𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓. she passed away alone at sea
❨ gen v ❩
KANASHIBARI IS A TERM USED IN JAPAN FOR SLEEP PARALYSIS, metal-binding, it was translated to. When you wake up in the middle of the night and can't move, like some gigantically big evil spirit was sitting on your chest.
Cate only ever heard it from Miyeon, who was Korean but dabbled in Japanese history. Cate would occasionally wake up with the thought that Miyeon was perched on her chest, as if she had relinquished control of her powers and gone rogue, manipulating her closest friends into committing dreadful acts like self-harm or amnesia.
And if Miyeon was sitting there it meant that she was a ghost and therefore she was dead, but then she would hear her light snoring across the room during one of their sleepovers and realized it was metal-binding.
She would open her eyes and stare into the darkness. Occasionally, she'd discern voices resembling furious demons, yet she found herself unable to utter even the slightest sound. It seemed that the longer she lay there, the sensation of her body drifting away intensified.
Cate suffered from metal binding a lot. It stopped a bit when she, Miyeon, and Jordan would have sleepovers. By then she figured it was because she became a ghost herself.
Ghosts were pretty intense. They're not the kind that go around dressed in sheets. They were beautiful gowns and had long flowing hair hanging in their faces, and also no feet. Usually, they're women who were rightfully pissed off because someone had done something horrible to them. Sometimes, if a person had been mistreated, they can become a living ghost, and their soul leaves their sleeping body and wandered around the city at night doing spirit attacks and wreaking vengeance on all the shitty people who tortured them by sitting on their chests.
Cate felt like a living ghost.
It wasn't as crazy as it sounded.
One night, Cate had this crazy cosmic dream about one of her classmates, she couldn't remember the details of it because the only thing she could remember was when her head fell forward, she jerked awake, but over and over she nodded off again. In the interstices between sleeping and waking, she floated in a darkened liminal state that was not quite a dream but was perpetually on the edge of becoming one.
There she hung, submerged and tumbling slowly, like a particle of flotsam just below the crest of a wave that was always just about to break.
"It helps to count your breaths," Miyeon grumbled from her resting position, on the couch while Jordan lay tucked underneath her on the floor, Cate in her dorm bed. "It's not like you're thinking about breathing, but you're not not thinking about it either. It's kind of like," she paused, almost drifting to sleep while thinking of an example for the girl. "Well, like you're sitting on the beach and watching the waves lapping up on the sand or some little kids you don't know playing in the distance. You're just noticing everything that's going on, both inside you and outside you, including your breathing and the kids and the waves and the sand."
Miyeon mumbled more, drifting further into sleep as she continued to talk borderline gibberish.
It sounded simple enough, but when Cate first tried she got totally distracted by all her crazy thoughts and obsessions, and then her body started to itch and felt like millipedes were crawling all over her. When she explained this to the girl, she told her to count her breaths like this; Breathe in, breathe out... One. Breathe in, breathe out... Two.
Miyeon continued by saying she should count up to ten, and when she got to it, start over.
A few moments passed before Cate spoke up again, "What if I travel so far away in my dream that I can't get back in time to wake up?" Cate had posed this question to her mother once during her childhood, shortly after her brother vanished. Instead of a response, her mother met her inquiry with a profoundly disheartening expression, one that no child should ever encounter from their parent. Now, contemplating the same question with Miyeon, Cate felt a surge of anxiety and vulnerability, fearing that Miyeon's reaction might mirror her mother's distant response from years ago. "What if... my dream isn't sweet? What if it's horrible?"
"Remind yourself it's just a dream," she said. "And then wake up."
"But what if I can't get back in time?"
"Then I'll come and get you,"
A week after that memorable day, Miyeon whisked Cate away to the beach, both of them playing hooky from classes. As they strolled along the shore, Miyeon turned to her and began, "Have you ever tried to bully a wave? Punch it? Kick it? Hit it? Beat it to death with a stick?"
They indulged in rice balls and chocolate, simply enjoying each other's company like two carefree girls. Miyeon perched on a petite wooden bench while Cate reclined on the warm sand by her feet. The sun cast its radiant rays upon them, illuminating the scene. Miyeon, sporting a damp white hand towel wrapped around her head, exuded an air of serenity in her chic grey bathing suit, as cool as a cucumber.
