Mucho y nada a la vez

As it turns out, rebuilding a monastery is a whole lot more trouble than rebuilding the Bounty for the eightieth time. 

And by trouble, Cole means incredibly expensive.

“Re-installing central heating costs what?!” 

Kai’s horrified cry reverberates throughout the half-constructed monastery, the echo from the noticeably empty rooms only adding to insult. 

Oh, what Cole would give to have his bed back. 

“I guess we’ll have to use you during the winter,” Nya sighs, patting Kai on the back. “Lloyd, get ready to supercharge him.”

“Forget heating, do you know how much Wi-Fi costs?” Lloyd stares at the estimated summary like it’s personally kicked his pet. “Who even has that much money? God?”

“If god had money, he could’ve given Sensei Wu his inheritance and we’d all be loaded,” Jay mutters. “But noooo, ‘material possessions are the death of the soul’, blah blah blah, we’ll see whose soul is dead when the gas cuts out and he can’t make midnight tea anymore.” 

“It does seem a bit extreme, looking at it all like this,” Zane remarks. Somewhat ironically, as he’s taken one look at the bill then wisely retreated across the room. 

“Well, blowing up the entire monastery with us in it was extreme, so it figures repairs are just as bad,” Nya grumbles. 

They all shift, the mood dampening at the reminder. 

Lloyd opens his mouth. “I’m sor—”

“Do not,” Kai stabs a finger at him. “Even try.”

Lloyd slumps. “If I hadn’t gotten caught—”

“We all agreed to the plan, okay?” Cole says. “Also, no one knew we’d be sending you to Harumi, so the whole thing was doomed from the start.”

While he looks a bit miffed, Lloyd gives it up. Though perhaps that’s mostly in part because he desperately wants to avoid any more conversation about—

“So speaking of Harumi,” Jay starts. 

Lloyd springs for the window. 

Unfortunately for Lloyd, said window is currently boarded up by heavy-duty plywood, since quality window glass fell low on the list of priorities, which gives Kai plenty of time to tackle him before he can even raise his leg to kick it in. 

“No!” Zane cries. “We can’t afford anymore plywood!”

“Or like, Band-Aids at bare minimum, so don’t you dare!” Nya adds. 

“—overdramatic phase has gotta go, what are you, five — hey, no biting!”

Lloyd makes a muffled sound as he wrestles on the floor with Kai. Cole turns, very slowly, to glare at Jay.

“Oh come on, we were all thinking it,” Jay defends, reluctantly standing to help pry Lloyd from the floor. “Fine, hey, I promise we won’t talk about certain loser ex-princesses who are nice and cozy in their prison cells right now, okay? There, there, little gremlin, she can’t hurt you anymore—”

“I’ll bite you next,” Lloyd threatens, but he returns to his seat, wincing as Kai scuffs his hair. 

“Turn Oni again, and that might be an actual threat.”

Lloyd startles terribly, staring at Kai with wide eyes. “That’s — not — I wouldn’t—”

“Kai,” Nya hisses.

“Woah, hey, no, I didn’t mean it like that!” Kai says quickly. “It’s supposed to be positive reinforcement! Easing it into a normal thing, y’know?”

Lloyd growls. “Nothing about this is a normal thing—”

“Except none of us are normal, so therefore it is,” Kai interrupts him smoothly. “Also we already loved you when you were a tiny demon, turning into a literal one is nothing. Give us some credit.” 

Lloyd pulls his hood over his flaming face, thunking his head against the table. Kai pats him cheerfully on the shoulder. 

“Additionally, unless we can swindle someone by selling Lloyd in his Oni form on the black market for cold cash before stealing him back, I don’t see how this helps matters.”

Zane finds himself on the receiving end of five blank stares. Lloyd, successfully having been pulled from his hood, whistles. 

“I forget how evil you can be, sometimes.”

Kai gapes at him. “So that makes you feel better?”

“I mean, in terms of normalizing it—”

“Alright!” Cole slams his hands on the table, silencing them all. He glares them down. “Meeting room in five. We’re figuring out how to make this place livable if it kills us.”

There’s a brief silence, then Jay hesitantly raises his hand.

“Hey, so uh, we kinda don’t have a meeting room right now?”

Cole collapses on the table in despair. 

---

Twenty minutes and one session of shoving chairs into what could have been the living room later — it’s hard to tell, with all the construction markings and plywood still up — they’ve kicked off the official first meeting of the Finish-Making-the-Monastery-Livable plan. 

“Alright,” Lloyd announces, brushing his hands as he steps back from the chalkboard that may or may not have been stolen. “At the top of the list we have Wi-Fi, central air and heating, beds — huh, maybe those should go higher — running water, electricity — that one’s debatable, me and Jay can tag-team it if we get desperate — blankets-slash-pillows-slash-etcetera, stuff to cook with, actual food — y’know what, I’m putting that closer to the top—”

“So basically, we have nothing,” Cole says blankly. 

Lloyd glances at the list, then to the sliver of chalk left in his hands. “Uh. Yeah.” 

“Take the weaponry, sure, but all my albums?” Jay mourns. “I spent years collecting those.” 

“I lost the blanket we stole from that super fancy apartment we lived in for like five minutes when Lloyd was a kid,” Kai sighs. “That thing literally made it through the apocalypse, just to bite it now.” 

“Two apocalypses too many,” Nya says.

“Did the Preeminent count as an apocalypse? Like, a minor one?”

“Three apocalypses. It took three apocalypses to vaporize my closet,” Cole sinks lower in his seat. “Man, the hoodie you got me for my birthday was in there.” 

“All of our photographs are lost, too.” Zane stares at his hands. 

Lloyd murmurs something under his breath that sounds a lot like family pictures and figures. 

The mood plummets a bit more, after that. 

“Motherfu—”

“Alright, this isn’t helping,” Cole claps his hands. “We can all cry again later. Lloyd, overall mission status conclusion?”

“Well, like you said, we basically have nothing,” Lloyd sighs. “So unless Zane wants to stop chickening out and abandon his morals so we can just hack into everything and get it free, we need to find some way to pay for all this.”

“Again, I cannot hack in to rebuilding an entire cooling unit throughout the monastery, much less make the latest clothing line from Gucci materialize,” Zane says. Kai swears. “Also, that is called stealing.” 

“You call it stealing, I call it a charitable donation,” Nya says. “I turned into the ocean for this city, the least they can do is cut me a check.” 

“Besides, even if it is stealing, what are they gonna do, send us to jail again?” Jay scoffs.

Lloyd jabs the piece of chalk in his direction. “Don’t jinx us.” 

“Too bad we wasted our chance at crime and didn’t even get rich,” Kai mutters. “All we got was Nya.”

He yelps as she punches him in the arm. “What, too soon?”

“You should be so lucky to have me,” she sniffs. 

“Hey, but going on the donation thought train — do we know anyone who’s rich?” Jay asks. “Why don’t we have any rich friends?”

“Hey, you know what’s rich? That coming from the son of a billionaire.”

“Hey, you know what else got blown up? My inheritance!” 

“Please, let it go,” Zane says. “We do have rich friends, I’ll remind you, we’re friends with actual monarchy. But we can’t exactly go and ask anyone else for money, since they all already helped out so much in getting the monastery rebuilt.”

There’s a moment of pensive silence. Lloyd draws a little sad face on the chalkboard next to ASK FOR DONATIONS. 

“What if we just…sued Harumi,” Cole says. “Like, there’s gotta be some law that could work in our favor here.”

“I don’t think the court would go for that,” Lloyd mutters. “Since they’re all morally corrupt frauds who hate us.”

“Yeah! Down with the system!” Kai punches his fist in the air. 

