#THISS! let’s remember that they’re humans too!

[aweebwrites]

Move on Dragons Ch17

“Lookss like even this version of Acronix likess tech.” Jay chuckled, the baby dragon staring at the screen of his hand held game with wide, reflective eyes.

“And this version of Krux still hates it.” Kai says drily, holding his phone up high using his tail so the hissing little runt can’t continue trying to chew it to bits. “How much longer until they’d need him?” He asked Jay as he pushed at buttons quickly on his game, the smaller dragon completely enraptured.

“They’ll want him any ssecond now.” Jay spoke quieter, the tip of his long, horned tail thumping the ground as he focused on what appeared to be a hard level. “You sure you can manage to disstract him while they’re gone? He doesn’t like being out of sight of his brother and Cole’s still gone with Lloyd and Nya to New Ninjago City so he can’t use his magic touch with kids- and baby dragons.” He reminded, looking up at Kai with slitted blue eyes and Kai nodded, plucking Rux off of him, the latter trying to dig his claws in his scales to climb him.

“I’ll take him out on a flight. That should keep him distracted until they’re done. It’s not a long process after all.” Kai murmured as he kept his hand out of reach of Rux’s small but sharp teeth. He already learned the hard way that while they can’t bite through his scales, his little teeth were perfect for getting around them. “You’re getting better with your S’s though.” He praised and Jay shot him a fanged grin.

“I just gotta keep working around thesse teeth with thiss tongue.” Jay says as he paused his game to prod at his long, thick fangs then used a slender, forked tongue to lick at one. “I mean, if Pythor figured it out, so can I.” He grinned then laughed once Nix gave a protesting sound, tentatively reaching out to grasp the device Jay yelled.

They were starting to learn how to hold things with their paws now and learning how to sit with just their hind legs and tails as support. With the majority of the company they have being human- or somewhat human-, it was natural for them to begin trying to copy them. Both Kai and Jay sensed as someone approached them then turned around to see both elders as they approached. Looks like it’s time.

“Alright.” Kai grunted as he set Rux down then stood with a stretch. “You me, some air time.” He says, placing both hands on his hips as he set down his phone with his tail.

Before the small gray dragon could dart after the phone, Kai shifted, leaning forward to land on his front paws. Rux stared up at him with large reflective eyes, never seeing Kai shift before. Sure Kai had interacted with the dragons in both forms to make sure they were used to both, but he’s never had a reason or chance to shift before them until now. He scooped Rux up in his paw, the latter barely even taking up much space there. He had to be careful with him. With that, he spread his wings and took off, able to tell with the delighted sound Rux made, that he already enjoyed flying. Looks like distracting him really wasn’t that hard of a task.

On the ground, Jay pocketed the game to Nix’s displeasure and picked the even heavier dragon up as he turned to the elders. Jay hesitated.

“It won’t hurt him, right?” He had to ask, looking down at Nix as he looked up at both elders with large, mirror-like eyes.

“Not at all.” Wu reassured him.

“It is a quick and painless process. He hasn’t awoken his powers as yet so he won’t even feel it.” Garmadad nodded and Jay nodded too, allowing them to escort him to the awaiting dragons. 

_______

“Uh.” Cole says as he blinked at the villain they were supposed to take down for robbing a bank.

“You have got to be kidding me.” Lloyd couldn’t help but say as Nya grimaced.

“How did they let this guy rob a bank?” Nya asked as they looked at the villain Fugi-dove as he attempted to make some nearby pigeons attack them.

“Oh come on! Please? They’re right there! Just- at least fly off!” Fugi-dove begged, using the large wings he had attached to his arms to try and rile them up but the pigeons continued to ignore his existence.

“I put on make-up… for this…” Lloyd says with an undertone of anger in his annoyed voice, all of his visible skin covered in makeup to hide his oni nature.

“We told you there was no need.” Cole reminded. “ No matter how you look, you’re still the green ninja who saved this city more times than we can count.” He told him as Nya gathered water from a nearby fountain and captured the culprit in it, leaving his head out as he fought and squirmed against it.

“Cole’s right you know.” Nya says as she walked over and picked up the bag of money Fugi-dove dropped. “You’ve been telling Jay he should accept the way he looks. Maybe it’s time you take a page out of your own book.” She smiled a little, looking across at him.

“It’s not like that, really.” Lloyd told them as they waited for the police to show up.

Both Nya and Cole rose a brow at him.