Cate felt hot, sweaty, and restless, yet the idea of taking a swim didn't appeal to her.
"Bully a wave?" Cate repeated. "No, of course not."
"Try it. Go to the water wait for the biggest wave and give it a punch. Give it a good kick. Hit it with a stick. Go on. I will watch." She passed a stick to Cate, long enough to serve as a walking stick from their earlier stroll.
With no one else in sight except for a couple of distant surfers, Cate grasped Miyeon's stick tightly in her hand. She marched towards the ocean's edge, then broke into a run, brandishing the stick above her head like a sword.
The waves were big, breaking on the beach, and she ran into the first one that came at her, yelling like a samurai going into battle. Cate smacked the wave with the stick, cutting through it, but the water kept coming. She ran back up the beach and escaped, but the next one knocked her over.
She got to her feet and attacked again and again, and each time the water crashed down on top of her, grinding her against the rocks and covering her with foam and sand. She didn't mind. The sharp cold felt good, the violence of the waves felt powerful and real, and the bitterness of salt in her nose tasted harshly delicious.
Over and over, she ran at the sea, beating it until she was so tired she could barely stand. And then the next time she fell, she just laid there and let the waves wash over her, and she wondered what would happen if she stopped trying to get back up. Just let her body go. Would she be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat her limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on her fingertips. Her beautiful bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in her eye sockets.
She stood up and walked back to where Miyeon was sitting. She took the small towel from her head and handed it to Cate. "Damn," Cate said, throwing herself down in the sand. "I lost. The ocean won." She smiled.
"Was it a good feeling?"
"Mm," She declared.
"That's good," she said. "Have another rice ball?"
They lingered there for a while longer, allowing their bathing suits to dry under the sun's warm embrace. In the distance, down the beach, the surfers continued their attempts, falling into the water and vanishing from view intermittently.
"The waves keep beating them up, too," Cate spoke, pointing. Miyeon squinted, "There," Cate pointed, again. "See that one? He's just standing up... he's up ... he's up... oh, he's down." She laughed. It was fun to watch.
Miyeon nodded, like she was agreeing with her. "Up, down, same thing." a typical Miyeon comment, all about pointing to what she calls the not-two nature of existence when Cate's just trying to watch some cute guys surfing.
She understood better than to engage in an argument with Miyeon, as Miyeon invariably emerged victorious, but it was like a knock-knock joke, where you have to say "Who's there?" so the other person can tell you the punch line.
So she said, "No, it's not the same thing. Not for a surfer."
"Hm," she said. "You're right. Not the same." She adjusted her position. "But not different, either."
"It is different, Minnie. The whole point of surfing is to stand on top of the wave, not underneath it."
"Surfer, wave, same thing." Okay, now Miyeon was just messing with her.
"That's just stupid," Cate said. "A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?"
Miyeon looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave until it is time to sink again. Up, down. Person, wave." She pointed to the steep cliffs along the shoreline. "That's all."
This was pretty typical of the kind of conversation Cate had with her. She never completely understood what she was saying, but she liked that she tried to explain it to her anyway. It's nice of her.
It was a memory that Cate never wanted to fade away.
Even in that moment, as Cate gently cradled Miyeon's face in her hands, returning the memories she had taken, Cate was still thinking about what she said about the waves, and it made her sad because she knew that if their friendship was a little wave, it was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though she knew one can't hold on to water, still she gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep Miyeon from leaking away.
What started with the attack on Rufus, ended with the single most devastating look she had ever gotten from her best friends.
And it made her want to die.
the noises began, then. Sometimes, she heard small voices coming from the shadows. They weren't loud just swelling. Like ghosts or people moaning, but softly so no one would hear except her. But this was different.
She thought she could hear words tangled inside the sounds, but she couldn't understand them yet.
But then she heard them, her friends. Their voices were angry and sharp, whereas in the midst was a voice of sadness.
Cate thought about going back to her room and shutting the door, but she really needed to be there. She pressed her hands to her ears and crouched against the wall.
Stop! she pleaded, but the crying continued, and now a chorus of voices rose around her, from floor to rafter, and from every corner of the house, joining in.
She pressed her hands harder and closed her eyes. Please, she cried, be quiet, and when she removed her hands, she was met with the house silent.