“Also, Harumi likely has very little in the way of money, either,” Zane says. “Considering she blew up any and all assets she might have had claim to.”

“Haha, what a loser,” Nya crows.

“What if we sued Garmadon?” Cole tries. “The courts have to hate him more than they hate us.”

Lloyd scowls, scrawling a large NO on the chalkboard. “Not worth the effort. Plus, I’m pretty sure he’s still couch-surfing at Vinny’s, which means also penniless.”

“We could sue Kalmaar,” Nya cracks her knuckles.

“Isn’t he dead?” 

“Oh, yeah.” Nya looks disappointed. 

“Did anyone survive that we can sue successfully?” Jay muses. “And actually get money out of?”

“Vangelis,” Cole snaps his fingers. “Wait. No, we ousted him from the throne, so he’s probably broke too.”

“Vangelis survived?”

As they dissolve into bickering over the status of enemies potentially living-or-dead, Kai squints at the chalkboard, where Lloyd is still scratching out letters despite having completely lost the room. 

“We…are…fu—Lloyd!” 

“Well it’s true,” Lloyd huffs, finishing off his message with a flourish. “Tada. There’s my grand plan.”

“That’s not a plan, it’s a pessimistic estimation at how things are gonna go.”

“It’s extremely rude language, is what it is! I thought we taught you better.”

Lloyd simply looks pleased with himself at having recaptured the room’s attention. It is, of course, then that Sensei Wu walks into that room. He stops, looking from where they’re all frozen in place, then to the chalkboard. 

Lloyd pales. 

Sensei Wu pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers and closes his eyes. 

“My dearest nephew, you have three seconds to make that disappear, or I’ll be forced to—”

Lloyd springs for the chalkboard in record time, wiping frantically at his writing with the sleeve of his gi. 

“People would kill for that thing, and here he’s using it as a chalkboard eraser,” Jay mutters. 

It isn’t until later, when they’ve all retreated to the collective mass of blow-up mattress and borrowed blankets they’re calling a bedroom, that anyone breaches the topic again. 

There’s a loud rustling as Cole turns over where he’s precariously shoved between Kai and Zane. 

“…can we sue the mayor?”

There’s a noted pause of silence, only broken by the whirring of the cheap oscillating fan. 

“You know,” Zane says slowly. “In terms of slander and defamation…” 

An evil, sharp-toothed smile spreads across Lloyd’s face. “I like the sound of that.”

“Hey, let’s sue the new ninja, too,” Jay grins. “Can Pixal retroactively trademark our vibe?”

“You cannot sue them based on vibe appropriation.”

“Yeah, but I can sue them for impersonation.”

---

They cannot, as it turns out, sue the mayor, because legal work like that costs even more money. 

They can, however, ruin his year by filing (and forging) every possible insurance claim under the sun, so they all walk out of the office a little more satisfied than before. 

“I hope all your socks go missing in the laundry!” Nya yells toward the building as they hit the streets. “I hope you have a rock stuck in your shoe for the rest of your life! I hope you’re plagued with a mildly inconvenient headache every waking moment and never fully enjoy anything ever again!”

“Alright, alright, we’re getting looks,” Cole grabs her arm. “Let it go.”

“As much as I appreciate it, I am not going back to jail,” Jay shudders. “Twice was enough.”

Kai frowns. “Twice? When else did you get arrested?”

“We all did, re—” Jay cuts off, suddenly aware of the absolute daggers Nya is staring at him. “Uhhh…aw, snap, another mental breakdown, haha!”

“Is this the whole ‘we all have missing memories you guys are definitely hiding from us’ thing again? ‘Cause I swear—”

“I said I’m getting to it, it’s a really boring story anyways—”

“Didn’t you say you lost an eye—”

“Oh look, a window!”

This time, Jay is thwarted by Lloyd, who’s simply jumped out enough windows to recognize when someone’s about to try it themselves. Except Jay is aiming to jump inside a window this time, so they both go crashing into Pixal just as she joins them. 

To her credit, she barely flinches. “I thought I heard clown noises nearby.” 

Lloyd stares at her in such utter betrayal, the mental breakdown thing might become valid.  

“Pixal,” Jay simply begs. “Please. Help your clowns scavenge our clown dinners.”

Pixel surveys them all, a fond smile tugging at her lips. “There is a nice pizza place down the block.”

The cheers she’s met with nearly succeeded at knocking her over where Jay failed.  

Dinner that night comprises of actual, warm, take-out pizza, which nearly moves Cole to tears.

“Definitely changing the priorities order,” Lloyd says blissfully through a mouthful of cheese. “Food goes at the top, no questions.”

“Seconded,” Kai mumbles. 

“Thirded.”

“Fourthed.”

“I cannot believe, that after everything we’ve been through, we did not qualify for the post-apocalypse discount,” Zane bites out. 

“Well,” Jay says brightly. “Pixal hacked the card reader, so technically we got a hundred percent discount.”

Zane stares at her, in equally utter betrayal. “Pixal?”

She shrugs. “They can try to send me to prison. They will fail.” 

---

Two days later, Skylor cements herself as everybody’s most favorite person in the entire world by not only saving them from starvation by demanding they sit their butts down in the restaurant and eat for free, but also donating six pillows and a year’s worth of shampoo. 

“I know it’s not a lot, but I’m on the lookout for more,” she tells them. “I’ve asked other people to help chip in, too, so hopefully that’ll make things a little easier.”

“Skylor,” Cole nearly sobs into his new, beautiful pillow. “If Kai doesn’t marry you, I will.”

“H-hey!”

“No marriage necessary,” she snorts. “Consider keeping you all fed my way of saying thanks.”

“But you already helped out with the monastery,” Nya says, around the same time the rest of them assure her there’s no need for thanks, despite the fact that no one has the slightest desire to relinquish their food. 

“Fine, then,” Skyler huffs, her cheeks turning pink. “Make me say it out loud, will you — consider it my way of showing that I care about you all. Very much.” 

“Aww,” Lloyd says. 

Kai makes a face somewhere between melting and heart eyes. 

“I hate all of you,” she mutters. 

“We love you too, Skylor,” Cole grins. 

“Hate you!”

Despite her words, they all leave with six boxes of leftovers and free dessert. 

This, of course, brings another slightly-pressing issue to mind.  

---

They end up getting a refrigerator for a steal of a bargain, which is probably again influenced by Pixal’s criminal extremely generous activity. 

Given how enthusiastic they all are about getting it installed, Kai is half-expecting there to be no work left for him at all by the time he returns from the food run. 

He’s…not entirely disappointed when he walks into the kitchen, though he is rather baffled. 

The room freezes as if on record-scratch. Jay is perched on top of the counters, Lloyd has a sledgehammer raised halfway in the air, and Cole is on the ground beside the refrigerator crying. 

“What?” Kai asks, blankly. 

“The fridge…doesn’t fit…” Cole moans into the floor. 

“We didn’t leave enough space between the cabinets,” Jay informs him through a mouthful of gummy worms. “So the door can’t open.”

Kai looks at Lloyd. “So the sledgehammer is for…?”

“DIY home improvement,” he shrugs.

“Huh.” Kai glances at the cabinets. “Put some safety goggles on first, okay?”

Lloyd only gets about two swings in before Zane descends with the all wrath of the Ice Emperor and adds to the tally of times-the- Green-Ninja-almost-met-his-doom, but it’s fun while it lasts. 

They were ugly cabinets, anyways. 

---

While his love for his family could potentially fuel a nuclear power plant, Kai does grow tired of being the living team space heater rather quickly. 

The effort of keeping his power going all night just gets annoying (and exhausting) — so by the time he’s tagged in Lloyd to use his power to keep him going, they’re up to two moody ninja short on sleep, and no one wants to deal with that. 

