Nya’s brother looks like their dad.
It becomes more and more evident as the years pass. She starts to see the same wrinkles around the eyes, the same messy bundle of hair with the spikes and all, the same colors on his face and all over his skin. Everything else of him reminiscent of the man in the picture, the one picture that has survived the passage of time and humidity and mold and fire and smoke and fits of rage from every time the siblings fight and things end up broken or spontaneously combusting. The one picture they keep hanging on the wall every Day of the Departed, and that Nya keeps on her nightstand drawer after they move into the monastery. It’s the only reference she has, but it is clear enough.
Kai looks like their father.
And he tries to act like him, too.
It’s as annoying then as it will be in the years to come. Her big brother, pretending to be a dad at five years old. Nya cannot stand how much he behaves like he knows what’s best for her, for both of them, like he’s too old to stay in school by the age of eleven and Nya is too small to do anything other than that for the rest of her life. For a while, they handle the forge together, and Nya is as good as he is with the swords. But that’s not good enough, apparently. As he puts it, she’s still his baby sister. So he drops out of school and tells her to focus on her education and leave all the work to him, so he can focus on making money for the both of them. He tells her to keep studying and not to worry about finances. To sleep even when he’s working loudly and late, to eat and stay healthy even though they’re always short on food, because she is his baby sister, and she’s not supposed to go to bed hungry, not on my watch, he says. He nearly never watches her. He’s always too busy with the swords.
He tells her to be a child. The wild, carefree child she was at three years old, running around the house and knocking over her father’s armors, playing in the mud and making friends with the other kids in the village. She’d love that. She’d love to be a mess of a human being who is free and doesn’t have to worry about homework and food and stuff, and to actually have friends who aren’t her brother. She’d love to keep studying, because school is actually not so boring sometimes, and it could mean a chance for her to go to Ninjago City one day so that she can become an engineer, which is so much better than being a blacksmith, isn’t it, as he says with a grin sometimes.
That’s who she’d like to be. She was born a harbinger of chaos, a wild spirit, her father’s fire pulsing through her veins with the strength of her mother’s waves.
This is who she is. What her family is.
But of course, she doesn’t get to grow up with her actual family.
And as it turns out, two unfortunate consequences of dropping out of school so that you can focus on work and give your baby sister a better life is that: a) said baby sister will become a lot better at maths than you and b) said work and its finances will require a lot of maths.
So. Nya grows up with budgeting. She grows up learning to manage a small business, when and where to spend money, and how many swords to make in a week so that the two of them won’t go to bed hungry on a Sunday evening. She grows up on sleepless nights, taking notes at the light of a candle as they struggle not to fall asleep on the kitchen table because he has work tomorrow and she has school in the morning. She still works at the forge sometimes, on weekends, or when Kai is sick or tired, or when they’ve been arguing and he suddenly stops being the big brother who takes care of her and keeps her safe and she tells him to be a child, angry, troublesome and shouting all the time because their parents are gone and there’s nobody to tell them to not talk to your sister that way or be patient with your brother, and he leaves the house in a fit and doesn’t come back until noon and she has to make their living for the day.
Be a child, they tell each other. But that’s long gone by the time they get there.
And despite that. Despite the nights and the days and the forge and the smoke and the occasional screaming, Kai still wants to act like a father. Most of the time. Some of it.
He makes the swords. He teaches himself how to cook. He keeps her away from the forge so that she doesn’t get hurt. He cuddles with her on cold nights. He takes her to school. He sews her clothes.
There are no pictures from that time, of course. But for a brief while, she used to have really long hair.
She can’t remember the first few weeks after their parents vanished. It takes about thirteen years and a somewhat brief alcohol dependence on Kai’s part (developed after Zane’s death) for him to even begin to describe those first few weeks as, a haze. He talks vaguely about the two of them walking around the house like ghosts, stuck on the same pair of PJs for days, filthy and sad, tears washing away the dirt on their faces.
For a while, I forgot to do all the things they would usually do for us. Dressing. Bathing. Cooking and eating. I think we were stuck in those same clothes for days, until some neighbor came to check on us.
So naturally, their hair grew a lot over that time.
