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Lloyd watches Arin as the younger ninja scuffs up dirt with his boot, angrily muttering his breath.
He gives Arin a couple minutes of solitary before he intervenes, which is spent tapping his foot and frustratedly shuffling towards the wall and leaning against it. At that point, Lloyd steps out into the courtyard, offering Arin a small wave. Arin perks up upon the sound of footsteps, and sees Lloyd approaching him. He immediately straightens and panickedly mimics Lloyd's wave, scrambling with his words. "S—Sensei! I was just taking a break, I swear—"
"Don't worry about it, Arin." Lloyd smiles, and joins him in leaning against the wall. Arin leans back as well, looking at him with confusion. "So, how's the self-training going?"
Arin visibly stifles a groan, pushing his hands against his face. Lloyd sympathizes; Sensei Wu would often let, or make, the ninja train by themselves before they would go head-to-toe with each other. It ended in annoyance, anger in the worst cases, most of the time.
"Same results?" Lloyd prods anyway. Arin peeks in between his fingers to give Lloyd the most depressed look he's seen the cheerful boy ever don. Lloyd hides a wince.
"It's like—" Arin struggles to find a way to express his struggle. "It doesn’t listen to me anymore. I’m trying to do what you told me to, but I lose control and it like— sputters out! I don’t know what to do anymore!”
Arin slides down to sit on the ground, burying his head in between his knees. Lloyd doesn’t move to sit down, not yet. He waits for Arin to say something else, to figure out what he’s supposed to say as the boy’s mentor, but Arin doesn’t give any sign of wanting to continue. So Lloyd simply says, “Have you tried clearing your mind?”
Lloyd can almost feel the animosity radiating off of Arin upon saying that. He doesn’t need to pry at Arin’s tone to know he’s scowling.
“Sensei, no offense, but I’m pretty sure that technique is bunk.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Lloyd said, hoping the comparison would help. “Just give it a little more time, Arin. Be patient with yourself!”
“A little more time?” Arin asks, sharply inhaling. His head snaps up to glare at Lloyd — Lloyd nearly stumbles back, surprised because Arin never snaps at anyone — as fire sparks in his eyes. “Sensei, the entire world is breaking apart at the seams. Imperium is still on a rise and— who knows what Empress Beatrix is gonna do next?! I didn’t help that time we infiltrated Imperium and you almost died! I need improve now, because we’ll never know what’ll hit us next, and I need to keep you safe —”
Lloyd watches, attention rapt as Arin stutters, that fire previously raging flitting between snuffing out and weakly surging. Arin tries to regain his breathing, clenching a fist to his chest. Lloyd does not move.
Arin stands up — wobbles a bit, rights himself — and breathes . Lloyd finally snaps out of it and steadies Arin, unclenching the boy’s hand from his chest and pressing his own palm to it. Gently, he lets a bit of green energy soothe the beating of Arin’s heart, to loosen the flow of the blood in his veins, to relax his constricting throat. Lloyd instructs Arin’s being to breathe, deep and slow, and Arin follows, slumping in Lloyd’s hold. When Lloyd looks at Arin in the eyes again, the fire is replaced by cold defeat, something shimmering in his eyes.
“I can’t even calm myself down,” Arin mutters, wrenching himself away from Lloyd with downcast eyes. “I’m that useless.”
“Hey now,” Lloyd sternly scolds. “Don’t say that. Everyone’s going to start from somewhere.”
“Lloyd.” Lloyd blinks. Arin’s never used his name without an honorific before. “It’s been over a month. A month , since we escaped from Imperium, two since you took me and Sora under your wing. I haven’t changed at all .”
“Sora’s—” Lloyd tried to weakly defend, before Arin cut him off again with a glare.
“Sora is doing great . Fine, actually! Because she actually has an element to control, she has something to show for , and I’m just—! I’m just the kid that learnt Spinjitzu all by himself! The wrong way !”
