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He can feel the wind.
That’s what he missed most, in the Cursed Realm and then during his stint as a ghost. When he’d possessed Kai, he’d been too overwhelmed by the vastly stronger elements of the Green Ninja, barely able to control any one element with two more raging beyond his command. He had resigned himself to its absence after that, when he came back and found himself working with the other ninja, because without stolen artifacts or an Elementally-powered host, the effort required to summon a small breeze was never worth the depressing realization that he couldn’t feel it.
But now? Now, not only can he direct the wind with a breath, like when he was alive, and guide it to either gentleness or ferocity or anywhere in between without fighting madly for control like when he was dead, but he can feel it. Cloth flapping against his skin, grasses rustling at his feet, hair perpetually tousled, and he basically can’t hold on to anything lightweight because after so long suffocating in dead air, he can’t help but reach for his Element every conscious moment.
The other ninja figure out pretty quickly that he’s an open book now, that they just have to observe the breeze to gauge his mood, but he’s enjoying life too much to really mind that they can all read him so easily. The ones who have lost their powers before catch on the quickest of all, and just make sure not to leave anything important where it can be accidentally blown away. The others can read his mood but don’t really seem to get it, until Nya asks him with suspicion just why he’s so happy all the time now.
“Because,” he says, “I can breathe.” She glances at Cole, and no, that’s not his point; literal breath is part of it — he’s had enough “ghost club” discussions with the Earth Ninja to work through the return to physicality and what seems to matter most for each of them — but there’s breathing and then there’s breathing. Maybe if he shows her…
He inhales, raising his hands towards his chest palms-down as if he’s starting a kata, so that she can see what he’s doing; holds the breath, and the courtyard goes still. He exhales, lowers his hands, and the air comes alive and this is what he means by breath, this is life. She won’t be able to sense it, but she’s watching scattered leaves dance on the currents that she can’t see, wide-eyed when she looks back to him, and he hums in consideration before shifting into a kata after all, the motion of his limbs in tandem with his element to illustrate what he’s doing.
He keeps the breeze gentle, grouping leaves together so that Wind is as close to visible as it can get, but when Cole barks out a laugh as the courtyard becomes the gentlest cyclone possible, he takes a deeper breath and moves more quickly, letting both the Earth and Water Ninja feel the air tug at their hair. He exhales and the breeze picks up; he transitions to a circular kata, and though he faces away from the two ninja when it happens, he can sense when they allow themselves to follow this odd dance.
The courtyard is perfect for this, he thinks, pacing his way around it at ever-increasing speed, meandering into the center where his kata has morphed into the one he uses to practice Spinjitzu. The art never came to him in life; however naturally his tornadoes formed, they never took on the additional something that would make them flash and shine the way the others’ do, the way Sensei’s did. In his first return, he compensated with simple brute force. But with allies caught up in the wind, he doesn’t reach for the full power that could howl through the Monastery and reduce it to rubble in minutes—
He stumbles. The breeze falters, but there’s a laugh carried on the wind, and his eyes snap up to track its source — it’s Nya, discovering that she can lift her feet and be carried a step or two, and in her dance she’s slowly turning round and round, no doubt relishing the similarity to her own cyclones. Near her, Cole uncertainly mimics the motion, with much more flailing but no less mirth.
His feet find the next position in the kata before he’s consciously deciding it (“no, Jay, it can’t be muscle memory, this body has never done Spinjitzu before—” “Well how else do you explain it? Anyway it’s so cool!”) and he breathes. Shuts his eyes, raises his arms, sinks into the rhythm of the dance and breathes.
The simplified Spinjitzu katas are second nature to him, and a complex technique isn’t as risky as it could otherwise have been; he’s sure he could sustain his own tornado and the larger, gentler currents independently of each other. He could start spinning and the ninja would be reasonably safe, or if not, they could spin themselves out of danger and then yell at him about it. In fact, it might be interesting to try sometime, to see how his Element could lend itself to strengthening all of their independent Spinjitzu tornadoes.
But today he isn’t after the thrill or the rush that would bring. Today, he’s showing the allies who trust him the least that Wind is not to blame for its Master’s wrongdoing, that there is something worth more than the harm he caused. Maybe it’s not enough to redeem him, but enough to show them: this is the air he breathes, and breath is life. He can breathe. He is alive.