My Best Friend's A Ghost

Zane

FINALLY! I swear, I meant to have this chapter written earlier, but a certain SOMEONE *glares at Morro* was being SUPER uncooperative. 

But hey, it's done. And just in time for Halloween too!

Speaking of which, this story turns 1 next Wednesday. Thanks for indulging in this little experiment, guys! It wouldn't have gotten here without all of y'all! :D

Alright, enough outta me. Enjoy!

~~~~~~~

Cole was a little odd, but then again, who was Zane to judge?

The ice ninja's life was far from normal. He was built--yes, that's right, built--many years ago by his father and had lived most of his life in the snowy and isolated Birchwood Forest. Then, when his father died, he had his memories switched off and had spent the next few years wandering from village to village, trying to find his purpose in the world.

Then, he had met Sensei, his team, and well, the rest is history.

So yes, Zane was not one to judge what qualified as 'weird'.

Still, it was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that Cole could see the undead. For a time, it simply did not compute for him--ghost should not exist and therefore Cole should not be seeing them. But, after a lot of thinking and meditating, Zane found a work-around that would prevent his CPU from overloading. It went a little something like this:

Ghosts were simply a part of the mythos that was common throughout Ninjago, like dragons and the Serpentine. Throughout his travels, he had seen the two latter beings with his very own eyes, even though they were supposed to not exist or, at the very least, be extinct. So, by that logic, ghosts could exist--he simply just hadn't seen anything to prove or disprove that they didn't.

It was a little unorthodox, perhaps, but it kept him from having headaches every time he thought too hard about the topic.

Which, as it turns out, started to be a lot, especially when the rest of his teammates started to gain the ability to talk to Cole's ghost friend. He would often catch Kai arguing with an invisible person or witness Jay babbling to someone he could not see nor hear.

It left Zane curious, as well as the slightest bit jealous. He did not enjoy being the "odd one out", as it were, but--given Cole's reluctance whenever he brought up the topic--there didn't seem to be a way out of his situation.

At least, not until tonight.

It was strange, Zane would later muse, how normal it had been, at least in the beginning. The Ninja of Ice had been walking out to the deck of the Bounty with the intention of doing some stargazing (a hobby he had picked up when, for some reason or another, he found himself unable to fall asleep), when he saw Cole, sitting against the mast and staring up at the sky. At first, the black ninja seemed to be enjoying the night sky, but as Zane drew nearer, he realized that his teammate was in the middle of a conversation.

"...don't know why you followed me out here, then," Cole was saying, rolling his eyes. "You could have stayed inside the ship, where you don't have to worry about a stray splash or something."

Zane cocked his head to the side, confused. He couldn't see who Cole was talking to, and the subject of the conversation was an odd one--the only one who would have a problem with water splashing him would be Kai, and that was only on the account of the water messing with his hairdo...

But then the nindroid noticed that his brother's eyes had turned glassy and his gaze suddenly looked far-away.

Ahhh. He understood now.