While they’ve scrounged up a few dollar-store quality blankets, Jay takes the opportunity to highlight his accomplishments in arts-and-crafts.

“You mean your mom’s accomplishments.”

“Hey, we made it together! It counts.”

The it in question quickly gains the name “god-awful-t-shirt-blanket” simply because the blinding combination of all their cast-off shirts sewn together is impressively terrible. 

“I still think this is a waste of good clothes,” Kai grumbles. “It’s not like we have outfits to spare these days, you know.”

“Do you wanna keep heating the room at night or no?” Nya threatens. 

Kai quickly shuts his mouth and returns to sewing Cole’s old plaid shirt to one of Jay’s neon blue shirts that features a dolphin printed in enough colors to kill a man. 

“So, what do we think?” Lloyd steps back, wiping at his forehead with his arm as he surveys their masterpiece. 

Staring at the multi-colored mess they’ve patched together into a quilt, Nya announces, “It’s the ugliest blanket I’ve ever seen.”

“Harsh.”

“Hey, we did our best!”

“See if I ever sew for you again,” Lloyd huffs. 

“I didn’t say that was a bad thing,” Nya quickly interjects. “It looks a little like us!”

“Are you saying we’re ugly?!”

“Nya, no, our family genes are enough to carry us through this, I promise—”

---

They’re in the middle of figuring out how to steal Wi-Fi from the government when Tox drops by, Karloff in tow. 

“You really…need…to get an elevator…or something,” she pants, red-faced and sweaty as she hauls several large bags behind her.

In contrast, Karloff looks unfazed, casually toting a hideously floral-patterned sofa over his shoulder. 

“Skylor mentioned you need furniture, no?” he says. “It’s not much, but you need somewhere to sit.”

“Karloff,” Jay tells him, very seriously. “This is the most beautiful sofa I’ve ever seen.” 

“Haha! Karloff is right once again,” he brags to Tox. 

Tox stares at Jay in flabbergasted despair. 

“You can’t put that in your home,” she mutters. “You can’t. It’s a crime against eyes everywhere.”

“Well, it’s better than no sofa, and we’re literally turning down nothing these days,” Nya says cheerfully. She leans over to peer at the bags Tox has managed to drag up. “Speaking of…?”

“Oh, yeah.” Tox heaves the bags in front of her. “Skylor said you guys needed help interior decorating? So I brought a couple rugs. She also mentioned something about the ugliest blanket she’s ever seen, so we called up some of the other Elemental Masters and got like, six or seven together. They’re not exactly works of art, but they’re okay?”

Kai tears open the first bag, his eyes lighting up. “They’re beautiful,” he whispers reverently. “Hey, guys, we got blankets! Dibs on the one with a wolf.”

“Oh, no, not that one, it’s from my awful middle school phase—”

“What do you mean, dibs, I want the wolf one!”

“Oh yeah? Down to fight for it?”

“You’re on. Training ground in five.”

“Absolutely not, we are not fighting over a blanket we’ve been so generously gifted,” Zane snaps, snagging Kai and Cole by their collars. 

“Yeah, we also don’t really have a training ground anymore,” Lloyd says, half-buried in a blanket embroidered with countless bug-eyed fish. “It went ka-boom.”

Nya rubs her temples. “Zane?”

“Already factored into the expenses,” he sighs. 

“Oh wow, you guys weren’t kidding,” Tox says. “Do you want, uh, like a keychain? I have some mints here too I can donate…man, Karloff, help me out!” 

“Does the monastery need a metal helmet?”

“We’re really not that broke,” Nya says hastily, pushing away the offered mints. “But thanks.”

“Speak for yourself.” Lloyd snags the mints, clasping his hands together in prayer at Tox before slipping back into the emerging blanket battle. 

Nya sighs. “Do you guys want tea? We’ve got three whole mugs, now.”

Tox glances from the other ninja, where Jay has been successfully rolled into a blanket burrito and is in potential danger of being rolled right down the mountain, to Karloff, who’s the reason said danger is potential. 

“We can spare a minute, I guess.”

The t-shirt blanket is later relegated to the living room, where it lives as a throw blanket over Karloff’s floral sofa. They unanimously decide it’s the perfect home for it, and the only real critic is Skylor, who’s almost reduced to tears the next time she visits. 

---

They celebrate their achievement of having a living room by all eating dinner on Karloff’s floral-patterned couch. This comes with a good deal of kicking and squirming and the tragic loss of Kai’s fortune cookie, but they make it work. 

“This is kind of depressing, though. Sitting in the dark,” Nya remarks. 

A muscle in Jay’s jaw twitches. “Well, maybe if someone hadn’t melted all our candles—”

“You were the one who had the brilliant idea of trying to barbecue with them, genius!” Kai snaps. 

“It was a pretty spectacular fire,” Lloyd admits. Then, hastily, “In a really cool way!” 

“Perhaps a lamp should go next on the list,” Zane says. “Rather than relying on Kai as our light.”

“Hey, I’m a great light,” Kai scowls. “I’m the light of your life. I could light this place up all day!” 

“Yes, and I’m sure it would end similarly to the time you nearly burned down a building under the belief that you were achieving your true potential, but were, in fact, just dehydrated.”

Kai gapes at Zane in betrayal. “You said you’d take that to the grave!” 

Zane carefully laces his fingers together. “Technically, I did.”

“No you didn’t!” Jay interjects. “We never buried you, so you never had a grave! Ha!”

Zane looks affronted. “I didn’t get a grave?”

“You got a statue!” Kai quickly consoles . 

“Yeah, what’d you want us to do, pick your exploded pieces out of the street for half a year then toss ‘em in the ground?”

“Oh, as if that’s any worse than being left to pour your corpse out in cups of water.”

 “It wasn’t my corpse, I was still alive!”

“You were the literal ocean. Fish swam in you.” 

“Ew, does that mean—”

“Finish that sentence and I will drown you where you stand—”

“You’re all in desperate need of counseling,” Pixal mutters. 

“Tell me about it,” Lloyd says, leaning back on the armrest of the sofa. 

Cole shakes his head. “Lost causes, all of them.”

Pixal stares at them both, expression pinched, before deciding to respect the hopelessness of lost causes. 

“Hold on, I think Kai’s crying,” Lloyd moves to sit up, only to wobble, slip sideways, and go crashing to the floor gracelessly.  

“Just like when I fell to my doom off the Bounty,” Cole reminisces.  

 Pixal’s eyes glaze over. 

---

Later that evening, Pixal adds “therapy” to the list of potential expenses on the fridge door. Regretfully, it loses miserably in the debate against hot shower expenses, so it too joins the pile of repressed memories that will undoubtedly haunt them in the future. 

“But hey, a hot shower can cure depression on a good day,” Cole says, and that settles that. 

---

Hot showers, as it turns out, are a hard-won priority. 

It’s less so after Jay, Nya, and Pixal camp out overnight near the pipeline and perform their own less-than-legal maintenance, but one of Zane’s carefully filed insurance claims actually went through the other day, so they’re taking their luck as they can. 

It’s not until they get working on the bathroom itself that the true difficulty makes itself clear. 

“Hey, uh,” Kai stares down at the patch of rotted floor he’s ripped up, wiping at the fog that’s spread across his safety goggles. “Is the base layer supposed to look like that?”

“Look like what?” Cole abandons the tiling he’s been placing to glance over. His face drops. “Uh-oh.” 

“Is that all black mold?” Nya gags, nearly dropping her bottle of cleaning bleach.  

“FSM, no wonder we’re all crazy,” Cole mutters. 

“Alright,” Kai strips off his rubber gloves. “Nothing for it. Back up, guys, I’m barbecuing this baby.”

