjusting his cufflinks, fiddling with his earrings, his throat. Eventually, his words became her silence– a comfort in the dead of night, steady and warm and welcoming her home like natives. Now, it all split in her hand like firecrackers.
“Is it Jay?” Kai asks.
“He doesn’t know me,” Nya says oddly, “he doesn’t know… any of us. I… Kai, I saw him.”
“Was he uglier?” her brother pushes her lightly, clearly teasing.
“No, I mean,” Nya rolls her eyes, “I used to see him. I used to hallucinate him. Sometimes I still do. I would see him in the shadows, as a face in the crowd… and then, I saw– I saw him for real. I thought I was just going crazy, but he really was there. And then now, he isn’t. Kai, the Merge took him from me!”
“The Merge didn’t take him from you. It didn’t take anything from any of us,” Kai says fiercely, “he’s my brother too, Nya. We’ll find him, and then he’ll be mortified about his actions and we’ll all make fun of him for ages. I mean– he’s still Jay!”
“I will always hate you,” Jay murmured, a rasp in his voice that wasn’t there before. His eyes were flat and red, like a shark. His umber hair was disheveled, falling into his eyes. The blue of his suit meets the shoreline of his skin, a candlewick casting shadows.
Was that Jay?
It was her Jay, for sure, the remnants of what the tide had eaten and abandoned washed up on the beach. How could she say goodbye to that?
She couldn’t, she knew she couldn’t– she couldn’t go back to clutching the dust-ridden blankets that laid haphazardly on his bed, clinging to the wooden bedframe. She wouldn’t go back to the pulsating, sweaty walls of his bedroom, ones that melted into flesh and spirits— she was doomed to love him forever, regardless of how many pieces he shattered his heart into. Maybe that was her punishment.
Nya didn’t like the look of Jay looking stricken at Ras’s feet, white-knuckled with failure. She liked the feeling of fighting him even less— it was almost nauseating. She couldn’t hurt him— she couldn’t, she would forfeit before she had the chance to— and it’s all back to wouldn’t and couldn’t, but the truth was that she already had.
Jay might’ve killed her if she hadn’t. That was the worst part.
“Let’s go back,” Nya says instead, refusing to answer Kai’s question. “We should fix up his bedroom for when he gets back. And… we should pay a visit to the Land of Lost Things to find everything he might’ve forgotten.”
“That’s more like it!” Kai crosses his arms, winking at her, “What’d I say, huh?”
She rolled her eyes, feeling a burst of affection unfurl for her older brother. He always did try, in his own way. He knew her better than she would have thought to admit. “Sure, Kai.”
But the truth was, Nya didn’t answer because she didn’t know if that was Jay.
While in the Cloud Kingdom archives, she came across something strange. Hidden below sleek silk spirals ascending ladders, molding into monistic, syllabic books, there was a book. It was dusty and bookmarked heavily, small folded pages to mark places someone might have been once. The last person to check it out had been Euphrasia, a small E printed neatly at the index.
“What do you think, Jay?” Nya asked the dream-boy hallucination that lurked at the thickets of her vision, never quite in reach. Maybe this, too, was a punishment, because seeing his face would have been everything to her. “Should I take a break?”
Jay had said nothing.
“Me too,” Nya yawned, unable to stuff down the curiosity to see just what had gotten Euphrasia so worked up. Flipping it open, paragraphs of text were highlighted in all types of colors– yellow mornings, red welts, the color of bright snapdragons, reminiscent of a certain firestriker she knew. But of course, her eyes had been drawn to the blazing electric blue instead.
None of the words mattered to her then. But it mattered to her now. There, in bright black words that bled into the highlighter, was this: if you replace all the parts of a ship with new identical parts, is it the same ship?
Was that still her Jay? If he wasn’t, at what point was he no longer Jay?
His room is untouched.
Nya knows that too, because she was always sure to clean the dust off his drawers and half-finished inventions, placing them right back where she found them. She would remake his bed every morning, wipe down the walls, repaint the chipping cracks.
Almost to his birthday, too, she would get dressed alone in his room, accidentally tearing a button off her clothes with the aggressiveness she wears her skin, and once she finds a needle big enough to thread it, sewing it back on with the motions she remembered he used, owning only what she remembered.
Then, she would leave and lock it. His bedroom was a museum, a morgue, something she preserved for years.
