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.
And Garmadon, for the first time in centuries, let himself believe that the light might, eventually, win.
“If you asked it of me,” he continued, his voice gravelly. “If you looked at me and told me to spare a life, to stay my hand, to offer mercy instead of ruin… I would do it. Not because it is in my nature. But because it is in yours. And your nature is the only law I recognize.”
He brought a hand up, his cool fingers brushing a strand of hair from her cheek.
“The urge is always there. The chaos. The fury. It sings to me, Althea. It’s a song of breaking and burning. But your voice…” He leaned forward until his forehead rested against hers. “Your voice is quieter. It doesn’t roar. It just… is. And it drowns out the rest.”
He closed his eyes, a faint tremor running through him.
“For you, I would hold back the storm. I would leash the monster. Not in a cage of energy but in a cage of my own will. Because the thought of your disappointment… the thought of seeing that light in your eyes dim because of me…”
He shook his head, the motion small. “That is a torment I could not endure.”
- The Warden and the Monster (Chapter 10)
---.𖥔 ݁ ˖ 𖥔 ˖ ݁ 𖥔.---
Teehee, decided to give a bit of a scene teaser for my Garfieldshipping AU
I'll probably start posting it once I'm done posting 6YoS on AO3 (which btw I already posted the first chapter there 🫶)
A warrior cursed by darkness. A guardian bound by light. Their love could save their world.
Or destroy it.
Garmadon, a Master of Spinjitzu touched by venom and shadow, hunts a corrupting evil.
Althea, the last Warden of a fallen clan, carries that very evil on her back, a fragment of the Overlord itself.
Hunted and hollow, she trusts no one.
When he saves her life, an uneasy alliance becomes a sanctuary.
A hidden shack becomes a home. But as their love deepens and a child is born, the darkness closes in. To protect their son, one of them must vanish, leading the hunters away forever.
How far would you go for love when love is the greatest threat of all?
The silence of the Mountain of Impossible Heights was a lie.
Garmadon sat in a meditative pose.
But peace was a distant memory, a flavor he could no longer taste. The air around him hummed with a silence that wasn't silent at all.
It was a blanket smothering the world's natural song, replaced by a low, persistent static that grated against his senses.
It was this static that had drawn him from the Monastery, a dissonant chord in the symphony of creation that only he, it seemed, could hear.
A soft chuff broke his concentration.
He opened his eyes, the crimson hue within them a permanent stain from the serpentine's bite, a constant reminder of the venom simmering in his veins.
It was a slow poison, not just of the body but of the spirit.
It made the shadows deeper, the quiet moments more agitated and the urge to act, to break, to conquer, to impose his will, a constant whisper in the back of his mind.
He fought it, as he always did, with discipline and focus.
Wu stood a few feet away, a steaming cup of tea in hand, his expression unreadable.
"Brother," Garmadon greeted, his voice a low rumble that betrayed the effort of his calm.
"The wind speaks to you again?" Wu asked, offering the second cup he had brought.
Garmadon took it, the heat was a welcome anchor to the physical world.
"Not the wind. Something else. A… tear in the melody. A wrong note that hasn't been played yet." He gestured vaguely east, towards the jagged, less traveled peaks. "It comes from there. A place of dead echoes and cold stone."
Wu sipped his tea, his golden eyes studying his brother. "The Valley of Thousand Sorrows. A place of forgotten battles. It is not wise to go digging up old tales, Garmadon."
A flicker of irritation, sharp and hot, rose in Garmadon's chest.
The venom liked that.
"And if such tales are not content to stay buried?" he countered, his tone sharper than he intended.
He took a breath, forcing the heat back.
This was Wu. His brother. Not an enemy.
"It is a blight, Wu. A stain on Father's creation. I can feel it. Can you not?" His eyes gleamed with determined intensity.
Wu’s gaze was steady. "I feel a disturbance. A shadow. But I trust in the balance. To chase every shadow is to be consumed by the dark."
Garmadon couldn't help the smirk that touched his lips. He set his tea down, the playful rivalry of a lifetime surfacing through the gloom.
"And that is why you will grow old and wise within these walls, brother, while I actually do something." He stood, clapping a hand on Wu's shoulder. "Someone has to. Your 'balance' won't maintain itself. Sometimes, a shadow needs to be confronted before it can grow."
Wu finally smiled, a small, weary thing. "Your passion was always your strength, Garmadon. And your weakness. Be not the hammer that sees only nails. Be the scalpel. Investigate, do not provoke."
"Who, me? Provoke?" Garmadon’s laugh was a short, genuine bark. "I am the soul of discretion."
Wu raised a skeptical eyebrow, a familiar expression that spoke of centuries of brotherly exasperation. "The last 'solo mission' you returned from, you had accidentally become the champion of a tribe of rock bottom dwellers and started a war with their caveshrimp-farming neighbors."
"They were oppressing the shrimp-farmers! It was a matter of principle!" Garmadon protested, the red in his eyes glinting with mirth.
For a moment, they were just brothers.
Not masters of Spinjitzu, not heirs to a legacy, just two boys in grown bodies, teasing each other in their father's monastery.
"The principle of a well seasoned dinner," Wu retorted dryly. "Just… be careful. This feeling you have… it feels different. Colder."
The playfulness faded from Garmadon's face.
"It is," he said, his voice sobering. "That's why I must go. I will be the scalpel, brother. I promise. I will find the source of this… static, and I will silence it."
He packed lightly. A waterskin, some dried fruit, his traveling cloak.
He stood at the monastery gates, the static in the east a dull throb in his mind, a siren's call he could no longer ignore.
Wu stood beside him. "May father guide your path."
"And may he grant you patience for when I return with another fantastic story you won't believe," Garmadon replied with a final, rakish grin.
Then he was off, descending the mountain path with a powerful, determined stride.
The further he got from the monastery, the louder the static became.
It was no longer just a sound.
It was a pressure, a cold weight that made the air feel thin.
The whisper of the venom in his blood seemed to harmonize with it, a dark duet that set his nerves on edge.
He traveled for days, the lush green of the Ninjago foothills giving way to stark, grey cliffs and petrified forests.
Life here was scarce, hushed, as if holding its breath.
He was getting closer.
On the third day, he found the first sign that he wasn't chasing a phantom.
A symbol, freshly carved into the bark of a dead tree: a circle of swirls that reminded him of flames of darkness.
It pulsed with a faint, malevolent energy that made the hairs on his arm stand up.
It was a mark he did not know but its intention was clear: defilement.
His hand curled into a fist.
This was no old tale. This was a present danger.
Wu's cautionary words were a distant echo. The scalpel was forgotten. The hammer was in his hand.
The static was now a scream only he could hear and at its source, he knew, was a battle.
He broke into a run, not with the grace of a Spinjitzu Master but with the fierce, powerful lope of a hunter closing in on its prey.
He was going to find the source of this blight and he was going to wipe it from the face of Ninjago.
He had no idea that the ‘blight’ was a woman with eyes as fierce as her shields and that his mission was about to change everything.
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Finally decided to post it here since a lot of people voted Tumblr on my Instagram channel so here's Six Years of Sunlight :3
