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Nayeon dreams.
Her feet are bare, the world barren and lightless. Or perhaps her eyes are closed. Either way, when the touch of fingers comes cool against her skin, she doesn’t need sight to know.
“Mina?”
The name slips out the way a child steps around a half-open door after a nightmare— timid and unsure, seeking refuge. Mina’s palms press lighter than the slightest breeze against her ribs, searching too, and when Nayeon steps forward they pass right through.
There’s no pain for once, only a gentle chill when palms curve carefully around where Nayeon knows her heart should be, a subtle tugging where Nayeon knows there should be agony, and then Mina’s hands are drawing out of her chest ever so delicately and she says back with wonder, “Nayeon.”
And Nayeon dreams— dreams of being awake, of opening her eyes and seeing, at last, this: Mina, her heart, cradling it close to her own and looking back at Nayeon with something so fragile and so incredibly tender in her gaze, her grasp, that Nayeon—
Nayeon—
Nayeon wakes.
The room is empty and pitch dark. Still blind. Her heart tapping a nervous stutter in her chest. She doesn’t sleep with lights on anymore, now that the nightmares have stopped.
Instead she dreams.
/
Nayeon thought she gave up on dreams a long time ago, after she’d decided they were always too impossible, unfathomable things that could only ever happen when the reality of life was distorted by the insubstantial shadows of sleep. Occasionally she wants to remember them, most of the time she doesn’t. They’ll never be more than what they already are.
What were they? Mina was what they call a superhero. Someone different, who could turn invisible and intangible and could travel across the universe in the span of a heartbeat; someone who was everything that Nayeon was not. Nayeon who was far from extraordinary and far from a hero.
What were they? Best friends, maybe. Something more, something less; and in the end nothing at all.
In the beginning, though, it was just them. Nayeon and Mina.
/
The first time, neither of them understand.
It happens like this: Mina’s sitting under the shade of a tree, reading about wizards while Nayeon braids her hair and scowls at any boys who get too close.
“They don’t actually have cooties, Nayeon,” Mina informs her solemnly. “I looked it up.”
A couple months ago, Nayeon would’ve rolled her eyes at the absurdity of an ten-year-old educating her, but she’s learned by now that Mina spends more time absorbing knowledge from pages and texts than she does on the playground. So Nayeon just makes a low sound of agreement and goes back to Mina’s pigtails, and she definitely doesn’t mention the time Mark made Mina cry because he pulled too hard on one of them. Maybe he doesn’t have cooties, but Mark will stay folded away into the back of her mind, sectioned off with caution tape and observed warily.
Perhaps Nayeon needs stronger caution tape, because right then she spots Mark with a group of his friends, kicking at a soccer ball in the center of the field.
“Nayeon,” Mina admonishes, giggling when Nayeon rolls her eyes and makes a face at the sight. “You’re not still mad at him over that, right? It was two years ago!”
“It was not!” says Nayeon defensively, before reconsidering and realizing that, yeah, it was two years ago. “Okay, maybe it was.” Then, “Hey, stop moving,” when Mina lowers her head to look back down at the book and nearly causes her to lose her grip on the braid.
Mina stills obediently, and though Nayeon can easily tell she’s trying not to laugh, she lets it go in favor of returning her attention to the task at hand. Right over, left over, right over, left over, repeat...
“Watch out!”
Nayeon glances up just in time to catch a blur of motion, black and white spiraling to form the shape of a soccer ball that’s heading straight for the two of them, and she doesn’t have much choice to do anything but brace herself. Except it strikes her, that at this angle she isn’t the one who’ll get hit, Mina is in the way. So Nayeon goes to shove her to the side and—
The impact takes her by surprise.
A second later, after the shock wears off and the pain sets in, Nayeon’s pressing a hand to her jaw where a bruise will surely arise later. She blinks away the stars to find Mina clambering inelegantly into her lap, with a high and frightened, “Nayeon?” and she’s all too conscious of the awfully concerned expression the younger wears, the way she lifts her hands to cup Nayeon’s jaw.
Nayeon waits for a moment of contact that never comes. What she gets, instead, is an odd tingling sensation where Mina’s fingers should have touched her skin, and a shudder that runs down the length of her spine and leaves her unsteady despite the firmness of the ground below. She drops her hand from its protective position right as Mina jerks hers back, and Nayeon finds that her voice, too, is uncertain when she says, “Mina?”