And when they slowly came back to life and that frozen point in time suddenly thawed, of course, hair wasn’t as much of a priority as finding neighbors who would feed them or as keeping themselves alive. Maybe for Kai it was, because even though she gets faint glimpses of the long mass of hair that she used to have hanging down to her waist, she has no memories of seeing Kai with nothing other than his spikes. Maybe, because he was a boy, some other kid at the village made a mean comment on his depression-length hair that caused him to furiously grab a pair of scissors and chop the whole thing away. For her, though, it must’ve taken a bit longer to get rid of it.
Not sure how it happened. But it was really long back then. Maybe you were playing at the forge and your hair caught fire. Or maybe you just got sick of it and came at me one day with the scissors. Anyway, I might’ve overdid it. That first time.
He might’ve, probably. Because her hair went from the big mass that could cover her whole face and part of her torso to a bob cut that made her look bald in shadows and that girls at school made fun of for at least a week, saying that she looked like a boy. And yet, for some mysterious reason, she keeps it for the rest of her teen years. She keeps Kai as her hairdresser and as a sort of dad, even though he yells and gets angry sometimes and is only two years older than her and it annoys her to no end that he behaves like a grownup when he really isn’t.
But he’s the best she’s got.
She supposes it goes the same way for her.
He cuts her hair in a periodic fashion, at least once every two months, as soon as the tips start to grow past her ears. It’s good, because it doesn’t get in the way of her eyes whenever she’s working or studying (or playing, but she doesn’t do that anymore, not really). It saves up in hair products and hairstyles, as she has so little hair there’s not much to do with it. It makes it so that her hair is no longer a weight on her back and their wallet, and maybe that’s why she keeps it that way, despite the mockery and the namecalling. Because it’s practical, and it makes her feel like less of a burden on her brother and more like she’s being kind of useful. At least she’s not being the opposite.
For a bunch of years, from a moment that she can’t remember to one that she does, she forgets what it was like to have long hair, and to have a brother who had long hair. Kai takes care of it, like he takes care of everything. Wants to. Tries to. Struggles to, because he’s just a kid as well, and him losing his childhood won’t actually prevent her from losing hers. His sacrifice is as useless as she feels.
There comes a particularly harsh winter, when she’s around ten and he’s around twelve, in which he stops going to school altogether and expressively forbids her from helping out at the shop. It’s stupid, because the reason for it is that money is harder to come by and they need more food, but he claims he can’t have her here because she’ll distract him from the work he should be doing. So, a bit out of spite, she actually focuses on school during that time. She doesn’t focus on finances, or work, or how hungry she is, or the fact that Kai barely has time to cook for her or cuddle her on the very cold nights or cut her hair as it grows and grows.
She finds a way to justify it, because if she doesn’t, she’ll turn into an angry, wild thing, as angry as her brother, or worse: as herself.
It’s practical, because she’s not working, so she doesn’t need to prevent her hair from getting in the way of her eyes. It’s nice, because it gives an extra layer over the nape of her neck, protecting her from the bitter cold of winter. It saves time, because Kai doesn’t have any of that to cut it, and she’s supposedly too young to touch the scissors.
Kai behaves like their dad, but he isn’t one. A dad would find time, or have no need for it, to cut his daughter’s hair. A dad would not forget about it, once winter’s through. A dad would find a way to manage this without struggling so much, and he wouldn’t yell at her like Kai does.
There is a night, in which they’re having dinner, together, for the first time in days, and for no particular reason, Kai gives her an apologetic look. And then he sees her and he just. Stays there. Still. Pale. Bags under his glassy eyes. She frowns at him.
“Nothing. Just…” He points in the general direction of her, strands of hair hanging down to her waist. “You look like Mom.”
He only says so because he’s extremely sleep-deprived, she knows. He doesn’t talk about their parents otherwise (unless he’s drunk or high, but those two things don’t come into their lives for some time, because their childhood is not that fucked up). And this is probably the first time he’s seeing her, really seeing her, with her long hair since she was very little. And he looks at her and he just. Says that.
Next morning, she grabs the scissors and gets rid of it, goes back to looking like a boy. The bob cut is messier than when her brother does it but at least he doesn’t compare her to their mother anymore.
She doesn’t ask. If she did—
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