"Cate?" She heard Minnie call from in front of her, her clear, be-like voice ringing through the sudden silence. "Are you okay?"
Her heart was beating fast. She gulped and swallowed the air.
How could she explain to her something that she couldn't understand, it never occurred to her that maybe her situation wasn't normal until the voices started, and even then she didn't get it right away. It wasn't totally surprising when people do crazy shit, but when people weren't talking to her, is when she got freaked out.
Everyone had something to say. At first, Cate thought they were just saying stuff, maybe to each other, or maybe to the molecules in the air, just expressing themselves into the universe, as they've always done. But then her ears happened to come along, and when she realized that she had ears that could hear ― supernatural ears― they started trying to communicate with her, only they were talking directly to her, so naturally, she lost it.
At first, she wasn't sure if they were even voices at all. A voice is a sound that a human makes and usually when voices speak, they mean something, but these voices were random, moths never connected with the sounds she heard. And if they meant something, she could understand what it was. This frustrated the hell out of her.
Some people's thoughts were in horrible ways, metallic and grading, like grinding gears that made you want to punch your own head, but others were even more unpleasantly, inhuman, like the wind or clouds or water. At first, she couldn't figure out where the voices were coming from.
The voices weren't her thoughts they were outside. They were different. They were other people's thoughts.
People's inside voices were very good at communicating their feelings. It's not always awful, though. Sometimes the voices were attractive and pleasant, Luke's was like that, on days she'd forget to take her meds.
But she couldn't hack it. She couldn't learn how to tune her ears so she could hear her own thoughts over all the noise that others were making.
After Dean Shetty gave her the pills, it took a while, but the voices came and went, and she could go weeks, or months, without hearing them. And she thought for a moment that it wasn't the pills, maybe the voices got frustrated and gave up on her and went away, but they always came back. Just as she was beginning to forget about them and think maybe she could be normal again, suddenly, the man using the stapler or the barista would make a comment, and then the next thing she knew, everybody was yakking away. Everyone's got an opinion. Everyone's got a story to tell.
She's spent a lot of time, thinking about the voices, ever since she started hearing them and talking with the therapist and the Dean. She wasn't a random lunatic who imagined she was some kind of ambassador for the things of the world. It's not like she was chosen.
She almost forgot that Miyeon and Jordan were with her when she ran out of time.
Miyeon screamed with enough anguish to cause Jordan to jump away from them. As Cate fell, Miyeon followed suit to her knees and lifted her head up as Cate seized.
Andre knocked Miyeon ut the way, replacing her hands with his own on Cate's head.
"When she pushes too hard, it fucks with her head." He told them.
"Didn't you learn CPR?"
"Where?" Jordan charged.
"At superhero school? Jesus!" Marie spat, her words muddied by her rushing heart rate. "Her... her pulse is slowing."
Miyeon whimpered, caressing Cate's hand. Jordan's eyes watered at the sound.
"Can you speed it up?" He whispered, feeling the girl's pulse.
"I don't know. I-I, um... What if it kills her?"
Miyeon gasped, trying to breathe herself. Her eyes fixed on Cate's face. Jordan put a hand over her shoulder and pulled her close as Marie sped up Cate's heart rate. To which Miyeon released a sigh of release.
"When does she wake up?" Miyeon whispered, hand still connected to Cate's.
"Cate. Cate, are you with us?" Marie's voice carried a note of desperation as she tried to steady her own racing heart.
Jordan glanced over his shoulder, observing Miyeon as she knelt beside Cate, steadfastly holding onto her hand. It brought a sense of relief to Jordan, reassured by the evidence that, despite any emotional distance, Miyeon still deeply cared for Cate. "Has she ever pushed this much before?" he inquired.
"Who cares?" Andre grumbled, "This is what she gets for mind-raping her friends."
The room crackled with tension, every movement sending sparks coursing through her. Miyeon's fury was palpable.
"You don't get to say that." Miyeon had their attention, "you don't get to be mad when moments ago you were on your knees professing your love to her." She narrowed her eyes on Andre and tried to decipher his motives, but his neutral expression betrayed her. Unsure whether he was a friend or a foe disguised as one, Miyeon's jaw clenched and her heart raced. Heat suffused her face as she felt Andre uncovering a new vulnerability in her defenses.