Now, it is either a funeral or a coming home party. The other ninja lay languidly in his room, Lloyd and Cole and Zane and Kai all carefully sitting on the rug while the newer ninja looked around the place as if it was something to be admired. She almost wants to tell them not to touch anything.
They do anyway. That was the point.
There’s a lot of work to be done– because Nya had preserved it the exact way it had been left before the merge, the state it remained in was far from neat.
Cole is cleaning out the closet, pulling hangers of clothing out, fabric and gi that would never fit Jay now— seeing him in the arena, Jay was still just as lean, only taller now— and saw him she did, with a tongue stained of mulberry blood, and face that she remembers seeing at the local park, smelling the bark and loving her boy ragged to the bone.
“Hey, I remember this!” Cole blurts, and Nya turns to see that he’s held in his hands, a crumpled paper that he fished out from behind Jay’s stack of clothes. He unfolds it, and several more pieces of paper fall out. Nya can’t help it. She starts laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Sora asks weakly.
“Did I miss a joke?” Wyldfyre grumbles, “I hate missing jokes.”
“That was when Jay got the Destiny’s Bounty up and running for the first time,” Lloyd explained, smiling, “he was just supposed to fix it, really, since the Monastery had been burned down— but he decided he wanted to make it fly instead.”
“He was the one that decided to make the ship fly?” Sora’s head swivels left and right.
“What a bonehead,” Cole looks at the papers, bending down to unfold them. “He couldn’t even get it right. Mr. Walker had to help him, but he stayed up ages trying to get it to work. Look, he couldn’t even focus back then.”
Cole unfolds the papers, holding them up. Amongst what seems to be legitimate coding and half-jolted thoughts and connections are scribbles of other inventions, random drawings, ideas clearly written down in the late nights, even small portraits of what is meant to be Nya.
“Gross!” Kai wrinkles his nose, covering his eyes as if there was something debauched about the innocuous doodles. Cole rolls his eyes.
“It appears that Jay was smitten, even back then,” Zane says, grabbing the papers. “What are the others?”
“The security system you guys designed,” Nya replied. She holds the blueprints as if it was a conduit for Jay, someone who was maybe long gone, as if he could feel her as the world moved on, over prairies and deep trees. “Kai kept creating more insane and ridiculous scenarios, so Jay kept countering by adding a countermeasure for each one into the blueprint, even though you told him aliens abducting the Monastery was highly unlikely.”
She glides a hand over the raised pencil, feeling the smile fade. Every line looked deliberate, as if he had taken great care to not miss any of her features that he scribbled into the margins. She held it as if it were proof that Jay— her Jay, had existed once.
And then it was all gone, and she was back in the arena.
She remembered the chill going up her arms, a suffocating feeling in her throat as Jay readied up, unfeeling. He was the cold front. So ready to fight her. To kill her.
“I owe it to Ras to win this tournament,” he strains, firmly, as if Ras was the one that took in that abandoned kid in the junkyard, fed him soup and bread. As if he was the Master that had brought him from that junkyard to a few brothers that would stick to him like wild geese, announcing his place in the family of things. “Whatever it takes.”
And then the nightmare really began. She was frozen, watching herself in the reflection of a blue wolf mask. There was no silver lining, no marvel attached to the grievance, a catfish sliced tail to gill.
“Jay, stop!” Nya shouted, and she could feel something pooling into her voice, maybe despair, maybe sickening desperation, “Don’t– don’t do that!”
She couldn’t bear to watch it. But the familiarity in which Jay held his mask was one Nya had seen much of, on the nights that she was up; the curl of his sleep, breathing waves onto the waters of her bed, a star in the fog of morning. She knew that familiarity, it was the one he had when he cradled sugar cubes in the palms of his hands to sweeten the tea, tiptoeing up the stairs, not letting one tiny bit chip off an edge.
The ship of Theseus comes sailing in once more, remembering the thick pure red in his eyes, nothing left of his boyish smile and dainty hands, his undershirt robe-swish. He was a locked up church, a wooden saint on fire, burning in her place.
What right did the Merge have to take him from her?
“We will find him, Nya,” Zane assured, “It is still Jay. My memory cache indicates that during your fight, he said he felt indebted to Ras for saving him from the Administration. That shows, at the very least, he is capable of feeling emotions like gratitude and fears disappointment. He is not too far gone yet.”
Nya blinked.