Arin trembles and takes multiple steps backwards. “I can’t do this,” he whispers. Then, louder, “Sensei Lloyd, I do think that you’ll find training Sora to be a better waste of your time and energy. I’m getting nowhere.”
Lloyd—
Can’t let Arin do this to himself.
Arin shrinks in on himself as he looks resolute. Lloyd doesn’t know how to deal with that. He doesn’t know how to fix this. How to make Arin feel better.
(God, Lloyd misses Kai).
Arin turns to leave, and flinches when the monastery doors slam themselves closed. He whirls on his heel, mustering up a glare to fire at Lloyd. "I'm leaving, this is my choice. You don't get to—"
"You might regret it." Lloyd doesn't mean for it to sound like a threat. "Arin— I've been where you are—"
"I don't have an element," Arin snaps. He's shaking. "You're not like me. I'm just—! I'm just a little kid!"
Lloyd feels pain stab his gut. He was a kid, then, too.
"Let's think about this rationally," Lloyd reasons, trying for a different strategy. But changing strategies mid-battle never personally worked out for Lloyd, and there was nothing different with this time.
" Fuck your strategies!" Arin yells, enraged, instinctively twisting into a Spinjitzu kick. Lloyd catches it on instinct, but he didn't see it coming. He's almost shocked that Arin would ever resort to that.
"You need to turn your foot a little more to actually pack a punch," Lloyd can't help but say, the words falling out of his mouth like grains of sand.
"What does it even matter ?" Arin scowls, but retaliates anyway by wrenching his foot from Lloyd's grasp, and correcting the earlier move. Had Lloyd been a lesser man, he would've been knocked clean off by the kick to his stomach. As it was, though, Lloyd stood strong with widened eyes and a plan formulating in his head.
"That was good," Lloyd speculates. "But you need to follow it up with a punch to keep your opponent distracted enough to use Spinjitzu on them."
"Would you STOP —" Arin roars as he pulls back for a punch— " TRYING TO TEACH ME?! "
Lloyd steps back immediately into his own Spinjitzu as Arin falls into his, clashing with the boy to test the integrity of the spin. Lloyd hears Arin cry out in surprise, expects the other to fall over—
—And is promptly blasted to the wall, breath effectively knocked out of him. Lloyd wheezes, clutching his chest as he tries to regain his breath. Arin shouts in worry, and scrambles toward the dent he made in the monastery wall. "Sensei?! Are you okay?!"
"Where did you—" Lloyd has to pause mid-sentence as Arin helps him out of the hole, wheezing. "How did you learn that?"
"I just—" Arin stammers, hands fumbling and nearly dropping Lloyd. "I didn't— I was mad so—"
Lloyd grins. "Don't apologize, that was great ."
Arin sputters, actually dropping Lloyd this time, but Lloyd catches himself on his feet and stands upright to give Arin a proud smile. "I've never seen Spinjitzu used like this before, it looked like you invented a new style altogether."
Arin flushes, hands twitching midair as if he didn't know what to do with them. "I was just—" Arin cleared his throat, straightening himself. "It felt right."
Lloyd snorts. "It goes far deeper than that, but you summarized it pretty well."
Lloyd gives Arin a second to recalibrate, to calm down and think again on what happened. Eventually, Arin faces Lloyd, a meek tone that was much more like him lacing his words. "How… did I do it…?"
"I can't explain it specifically to you," Lloyd replies nonchalantly, shrugging his shoulders. "Since you're the inventor of your own technique, but it goes like this—"
So Lloyd explains, and Arin listens, rapt with attention. Lloyd gets him to try it, again with a dummy, again against him, until Arin gets the hang of it.
Arin looks considerably brighter than when Lloyd found him, but there's still that— air of dissatisfaction. Lloyd doesn't know what to do with it. Arin might look less unhappy now, but he's not— completely okay. Lloyd knows that it would be better if he left Arin alone for now, knows that's what he would've wanted—
But maybe. Maybe Lloyd should stop thinking about Arin in relation to himself.
