Chapter Text
Night sweats. Screaming. Delirium.
The visions were getting worse. They came like storms now. Sudden, violent, and impossible to stop.
Akita sat quietly at the edge of the futon, her hands folded in her lap as Lloyd twisted ever so slightly under the covers. She observed his sleeping form in the hush of their shared room, the shoji screen doors left open to let in the night air. His breathing was shallow. His brow glistened. And though his body lay still, she knew his mind was not.
It was elsewhere. Trapped in whatever strange place his powers pulled him to when he fell unconscious into what he liked to call the void .
His breath rasped through clenched teeth before settling. His forehead burned hotter than any fever should. Sweat soaked the thin cotton sheet, and still, his body trembled as if cold.
This time, he hadn’t been fully awake in five days. Usually in and out of consciousness. A certain delirium about him whenever slightly awake whilst in and out of the void.
His powers. That relentless, destructive yet beautiful, radiant thing within him. Devoured his energy even whilst he slept. It left him pale. Starved. Hollow.
In his unconscious state, his elemental energy leached away at his core, drawing from him like a river carves through stone. Exhausting him. Weakening him.
But Akita was yet to give up.
They had good days. Small ones. Bright ones.
Sometimes multiple good days in a row.
Days when Lloyd would wake clear-eyed and himself. Stirring at the first bell of morning. He would rise without pain, bathe without help, speak without pain in his voice. He would dress in his forest green, gold and black yukata, trimmed with red, and walk the castle grounds like nothing had touched him.
Revitalised. Chatting to those in the castle. She would walk with him beneath the deep eaves of the tiled rooftops, their wooden sandals echoing faintly along the veranda.
Sometimes he’d even cross the red-lacquered bridge over the moat to visit the martial arts school. Where his young students, younger than he had been when he discovered he was the green ninja, bowed deeply before pouncing on him in excitement of his return.
Master Lloyd
And on those days, she almost believed he was healing.
For some time everything would seem well. She and Lloyd would eat in her family’s private courtyard, spar under the red maple trees, meditate in the gardens, read, walk, talk, run errands, attend the newly built theatre, drag themselves to her father’s counsel where they would whisper in strategy meetings, and then read some more in their private wing.
Every spare minute of the day in the waking world spent together.
Only for the mysterious illness to return.
It always returned.
But he would always come back to her.
It took days. A flicker of light in his eyes, then gone. The pain beginning again.
In and out.
It had been over a year and a half now since the illness had developed past a small sickness.
A year and a half of unanswered questions. Of half-cures and fragile hope.
When her people’s healers only offered temporary relief, Akita looked to those who had come from merged realms and settled in her people’s new home of Mirai.
They had tried almost everything at their disposal.
Former Monks, healers, gurus, scholars, priests.
Acupuncture. Reiki. Ki alignment. Chi paths. Chakra unblocking. Spirit-water submersion. Purification rituals. Spirit-channeling. Even sound cleansing with harmonic bells.
Only some helped in moderation. But nothing was definite.
Akita split her time between overseeing these treatments and commanding her father’s Northern border troops. But when she was in the castle, she hardly left Lloyd’s side.
Although looking for a cure proved harder than they thought. Her team in the palace would translate tomes and texts and experiment with what little they had.
Anything that might explain the curse, or gift, that plagued him.
Because this didn’t feel like any illness.
It felt ancient.
Lloyd agreed.
In his lucid moments whilst in and out of the void , he would scribble madly across scrolls and scraps of parchment. Names. Scenes. Battles. Events. Portraits. Dialogues he swore were real. As to not forget anything major when his time in the void came to an end days later.
“Memories,” he’d whisper, eyes glassy. “only they haven’t happened yet.” Before falling back into unconsciousness.
At the time he had seemed insane to all those in the castle. Rumours could even be heard outside the castle grounds whenever she ventured out.
But not her. Akita knew better.
Akita remembered what happened eighteen months ago.
He had drawn it first, charcoal on rice paper, eyes half-glazed.
A city engulfed in flame. The West District, burning. Every detail eerily precise.
And it happened, just as he said it would.
Two weeks later, he sketched the face of a stranger. Someone no one recognised. Gaunt cheeks. Dark eyes. A hidden blade.
That same man arrived three days later under diplomatic banners from a foreign realm a little more North than Mirai.
He tried to kill her father.
After that, the council stopped calling Lloyd insane.
Now, they called him something worse. Dangerous.
But she knew better.
Lloyd still researched with them whenever he could. Between episodes, he would study quietly in the library, sorting through fragmented post-Merge records, comparing symbols from his visions to the known maps of the reshaped world to no avail. So far they had only received mapping of the far Southern and Northern merged lands but nothing in between. The Southern map from where they lived and mapped. The North from an explorer who had set alight the bottom of his map when her troops tried to take him in for questioning.
But this new world was still too young and vast to find the answers they needed.
They were still exploring. Still finding their feet. Still expanding her father’s help over the lands. Ensuring their safety, security and the prosperity of their people.
Her people’s reach stretched far. But not far enough.
Not yet.
She stared at Lloyd’s sleeping form in their shared room. Hair plastered to his forehead. Sweat drying in his form. Exhausted from the pain and the screaming. He had settled almost.
Akita sighed. Before wringing a cold towel and placing it softly on his forehead. There was help within the castle for tasks like this. But she didn't mind.
With their world expanding and her troops redefining borders of the waking world. It wouldn't take long to find what they needed or someone who knew something.
Akita would make sure of it.