She had seen the way he hung his head, twisting his robe with apparent shame. He didn’t want to kill her— he had only wanted to prove his worth to Ras. He wanted to repay Ras for whatever the conniving tiger had put in his head, right?
Years of commuter smiles, trampled flowers, passing platters stacked with awkward flirtatious attempts, grocery aisle quarrels, filling the coffee machine with birdcalls, limericks, browsing histories— was it even possible for the Merge to take that away in a mere second?
Nya pressed the paper to her sternum, feeling sick. Was it possible, then— that her Jay was still in there? Worse, had she ruined her chance?
“What the heck is this?” Sora blurted, and Nya turned around.
Kai pokes his head out from under Jay’s bed, cleaning out small pickets of depraved metal. Violet and winterberry scraps of cloth, needle and thread, a half-patched gi that Jay had been in the middle of fixing. Zane turns around too, from where he was delivering refreshments to Lloyd. Nya recognizes the deep-sopped fruit, the rind green that grows on the trees outside the Monastery.
Sora is holding up a thick ceramic plate, or what looks to be a shattered plate, until which she rotates it.
“Sora,” Cole whispers from the corner of his mouth, “Put that down… very slowly.”
“What is it?” Wyldfyre grumbles, snatching it carelessly. She holds it up to the light in the room, twisting it every way and that, “some kind of frisbee? Oh— oh, I know! It’s a treat!”
Lloyd snatches the small disc away quickly before she chomps down on it, looking disgruntled as her canines come down on air. He chuckles nervously, holding it out carefully to Nya.
“It’s Jay’s medallion,” Nya says softly, taking it from Lloyd, “I was sure it would be…”
“In the Land of Lost Things?” Cole finishes, joking. “if everything Jay forgot ended up there, we would all be there right now.”
“Maybe that’s why you ended up there, Cole.”
(Lloyd nudges him hard, but Kai cracks a snort. Nya can’t help a smile).
“So…” Wyldfyre interrupts, unimpressed, “What is it? An ancient amulet with super-cool powers? Not that it would be better than my heat powers, but—“
“It’s a promise,” Nya answers her, trying to get the scratches off the thing. “The Yin-Yang promise is a sacred tradition practiced by the people here. It’s done between lovers.”
“Like you and Roby,” Lloyd offers.
“Roby and I proclaimed our love through roars,” Wyldfyre grumbles, “not easily breakable and flammable porcelain!”
She understood that feeling. When Jay popped the question, at the end of the world, a glint in his eyes, she hadn’t been looking at the medallion. She was looking at Jay— her Jay, the one who looked at her like she was a house of cards, focusing his breath away from her, painting the coils of his wheels his signature electric blue in the early morning, oversized pajamas and all.
Would he remember that? The steady thudding of the end of the world at the door, getting on his knees when he thought he might never be able to again?
He wasn’t offering a medallion at that moment. He was offering days, years of saved receipts, late-night walks, movie marathons, desk drawers stuffed with socks. Would he ever remember that— would he ever even remember just this, a room he made his own through years and years?
No man ever steps in the same river twice, Nya once heard, for it’s not the same river and not the same man. When Jay sleeps in this bed once more, would it be Jay?
“Me?” Ras’s lips twist, as if he was offended by the very question asked. “The Merge left Jay Walker without his memory. Lost, alone, friendless. I found him. Helped him with no one else did— where were you?”
Did Ras see himself in Jay? Someone to be saved?
Something burrows down in Nya’s stomach, digging a way out. Could they have argued with that—? They had been busy trying to save the world. They hadn’t known where Jay was. They couldn’t have known. Could they?
The question comes barreling back. Was the Jay she knew dead?
If every memory of his was replaced with a new one, was it the same person? Was it the name that made Jay himself? How many of Jay’s memories would have to be replaced, how much of his soul shattered before he was no longer considered Jay? What makes Jay, Jay, if his constituent parts were gone?
— and if someone used those parts to rebuild someone new, was that Jay instead?
“Nya,” A small paper airplane hits her head. “You know I can see you overthinking, right?”
“We shouldn’t forget about Arin either,” Sora stresses. She leans against the stack cord of firewood, tracing it with her fingernails. The pink of her hair stuck out against the plumbago blue of the walls.
“No one’s forgotten, Sora,” Lloyd says, moving a few plants into Jay’s room, tucking them into corners like hidden easter eggs. “We just need time to regroup and recuperate. A ninja can’t continuously fight on. Master Wu always said a ninja never quits, but a good ninja knows when to retreat.”