“Wait wait wait don’t—”

Ten minutes and a good deal of hacking and wheezing through teary eyes later, Cole murders Kai while they all look on. 

Well, he attempts to.

“You filled the monastery with chlorine gas, you absolute moron—!”

“How was I supposed to know that would happen, I’m not a chemist—”

Nya glares ahead darkly as Lloyd gingerly treats the reddened blisters on her hands. 

“None of you,” Zane says, through gritted teeth. “Are touching cleaning chemicals for a year.” 

---

“Not sure I wanna know how you pulled off poisoning yourselves, but I’m kinda impressed you did a better job of it than most criminals would,” Ronin tells them, once the monastery has been successfully de-chlorinated and the bathroom tiles firmly put in place, sans black mold. 

“Maybe we can hire ourselves out to them when we’re strapped for cash,” Nya sighs.

“We’re literally always strapped for cash. We’re broke.”

Ronin laughs, clapping Jay on the back. “Welcome to adulthood, kid.”

“I don’t think normal adulthood gets their home blown up on a regular basis,” Lloyd hisses.

“Fair point,” Ronin nods. 

“Well, thanks for saving us all from a slow and painful death,” Cole scrubs his hands over his face. “We can pay you back sometime in the next century. Maybe.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Ronin waves them off. “It’d be like kicking a dog when it’s down, askin’ you all to pay. Besides, I probably owe you one.”

“You sure do,” Jay glares. 

“Hey, hey, I said I was sorry for the whole human sacrifice thing,” Ronin placates. “Want some good news, at least?”

“Is it actually good news?” Lloyd eyes him shrewdly.

“Lighten up, captain trust issues.” Kai barely snags Lloyd before he lands himself back in jail. “I looked into some more of those insurance claims you filed, and you actually got somethin’ out of it. I, uh, helped the bank along a bit, with the refund.”

“Bank?” Cole whispers.

“Refund?” Jay’s eyes shine. 

“Yeah, got you all your checks right here,” Ronin says, tugging six neat envelopes from his jacket. “Just don’t blow ‘em all at once, okay? Haha.”

Zane looks as if he might propose to him on the spot. 

“Hey, this isn’t too bad!” Kai exclaims. “We got money!”

“Guys,” Lloyd says, staring at his check. “You know we should probably pool all this together and spend it on necessities, right?”

“Yeah,” Cole sighs. 

“It would be the smartest course of action,” Zane adds. 

There’s a noted silence.

“Or,” Lloyd says. 

---

In their defense, they spend exactly two-thirds of their checks on household items. 

Whether or not these are needed household items remains a debate. 

“If we’re all buying lamps for the living room, can we at least attempt to match?” Zane sighs. 

“Booo, where’s your joy and whimsy?” Jay sticks out his tongue. 

“That isn’t even a lamp, it’s a light-up axolotl.”

“The heck’s an axo-lot—”

“It lights up, doesn’t it? Ergo, it’s a lamp.”

“Ergo, what are you, Sensei Wu—”

“We’re never having guests over again,” Cole remarks, as Lloyd and Nya maneuver a five-foot-tall rendition of Godzilla into the shopping cart that may or may not light up. 

“The monastery’s gonna look rad as heck, we’re forcing everyone to come over and look at it,” Kai corrects as he tosses a set of flame-patterned curtains into the mess. 

“Absolutely not.” 

“I actually might like them,” Zane muses. “They would capture the energy of our kitchen perfectly.”

Kai beams. “Flame curtains are a go!” 

In the aftermath, they total around six individual blankets, five mismatching lamps and one light-up axolotl, a table that no one knows how to put together, one set of flame-patterned curtains, another hideous couch, and enough cutlery and kitchenware that no one has to eat out of Sensei Wu’s incense bowls anymore. 

“Alright,” Lloyd says. “We’ve got three hours until the stores start closing. Everyone take the rest of your checks, don’t think about how much of a disaster the monastery still is, and start thinking about how valid retail therapy is.” 

“Aye-aye,” Kai salutes, before immediately booking it for the clothing outlets. 

---

Three hours later, Kai’s happily blown his entire check on a new wardrobe and exactly one pair of name-brand brand shoes. He’s unreasonably proud of himself for his restraint, until he catches Cole with three pairs of his own name-brand shoes, and immediately regrets being responsible. 

He spots Jay going off in the N-Pop section of a music store, Nya investing in a sinfully-priced espresso machine, and Zane walking toward the clothing outlets himself with a high-quality pair of noise-cancelling headphones. 

He doesn’t find Lloyd until well after he’s picked up his own clothes, already sporting an oversized hoodie he could’ve just stolen from Kai. 

He’s more concerned when Lloyd proceeds to blow the last of his check at the sporting goods section of the local convenience store. Considering how long Lloyd spent looking wistfully at the candy aisle, Kai is baffled by the decision. 

He’s even more baffled when Lloyd proceeds to box up his purchase for delivery instead of keeping it himself.

He’s utterly horrified when he sees who it’s addressed to.

“Are you serious?!” he asks shrilly, torn between ripping the box from Lloyd’s hands or immediately calling the mental health hotline. “You’re sending her gifts?”

“It’s not a gift, it’s — look, it’s a long story, you wouldn’t get it,” Lloyd grumbles, plastering another layer of duct tape over the box. “Just help me deliver it to Kryptarium and I’ll show you, okay?”

Kai very much does not help, because he’s not an enabler and he cares about his brother’s mental health, but he does follow Lloyd to Kryptarium Prison and lurk behind him as he eagerly watches the surveillance screens. 

Harumi stares at the box before her, looking every bit as baffled as Kai is. 

“Who would send me a volleyball—”

She freezes, her face going utterly blank. A muscle in her jaw twitches. 

There’s a brief flash of what could be amusement, a brief expression as if she’s eaten something sour, then a fury like no other eclipses her face. 

“LLOYD! I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF, YOU THINK YOU’RE HILARIOUS—”

Lloyd’s still laughing by the time they’re escorted from the premises, hard enough that Kai has to catch him when he trips at the top of the steps. 

“What’d you even write on the note?” Kai finally asks, a bit in awe. 

Lloyd grins. “I told her good luck getting together her villainous volleyball team in jail.”

Kai blinks. “Do I…want to know?”

“Nope!” Lloyd says airily. “But I’ve made my point.”

---

Regardless of some behaviors, the mental health hotline remains a constant idea. It simply happens to come up at inconvenient times, such as when Cole drops a dresser on his foot halfway across the courtyard. 

He swears so loudly the whole monastery echoes with it. 

“Oh geez, Cole, are you okay? Why’d you lift the whole thing on your own?”

“We could have helped,” Zane rushes over. “You don’t have to do it all yourself—”

“Yes I do!” Cole yells. “I’m stronger than that, I’m supposed to be stronger, I have to be stronger or you’re all going to die next time—”

He cuts off abruptly. Zane looks heartbroken. Jay—

Is suddenly busy smacking Cole upside the head. 

“No, you don’t!” he snaps back, even louder. “You don’t have to do it by yourself! None of you do! Every time anyone tries to do something by themselves it all goes wrong and we lose someone, so we’re never — doing that — again!” 

He seizes Cole around the arms, his wild eyes meeting Cole’s wide ones. “No one blames you for the stupid tunnel. I don’t care how strong you are. We’re all here and that’s what matters, so don’t you dare put that at risk.”

“But I—”

“No.”

“Jay, I—”

“No.”

“I—”

“No!” A manic expression overtakes Jay’s face. “No, no, no! No one’s taking the blame. No one’s isolating themselves. No. One. Is. Going. Off. Alone. You hear me?!” 

The others are frozen, halfway outstretched hands caught as if suspended in ice. Kai’s expression is twisted painfully. Lloyd’s eyes are on the ground. Zane is as frozen as the metaphorical ice, and Nya looks devastated. 

