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One of the first things that they had noticed about Lloyd, aside from his name being a pun, were the red eyes. Not red in the irritated or bloodshot way but red in the ruby red irises that were the same shade as Garmadon’s way.
That was more unsettling than anything else. Almost more unsettling than how annoying the kid was.
Nya hadn’t meant to be awake at two a.m. but here she was, leaving her room at this hour anyway.
She had been planning to get water but when she walked past the bathroom to find the only nine-year-old living in this Monastery standing on a box so that he could stare intensely into the mirror, those plans were scrapped.
What was he doing? And better yet, why was he still awake right now?
So she stopped in the bathroom’s doorway.
“Lloyd?” she called out.
Now with a better view of what she had almost walked past, she realised Lloyd hadn’t just been looking at himself, he was looking at his eyes.
Unlike the guys, except for maybe Zane (but he rarely held proper eye contact anyway), she could look the kid in the eyes. Though that was the product of how much time the two of them had spent together. Far more than how long Lloyd had spent with anyone else, given they were both often left behind by the others and Sensei Wu.
“Oh! Hi Nya!” The words tumbled out of his mouth so quickly they lost the distance between them. Lloyd also almost fell off the box he was standing on in his rush to turn around.
She searched his face, and his eyes specifically, because something had to be wrong with them otherwise why else would he be in the bathroom staring at himself this early in the morning?
When Nya didn’t find anything, she almost wished she had. Because if nothing was wrong then the problem was their colour. Again.
“You were looking at your eyes again, weren’t you?” she asked.
“…No. I wasn’t!” Lloyd insisted a bit too quickly to be casual.
She moved to shut the door behind her before she spoke because the others — if any of them were awake right now — didn’t need to hear this.
“Want to try that again?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your eyes,” [x]. “How long will it take you to see that?”
Lloyd didn’t know how to answer that so he kept quiet and glanced away from her.
“How about this: my eyes are this bright blue, so do you think they’re ugly?” she asked.
“No!” That sounded more sure than anything he had said since she’d found him in here.
“Then why do you think that of yours?”
He didn’t say anything for a long minute as he suddenly found to the chipped floor tile very interesting.
“But yours are just a brighter version of a normal eye colour,” he argued. “Red isn’t a normal colour,”
”No, it isn’t,” Nya agreed, “but that still doesn’t make them ugly,”
“Really?” he asked, not believing what she had said in the slightest.
For the first time since she had stopped here tonight, Lloyd looked up at her.
“Really.”
Having gold sparkly flecks in his eyes was the best part of the golden power, Lloyd decided after only having them for a few days.
There were so many gold flecks that they took over the actual colour of his eyes. Enough so that from a distance, his eyes looked like they were just gold…or so the press had said. Many times. They kept bringing it up again and again that he almost forgot his eyes weren’t just gold.
He’d seen the photos that had been taken of him during that time — both those published by the press and those people had taken on the street and posted online — and in every single one, his eyes matched the golden gi almost exactly.
That was so cool, even more than being the Golden Ninja.
But when he caught sight of his eyes in a reflection, not even in the mirror, the red was still there. His eyes weren’t actually only gold, not matter how much he tried to pretend otherwise.
When he lost the golden power, his eyes slowly lost the gold flecks too. Every day after he lost it, Lloyd would wake up to less and less until one day when the flecks were completely gone.
In the year that they spent apart looking for Wu, Lloyd’s eyes changed again. One of a few changes to happen to him in that period.
Only this change was even more than when he’d taken on the golden power. Where then, it had been just adding detail to them, this time they changed to an entirely different colour. His eyes went from ruby red to the same shade of green as his powers
This was better than even the gold-red, because it finally made sense. The Green Ninja had green eyes.
“Even though I didn’t have any say in the change, I like my eyes how they are now,” he decided, saying it out loud for the first time when he and Nya were the only ones out on the Bounty’s deck together one evening.
“Is that so?” she asked, looking over at him.
“Yeah,”
“Well, I like them in both colours,” Nya told him.
The two of them had been called back inside for dinner by an impatient Jay seconds after Nya finished saying that.
In four years of knowing him, Pixal had never seen Lloyd with entirely red eyes until now.
Sure, she had seen him with gold speckled red eyes when the two of them had first met— that was before they settled on green and stayed that way for the last few years. But they had been more gold than red back then. You wouldn’t notice the red unless you were looking for it and even then, you needed to be looking really closely.
The others, and even Lloyd himself, had mentioned that his eyes had been fully red before they had met her, Pixal never thought she would see that.
She had been the one Lloyd had kept the most contact with during the year everyone was split up while looking for Master Wu and so she got to hear the shift be described (and seen, if only briefly the few times when Lloyd met with Samurai X in person) in real time.