Nya can tell the use of Master Wu’s name has invoked some strange feelings within the group. A weak cough escapes Kai, and Zane thumps him on the back helpfully. The air in the room ripples tensely.
Lloyd sighs. “Guys, we have to talk about it. The… Master Wu Merge Thing.”
“We have to talk about a lot of things,” Wyldfyre grunts, “like how Arin willingly ran after that no-good super evil Ras?”
“Or that the rest of the forbidden five are out?” Kai provides.
“And that Jay is supposedly training under Ras and said he used to work at the Administration?” Zane says helpfully.
“And how Wyldfyre has a boyfriend now?” Cole adds.
Nya looks at Cole, frowning. “is that really our biggest concern?”
“This is serious, Nya,” Cole whispers, beckoning her in for a moment, “she got a boyfriend before Skylor and Kai managed to figure their mess out. Isn’t that crazy?”
“And we’ll talk about it all in the morning,” Lloyd stresses, now sporting a small trash can to throw whatever they had dug out from Jay’s room in. “We’ve had a long, long week.”
“I miss when he was just a master-in-training,” Cole nudges Kai.
The team silently trudges out, Jay’s room looking somewhat cleaner than it did before. Nya switches off the light, the white shade dissolving like a tablet in a glass of water. It’s dark and silent. Jay wouldn’t remember any of this.
Maybe it’s a blessing, too, that he doesn’t have to remember the drunk way he held a mop with white knuckles, trembling and hurt and biting back a quiet away when asked to make a wish.
And what about desire? Would it be better to not remember that, too? The thing about his soul— Jay’s soul, was that it was certainly not something that was meant to be shattered, but it was never maybe the same it had been. Had he ever been whole?
Nya knows his heart leaked out of himself. He leaked into others.
“Lloyd,” Nya calls, holding him back.
Lloyd turns, and Nya can see the warm light of the halls of the building behind him, lighting her younger brother in a sunset glow. Nya swallows down a lump in her throat. Lloyd looks like a guardian angel, as he always does; dressed in white, but she knows he’s not. He’s just Lloyd.
“Lloyd,” she tries, “do you think…”
“We can repair his soul?” Lloyd finishes, “there has to be a way, Nya. We’ll find it.”
“No—“ Nya shakes her head, “do you think that’s… our Jay?”
“You mean, like an imposter?” Lloyd seems to think about it, rubbing his cheek. Nya appreciates that he doesn’t say what he’s thinking: that Nya is in denial. “… I don’t think so. That’s definitely him.”
“No, I mean,” Nya tries again, “Like… that’s Jay, for sure, but is he even Jay anymore?”
Lloyd pulls her in for a hug.
It’s a tight squeeze. It’s all Nya wanted for a moment. Any movements in the room have now settled, the room pulling over for the night. It feels like the books on the walls, the bed, the drawers have all lined up in a throng, waiting. She could never forget the feeling of seeing Jay in every crowd. She could never forget.
When Lloyd mutters his answer into her ear, she feels her lips tremble.
“He’s our Jay, Nya. He could never be anyone else.”
Jay’s blurry, dream-face haunts her from the corner of the dark room.
One night, Nya chases the ghost.
Missing him dearly, now more so than before, she slinks out of bed. The edge of the sheets catch on her loose trousers, sending her stumbling. She's out the door of her bedroom, the Monastery shrouded in a lingering clooud of silence and darkness as each slumbers on. There's a faint light coming from Lloyd's room, and she knows he's staying up to avoid the visions that worsened with the tournament.
She catches herself before she knocks on his door, instead opting to follow the ghost as it slipped out from her reach into the next door, the next room, always one foot out of the door. That was her Jay. She follows it languidly, passing a creaked open door of Cole's, a loud snoring Kai, a faint buzzing of Zane's systems powering down. Arin's room is abandoned, and Sora's door is shut. Through the window at the end of the hall she can spot the tail-end of the Destiny's Bounty, standing guard to whatever crept in the night.
Eventuall, she arrives at the kitchen, where Cole is tiredly drinking a cup of tea. She clears her throat, Cole's head snapping up.
"Nya," he says, gratefully. He slides the tea packets out of view, "Can't sleep? It's okay, I don't think anyone could after all that. Besides Kai. He's out like a rock."