“No more being alone,” Jay says, the fire in his voice giving way to something wetter and considerably more sniffly. “No more. Don’t — you can’t—”

“Okay,” Cole whispers. He carefully takes Jay’s hands from his shoulders, grasping them in his own instead. “Okay. No more going at it alone. I promise.”  

 The monastery courtyard seems a little colder, in the silence.  

“Anyone feel like circling back to the whole ‘suing Harumi’ idea?” Kai finally speaks up. 

Jay gives a wet snort. 

“Well, we’re probably gonna need to afford tissues,” Lloyd says. His own voice isn’t exactly dry, either. 

---

The downside to sticking therapy smack at the bottom of their priorities is that they all really are, in fact, not okay. 

Most of the time, they manage. 

There’s a solace in being together, a comfort in having the people you trust and care for most in the world right next to you when the nightmares get bad. When Jay awakens screaming for Nya or clutching at his throat for air, Nya is already holding his hand and Cole’s holding the rest of him.

When Zane lapses into silence too long, emotions a roiling mess that leave him paralyzed, Kai is there with one-two-three’s for breathing and Lloyd is there to draw little cats with him until the world subsides again. 

When Cole’s eyes shadow in training and his hits grow wild, Zane is there to pin him before he bloodies his hands and Jay is there to sing horrible off-key songs he loves until the panic ebbs.

When Nya stares at the water too-long, her eyes misty and her expression dreamy, Jay is there to hold her tight and Kai is there to talk until his voice goes hoarse and hers returns. 

There are other times, though, when it’s harder. 

It hits Kai this time about halfway through painting the walls of the kitchen a cheerful yellow, said paint splattered up to his elbows, courtesy of Lloyd. He glances down — to joke, to laugh, to not think—

And pauses. With the headband he’s stolen from Pixal in place, pushing back the mass of thick blond hair, Kai can just see the purple-red edges of the swollen, irritated wounds that scar Lloyd’s scalp. The twin marks are a better sight than when Kai first glimpsed them, bleeding circles that looked as if someone had drilled into Lloyd’s skull — but not by much. 

“S’fine,” Lloyd mutters, catching Kai’s devastated expression. “I can’t even feel ‘em. Not really.”

“Liar,” Kai rasps. “They look awful.”

Lloyd makes a face. “Gee, thanks a lot.”

“I mean it. What if they get infected, or worse, or — have you had Sensei look at them?”

Lloyd wraps his arms around himself, avoiding Kai’s eyes. “No. I didn’t really…I did what he asked. What they both did. And then screwed the whole thing up, so it was all useless anyways, so I—”

He bites his lip, hard enough to crack the already dry skin. 

“I don’t really wanna hear anyone telling me what else I’m doing wrong with myself, right now.” 

Kai is angry enough to feel sick. 

“That’s stupid. That’s so stupid, he should — it shouldn’t be like that, it’s — why didn’t anyone—” he shakes his head. “Why doesn’t anyone ever ask us if we wanna be — if we wanna—”

Lloyd’s hand closes around his wrist, gently tugging Kai’s own hand from where it’s clawed unconsciously at his arm, leaving ugly red stripes against his skin. 

“You asked,” he says, quietly. “That meant a lot.”

Kai looks away. “Lot of good it did.”

Lloyd’s grip tightens. “It meant the world to me,” he repeats, stronger this time. 

“But I couldn’t—!”

Lloyd abandons his hold on his wrist to wrap his arms around Kai entirely, holding tight. Bony and strong and familiar, Kai’s little brother to the core. 

“Thank you,” he says, fervently enough that Kai can feel the ache in his voice. “Thank you for looking out for me.”

Kai’s voice is a miserable mess of fought-back tears. “I couldn’t even do anything.” 

“You asked me what I wanted,” Lloyd says once again, and Kai can hear the edge of tears threatening his voice, now. “That was everything.” 

Giving in, Kai drops his head into the mess of blond curls and hugs Lloyd back. Lloyd’s hair smells like blood and paint and steel and the strawberry shampoo Skylor gave them, and now it’s gonna smell like Kai’s stupid snot and tears. 

“Hey, having another hug party without me is lame.” 

Kai gives a wet, broken response as Nya throws her arms around them both. 

“Idiots,” she murmurs, resting her head atop theirs. “I love you both, you know that?”

“Ew, gross,” Lloyd snorts wetly. “Hey Kai, Nya loves us.”

“Little jerk, who you callin’ gross? And here I thought you loved us too.” 

“Well obviously I love you guys back, who’s the idiot now—”

Kai simply clutches them both and cries harder, as if holding onto them will stop himself from falling apart.

It works, in the ways that matter, though it’s always because they’re holding back even tighter. 

Later that evening, Zane bathes Lloyd’s head in antiseptic and Jay forces them all to sit through the PowerPoint presentation he’s made with Nya titled “Every Super Cool Totally Good Character with Horns Ranked”. He loses them the minute he brings anime characters into it, as everyone suddenly develops incredibly passionate opinions about the rankees, but Lloyd’s laughing too hard to have his own opinion and Kai doesn’t feel like he’s drowning under inadequacy anymore — just choking to death under the weight of Jay’s elbow for daring to insult Re:Zero as an anime “since it actually has Oni in it, idiot, your opinion is trash—” 

They get things back to being okay, one way or another. 

---

Somewhere in the third month of renovations, they finally scrounge up six whole beds. It takes a good deal of dragging and cursing, but they finally manage to move into their own rooms, the once-empty spaces looking a little less lonely. 

“Now we don’t have to all sleep together in the same room anymore,” Jay announces. There’s no small amount of celebration at that.

The celebration lasts up until sometime around three in the morning, at which point the  consistent nightmares land them all right back in the pile of communal air mattresses. 

“Just for like, one more night,” Kai yawns, as Lloyd curls closer beneath his arm. 

“Totally, yeah,” Nya echoes, one leg spread across Jay, her arm sprawled over Kai. 

“Go to sleep already, FSM’ sake,” Cole begs, before slumping over Zane. 

For all Cole’s begging, he’s still the first to act when Zane suddenly lurches up from the bed, gasping for air like he’s drowning and giving them all joint heart attacks. 

“—hey, hey, it’s okay, it’s just us—”

Cole’s hands hover, non-threatening, as Zane buries his face in his palms, breathing ragged. The others have begun to get up now as well, the slow kind of approach that lets Zane know exactly where each of them are. 

“I despise this,” Zane spits, as his hand drags down to fist over his chest. “I hate feeling like this. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it—”

“I know,” Cole says. “I know.”

“This is why — it’s so much easier—“

“It’s okay, it’s—”

“It is not! I do not need to breathe, and yet I can’t!” Zane bursts out, frustrated and frightened. “I’m not supposed to break down like this, I do not, I do not—”

“You’re not a machine,” Cole says steadily. “You get to break down.” 

“But if I—”

“You don’t,” Lloyd murmurs. “You don’t have to turn ‘em off, Zane. You’re one of the strongest people I know.” 

Zane’s head lowers, his eyes shadowed. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he says, but it’s reluctant. 

“Yeah, you’d never hurt, but you’d never be happy, either,” Kai says. “And that’d suck.”

“It’d suck for us, too,” Cole speaks up. “We’d have to live without your laugh. Without your sassy remarks. Without your kindness.”

“We’d live without you,” Lloyd says, quietly. “And you wouldn’t really be living, would you?”

Zane crumples, his shoulders shaking as he allows Kai to pull him close. 

“If it gets too much, just come to us,” Jay says. “We’ll be more, okay? We’re pretty good at that.”

Zane gives a wet, stifled laugh. 