Perhaps it was time to break tradition.
Lloyd sits down next to an exhausted Arin on the steps of the monastery, watching the sunset. Arin barely startles at Lloyd's appearance, offering Lloyd a quiet gaze. Lloyd nods back at him and goes back to watching the sunset with him. He feels Arin hesitate beside him, before the boy also goes back to watching the sunset.
Lloyd should really start getting used to being the one to start the hard conversations, but you know what they say. Habits die hard.
"Even without an element," Lloyd whispers, causing Arin to actually jump from his spot. "A ninja can still perform Spinjitzu. An element doesn't make a great ninja."
Arin face twists from where Lloyd can see it out of the corner of his eye, and he hears him mumble, "That wouldn't have been a problem if this was pre-Rift."
"That's no way to think like a ninja," Lloyd scolds him. Arin doesn't flinch, per se, but something makes him scooch back, away from Lloyd.
Lloyd sighs, stamps on it, and tries again. "Arin, what I really mean to say is that you don't need to be the master of something to be a great ninja. I mean— you could take a look at Samurai X— PIXAL— and even Nya back before her element manifested! You could probably ask her and she'd definitely say that she misses being Samurai X more than being a ninja, so—"
"But they're—" Arin mumbles something, before catching his breath. "They're actually great . At what they do. I'm just—"
Arin gestures with his hands. Lloyd only quirks an eyebrow at it.
"Do you think I got here without practice?"
"Well, obviously no." Arin makes a sound between a scoff and a chuckle. "But it's like— I don't feel myself improving. I'm not… I'm just staying in the same place."
" Everyone's gonna feel like that at some point," Lloyd says earnestly. "You're not gonna be able to avoid it. Hell, when I was a kid, before I got all aged up by the Tomorrow's Tea, I couldn't even channel green energy in a way that was useful . And… ah, my oni side. Don't even know where to start with that ."
Lloyd shrugs as Arin furrows his brows. "Okay, wait, backtrack, you have an oni form, and you cheated your way to adulthood—"
"Okay," Lloyd loudly interrupts, the childish side of him winning out. "I did not cheat—"
"Holy shit, how old even are you—" Lloyd groans as he holds up a palm to avoid looking at Arin's shit-eating grin.
"We are not talking about that."
"We are so gonna be talking about this—"
"Tell Sora and it's thirty minutes added to your training regime," Lloyd warns, and Arin quickly shuts up at that, but his face still holds that devil's smile.
And Lloyd goes soft— soft —at that, and he seems to find a vague clue to name that desperation he felt earlier. Why he closed those doors on a whim.
"You're going to be someone great, Arin," Lloyd tells him, quiet and gentle, firm and proud. "And you're going to get there. Don't give up on us yet."
Arin's smile melts into something softer, it's silent but speaks volumes at the same time. "Okay."
"Plus, Kai and Nya'll kill me before they let you guys leave." Lloyd snorts, and throws an arm over Arin's shoulder. Arin scoots closer to allow comfort, rolling his eyes.
"Oh you know how they are! Big softies around kids, you know."
"You probably know about that more than I do." Arin chuckles, and Lloyd's face burns red, a protest already on his tongue. "Besides, it runs in the family I'm pretty sure, so. I get enough of that from you."
Something somersaults in Lloyd and punches him in the gut as a finishing move. Lloyd pretends he's not holding back tears as he presses against Arin's side. It's— it's definitely his oni instincts or something. His father mentioned being possessive as an oni trait, right?
"Ugh, I'm right," Arin groans, side eyeing Lloyd with a smile. "Noo, I'm gonna contract your familial disease."
"And you're going to be grateful about it." Lloyd tells Arin sternly. He also pretends he doesn't have a smile twice as wide as the world on his face right now.