And Mina’s entire form wavers, the shape of her suddenly evanescent, and Nayeon glimpses through her Mark on the field behind, running over to retrieve the soccer ball. He’s hidden from view once Mina seems to... stabilize, like the flakes of a snow globe settling slowly into place.
Mark reaches them, panting, and snatches the ball away without acknowledging them at all except for a single, unnerved look that he throws in Mina’s direction. He won’t speak to them again for a full year, not that either of them mind (the scowl Mina wears when Nayeon’s poking at her purpling jaw later tells her that this time she won’t be so quick to forgive). But beyond that, Nayeon has the sinking suspicion that it’s because for the first time, Mark had looked at Mina and seen exactly what Nayeon did.
Nothing.
See, she hadn’t moved quickly enough. That ball should have hit Mina. But somehow, Nayeon’s the one who ends up holding an ice pack to her face for a good half-hour afterwards, because instead of hitting her it went straight through. Didn't touch her at all.
Like Mina was never even there.
/
Of course, Nayeon couldn’t possibly remember every last detail of every one of these moments. What she keeps are, instead, these inexplicably vivid fragments: Mark’s shirt, striking blue; the creak of playground swings in the distance; closer, the dewy gleam of a spider’s silk spun off the branch above, the very corner of Mina’s smile from Nayeon's vantage behind...
Then, after the ball: Mina's panic, her knee pressing Nayeon's leg into the cool earth; her hands weightless on Nayeon's cheeks and through, after the ball; the little upset crease of her mouth towards the tiny mole below, the dainty green leaf that had caught itself in her hair; after the ball—
Was it true, that nothing had changed?
/
Nayeon feels her before she sees her. It’s more of a disruption in the flow of the air than a presence; the tiniest imbalance that throws the entire system off. There’s only one person it can be.
“Mina,” she says, and sighs. “I know you’re there. Come out.”
Nayeon doesn’t turn around, but she glances away from her laptop and to the right, at the mirror above her dresser, and suddenly there’s a tremor in the reflection, spreading across the image of her room like a ripple as Mina shimmers into view.
“Good morning,” she says quietly, meeting Nayeon’s gaze in the glass. “Are you working?” There’s dirt smudged over her cheekbone, her hair tousled, but besides that Nayeon’s brief inspection reveals none of the bruises and scrapes she’s come to expect.
The perpetual knot in her chest slackens a little, just enough for her to speak. “Case study due in a couple hours.”
“Oh.” Mina picks at a thread on the hem of her shirt with her right hand, tucks a feathery strand of brown behind her ear with the left, then seems to realize when she’s finished that she has nothing else to do with them. They flutter uncertainly in the space in front of her like confused sparrows, flitting their way up to the exposed skin of her elbows. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Mina.” Nayeon exhales again, a longer breath this time. Heavier. She stayed up until three a.m. last night working on this assignment and the effects are beginning to set in beneath the dampening layers of caffeine. Mina exhausts her in a way other people can’t; Nayeon deals with it better on some days than others. Today Mina’s contrite voice settles snugly into the hollow spaces of her bones, an added burden she lacks the energy to bear, but it’d be too harsh to cover her ears like she’s tempted to. She takes the next best option and breaks eye contact, staring blankly at the uniform black letters stacked neatly on her screen. “It’s fine.”
That must have come out cooler than she intended, because Mina only says, “Sorry,” rather feebly. Which does nothing for the steadily increasing pressure on Nayeon’s ribcage.
Fine, Nayeon thinks, and turns to face her.
It’s always fascinated her, ever since she was a child, how much someone’s face could change simply by looking at them through a mirror. It’s like— well, until she looked at photographs all she saw of herself was the reflection in the bathroom mirror, which was exactly what everyone else saw except flipped. The reverse image. And since nobody is perfectly symmetrical, nobody ever sees themselves the way other people do.
Mina looks more real this way than through the mirror. More tangible. How does the rest of the world see her? Nayeon knows it’s not the same way Nayeon sees her right now: she’s smaller, somehow, with how her arms are tucked into each other and her posture is almost wilted; smaller and more vulnerable. There’s also the fundamental difference that Nayeon can see her at all.