“Don’t go, even if it’s just your emotions leaving,” Nya murmurs, her head against his. “It isn’t worth it.”

With slowing shudders, Zane lets himself relax, the warmth of their little family pressing around him. Kai is an immovable barrier at his side, save for where Lloyd’s tucked beneath his arm. Jay’s legs tangle with Lloyd and Cole’s, his hand held tightly in Nya’s.  

“Leaving isn’t worth it,” Nya echoes. “Not in any lifetime.”

---

Bit by bit, the monastery comes together. 

The smell of new paint gives way to a familiar scent of mixing elements and laundry soap, one that’s followed them since the first Bounty. They comb through every online shop until they find the exact brand of sheets that feel like the first apartment they ever lived in together. Thrift shops and sales and birthdays stock closets once again, new hoodies that are quickly stolen and passed back and forth. The collection of CD’s and movies rebuilds into stacks once again through shared movie nights and pirated music.

And little by little, with the consistent passage of time, photographs line the walls of the monastery once again.

 A little older, a little worn, but a collection of family all the same. 

---

“Except we still don’t have damn central heating—” 

“Suck it up and light the fireplace, hothead.” 

1. i don't really think that they are separate species, rather just a different race. kinda like humans. transformers don't need to have a singular homogenous culture or physical features to be Cybertronian. its mentioned that the Decepticons are the descendants of the Destrons, a larger faction which contained various sub-factions within them which probably have their own customs.

2. the very existence of Megazarak does imply that 'Decepticons' as a group are not evil because the Great War didn't start until Megatron gained power. this also tell us that Megazarak, despite what little we know of him, could've not been interested in war and might have been trying to avoid it amidst rising tensions because in the Allspark Almanac... its also very explicitly stated that Megatron urged for war, he was pushing for it and that probably means there really wasn't anyone at the top echelons of the Decepticon who called for total war. if it was happening, then Megatron wouldn't need to say anything in the first place.

3. this gives Megatron many more reasons to convince other Decepticons to join him in a coup against Megazarak. they occupy most of the military positions in the Autobot Commonwealth, the Autobots are an adversary they've been fighting for millions of years even before Megatron was protoformed. Megatron could argue and appeal to the common Decepticon by saying that they're being exploited, that despite being the ones carrying out the imperialist agenda of the Autobots (they're not entirely good guys), they're left NO benefits from this Empire. Megatron can easily point this out but the way he does it is actually very interesting (to me at least)...

4. because he says its an injustice and imperialism is an injustice, its a fact. but his takeaway is not "imperialism is injustice because an imperialist system requires an underclass or a conquered peoples to move it forward therefore it must be dismantled", instead its "imperialism is injustice we don't get the same level of benefits the regular Autobots get from this Empire even though we're the ones get fighting to make it a reality so i propose that we build our own empire". he's using revolutionary rhetoric to paint his own ambitions as something that would benefit the regular Decepticon foot soldier even though we all know its the opposite and it really adds to his character: Megatron doesn't think that conquest is inherently negative. so as long as it isn't him or his people being conquered. he says he's heroic but really, its a very twisted line of thought. at least IDW was a revolutionary who lost his way but TFA genuinely believed from the get-go that having a Decepticon Empire was the only way. he was a colonialist from the start.

6. ALSO it would make perfect sense as to how TFA Megs would end up having to form a DJD because the Decepticon movement was not exactly his. its something he took for himself, hijacked even. so obviously there's going to be Megazarak loyalists, those who may have not supported Megazarak's leadership but agreed that the Decepticons don't need to be in another war, there's going to be Decepticons who are from the many other Destron sub-factions who work with the Decepticons for their own advantages, there will be other Decepticons who would get ideas for a coup of their own after witnessing Megatron overthrow his predecessor. especially since Megatron chose to exile Megazarak instead of kill him which i suspect to be a politically motivated choice. Megatron needs to tighten his reigns because he didn't exactly have full overview of what he was handling until a while later. it explains why he was so quick to execute Starscream for his treachery instead of keeping him around longer cause my man has a LOT of experience.

7. one more thing i need to mention is how the Destrons actually won against the Protectorbots (Autobot's preceding faction) in the Third-Cybertronian Civil War? (yes, three. Megs is doing the fourth.) so... how did the Autobots come to power then? how did Decepticons/Destrons who literally won the war end up being reduced to just military positions and not getting benefits from the Empire they built? maybe its a plot hole or something but i suspect there's more to the conflict than they let on cause again, just like Megazarak, this is something they don't expand upon.

the Destron coalition collapse: i theorize that Destron in-fighting gave Autobots the upper hand, the Destrons slip out of power before the Decepticons could become as prominent as they were and the Autobots most likely saw the opportunity to seize administrative control of Cybertron. it is explicitly stated that the Destrons were made of many sub-factions which all seem to be very diverse unlike Autobots or Protectorbots who never have such things explicitly stated for them. the Destrons were probably a loose alliance between multiple smaller factions/clans/tribes and they probably had a figure-head who didn't interfere with any of the internal subjects of these sub-groups. it also kind of explains how Megatron has such an... open mind in a way? he was willing to accept Blackarachnia despite the techno-organic origins and didn't seem repulsed by humans in the way the Elite Guard was. i always found that interesting. it leads me to believe that he's had experience in diverse enviornments and genuinely could care less about identity as long as you are not Autobot-affiliated.

another interesting thing is that this also implies Decepticons were granted some sort of autonomy, some sort of governance of their own considering how Megazarak was apparently leader... but it was probably overseen by Autobots because i doubt they're letting any Destron activity go unnoticed.

8. and that theory brings me to my last point that the injustice Megatron is referring to could also be the divisive power-grab from the Autobots at the right moment when the Destron alliance was falling apart. because the Destrons, their ancestors won the war! they won yet they're still toiling away for Cybertron defence and expansion without getting major administrative benefits. and given the more military leaning culture of the Decepticons, its no wonder why it would be considered a grave injustice.

i think its highly likely that bots who were in the Protectorbots and then joined the Autobot administration (with a massive Decepticon hate-boner) could've also been skilfully diverting resources away from Destrons through their newfound political power to further suffocate the alliance. hence why Megatron refers it to as 'Autobot tyranny'... although he probably would've done the same given the chance.

i actually like his military-backstory in TFA. even a little bit more than the revolutionary one cause if he has military experience then i can totally see how he was able to expand the Decepticon Empire to its golden era. i like to think he fought in the Third-Cybertronian Civil War because i don't think the peace between Decepticons and the newer Autobot faction lasted as long as we think.

it also gives Megatron a lot more challenges to deal with, i feel. a military structure is not easy to navigate and the politics is stiff. being a politician is not the same as being a revolutionary. Megatron probably didn't have enough influence at first and needed to cement himself, in order to do that though, he's probably had to appeal to and appease many, especially those in the top-brass. its a test of his charm and wit, really brings out his full potential.

But that doesn’t mean Danny has to like it.

It had started simple at first, fangs and pointed ears developing. Then his skin tone had started to change. He refuses to look in a mirror when in ghost form. He looks too much like Dan.

Then his hair started to float. And that was okay. It made it look like he was floating in space. Then it looked more like fire than hair.

His friends try to reassure him, telling him that it doesn’t matter what he looks like. He isn’t Dan, and he wouldn’t turn into him because he had avoided the Nasty Burger Incident.

He doesn’t like going to Nasty Burger anymore either.

But they only say those things because he’s not being honest with them. He doesn’t tell them how it feels like the medallion is still in his chest. He doesn’t tell them that sometimes when he’s floating above the clouds by himself in the stillness of the night, he can hear a ticking. He had looked around at first before realizing that the ticking came from his chest. 

From his core.

And he has started having strange dreams.

Dreams of things he doesn’t remember but feels like he should.