“Ok, maybe just a smidgen- but we haven’t even told the city about the dragons- or our appearance change. If we just randomly show up as half dragon and half dragon and oni, we might stir up panic.” He reasoned as Little G poked his head out from under his hood, some of the makeup on his shiny scales.

“He has a point.” Cole shrugged, looking across at Nya.

“We should at least notify the city of the whole half dragon shifting thing, though it’ll be good to know if the change is permanent or not.” Nya says, looking down at her gloved hands.

“What do you mean? Isn’t it?” Cole asked as the sound of sirens grew closer. “Kai’s was permanent.” He pointed out.

“No, that was because of the scales the dragons gave him.” Lloyd reminded them.

“Scales?” Nya blinked but then remembered the colourful necklace of scales Kai had first returned with after spending his first week in their dimension. “What did happen to those scales?” She asked, thoughtfully.

“We’ll ask him when we get back. We’ll figure out what to tell the city then too.” Lloyd told them and they nodded, turning to the chief of police as he came out of his car, a few other police with him too.

_______

Jay played his game again though a bit nervously, the entire Dragon colony watching him as he kept Nix distracted as Garmadon accepted a large, metal construct that looked just like a time blade- but way bigger. He walked forward to Jay and he blinked once he set it down around him, leaving both he and Nix in the middle.

“U-uh, this won’t take my powers… Right?” He asked anxiously, his tail flicking nervously.

“Correct. Kronos Steel is designed to only contain the powers of time.” Wu rumbled quietly as Garmadon stepped back.

Jay blinked once Nix began to glow green, the dragonling’s eyes still glued to the screen of his game even as Jay stopped playing. He watched as the green energy of his time forward powers began leaving him, the metallic blades in the sides of the device beginning to glow with it. The last of Nix’s glow was absorbed by the time blade, leaving the green streak down the right side of his body to go dark. With that, Garmadad removed the blade that fit his paw well.

“There is only one place we can ensure its safety.” Wu says and Garmadad nods, knowing that as well.

“Getting it there will be a dangerous task.” He whispered but knew it had to be done.

“They will be careful. Morro must go with them.” Wu told him and Garmadad gave a slow sigh before he nodded.

Their former home high up on the mountain, once the safest place for dragons, was now the most dangerous. But already, it held and protected the time stop power.

_______

‘You sure like flying, huh?’ Kai rumbled as he glanced down at Rux in his paws the young dragon’s reflective eyes wide open and filled with wonder at the world around him.

It didn’t matter that Kai’s only been looping around a small space above Hiroshi’s Labyrinth. He was enraptured it appears. Kai was sure he could head back now but… He spotted their usual river for fishing before grunting and descending to a hover by its bank, displeasing the dragonling.

‘Calm down. I’m only fetching us a snack.’ Kai huffed through his nose then looked over the water. 

With the sun keeping his shadow behind him, fishing should be easier now. He eyed the river, eyed the fish loitering in a deeper section of it before he marked his prey. He beat his wings, swooping low and extending his hind legs. With a loud splash, he pulled two large fish out of the water, both trapped in his clawed back paws. He dropped them on the shore, far from the river then landed. He then set Rux down before he shifted into his smaller half dragon form, snorting once he watched Rux warily approach the flopping fish. The one closest to him stopped flopping and he reached a paw out to touch it- only to release a startled cry once it flopped towards him. Kai laughed once he dashed towards him, under his wing to hide.

“It’s alright bud. It can’t hurt you.” Kai spoke low, lifting his wing a little so he could look at the wary dragonling. “Come ‘ere.” He says as he pulled him out and Rux squirmed in his arms, wanting to hide again.

“They take a sec to stop flopping around but here’s a faster way.” Kai says, setting him down before dropping on all fours.

He then aimed for the head of the fish and bit into it, sitting back on all fours still as he chewed, the fish half out of his mouth. Rux blinked up at him as he chewed then glanced at the other gasping fish. He mustered up some courage and moved forward slowly, flinching once it started to flop again. Rux growled then and pounced, biting into its side, struggling for a bit as it wiggled in his mouth, Kai laughing around his own snack as he did. It took Rux three limbs to pin the fish down, Kai having a whale of a time watching him.

“Will you eat it with the scales?” Kai asked as he padded over on all fours, spitting out the spiny tail of the fish he ate.