“It’s fine,” Nayeon says again more insistently, winces internally immediately after, and softens her tone. “Really. You know my door’s always open for you.”
She waits a few beats before adding: “Not that you need it to be.”
It’s the kind of joke Nayeon used to make often, and it succeeds in coaxing a gossamer laugh out of Mina, a wisp of breath that Nayeon’s disentangled and drawn out carefully. Mina unfurls with it, stepping toward Nayeon’s bed and perching herself precariously on the edge. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I’m always right.”
“Always humble, too,” Mina throws back just loud enough for her to hear, smirking ever so slightly when Nayeon’s smug expression skids into a scowl.
Nayeon flings a pen. Mina merely smiles, doesn’t even flinch, and it passes straight through the crinkling skin at the corner of her eye and lands with a muffled thump on Nayeon’s pillow.
“Jerk,” Nayeon mumbles, resigned. “That’s so unfair. You don’t even have to dodge.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t throw it in the first place. Come here?”
Nayeon grumbles under her breath but gets up anyway, ambling over and sinking down on the mattress next to Mina. It’s so easy to fall back on their familiar banter, despite this being Mina’s first visit in weeks, and though Nayeon truly, sincerely gets it, she can’t help but wonder if Mina will eventually stop altogether. Vanish from her memory and become invisible to Nayeon too.
For now, at least, Mina is here. In Nayeon’s apartment, since she moved out of the student dorms last year. Mina shifts to close the gap between them and nestles into Nayeon’s side, resting her head on the other girl’s shoulder; Nayeon wraps an arm around her instinctively. Her breath tickles warm under Nayeon’s chin, her hair at Nayeon’s collarbones, and she doesn’t speak.
“Tough day at work?” Nayeon asks as Mina’s eyes slip half-shut.
She’s aware that Mina is probably too tired to give her a proper reply, but it’s okay because she doesn’t need one. She had her questions answered this morning by a segment of CNN, had watched Mina— or rather, the fuzzy, neon shape of her from thermal filming— dart gracefully around the hulking figures of three masked men outside a bank, incapacitating them with well-placed blows or jabs of her taser. On social media there’d been messier videos from a shaky phone camera, capturing the occasional moments Mina flashed into sight to guide a bystander out of the line of fire, hastily-aimed bullets flying straight through her flickering form.
Mina hums in agreement, relaxing so completely against Nayeon until in the stillness Nayeon can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. The urge rises to— to disturb this intimacy, find a way to create distance, but Nayeon can’t quite bring herself to move away and instead she lifts her other hand to brush back Mina’s messy hair.
“You should shower.”
Mina doesn’t react.
“Seriously.” Nayeon prods her. “You stink.” (She doesn’t).
No response.
"I shouldn’t even be letting you on my bed. I did laundry literally two days ago—”
“Nayeon,” and she stops talking abruptly. “Could you kindly,” Mina turns her face and her next words are muffled into Nayeon’s shoulder, “shut up for once, please?”
“Oh?” says Nayeon, feigning offense. “After all these years, this is what I get in return? You’re still telling me to shut up?”
“You’re loud,” Mina mutters. “And you were then too.”
Then. Simpler times, when the dragging weight in Nayeon had been light enough that she jumped at a small tap on her shoulder, when she’d pivoted to find a Mina whose figure was filled in solidly without a hint of translucency lurking in her contours. An audacious first grader asking her, knowledgeable and experienced and a-whole-year-older Nayeon, to please quiet down in the library.
Nayeon allows the corner of her lip to quirk up at the memory. “I guess nothing’s changed.”
“You really think so?” Mina asks, raising her head. The motion forces Nayeon to lean away so they don’t knock into each other. “Nothing at all?”
Nayeon tracks her stare around the simple apartment, past the plush toy by her pillow, the open laptop on her desk, the framed photo of her and Jaebum hanging on the wall, until it settles back on her. Mina’s gaze is too alert for someone who’d been half-asleep minutes earlier, and Nayeon’s own mind is too clouded over to pick it apart. How frustrating.
“Nothing that matters,” she says truthfully; she thinks. “We’re still best friends, aren't we?”
Mina exhales, looks down to where her fingers have tangled in the sheets. “Of course.”