Her eyebrows raise, motioning to the small tea packet in his cup. "Stealing Lloyd's tea?"
"It's our tea," Cole defends, "what are you doing up so late, anyway? Going for a walk?"
A loud bang comes from the living room, a grating sound that cuts through the silence of the place. Behind her, the Monastery mourns on. Silent and dark and cold and unfamiliar to her. But here, in the small corner she carved out for herself, everything feels worlds away. Cole's eyes are on her, a flicker of something in the shadows of his face.
"Sora's up," he explains, "Tinkering away. Guess she can't sleep either. We had a talk."
"About?"
"She blames herself," He sighs, shifting. His eyes glaze over to the framed pictures of the finders on the fridge, glossy and hanging like a trophy. He makes a non-committal sound, then rests his elbow against the slab. He perches his chin on his palm and looks at her. Something feels different about him tonight. Not strange, or suspicious, just different. He sounds so odd then that she cannot help but look at him again. His gaze is distant, looking past her into the bleak dark, seeing nothing. "we both lost our best friends. I know what she's going through. We all do. But we shouldn't blame ourseleves."
"Shouldn't we?" Nya swallows, "Cole, what Ras said..."
"He was trying to get us to feel bad," Cole shrugs, taking another sip and gagging, casting the drink a look. He gestures with his free hand at all of it: the gathering shadows where the light ended, held at bay only by feeble flickering hanging lamp. "He was trying to get to us, Nya. And... I guess he kind of did, too. I mean, he got Arin."
Nya looks at the Jay at the edge of her eyesight, staring blankly with no face and no features, just sitting. She can't help but think he was judging her, too. Was this her fault? Should they have tried harder to look for him? Would it have gone this way if they found him before Ras did- and would realizing any of that change what had already happened?
"Not that," Nya insists, feeling tired from it all. "Jay already didn't believe me. If he were to find out we were given the option to go after him at the tournament and then didn't... I know he would have been halfway there if it were me he had to save."
Another loud noise rings like bullets through the kitchen, followed by a string of curses. Nya and Cole share a look, and he jokes weakly, "She's gonna wake up the whole Monastery, at this rate."
"I'll talk to her," Nya says, squeezing Cole's arm firmly. He nods, and makes no move to go to bed. Nya could tell he had a lot on his mind. The mischief in his eyes goes out like a candle snuffed. She looks down at his hands, clasped together and scarred and roughened from years of service. She makes to go, slipping away into the dark, where he can't reach for her, can't pull her back. Instead he stays at the island in the kitchen, a lone boat. Nya pretends not to notice the way his breath hitches.
"Nya?"
Nya pauses in the archway of the kitchen. "Cole?"
"I miss him too," Cole chokes, and Nya finds it easy to be frozen in place, swallowing something hard in her throat. Every memory flooding back to her, fighting a war to keep herself at bay. "More than you know. We all do. We'll... we'll fix this, Nya. All of it. Even if we can't, he belongs here. Shattered soul and all."
But Jay's not Zane, not a robot that can be rebooted with a memory cache. He isn't part of the sea, taken over by a force so powerful that it floods his brain and washes away the people he tried to protect. He was just Jay. And he was there at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Was it because he was in the mech?" Nya hears him say, and her back is to him, offering him a kind of privacy that's hard to resist, "because he was seperated from the rest of us on the Bounty?"
Nya doesn't answer, and neither does the hallucination of Jay that sits at the table, blurry and fading from view.
"I don't know." Nya says with finality, turning her head to the Jay at the table, and he disappears as quickly as he appeared. The table is empty, untouched from where he was fiddling with it, the ringing of his laughter like a bell in her ears. "get some sleep, Cole. Don't stay up too long."
With that, she leaves him to ponder his thoughts by the yellow-light, wading through the pitch-black in her pajamas. The garage was home to all kinds of things, now more empty with the absence of their main tinkerers. If not PIXAL, then Jay. If not Jay, then her.
They all their own quirks to inventing; Jay was more prone to crafting things out of scrap-metal and whatever he had on hand, creating something out of nothing and ill-suited to repairs. Nya herself was better at creating things, from things that were decidedly not scraps, and PIXAL excelled at both, so much of the tinkering was left to her. Now, though, with the disappearance of majority of the mechanics on the team, the garage became a mortuary.
