Jack was aware he wasn’t exactly inspiring confidence in Berry Punch. She’d seemed excited when he’d told her the news that her sister should be arriving to visit her soon. This excitement had almost completely faded away in the hour that had passed since he’d said this. She’d sent him a few questioning glances in that period of time, glances that he’d done his utmost to completely ignore. What he couldn’t ignore, however, was the mounting dread in the pit of his stomach. He’d been with them right up until they were only a couple blocks away. Sure, there had been his little event back near the market square that he hadn’t told Berry about, but the fallout from that shouldn’t have delayed the ponies for this long. All this caused Jack, Berry’s sole informant about the imminent arrival of her sister, to twitch like a bundle of nerves under an electrical current.
Berry, for her part, was trying to guess as to the nature of Jack. She’d assumed when she first met him in the haze of a midnight waking that he was a figment of her imagination, that the way he was fussing over her IV meant that it was simply one of the nurses and that she was perceiving things incorrectly. When he was still there when she woke up again the next day the idea that he was a hallucination imbedded itself into her thoughts and lingered there. Even as day after day passed with his continuing presence she remained unsure of his existence mostly due to the fact that she remained the only one who could interact with him, who could see him even.
She’d had two reasons for sending him to check up on Colada, first and most obviously she had been worried about her. The doctors wouldn’t let her leave their care while she was still recovering and the letter she’d sent to Cheerilee had come back full of platitudes and non-committal statements. Berry had refrained from judging Cheerilee for this, she’d known her a long while and trusted the teacher’s judgement on matters relating to children. She’d proven almost essential in helping Berry raise Colada after their mother passed away. Still, despite this trust, her curiosity writhed within her and she had hoped that sending Jack would help alleviate some of the problem.
The second reason was to see if he’d actually go away, come back, and relate any useful information on his return. This, Berry had hoped, would help her figure out if the ghost was truly there or if some part of her mind had broken from her… from… what had put her in the hospital in the first place.
To her mild surprise he had returned a couple of days later, and had brought the information that not only had he been to see Colada but that she was coming to the hospital to visit her older sister that very day. This had hit the bed bound Berry Punch like a bolt from the blue and she found herself trying to temper her excitement about seeing her younger sister for the first time in weeks with the idea that she still didn’t know if Jack truly existed.
As time wore on and her sister failed to arrive she noticed that Jack had been getting more and more nervous, more and more fidgety, and Berry found her hopes about his existence beginning to swing from one extreme to the other. Where as before she’d hoped that he did exist, if only to confirm to herself that she wasn’t crazy, she now found herself wishing he was just a figment. That there was no reason for Jack to be twitching like he was. That there was nothing wrong with the fact that her sister hadn’t arrived. That her sister was fine back with Cheerilee. That nothing was going wrong while she remained stuck in a hospital bed.
Regardless of his existence or lack thereof, Berry Punch found herself talking to him to try and vent the worries that were building up in her mind.
“And you said nothing happened on the way over?”
Jack flinched as Berry’s voice suddenly filled the room, then he settled down, calmer than before she’d spoken at all, and focused on the door to the room. Staying quiet for far longer than Berry thought was right, then... “Yes.” He confirmed, eventually.
“Mmmm” Berry mused. She was about to launch into an interrogation of the pause he’d given when she heard hoofsteps approaching and silenced herself with a mixture of anticipation and worry.
The doctor walked in, all smiles, with three familiar faces trailing behind him, who didn’t seem to match his expression. Derpy seemed happy as always and entered the room with a light and easy step while the two fillies near her fetlocks all but shuffled into the room. Dinky looked rather downcast but it was Colada who seemed especially downtrodden as she entered and Berry could see a familiar bittersweet emotion dance in her sister’s eyes. The kind of emotion you only got by seeing a family member in a hospital bed.
“You have a couple of visitors Miss Punch.” Said the doctor with a smile. “Keep in mind that you only have an hour and a half of visiting hours, I’ll be back then.” And with that the doctor was out of the room and down the hall, leaving the mares and fillies to talk amongst themselves.
“Sorry we’re so late Berry.” Derpy said with a voice so sincere that it almost sounded like an exaggeration. “We meant to be here earlier but something happened on the way over and the Princess ended up getting involved.” Berry started at that info and seemed to have trouble processing it. “Why don’t you say what happened Colada?” Derpy looked back to Colada to give the queue for her to explain and, in doing so, missed Berry’s quick glance to the corner of the room where Jack was all but writhing in silence.
Colada took a moment and breathed, finally raising her gaze to look at her older sister, just a little too late to catch the tail end of said quick glance. “I tried to grab a fish tank off the top shelf of the glass shop and it fell.” Said Colada in a defeated tone, then took another breath and continued her obviously rehearsed confession. “Even though Missus Derpy told me not to, and you always told me not to. Sorry.”