Nayeon smiles, withdraws her arm from around Mina’s waist, and pats her carefully on the head. “I’ve got to go work on that paper, or my professor will kill me.”
“Oh,” Mina breathes. Nayeon recognizes disappointment as she straightens and lets her toes touch the floor. “Sorry. I’ll see you around.”
“Where are you going? You need to rest.” Nayeon pushes her back down gently, relieved when her hands don’t pass through. She hates the chill that comes with sinking even a single finger into Mina’s phased form, the sensation she’d always imagined of touching a ghost, pricking far deeper than her nerves. But it’s alright. Most days Nayeon doesn’t have to feel it; most days Mina stays tangible; most days, Mina trusts Nayeon to touch her.
Mina blinks, stutters to a standstill. “But... the sheets. Your assignment. I’ll distract you.”
Nayeon considers pointing out that her sheets are irrevocably stained from that time Jaebum spilled his beer, or that Mina at her loudest rarely came close to being a distraction, or that even if the building collapsed on her laptop her assignment would come out no worse than it’s already doomed to be. But in the end she just says, “Sleep, Mina.”
Later, when Mina’s tossing restlessly on the bed, she isn’t silent at all.
Nayeon pretends not to catch the name she murmurs. It is, after all, only a dream.
/
“Nayeon! ”
The black fabric of her gown is stifling hot on her skin, and Mina is the loudest she’s ever been. Nayeon can hear her over the rest of the crowd, searches and finds her in the front row of the bleachers, proudly brandishing a flamboyant sign emblazoned with her name.
It’s the last day she’ll ever spend at this school that’s taken up four years of her life. The university she’s headed to has one of the best medical programs in the country. They’re young and there’s nothing only about dreams, not yet, not when Nayeon has a whole future ahead of her.
And behind her, when she turns: Mina, dropping the sign carelessly on the field as she dashes to where Nayeon waits, holding in a laugh that ends up escaping anyway when the two of them collide. The momentum of it spins them around, and it’s dizzying, the way Mina flings her arms around Nayeon’s neck and clasps her hands behind, burying her face into the golden sash proclaiming Nayeon as an honors student; Nayeon wants, so suddenly and so terribly, to tear it off and throw it into the air, let it tumble back down as she tilts Mina’s face up towards her own, wants—
Mina makes the choice for her, pulls back and presses her lips fleetingly to Nayeon’s cheek.
“I’ll miss you,” she breathes into Nayeon’s ear, and Nayeon knows.
They’ll call, they’ll text. Mina could, of course, visit her at any time she wished— teleportation is useful like that. Also, they have a whole summer before Nayeon goes. As an honors student specializing in natural sciences, Nayeon is good with facts like these. But this time she won’t bother.
Because this, too, is the truth: “Don’t worry,” Nayeon says, watching the brightness spark in Mina’s eyes at her words— she’s incandescent, it almost hurts to see. They did warn her, told her look too long and you’ll go blind; well, too late now. “I’ll wait for you,” she promises, and the skin of her cheek burns white-hot, kissed by the light of the sun.
She doesn’t look away.
/
When Mina materializes by the air conditioning unit of the tiny dorm Nayeon shares with her roommate, Nayeon doesn’t miss a step. She finishes the climb, hand over hand, wooden slats of the ladder digging into the balls of her feet, until she’s reached the top and flopped onto her bunk.
“It’s almost ten,” she tells Mina, holding her pillowcase up to the light and examining it closely. Part of the seam is coming loose. “You said seven. Where have you been for the last three hours?”
“There was a mugging downtown,” Mina says, tilting her head up to Nayeon. “Can I come up?”
Nayeon drops the pillow. Rolls over and buries her face in it. “Why are you asking when you’ll do what you want anyway.”
“Nayeon, please.”
Mina’s voice is tapering and thin, a worn rope fraying at the end.
The novelty of having a superhero for a... best friend wore off some time between the first time Mina sported a cast to one of their meet-ups and the third time she left Nayeon waiting alone at a two-person table, ears hot from the stares of surrounding diners and the stinging absence across from her. Mina’s trying, Nayeon tells herself at times like these. She’s trying. It’s not her fault.
It’s not. She’s not.