Another clang. A smile graces Nya's face. Not anymore, apparently.
Sora is hunched over, still in her battle-torn clothes and sporting all kinds of cuts and bruises. She wasn't using her power, but rather physically screwing things on with a screwdriver that held a small inital and a blue cloth wrapped around it for gripping purposes. She doesn't notice Nya hovering around, too fixated on whatever she was creating. Sometimes you didn't have to know what you were making. Sora clearly didn't.
"That was Jay's," Nya says suddenly, and a gasp is ripped out of Sora, who fumbles with the screwdriver and hides her creation behind her back. Her eyes are blown wide like saucers, breathing quick. "It's just me, Sora."
"You scared me," Sora clutches the cloth where her heart is, "uh, need something, Nya?"
"Do I need a reason to be in here?"
"I guess not," Sora says suspiciously, "If you're here to talk to me about what happened, Cole already beat you to it. I don't need to hear it again. It's like— nobody gets it."
"Do you want to know something Cole didn't tell you?" Nya says simply, mouth dry and tasting of ash. "A long time ago, Cole and Jay were having a really serious fight. It was over me. The specifics aren't... important, but it tore their friendship apart to the point they wouldn't even talk to each other. And then one day, Zane died."
Nya registers a split second of surprise on her face, but she keeps talking. "They made up about a year and a half later, because they were... pit against each other in a tournament. But by then it was too late, and Cole sacrificed himself for Jay to continue on. And Jay blamed himself for it. That was the first time they ever fought, and it took them a long to reconcile their friendship. I don't even think they knew how to. So when Cole says he understands, Sora, he does. More than anyone."
Sora is quiet. Nya lets her think on it. It's a lot to take in, but Cole lost someone that night, too. Arin wasn't the only casuality they suffered.
The thing about Arin was, Nya thought, that it was hard to be a ninja. Being a ninja meant giving up yourself, your family, your friends, for the sake of the world. Everyone on the team had done it. Letting go of Jay, at that moment, letting him slip through her fingers, was one of the most painful things she had ever done. Arin wasn't ready to put a pause on finding his parents, and she couldn't blame him. He hadn't been through what the rest of the team had.
"Nya," Sora says increduously, after a while, "did you say they were fighting over you? But you're— You're definitely in love with Jay! I mean, like—"
Talking is suddenly harder than it had ever been. "I wonder if he knew that."
"Of course he did," Sora blurts, clutching Nya's hand, "I— I didn't know him, but the way they talk about you two... the others, I mean. All the stories I heard, there's just no doubt about it."
"I never said it back to him," Nya says manages, "He understood. I know he did. But now, I think I should have. I took too long, didn't I? I mean, I never was never the type to believe in love at first sight, much less be a victim of it. I was too busy being other people to know if I was— a Samurai, the girl ninja, a sister, a girlfriend— and by the time I figured it out, it was too late. Sora, he can never be my Jay again. But he's still your Arin."
The ceramic of the medallion cuts into Nya's palms. Memories were what made a person. The end of the world couldn't keep Jay and Nya from each other, and that was a hypothesis that was tried and trusted and true. But what could keep them apart was forgetting. Maybe that was why she had been so scared of it.
"Nya?" Sora asks worriedly, and Nya doesn't understand until she's being pulled into Sora's hold, her body shaking and the dam breaking, finally breaking, and Nya is crying like never before. Maybe it was the buildup of everything culminating into this one moment, the thick stone in her throat, and the idea of never seeing Jay stretching in the morning had maybe done her in. She claws at Sora's clothing until she's repeating the same thing over and over again, begging some deity that she knows has never listened to bring Jay Walker back to her.
"Sora," Nya chokes, "you go after Arin until you can't anymore. Even if he doesn't want to come back. He's your best friend. Don't let go of him. Sora, promise it. Be better than me."
"One one condition," Sora whispers, "if you go after Jay. No matter who he's become. Whether he's your Jay or not."
The Jay in her corner-vision dips his head, sauntering and waltzing into the bare recesses, as if saying you forgot me first. This is payback. He's beautiful even when he's nothing. Even if Jay held another name, even if he remembered nothing, even if his soul lay in a million pieces at her feet, even if he was no longer the Jay she knew, she was doomed to love him forever. It was her punishment.
"Okay," Nya smiles tightly, pained, "I will."
And for the first time since the Merge, the hallucination is not there to mock her.