"We've been through too much together for this to tear us apart like this," she said, her voice tinged with sadness. "Cate deserves to have her voice heard, her side of the story acknowledged. When she wakes up, we all need to listen, really listen, to what she has to say." Miyeon continued, her voice edged with frustration, determination blazing in her eyes. "We're her friends, Andre. Let's act like it." Despite her agitation, Miyeon's tone remained firm, determined to protect her friend from further turmoil.
Miyeon's voice then dropped to a low, seething whisper. "You think you're clever, don't you?" Her eyes bored into his, searching for any hint of remorse or sincerity. "But let me tell you something, Andre. You may have found a crack, but I'm not going to let you shatter what we have." Despite the anger simmering beneath the surface, Miyeon's words were measured, and calculated, a warning of the storm brewing within her.
It was an unexpected reaction, as hardly anyone could provoke such a response from her. The tension in the room thickened, everyone nervously anticipating what her next move might be. Then, suddenly, Cate gasped, springing up and clutching Marie's arm tightly before disappearing into thin air, leaving everyone stunned in her wake.
"Holy shit, where'd she go?" Jordan exclaimed, hastily inspecting the sofa where Cate had just been lying.
The sound of bricks being shifted grabbed their attention, drawing their focus towards Dusty, who had noticed it first. In the far corner, where a closed-off wall once stood, bricks now hovered, forming an entrance to the forest beyond. Each of them paled, uncertain of whether they should venture through.
With hesitant steps, they ventured through the floating bricks, their hearts pounding with trepidation. As they entered the forest, the air grew thick with an otherworldly stillness. Glancing back, they watched in disbelief as the bricks behind them floated into thin air, leaving no trace of the entrance they had just passed through.
It dawned on them that they were now in a surreal space, a creation perhaps conjured up by Cate's mind.
Miyeon's awareness of Cate's power went beyond mere observation; it stemmed from a profound understanding of her friend's inner workings. She had witnessed Cate's struggles and triumphs, delving into the depths of her mind to unravel the complexities within.
Through their countless conversations and shared moments, Miyeon had glimpsed the extent of Cate's abilities, the subtle shifts in her demeanor betraying the immense psychic energy swirling beneath the surface.
Moreover, Miyeon had felt the ripple effects of Cate's power firsthand. There were moments when their thoughts seemed to intertwine, a silent dialogue unfolding between them without a word spoken. It was as if Cate's mind reached out, touching Miyeon's consciousness with an unseen force, leaving an indelible mark on her psyche.
Miyeon's intuition, honed by years of friendship and shared experiences, allowed her to perceive the depth of Cate's abilities. She recognized the significance of Cate's gift, not just as a means of reading minds, but as a manifestation of a power that transcended the physical realm. It was a power that resonated with the very essence of who Cate was, shaping her identity in ways that even Cate herself might not fully comprehend.
In essence, Miyeon knew that Cate was powerful because she had seen the impact of her abilities firsthand, felt the resonance of her psychic energy, and understood the depth of her friend's potential. It was a knowing that transcended logic, rooted in the unspoken bond between two souls who shared a connection that defied explanation.
There were times when Miyeon caught glimpses of raw potential flickering beneath Cate's calm exterior, like lightning hidden within a tranquil sky.
It was this deep-seated intuition, honed through years of friendship and shared experiences, that led Miyeon to recognize Cate's true power, even when others might overlook it.
Before any of them could fully comprehend the strangeness of their surroundings, Andre took a bold step forward into the forest, his curiosity driving him onward. Marie followed closely behind, her determination masking any apprehension she might have felt.
Meanwhile, Miyeon lingered at the forest's edge, her keen eyes taking in the vibrant shades of green and the delicate blooms that emerged from the underbrush. Jordan remained by her side, his gaze never wavering as they watched her with a mixture of admiration and concern, silently offering their support in this unfamiliar terrain.
𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄
omg hi hello
I LOCKED IN YALL !!! ty to anyone who has been so incredibly patient i promise to finish this story hopefully by the end of next month
except, now that i say it, i might not even do that. so lets safely say end of the year LOL
we're finally getting to more minnie lore !!!! and I'm so freaking excited i actually started working on the next chapter HHAHAHHA.
and hopefully more jordan and minnie scenes next too !!
heart heart kiss kiss
much love,