Light in the Black

izurria

Jack and Bunny watched silently as Jamie secured his face mask and latex gloves. He glanced up at the spirits as he put rubber bands around his wrist to secure the gloves.

"I'm not allowed to go into her room and see her without these on," he explained. "Mom's terrified I'll get it, too."

Jack and Bunny nodded in understanding. They had listened as Jamie had gone downstairs briefly to ask permission to even go into his sister's room for a few minutes to check on her. It had taken several times asking before his mom had said yes.

Jamie gently knocked on the door, other hand ready on the doorknob. "Hey Soph, I'm coming in to check on you, okay?"

"Okay," Sophie's voice softly acknowledged from the other side.

The first thing Jack noticed when Jamie first opened the door was how tired and pale Sophie looked. She didn't jostle herself too much looking towards the door from her position in bed, but she offered a smile to her three visitors.

"Hey, Jamie. Hi, Bunny, Jack."

"Hey, ya little anklebiter," Bunny said, quickly going forward and kneeling to the side of Sophie's bed. "How ya holding up?"

It was then that Jack noticed the other figure on the other side of Sophie's bed. The spirit sitting dutifully at Sophie's side looking so young; she couldn't have been older than Jamie at most. She looked like she had stepped out of a history book, her plain dress similar to what Jack remembered from his mortal life in the colonial era, though her dress seemed to be of much better quality than anything Jack's mother or sister could have afforded.

She glanced up, having felt Jack's gaze on her, and her eyes held a sense of tiredness, as if she'd been doing strenuous work for a long time with no rest. Jack supposed she had had no breaks if she'd been sitting with Sophie for the past few weeks while ill, but that shouldn't have been enough to make this girl look as tired as she looked.

"Uh, Miss, this is Bunny and Jack," Jamie introduced. "They're a part of the Guardians of Childhood."

"Bunny, I've heard of," she responded thoughtfully. Her accent was indistinguishable to Jack; it held a slight tone of English but didn't match any accent he'd heard before. "He was around long before I was. But Jack is new. You must've come to be after the Black Death."

"The Black Death?" Bunny questioned. "That pandemic faded out centuries ago. Not even many of us older spirits exactly remember those times. What would you know about the Black Death?"

She gave Bunny a gentle smile as she turned her attention back to Sophie, running her hand through Sophie's blonde tangles, slowly working through them to smooth the child's hair as she fell back asleep.

"Your lot has always been the only ones Father called upon to aid children in their time of need." Jack watched in amusement as her smile curved up into a mischievous smirk. "Some of us just aren't as flashy with our talents."

Untangling herself from Sophie's relaxed form, she went to her knees on the floor and became concentrated and repeating certain motions as she waved her hands over Sophie's prone body. Jack and Bunny watched in awe as Sophie's skin began to glow with an orange tint. Singed particles that violently hissed seemed to melt off of her skin and fade away into the air above before dissolving into nothing.

"Open a window, Jamie."

Jamie nodded at the spirit's wish, rushing over to the window and cracking it to let fresh air in. As he did so, the orange tinge faded from Sophie's skin as she remained undisturbed from her sleep. The spirit sat back and sighed, regarding Jamie once more.

"She should start seeing great improvement by the morning," she promised. "What I burned away were only remaining fragments. It took longer than I hoped for, but I'm starting to learn what she changed this time around."

"You healed her?" Bunny questioned, skeptical as he checked over Sophie's form when the spirit stood up and stepped back.

The spirit nodded. "Yersinia is gone from this place. I must follow her to the next destination, try to cut her off."

Jack and Bunny only watched in disbelief as the spirit quickly walked to the window, opening it completely and turning to regard them.

"Perhaps we shall meet again, Guardians. May the Moon guide you."

Her farewell given, the spirit climbed out the window and held a hand up to measure the wind swirling by before her body seemed to burn away into a bright flash, collecting itself into a ball of light that could easily be mistaken as a shooting star, and she was gone.

Jack turned to Bunny, whose attention was now turned back to Sophie as Jamie came over to join them again.

"Um... Should we go after her?"

"No," Bunny decided after a moment of hesitation. "She didn't hurt them. She's safe... For now, at least."

"So you really don't know who that is?" Jamie asked, sitting at the foot of his sister's bed.

"'Fraid not," Jack confessed. "Did she ever give you her name?"

"No. Only talked about that Yersinia person, said she had to burn her away like before."

The three sat in silence for another minute or so before a knock came at the door.

"Jamie, dinner's ready."

"Coming, Mom." He turned to Jack and Bunny as he stood up to go. "Don't forget to close the window on your way out. Keep me posted, yeah?"

"We will," Jack promised, and Jamie retreated back to his own room with his mother on his heels, her fretting voice echoing behind them.

Bunny sighed as the silence returned to Sophie's bedroom, and Jack stopped twirling his staff to focus on Bunny's confused features.

"As much as I hate to say it, mate," Bunny concluded. "I think we need to make a pit stop at your mum's. She's the only one I know with clear memories of the Black Death. She might know what's going on."

Jack smirked. "Race you there, Kangaroo?"

To Jack's delight, Bunny chuckled and stood up, rolling his shoulders back with a competitive shimmer coming to his eyes.

"You're on, Frostbite."