Seeing him with eyes that were only red was unsettling. Not because of the unnatural colour but because of how dull of a red they were. The red was so dark that, unless Lloyd stood in the light, they looked nearly brown.
“It isn’t helping,” she said to Nya as the two of them watched their honourary brother talk with Misako across the warehouse.
“What isn’t?”
“His eyes,”
The two of them watched as whatever they were discussing didn’t land well and the blond stormed off.
“Yeah, I know,” Nya agreed after a moment. “But there isn’t anything that we can do. Lloyd’s just got to get used to the red all over again,”
“Did you ever see them like this…before?”
“This dull of a red? No. Even when Lloyd’s eyes were just red, they were never like this,”
No one needed to say it out loud, but that said a lot more about what the blond had lost in the fight against Garmadon at Kryptarium.
When they met up with Lloyd after his confrontation with Garmadon on top of the ruined Borg Tower a few weeks after they’d had that conversation. Pixal felt more relieved than she should have been capable of feeling when she realised his eyes were green again.
When Lloyd transformed back out of his Oni form, the purple eyes he’d had in that form had stuck around.
He discovered that fun fact when purple eyes had been reflected back at him in the blade of his sword.
It wasn’t permanent like the green was — thank FSM — and ended up fading completely after an hour. But seeing himself with purple eyes had reminded him of Garmadon (the resurrected version of the man, not the original one).
That scared him more than he would ever willingly admit out loud.
It hadn’t only happened when he’d transformed then either. The next time he used his Oni form, the purple stuck around for longer than it had the first time. But following the third transformation, the purple still hadn’t faded more than four hours after Lloyd was back in human form again.
Seeing himself with purple eyes even before he had transformed was a wake up call to something he didn’t want to ever think about.
Everyone — Lloyd himself included — had thought that would be the last time that his eyes would change.
They weren’t wrong but they weren’t entirely right either. Though, unlike all the other times, this change wasn’t to a completely different colour. It was more like an addition than anything else.
After becoming a Conduit for the Source Dragons, his eyes glowed a bright neon green whenever he used his powers. Even if the powers themselves hadn’t actually changed much aside from becoming more powerful. When they did that, his eyes matched the sparkly…bits his powers gave off.
It had been a long time since his eyes changing in some way had been cool.
He’d had the glowing-eyes-when-he-used-his-powers thing for a few years now but Lloyd wasn’t sure how he felt about having the neon green as a permanent feature.
Before, his entire irises had glowed and went away within seconds of when he stopped using his powers. But now, after finishing the the Trial of the Green Ninja, that neon green ringed where his irises met the rest of his eyes and didn’t fade even two hours after the last time his powers had been used.
It could be worse.
Well, if you didn’t think of about how his eyes just constantly glowed at all times as something bad.
The constant glowing made walking around the Monastery at night so much easier when he didn’t need to bring his phone with him to use as a flashlight or feel his way around— that always risked him tripping over whatever people had left all over the floors.
And the potential that it had for jump-scaring his siblings when he sat in the dark and suddenly opened his eyes when they walked into the room made it 100% worth it too.
Lloyd had never expected the gold flecks to come back again after they entirely vanished from his eyes a month after he’d lost the golden power.
But here they were, alongside neon green rings.
He was too busy fighting Beatrix with the others to notice, it was only when they were all back home at the Monastery afterwards and Nya had brought it up that he even considered that this new form had caused any changes like the Oni one did.
This change wasn’t even bad. But having the neon rings and sparkly flecks at the same time was a bit much.
And then his eyes were seemingly also lost their pupils. That last shouldn’t be possible and yet it happened.
On the day that Sora had commented on his eyes not having pupils, Lloyd thought that one of the others had snuck weird contact lenses on him while he was asleep…until he tried to remove them and just poked himself in the eye. Twice.
It was uncanny, not having pupils along with the neon rings outlining his irises and the gold flecks in them too.
But Lloyd was getting tired of all the changes, and not just with his eyes (he’d gotten used to those a long time ago).
The two other forms had left so many marks on his body. Each form left him with so many new markings that he was slowly looking less and less human every time he transformed back into his usual form. All of that and not even his eyes were spared.
They had been only green, no neon rings or sparkles or glow for years, so why couldn’t they just stay like that?
Years ago, when his eyes first started turning green from the ruby red he originally had and had stopped on a muddy brown for a few weeks, he thought his eyes would be only thing that would change about himself.
He had been so wrong.
Now Lloyd barely recognised himself in the mirror (he never really looked in any of them since the Merge and this made him ignore them all even more).