“It fell?” Berry cut in, the sudden rush of worry for Colada drowning out the apology to her own ears. “Did you get cut or hurt?” The worry was expounded as she added silently in her head ‘So hurt that the princess ended up getting involved?’
“Nooo….” Colada dragged the word out as if hoping to eventually find some answer in it, then fell silent when she failed to stumble across one. She busied herself with running one of her front hooves across the other front leg, looking once more at the ground.
“Then what happened?”
“Uhm…” Colada threw a glance to Derpy, who nodded in encouragement, then turned back to face her sibling. “A uhm… a ghost caught it.” Then she braced herself for the disbelief, perhaps the claim that she was lying, perhaps the run around to confirm it with Derpy. What she didn’t expect was for her sister to simply ‘hmmm’ in thought, glance at the corner of the room, then look back to her.
Derpy, it seemed, was also unprepared for this reaction and silence held the room for a moment before Berry spoke up again. “And that’s why Princess Twilight showed up? To talk to you about the ghost that caught the fish tank?” Colada nodded once and Berry fell back into silence of thought for a moment before looking to the gray mare. “Can I have a couple moments alone with Colada please Derpy? I’d like to talk to her about what she did.”
Derpy’s thought process stuttered for a moment before she managed a nod and turned to Dinky and spoke with a voice that seemed to warble with excitement and, as it spoke, passed excitement on to her daughter. “Want to go talk to the doctors about how to help people when they get hurt, Dinky? I’m sure that Nurse Redheart would know someone we could talk to.” When her daughter offered her enthusiastic support of the idea the two left the room as well, leaving only Berry, Colada, and, in a sense, Jack.
Berry waited until Derpy was out of earshot with the door closed behind her before turning her gaze to the penitent Colada. “Big sis is gonna seem kinda crazy here for a second, alright? I’ll explain in a second okay?” Colada looked on in confusion before nodding with hesitant understanding. “Thanks.”
Then all the kindness she had just shown to her younger sibling seemed to evaporate as barely contained shouts were directed to the corner of the room. “Nothing important happened?!”
Then, Colada heard a rush of wind, almost like a response. The nature of its existence at all was strange given that all the windows were closed but the timing of it had been almost perfect. Berry had fallen silent and seemed to be listening to it so Colada tried to do the same. Focusing on the sound, she found she could almost hear a voice within it, it was saying. “... didn’t want to worry you.”
“Worry me?! Don’t worry about worrying me, I deserve to know if my sister got into trouble!” Berry replied, confirming to Colada that she wasn’t just imagining what she was hearing.
The wind, barely a whisper compared to the indignation of Berry Punch, spoke again. “I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal. I was gone right after everyone looked at me. If I’d known royalty was gonna show up I would’ve told you everything that happened.” The wind seemed to slack for a bit in a pause before it came back. “I was hoping everyone would just think that it was a weird visual effect. I didn’t want to upset you if no one even ended up remembering it.
There was a pause as Berry restrained her emotions, taking a breath to center herself. Judging by the lack of any gusts it seemed the invisible speaker was more than content to wait..
“How did anyone even see you? I thought only I could see you.” Berry said at last, changing the subject as she saw no use in pursuing the previous issue any further.
“I… I don’t know. I caught the fish tank and then everybody was looking right at me in shock. I don’t know how they knew it wasn’t like a unicorn’s magic or whatever.”
“You glowed.” Colada cut in, getting both the invisible voice and her sister to pause for a moment, the latter looking at her in surprise, though the former may have as well, Colada couldn’t tell. Colada tried to turn her head to where she’d heard the voice but wasn’t absolutely sure that she managed it. “When you caught it you’re um… outline?”
“Silhouette.” Said Berry and ‘the wind’ at the same time.
Colada nodded. “Yea that. It glowed. I could see you.” Colada took a moment to collect herself as Berry looked on in a mixture of confusion and worry. “Oh!” She said suddenly, remembering a lesson she’d been taught.. “Um. Thank you for catching the fish tank, uh, whatever your name is.”
“It… wasn’t a problem. And my name’s Jack.”
Berry glanced again to the corner, to Jack and, unseen by Colada, Jack glanced back to Berry. Each of their glances held the same unsaid question. ‘Is this a good thing or something I need to worry about?’ When they met each other’s gaze and saw the same question reflected back at them they both turned to look at Colada, though Colada only saw the movements of her sister of course she seemed to get the gist of what had just happened and, in the face of the curious worried glance that had been leveled at her, asked the only acceptable question for such a moment.
“What?”
“Alright that’s the preliminary paperwork in order, uh, Sam. We’re scheduling a test session as we speak which will happen sometime next week, we do need you to come back sometime tomorrow though to fill out a few more things including a more restrictive version of the NDA you signed today. Swing by whenever you have time and we should be able to fit you in.”
“Alright, sounds like a plan.”
“Good to hear. We’ll see you then Mister, uh, Missus, uhm… which-”
“Whichever.”