In truth, Nayeon’s starting to suspect that the weight of this— whatever this is— is too much for both of them. Nayeon feels it more and more often these days; sometimes it has to do with Mina and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it rolls in as unannounced as the first fog in late autumn, thick and stifling, pressing her into the bed and make her not want to do the simplest tasks, not try and not eat and not go to class, not exist at all. Sometimes Mina will show up at her door and bring blissful levity, sometimes she makes it worse.
Always, Nayeon is tired.
Today she’s spent from listening to her professor drone on about the map of arteries in the human body and from hours of poring over treatment for decompression sickness. It takes immense effort just to sit up against the wall and avert her eyes from the girl standing below, to say, “Okay.”
The creaking of wood gives away Mina’s solidity. Nayeon wonders why she doesn’t just let herself dissolve and re-form next to her. It would be much faster. But Mina takes her time.
The mattress dips next to her. “I’m sorry.”
“You were late,” Nayeon says matter-of-factly, staring into the ceiling light until a vaguely round shape blazes blue in her vision when she blinks, “again.”
“I know.” The sheets rustle as Mina adjusts to a more comfortable position. “There was a—”
“Mugging. You said.”
“Yes.” A pause. “I’m really sorry.”
“I know.” Nayeon succumbs and closes her eyes, fights back a stinging that isn’t caused by the imprint of artificial light. (Don’t sleep. (She’s so tired).) “I wish you wouldn’t stop for everyone.”
“I have to,” says Mina, dully. They’ve had this conversation. Mina stops for anyone in need and even when she sprints after Nayeon, it isn’t enough to catch up.
“You can’t ask me places and never come.”
“Nayeon—”
“I can’t keep doing this,” she admits.
A heartbeat goes by. Nayeon imagines that Mina is staring at her, struggling to understand, and even though she can’t see her face Nayeon can sense the exact moment that it sinks in, can discern acutely from the shifting of the mattress that Mina has leaned away.
“...What?” Mina whispers, disbelieving. Like she genuinely hadn’t seen this coming, the undoing of the remaining threads that bound them together. “Do you mean...?”
“I’m done,” Nayeon says with finality, and holds her breath.
The air next to her quivers, shivers from the chill of that, then goes absolutely still. When Nayeon opens her eyes at last, the space next to her is vacated and the dorm seemingly deserted.
“This doesn’t mean you can’t drop by,” Nayeon says as if she hasn’t gone. She rakes trembling fingers through her hair, calls out into the stagnance, “I mean. We’re still best friends, right?”
They’ll never be more than what they already are.
In the quiet, Nayeon catches a strange sound: a hitched inhale, a stifled sob; and she almost reaches out a hand in a futile motion to stop someone who can’t be stopped with such a trivial, material barrier. Then the moment passes, and the room is empty once more.
/
What had changed?
/
“So you can control it,” Nayeon says for the millionth time, because it’s that implausible. “You can make yourself invisible and— intangible, is that what it’s called? And turn back? And teleport?”
“Yes,” Mina confirms shyly. She hit her first growth spurt a few months ago and is, much to Nayeon’s discomfort, now only a centimeter shorter than her. To demonstrate, she extends an arm and Nayeon watches as it fades into nothingness.
“I still don’t understand why you can turn your clothes too,” Nayeon complains. When Mina narrows her eyes, she wags her eyebrows suggestively. “It’d be hilarious if you had to run around naked all day.”
“Honestly, you’re such a pervert.” Mina swats her arm, the faintest tinge of pretty pink stealing over her cheekbones. “Do you have any real questions?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you fall into the center of the earth every time you walk through walls?”
“I don’t know, Nayeon, it’s not as if I’m experienced with this sort of thing. It’s probably because I can choose what to pass through...?”
“Makes sense,” Nayeon agrees sagely. “What if—”
Mina glares. “No more stupid questions.”
“Fine, fine,” she chuckles, turning on the couch to face Mina. “Then do you have any questions?”
“Me?” Mina says in surprise, brow furrowing when Nayeon nods. She mulls it over for a few seconds before asking hesitantly, “Well, I suppose... what do you think? About, well, all this?”
“What do I think?” Nayeon echoes. “I think—”
She pounces on Mina, sending the smaller girl keeling over and into the cushions of the couch, digging her fingertips into the soft skin between ribs and the sides of her waist. Mina yelps below, squirming away from the assault and giggling helplessly, but Nayeon knows that if she really wanted to escape Nayeon’s touch would pass straight through her.