He then face palmed, remembering that he was pretty much a toddler in human standards who had no idea what he was saying. He received his answer anyway once Rux managed to get a bite out of the fish, settling down with both front paws and a hind one on the fish as a just in case as he ate into its soft middle. Kai laid down on his stomach next to him, letting him eat as he kept an eye and an ear out. Dragons may be the new apex predator of the Labyrinth but Rux was still small and snack sized for most of the predators here. After a while, he heard a low but clear call. A familiar one he recalled his dragon father using when he first stumbled into their dimension. Time to head home it seems. Kai shifted again, returning the call before he checked on Rux. He was amused to see him half asleep, still holding down the fish that had almost all of its middle eaten. Looks like a flight and a snack is the key to getting him to sleep. He wished he figured that out before he had to spend several nights awake, trying to get the whiny dragonling to sleep.

He gathered him up in his paws again, huffing in amusement as he perked up again, excited to be flying. He’ll be even more of a handful once he learns to fly on his own...

____________

(Pandemonium hasn’t cooled but I’ve gotten around to ignoring the hysteria and focusing on the important things, which means I'm back on my usual updating this every two days agenda. Story wise, I swear I have a reason for bringing in baby Acronix and Krux, other than the sake of baby dragons. I need em for both Garmadon and Cole's plot line. They also help out with everyone else's. I'm trying not to drag things out too much, because as cute and fun as this all is, it'll lose purpose if I let it do whatever. Also writing Jay's lines with all the extra S's suck so I'm slowly integrating them out. I wanted this fic to be like, 30 chapters max. I know I won't be able to keep it there because the final arc I have planned is gonna be p big so I'm extending it to at least 40. Here's to hopefully finishing this by or in May! Thanks for reading!!!)

[dateamonster]

Day 14 -- The Maze

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You are aware, distantly, that this isn’t real. You- your body- is still out there in the fray, casting out defensive words as the world crumbles around you. That barrier trick you picked up in the desert is keeping you out of the line of fire for now, but who knows for how much longer.

In here, wherever “here” can be said to be, you’re not much safer. The presence at your back remains no more than a pace behind you no matter which direction you turn, stalking with unhurried persistence. The walls are so high you can’t see the top. The path ahead is so dark you can’t see the end.

“Keep going,” someone says. A woman’s voice; a voice you know. "You’re almost there.”

Though held fast to your path and stiff with fear you manage to turn your head and see the dragonfly lady standing in an adjacent corridor. Love and dread in equal measures blossoms in your chest as you try to run to her, but the string twined around your hand keeps you in place, anchors you.

“Keep going,” she insists, and you know it’s not really her, you do, but you wish- you want- “Careful. You can’t stop now. Be smart and be cautious, but don’t be afraid. We’re with you. We’re all with you.”

And then you see them, stretched out in every direction, lining every cursal passageway, not only acolytes but monsters too and everything in between. Friends. Allies. Family come and gone and now come again. She’s right. For all your fears, you’ve never been alone.

“I miss you,” you want to say. “I’m sorry I let you down.” The thoughts don’t make sounds, but they seem to understand you anyway.

“You haven’t,” you hear. “Until you stop moving forward, you haven’t lost.”

Then one by one, the many creatures you’ve met in your travels come into view. A shadow to smile for you, an angel to raise a glass, a banshee signing her approval, and as you approach the end, though the sphinx’s stare is as enigmatic as ever, you swear you can hear a soft rumbling purr.

You remember your mission. Languages of the mad, the dead, the holy, the drowned, and so on and so on ring in your ears, burn in your mouth. These were the puzzle pieces you were supposed to gather so that you could translate the twenty-sided pidgin formula that would send your sibling back to the primordium, an acolyte’s summoning spell but in reverse. Calling something up is child’s play compared to sending that something back, never mind getting it to stay there. Would it even have worked? Maybe not, maybe so. But now you must find another way, and there is no more room for maybes.

The presence breathes on the back of your neck, hot and damp, but you carry on and you don’t look back. You follow your string like a lifeline and keep your place even and unfaltering, until the line runs out. It simply stops.

When you look up you see that you are standing at a crossroads, a fork in the path. Go left or go right; either way you turn is a way out, but the ways are not equal.

Outside the maze, the twin is raging like a vengeful god, and though you know they’re probably far beyond awareness at this point, you can’t get past the feeling that they’re still waiting for you. After all that’s what this was all about, right? They so desperately wanted you here to witness their final all-consuming act of destruction. You won’t keep them waiting anymore.

You open your eyes.

“Hey!” In the eye of the storm your twin remains slack and blank-eyed as the world warps and churns around them. Their mouth still moves furiously but they do not so much as turn their eyes to acknowledge you. The amount of concentration it must take to undo the fine threads that hold the world together word by word, not to mention the physical toll. You revise your strategy.