They feel like memories, but they can’t be.

They were filled with destruction and grief and loneliness and regret.

Danny avoids sleeping as much as he can. His grades start to get worse. His friends are concerned, Mr. Lancer is frustrated, his parents… his parents don’t even realize. They’re too busy hunting down Phantom.

He doesn’t care. He just doesn’t want to dream anymore.

Danny comes home from school one day to see his parents sitting on the couch. They’re scowling at him.

“Danny, Mr. Lancer called us. He said you’re failing several classes.” his mom says, crossing her arms.

Danny’s only failing two, but he doesn’t think that will help his case.

“We’re very disappointed in you, Danny. You should be doing better.” His dad frowns at him.

“And if you’re struggling, you know you can come to your dad or me for help.”

Danny bites his cheek to keep from throwing angry words at them. When would he go to them for help? They’re always busy. He hardly even sees them anymore except for when they’re chasing him as Phantom. 

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, young man?” his dad asks.

“Sorry.” Danny grits out. “I’ll do better.”

“You will. From now until you get your grades up, you're grounded.” his mom says.

Danny wants to laugh. As if they’d notice if he left the house. They’ve never noticed before. They never notice when he comes back bruised and bleeding; they don't notice when he doesn’t come home at all.

“We’re also going to be meeting with your teacher.” she says, standing up. “We’ll be meeting with Mr. Lancer tomorrow after school.”

“Where?” Danny manages to ask through the fear gripping his heart. The ticking in his chest grows louder. 

“He’ll be coming here.” his dad says.

Danny relaxes a bit. At least it isn’t at the Nasty Burger.

The next day, Danny is waiting anxiously in their living room. His parents are still downstairs.

The doorbell rings and he lets Mr. Lancer in exchanging half hearted greetings. They wait in awkward silence for a few minutes before Danny stands up.

“I’ll go get them.”

He makes his way downstairs. He can hear his parents moving around, probably building some new weapon to hurt Phantom with, Danny thinks grimly.

“Mom, dad, Mr. Lancer’s here.” he calls out from halfway down the stairs. They don’t answer and Danny rolls his eyes as he continues down into the basement. The first thing he sees is something glowing red on one of the lab tables. He immediately doesn’t like it. 

“Mom, dad, Mr. Lancer’s here.” he says again, and this time they hear and start heading up the stairs, passing Danny and talking to each other about their latest invention.

Danny’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He sees a series of text from Tucker.

sup man sam got us inthrough your window jazz hearrd but worry not sam talked her into not snitchin when the adults are done we can go to sams

Danny smiles. With the promise of hanging out later, the meeting he’s going to now doesn’t feel that bad.

They’ve only just started talking, Danny distracted by the ticking in his core growing louder and faster though no one else seems to hear it, when Danny feels a pulse of energy. He frowns. The pulse of energy came from the basement. Is a ghost coming through? But his breath doesn’t fog, so what—

In a single moment reality tips from order into chaos. The ticking in Danny’s chest builds to a whine.

Then Danny is opening his eyes, coughing hard enough that he fears he’ll cough up his lungs. He squints, trying to peer through the smoke. There is rubble everywhere. Close by he sees—

Danny gags, retching. There are bodies. There is blood. There are limbs not attached to bodies.

Danny retches again, but nothing comes up.

Smoke and dust hang heavy in the air, and Danny wonders how he could possibly have survived whatever just happened. Why did he survive when—

There is a ringing in his ears that masks the near whine coming from the rapid ticking in his chest.

It is too much. He cannot handle this. He feels unconsciousness tugging at him, and he doesn’t resist.

It’s later that he finds out that there was an explosion in the basement. An explosion that then started a chain reaction with all the other dangerous things in the lab, ending with the portal erupting with the fury of untamable energy finally unleashed.

It decimated not only the Fentons' house, but the surrounding ones as well. There is death and injuries, and everyone is wondering how Danny survived.

Meanwhile, he wonders if he can even die again.

He feels empty, blank, he doesn’t resist the social workers guiding him into a car. He doesn’t process the fact that they’ve dropped him off at Vlad’s mansion. He doesn’t even remember why that’s a bad idea. At least not until it’s too late, and Vlad has placed a power canceling cuff around his wrist and a shield around the house that is logged onto Danny’s ectosignature so that he cannot even escape in human form.

He is trapped.

He spirals.

Vlad grows frustrated and then angry at Danny’s lack of accepting Vlad as his new father figure.

It is not even Danny’s idea this time.

It is Vlad who grows tired of Danny’s mopping. It is Vlad who chains Danny down onto a lab table, ignoring Danny’s pleas that sound like madness to Vlad.

Vlad who stands over him, ghosts gauntlets raised, before he plunges them into Danny’s chest. He pulls out Phantom. Phantom who without his human half does not know how to handle the grief that tears at his core. Who does not know how to handle the destruction of one of his obsessions. There is still space. But he can hardly think of that amidst the grief. 

Phantom flies into Vlad, tearing out Plasmius. Plasmius who is also suffering from a partially broken obsession.

Ghost cores are not meant to merge. They repel each other like magnets. But when two cores with such similar obsessions, that are both cracked and mourning come so close together, it is like the irresistible pull of magnets. But ghost cores are not meant to merge. And so two cores come together, but at the same time two cores both try to flee in different directions.

Madness is the only logical outcome.

Madness that seeks to consume everything in an effort to end its suffering. It will destroy everything. For maybe, when there are no more reminders, it will finally feel peace.

"Clockwork says you're my responsibility now," Vlad said upon releasing him from the cloning chamber. "I suppose that's fitting. I am something like your father in a manner of speaking."

"You are not my father," he spat. Whatever else Vlad was—a con man, a fruitloop, a cheesehead in more ways than one—he had never been Phantom's father. "Let's get that out of the way right now. You may have been partially responsible for creating me, but there is no world where you would ever be my father, and there never will be."

Vlad raised his hands in surrender. "I suppose that was a bit tactless. Perhaps legal guardian would be more appropriate, seeing as you are technically a minor again. Or perhaps warden? Probation officer? Supervisor?"

"How about fruitloop?" Phantom scoffed.

"Oh, don't you start."

It took a few weeks—and a lot of overshadowing—to get all the paperwork in order, since Phantom didn't technically exist in this timeline. Vlad, of course, did it all himself, since Phantom saw no reason why he had to legally exist in this world. He spent most of his time sulking and ruminating, and pretending to be totally reformed and okay when Danny and his friends came to check on him every few days. As if it didn't feel like his heart was being ripped out every time he saw Sam and Tucker alive and smiling again.

—

"You're doing what?" Phantom demanded flatly.

"You heard me," Vlad said, crossing his arms. "You never finished high-school back when you were still human. I enrolled you at Casper High."

"I remember all your high school experiences, too," Phantom pointed out. "Messy Masters."

Vlad scowled at the cruel but childish nickname given to him by his high school bully Todd, who liked to dump food on him at lunch and tell people Vlad didn't even know how to eat without getting it all over himself.

"My high school education ended in 1983, and is outdated," he said, pointedly ignoring the remark. "And even if that were not the case, children are legally required to attend school, and your physical age means you are included."

"Can't you just 'home-school' me?" Phantom put finger quotes around the word to indicate that he meant for Vlad to tell the state they were homeschooling when in actuality he was just letting Phantom do whatever he wanted.

"I'm afraid not. You're not the only one of us who's expected to redeem themselves, and I fully intent to become an upstanding, law abiding citizen from here on."

"You overshadowed, like, eight people just to get me a social security number," Phantom pointed out.

"That... was a necessary evil. It would have be neigh impossible to do so otherwise. It's also irrelevant to the matter at hand, which is that you will be going to school from now on. 