“Who cares?” When they’re finished, Mina’s trapped between her knees, worn out enough to lie pliant. Nayeon’s laughing too, breathless and brilliant, exhilaration saturating every syllable.
“Who cares what I think? My best friend’s a superhero!”
/
(It’s never that simple).
After Nayeon waves goodbye to Jaebum and heads back inside her own building, she isn’t surprised to find Mina standing by the elevator, despite everything that happened last time.
“Hello,” Mina says, the second half of the word drowned out by the ding! of the elevator. She waits for Nayeon to step in before following her. “Having a nice day?”
For some reason, this innocuous question scorches through her and sets her blood on a low boil. What does Mina know? She’s only being cordial, Nayeon knows, but it accomplishes little to placate the way her anger roars to life, eager to fill the emptiness. “I was.”
Mina blinks. In the parallel mirrors lining the elevator walls, twenty thousand pairs of eyes do the same, all fixed on Nayeon. “I thought you said I could drop by. We’re still best friends?”
Nayeon lets out a laugh that feels squeezed out of her. “Yeah, great, a fucking superhero for a best friend. Teleporting in whenever she feels like it. Scaring me to hell.”
“You weren’t scared,” points out Mina, a low layer of hurt lining the statement, tainted by the lightest shade of annoyance. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Like what?” Nayeon’s irritation is obvious; everything about her has always been louder.
“Like a bitch,” Mina snaps all at once, uncharacteristically crude. “Is he that bad at kissing?”
Nayeon gapes at her, dumbfounded, until she manages to pull herself together long enough to close her mouth and twist it into a scowl. So she saw it, that instant before Nayeon got out of the car, when Jaebum had placed a hand above her knee and leaned in first.
It’s rare for her to see this side of Mina, rare that the other girl shows any sign of pettiness or exasperation, and Nayeon is seized by an unexplainable urge to take that anger and pick at it, shredding it apart and leaving Mina exposed. “So now you’re stalking me too. This is exactly what I meant. Watching us while invisible is so creepy, Mina, seriously.”
“I wasn’t,” Mina grits out, annoyance curdling into a ferocity that leaves a sour aftertaste scouring Nayeon’s throat. “I was right there. Waiting for you at the door.You didn’t see me.”
That accusation hangs in the confines of the elevator until they come to Nayeon’s floor and the doors slide open. Nayeon steps out; behind her, Mina slams the heel of her palm onto the close button and when Nayeon turns, suddenly regretful, she’s vanished before the doors have even begun to shut.
She wasn’t invisible. How did Nayeon miss her?
/
The truth is, Nayeon misses Mina a lot more than she’d like to admit.
It’s almost like she only ever sees Mina between classes and at lunch, never outside of school, and Nayeon feels childish to admit it but she wishes Mina would spend more time with her. Yeah, her best friend has superpowers and recently figured out how to harness them for the betterment of all society, but it’s their last year of high school together. She can be childish. They’re still children.
As if on cue, Mina materializes, seated neatly on Nayeon’s desk next to her binder and her lamp, and Nayeon’s pen scratches a dark jolt of shock down the middle of her college-ruled paper.
“Mina!” Nayeon gasps, clutching her chest dramatically. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Mina laughs, softly, her legs hanging off the edge of the wooden surface. Nayeon wonders how long she’s been sitting there before deciding to announce her presence; she kicks lightly at Nayeon’s chair and pretends she didn’t mean to when Nayeon shoos her away. “No, but I did spend the last three hours discussing in extensive detail five different ways to kill a man, and got to put that into practice. On dummies, of course.”
Mina’s taken up martial arts these past five or so years, experimenting with several different classes and instructors to see which style suits her best. Nayeon never thought they’d reach the point where her frail friend could probably take her out easily, but here they are. She shouldn’t be surprised, really; Mina accomplishes practically everything she sets her mind to.
“Was it fun?”
What a stupid question. But Mina takes it in stride, hums nonchalantly. “It was... instructive.”
“So not fun.”
Mina swings her legs onto Nayeon’s desk and sprawls over it, her head resting on top of all of Nayeon’s very important assignments and her hair fanning out with the papers. “Yeah, I don’t know. I know I might have to, but I don’t really want to kill people.”