“Hey dumbass!” And you throw a handful of debris at them. The rubble disintegrates a few feet from their person. Their head slowly swivels around. If there’s one thing you can count on it’s their ability to be distracted by the most obvious bait. “Is this supposed to scare me?”

They shift as if preparing to walk towards you, or drag themselves towards you as the case may be, and then before you can blink they are in front of you. Or are you in front of them? Space is not what it was a second ago, and time too seems to have slowed, or else sped up at such a rate that you feel sluggish in comparison. Your heart seizes in your chest. It’s only your barrier that stops them from getting a hand around your neck and even that is little comfort. You can feel the force of them bearing down on you, a singular unyielding push that never seems to tire.

“D-do I sscare you now?” they slur, and you can do nothing but watch as your sibling begins to split at the seams, spilling open before your eyes, discarding their human shell like the skin of an overripe fruit and underneath, all is horror.

The wet and writhing abomination looks at you blindly through unpupilled eyes overrun with red veins and it smiles, you think, with an excess of lipless puckers that must serve as mouths. It’s “skin” is a thin and nearly translucent membrane over a mass of pink meat. If it has any sort of reasonable skeletal structure it is too deep in the tissue for you to discern, yet something must be supporting it because it is staggering in size.

“Are you afffraid?” the aberrant mass breathes. “Thiss is me. Thiss is usss! Thiss is the perfect ssself! One hundred mouthss to eat and one huh-hundred mouthss to shhape the land into my own cr-creation!"

You are afraid, it’s true. There’s no denying that. Any reasonable being would be. But looking at this monstrosity, at this massive shelled mollusk, you realize the precise shape of your fear.

You are afraid in the way the rabbit fears large shadows on the ground for memory of the low-flying hawk. This is no hawk. This is a shattered chrysalis, an insect squirming helpless without the security of its insulation, and the most fearful thing now is the size of your pity, the absolute crushing weight of your own heartache. In the shadow of the End, you can’t help but thing that maybe there’s still a way-

Except, no. No more maybes. You swore this to yourself.

You will save them.

When you speak you speak surely, for your vocabulary is vast. You can’t change yourself, but your most essential tool has still not left you- the ability to change things around you. Fear, hatred, anguish, love: these too are only words, only things. You can bend them, twist them, hoist them about you like a sword and shield. You are a linguist, and you are a monster, and you are someone’s child, and you are someone’s oh so beloved sibling, and you have friends all over the goddamn map who in this exact moment, whether they know it or not, are looking to you to keep this painful and reckless planet turning. So when you come to the final crossroads on your way out of the labyrinth, when you are posed with a choice between left and right with a beast of unknowable terror breathing down your neck, you square your shoulder and you turn back.

“Come to me.”

Your barrier falls away and you open up your arms. The feeling of the monster’s skin as you embrace them should repulse you, you know, but you find that you don’t mind at all.

“Come to me, and I won’t turn you away again.”

They roar. They struggle.

“Come to me.” You hear yourself in the way that one hears the ocean in the hollows of a conch shell. You couldn’t say where the words are coming from, only that they are the right ones. You close your eyes and the tears that run down your cheeks are clean and cool as the rain. “This time we won’t run. This time we will be whole.

We will cry when sadness bids us.

We will rejoice when joy finds us again.

We will expose ourselves to the light and not be afraid.”

It’s not at all like when they would devour people, for which the lingering part that is still wholly you is quite grateful. The image of them feeding on you or you them has often been a present subject of your worst nightmares.

Instead when they flow into you they are a body of water, not a pillar of ash. Their many limbs tangle around your ribs like children’s hands on monkey bars; nervous, joyous, unafraid of the fall. You feel everything they feel and know everything they know and for one horrible moment you truly understand them. You understand their heinous desires, their most selfish wishes. You see how easy it would be to take up the tools and pick up where they left off, to flood the earth and wipe it clean, to create an untouched plane where you could start anew. A new being, a new world. It feels right. It feels inevitable.

But destiny be damned, that’s not what you want! For all the posturing, all the mindgames, they were never stronger than you. You understand that too, now. And this thing- this new and precious Being you’ve become has all of that power and more. You. You are so much more. You can’t explain it. It’s bigger than words alone, bigger than pieces of paper and streaks of ink, bigger than poets and muses, bigger than hunger. You see it all now and it is gorgeous and triumphant and overwhelming and...

And that’s around the time that you pass out.