"You're already enrolled with the name Dan Masters. Obviously I couldn't enroll you as Phantom, so you'll have to get used to being human again. At least between the hours of eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. I've already informed Daniel, and he agreed to keep an eye on you with the help of his little friends."

Phantom scowled and glared intensely.

"It's not like you've got anything else to do during the day," Vlad said, glowering right back, utterly uncowed.

With a groan, Phantom relented. "Fine." He supposed he could just ditch if it ever got too unbearable.

—

If he thought seeing Sam and Tucker every once in a while when they came to check on him was painful, seeing them at school every day was unbearable. It wasn't just them, though. All his old classmates, his teachers, catching sight of his sister in the halls every so often, and his parents when they did their monthly ghost safety assembly.

He was surrounded by living ghosts. His family, his friends, they never died in this timeline, have yet to die. He should be happy about that, yet it makes him feel even worse than when he was sulking alone in Vlad's mansion every day. They were a constant reminder of the versions of them that Phantom—Dan had lost. 

He sat alone at lunch, watching his old friend on the other side of the cafeteria. It was strange, having to eat again, now that he was once more half human. It was stranger to watch Sam and Tucker laughing and talking every day at lunch and know that they weren't his Sam and Tucker. They looked just like his friends, but they weren't his friends.

A lunch tray was set down on the table next to him and he instantly turned to glare, then stopped in surprise when he saw that it was Jazz taking the seat beside him.

"Hi there!" she said brightly. "Do you prefer Dan or Phantom?"

He opened his mouth slightly, but was to surprised to speak.

"My brother told me about you," she continued. "I noticed you sitting alone at lunch every day, and at first I figured I should just leave you be, but you looked so despondent, and I started to think that maybe letting you be alone wasn't the best thing for you after all, so I decided to come join you today for a chat. So what name do you prefer?"

That's right... she knew. She'd almost always known, even in his own timeline. He'd almost forgotten.

"Phantom, I suppose," he said. "But either is fine. Vlad says I'm supposed to only use Dan when I'm at school, but I don't exactly care about his rules."

"Well, the cafeteria's too loud for anyone to overhear us anyway, so Phantom it is. How's school treating you so far?"

Phantom shrugged. "Boring."

"Just boring?" Jazz asked. "Your expression just now didn't really scream 'bored' to me. You can talk to me about stuff, you know. I may only know the gist of your situation, but maybe I can still help."

"You know the gist?" Phantom echoed, raising an eyebrow. "So you know that, in my timeline, all of my friends and family died horribly in a fast food explosion, yourself included."

"Uh... I knew died horribly," she said. "Fast food explosion is new information."

"You know I razed the entire Earth into a wasteland?"

"Yup."

"You know I tried to do the same to the entire time-stream just over a month ago?"

"Uh-huh," she confirmed. "And I know that you're also lonely and grieving, and that Danny decided to give you a second chance."

"He really tells you everything, huh? I wish I'd trusted my Jazz that much."

Jazz grinned. "Well, it's not too late to trust a Jazz," she said. "So tell me, Phantom. What's on your mind?"

For a long moment, he just stared at her. Her terrified face just before her death in his timeline flashed before his eyes, superimposed over her open smile. His sister was gone. But... she was also here, waiting with open arms and a kind smile. Trying to get him to open up and talk about his problems again, just like she had back in his timeline.

It's not too late, she had said.  He wasn't sure he fully believed that.

"I remember you dying," he said at length. "The terror on your face. The way your screamed for help. But I couldn't save you. Yet here you are, just the same as the sister I lost, and yet not really her."

"And how does that make you feel?" she asked.

Phantom almost snorted at the question. It was so cliche.

He didn't laugh, though. Instead, he answered.

"I should be happy you're alive, but... I just feel... resentful. It makes me angry that there's a version of me that didn't have to suffer like I did. That didn't have to lose you."

Jazz nodded. There wasn't a single mote of judgment or disgust in her expression. She merely looked pensive.

"You know... anger is what we call a secondary emotion in psychology," she began. "That means that it's not usually the first thing you feel, but rather a reaction to whatever the primary emotion is. Like, if someone hits you, you feel hurt first, and that pain makes you feel angry at the person that caused it. Anger is also the second stage of grief as outlined in the theory of the five stages of grief."

"What's your point?"

"Well, your two fifths of the way to processing your grief, I guess," she replied with a shrug. "But also, if you look past the anger and dig a little deeper, you'll probably find that what you're really feeling is something else entirely, and the anger is just you trying to cover those feelings up. Anger is one of the easiest emotions, but also one of the most draining. People often find they have a lot more energy once they manage to stop being angry all the time."

The bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and Jazz stood up.

"Just something to think about," she said. "Can I join you for lunch tomorrow?"

"Well, killing you in front of the whole cafeteria would draw too much attention, so I suppose I can't stop you," Phantom told her.

"Great!" she said. "I'll see you tomorrow then!"

Jazz joined him again the next day, and the next. They talked some more. Mostly about his feelings, at least until he told her he was too drained from talking about his feelings all the time, and she relented with alacrity, and helped him with his history homework instead. Vlad was right about his high school education being outdated, and history was where Phantom was noticing it the most.

A few weeks later, the two of them were joined at their lunch table by another boy, who sat across from Jazz without saying a word. He was a goth guy with a spiky black mohawk, a black crop top, and lots of piercings. 

When she noticed Phantom looking at him with confusion, Jazz introduced him.

"Oh, this is my friend Spike," Jazz said. "You don't have to worry about him spilling any secrets or anything, he mostly keeps to himself, and he's very respectful, I think you'll like him once you get to know him. Spike, this is Dan, but I call him Phantom."

Spike jerked his chin up in greeting and continued to say nothing, instead taking a bite of his ham sandwich. 

"He doesn't talk much," she said easily. "Don't take it personally. before I started coming to sit with you, he and I usually ate lunch together, and he was just starting to feel left out. He promised not to let anything we say here leave this table."

Spike nodded.

"Alllright," Phantom allowed. If Jazz trusted this guy, then he supposed he could allow this. But he wasn't getting into any of his emotional stuff with an audience present. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a packet of papers, stapled together. His history midterm. "Look, I got a ninety-six percent."

"Phantom! That's amazing!" Jazz congratulated, picking up the packet and flipping through it excitedly. "You got all the questions on African history right? Rock on!"

Phantom and Spike both snorted at that. 

"Rock on?" Phantom repeated. "No offense, but you really can't pull off that kind of slang."

Spike huffed a quiet laugh and nodded.

Jazz pouted for a moment, that huffed dismissively and handed the test back to him. "Well, whatever," she said. "Is this your first A on a history test since starting here?"

"Yeah, I guess it is," he said, realizing it as he said it.

"How's that feel?"

"It feels..." he had to think about it for a moment. Not because he didn't know the answer but because he couldn't really believe it. "It feels really good," he said finally. Wow, it's been so long since I cared about anything as insignificant as a test, but it really feels good to have done well on it."

"It's not insignificant that you worked hard, and you got to see the fruits of your labor," Jazz pointed out. "And how did it feel to take the test. Did you get anxious?"

Phantom blinked. "No," he said, completely shocked. 

Ever since going back to school, he'd been facing the unfortunate and unexpected problem of having an anxiety attack every time he took a test—the thing that had killed his friends and family in his original timeline. He hadn't taken one since getting re-enrolled in high school, so he hadn't know that it would be such a trigger for him.

But when he'd taken his history mid-term, he'd been so focused on answering questions and remembering what he'd studied with Jazz, that the fact that he was taking a test had barely registered. And he hadn't even realized until she brought it up.

"That's fantastic, Phantom! You're making real progress!"

He grinned. Honest-to-goodness grinned out of raw joy.