“Then what do you want to do?” Nayeon asks her, mostly offhand, lighthearted.
Mina absorbs it very seriously though. Clasps her hands over her eyes like she’s trying to divine an answer from the lines of her palms. Nayeon waits patiently, drumming her fingers on the mahogany by Mina’s right ear, four taps for every rise-fall rotation of her chest. When Mina finally lets go and moves her hands away, she’s looking straight at Nayeon.
“I don’t want to kill people,” Mina says again. There’s something in her gaze, her tone— an unwavering idealism, buoyed by faith and reinforced with steely conviction— that knocks the reply right out from Nayeon’s lungs and leaves her wonderstruck. “I want to save them.”
It’s Nayeon’s last year of high school. She doesn’t have much time left to decide what she wants to do in the future, but right then it hits her: this is Mina’s purpose, saving people. It’s her world, and maybe the only chance Nayeon has to be part of it is if she can somehow do the same.
She might not have superpowers, but there are other ways.
Mina sits up and places her hand over Nayeon’s, running her thumb along the back, and that simple gesture has the uneven staccato rhythm of Nayeon’s fingertips falling still to a dutiful silence. Mina breaks it. Her touch is light and careful, her words fierce and sincere, and she tells Nayeon this: “I want to save everyone I possibly can.”
Nayeon knows that everything will be worth it.
/
The worst time, Mina barely even qualifies as a rookie. She’s fresh out of high school, hardly an adult, and received her first coverage from a local news station only a few months ago. Nayeon, on the other hand, is neck-deep in studying— less than a quarter of the way through the four years of uni she needs to slog through before med school.
They’re both still unused to their newfound circumstances, and so when Mina appears suddenly as Nayeon’s washing her hands in the bathroom, she nearly trips backwards and bashes her head open on the sink. As it is, she jerks up and smacks one wrist into the faucet.
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?” she hisses, pushing the tap shut and nursing her wrist gingerly. “What if someone else was in here?”
Mina rushes over immediately, says, “Sorry.” Cradles Nayeon’s hand in her own. “I have— I have a first-aid kit. Yes. At home. I’ll go.”
Before Mina can vanish, Nayeon grabs her wrist with her good hand. “Wait, it’s just a bruise.”
“Of course. Why didn’t I realize that? I’m—” Mina cuts herself off, floundering.
“Mina,” Nayeon says carefully, “are you alright? You seem...”
In the dim light, she glimpses the outline of Mina’s jaw. A band of ash on the bridge of her nose. Singed eyebrows, chapped lips, shiny eyes. Dread.
“There was a fire.” The revelation tumbles from Mina’s lips. She seems powerless to stop it. “They don’t know if it was arson or an accident. At the elementary school. Sprinklers broke.”
“Oh, Mina,” says Nayeon, understanding at once. “It’s not your fault.”
Mina crumples into her waiting embrace. She’s shaking but almost feverishly warm— remnants of the flame, Nayeon thinks— her hands burning imprints into Nayeon’s skin with how desperately she clutches at the other girl’s arms, her neck, whatever she can grasp.
“They were my responsibility. I’m supposed to save them.”
Nayeon knows. What use is invisibility against an enemy that doesn’t need sight? Teleporting more than a few feet with other living beings is too dangerous, they’d decided after an unfortunate experiment with a spider. And intangibility prevents her from getting burned but not the children that she must have— must have hugged to her chest, watched them inhale the smoke until they couldn’t anymore, went back in over and over to drag even the limp ones out of reach of the fire.
“There were too many,” Mina sobs, the collar of Nayeon’s shirt growing damp. “I’m so sorry.”
Nayeon shushes her cries soothingly, threads tender fingers through her sooty hair, brings her closer. This isn’t something she can remedy with a kiss, not like when Mina used to scrape her knees on the asphalt of the playground. “It’s not your fault,” she says again.
When Mina looks up at her, her face is blotched with red and streaked with tears. Moments of vulnerability, Nayeon finds, are enchanting. Hauntingly beautiful in a way that a joyful Mina, for all her radiance, is not. This isn’t something you can fix with a kiss, Nayeon. Don’t try.
Some people even Mina cannot save.
/
The last time they argue, Mina comes to her apartment in the dead of night.
