Ninja Shtuff

Garmadon stood at the edge of the festival grounds, his crimson eyes scanning the throng of laughing villagers, the garish stalls draped in paper lanterns, the children chasing each other with sticky fingers. His hand instinctively went to the hilt of his blade—a reflex he could not quite suppress, even now.

Beside him, Althea was already moving forward, drawn by the scent of roasting chestnuts and the distant strum of a shamisen.

"Stop lurking," she said without looking back, her voice carrying that particular warmth that had, over the months, become the only thing that could unknot the tension in his shoulders. "You look like you're about to interrogate the vendors."

"I am assessing threats," he grumbled, falling into step beside her. His new outfit felt like a weight reminding him of regality.

"The only threat here," she replied, her pastel green eyes dancing with amusement, "is your reputation if you scowl at one more elderly grandmother."

He opened his mouth to retort but the words died on his tongue.

She had turned to face him fully, and the lantern light caught her hair—her woody brown hair—and in it, nestled like tiny, captured flames, were flowers.

When had she-

Misako's doing, he realized.

The scholar must've pressed them into Althea's hands that morning with a knowing smile and a whispered word Garmadon had not bothered to overhear. He had dismissed it as female frivolity, a harmless indulgence before their rare evening out.

He had been a fool.

They were small blossoms, delicate and unassuming, woven into the strands near her temple. Cream petals blushing to gold at their centers, so perfectly matched to the soft glow of her forcefields that he wondered if Misako had chosen them specifically. They caught the lantern light and held it, refracting warmth across Althea's cheek, her jaw, the elegant curve of her neck.

She was not looking at him. She was already distracted by a stall selling grilled dango, her profile luminous against the festival's chaos.

And Garmadon, the Master of Spinjitzu, the son of the First Spinjitzu Master, the man who had stared into the abyss and felt it stare back—Garmadon forgot to breathe.

She is beautiful.

The thought was not new. It had ambushed him in a dusty marketplace, in a cramped cabin, in the golden light of dawn as she hummed through that melodic voice of hers.

But this... this was different. This was her, softened by simple joy, adorned not for battle or duty but for pleasure. For a night of ordinary happiness.

She was his.

And the flowers in her hair made her look like something out of the old myths, the ones where heroes fought not for glory but for the right to stand beside such radiance.

"Garmadon?"

He blinked. She was holding out a skewer of grilled dango, four perfect dumplings glistening with sweet soy glaze.

"You were staring," she said but there was no accusation in it. Only a quiet, knowing pleasure.

"I was... asserting the potential route through the crowd," he lied, taking the skewer.

She laughed—that soft, startled sound he had first heard in their cabin, the one that had cracked something open in his chest and never quite closed.

"Of course you were."

He bit into the dango. The texture was soft, chewy, the sweetness cloying on his tongue.

"It's too sweet for me," he pronounced. He ate another, just to make sure.

Althea took a bite of her own, her eyes closing briefly in appreciation.

"Not bad," she murmured around the mouthful. "Chewy and slightly salty. The perfect combination."

He watched her eat, watched the way her lips curved around the sticky rice, and decided the dango was, perhaps, not entirely objectionable.

The play was a farce—a tale of star-crossed lovers separated by war and reunited by improbable coincidence. The actors wore garish masks and declaimed their lines with theatrical desperation, and the crowd laughed in all the right places.

Garmadon did not laugh.

He watched.

He watched the warrior in the play, a man of shadow and storm, reach for his beloved across the stage. He watched the woman, radiant in golden silk, raise a shield of light to protect him from an arrow.

They are us, he thought, the realization striking with unexpected force. A crude imitation but... they are us.

The warrior bowed his head to receive his lady's hand. The audience sighed. The music swelled.

And Garmadon felt his own hand, almost of its own accord, reaching for Althea's.

He could protect her from armies. He could shield her from the Fragment's whispers. But this—this simple, stolen moment of peace—was something he could not create.

It was a gift. And she had given it to him.

He turned to look at her, to see if she too saw their reflection in the actors' painted faces—

And her lips brushed his cheek.

Soft. Brief. Devastating.

His entire body went rigid. Heat flooded his face, neck, ears—a blush, first masters, he was blushing, the fearsome Garmadon, son of Aurloen, reduced to a stammering fool by a single, chaste kiss.

"What-" he managed, his voice cracking.

Althea was grinning.

The flowers in her hair bobbed with her quiet laughter, and her eyes—her beautiful, pastel green eyes—were alight with triumphant mischief.

"Your face," she whispered, reaching up to trace the line of his burning cheek with one finger. "It's the color of the sunset rose."

He caught her hand before she could retreat, holding it against his skin. "You are a menace."

"I'm a delight, my love," she corrected, her smile softening into something deeper, something that made the crowd, the play, the entire festival fade into irrelevant noise.

The actor on stage spoke his final line: "And so, my love, we shall remain—two storms, colliding into peace."

Garmadon did not hear it.

He was too busy memorizing the way the flowers looked in Althea's hair, lit by paper lanterns and the quiet fire of her joy.

This, he thought, as she tugged him toward a stall selling honeyed apricots, this is what I am fighting for. This ordinary, impossible, breathtaking happiness.

The flowers blazed like tiny suns in the darkness.

I've been thinking about doing this one in a long while but was having issues with locking in

I kept thinking like wouldn't it be cool if the dark Lloyd was actually Oni Lloyd instead of just an emo version of himself? Like it would make sense that he would actually feel ashamed of that side because he didn't want to be like his dad (plus the whole angst scene with how he was rejecting his Oni side in Crystallized)

Tbh they should've explored the balance in his nature more like it must be really confusing for him with having both Oni and Dragon genes in him