She probably expected Nayeon to be asleep, but Nayeon isn’t. She’s lying facing the wall, tears dripping down her face like hot wax, soaking into the pillow and solidifying again, leaving everything brittle.
How did it start this time?
Uselessness, the last line of that research paper she couldn’t type out no matter how long her fingers stayed on those silver squares until they welded together. That awful, crushing weight blooming across her chest and pressing into her sternum, her xiphoid process, her thoracic vertebrae; all terms she’d memorized at the very beginning when she started down this path because she wanted so badly to save people (what did she want, what did she really want?).
She understands nothing, but most of all she doesn’t understand how this can hurt so much. Her mother reassured her once, back when her only fear was the monster under her bed, that nothing could hurt her if she couldn’t see it; but what if it’s invisible, little Nayeon had sniffled back, and her mother only smiled and said, well, you can’t touch it either, can you?
And she can’t. It’s all in her head, it is, and it shouldn’t be able to hurt her like this but it does.
It’s not real. Not the sudden surge of nausea that sends her curling into herself and clutching at the sheets, not the unnatural unbearable heat that flares in her lungs, not the slow peeling of her skin that scrapes her raw, not the hopelessness, not the helplessness, not this, nothing—
“Nayeon?”
Mina’s voice cuts through to the depths and leaves Nayeon gasping, resurfaced too quickly. Decompression sickness. The room spins once, vertigo, and gradually slows to a halt.
“Nayeon, what’s wrong?” Mina sits next to her, lays a hesitant hand on her arm.
What’s wrong? What a stupid question. Nayeon wants to smash it on the floor and trample it into the dust, but there’s a last semblance of restraint that prevents her. Some things might not be real, but Mina, at least, is: a comic book character come to life but real nevertheless, and there are no imaginary monsters here. There is only Mina.
Someone who can’t be seen and can’t be touched, and Nayeon knows now that her mother was wrong. It shouldn’t be able to hurt her like this, she’d said, but it does.
“Is it school?” Mina tries, oblivious as always.
Nayeon holds back. If she says anything, she’ll say everything.
Mina moves in until Nayeon can feel her hip bone pressing into her back. “Is it... Jaebum?”
Mina is ridiculous and always wants to oversimplify everything. Nayeon used to find it endearing. Now she sits up at last and turns so she’s face-to-face with Mina. “Mina, stop.”
“Stop what?” Mina presses, closer. Her frustration is palpable. “I wish you’d tell me.”
“And what?” Nayeon laughs. Doesn’t smile. “You’d save me from it, would you?”
“I could,” Mina insists. She’s right there. Her hand is heavy on Nayeon’s shoulder; warm, solid, tangible; there. “Is it him? I could.”
“It isn’t.” Nayeon is derisive. Mina’s optimism provokes only disdain.
“Then what is it?”
Nayeon ignores her. She’ll say everything. “And if it was, what could you do? Love me better?"
Mina is a stationary target. She sits in stunned silence, lips parted slightly, and all Nayeon can think is that Mina couldn’t even love her right.
Nayeon takes aim. “You can’t save everyone, Mina. I thought you learned that a long time ago.”
Fires. The recoil of the gun sends both of them reeling.
Mina recovers first. “I guess you’re right,” she says, and her eyes are glass. Nayeon searches them for her own reflection but finds nothing. “I can’t.”
All she leaves behind when she goes is a discomforting ache creeping up Nayeon’s throat, choking the apology she might have given to thin air, a feeling that she refuses to call remorse.
/
Sometime before that, and not after:
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
/
The last time, Mina stumbles through the closed door and collapses on her bed.
Nayeon hasn’t seen her in months and never wanted to see her this way, slumped face-down with half of her body hanging off the mattress, a gash carved gruesomely down her left leg. She runs for the medical kit stored beneath her sink, where it’s been collecting dust since Mina stopped coming. Takes a pair of scissors and cuts the combat pants away. Up close it looks even worse.
“Sorry about your sheets.”
It’s a ludicrous thing to say; Nayeon would slap her for it if she wasn’t already dying. Mina is a ghost fading in the sunlight; inconsistent, erratic, flickering at the corners and bony joints of elbows and knees. In and out of vision. It’s hard to focus on her. How did Mina get hurt in the first place? She’s meant to be untouchable.
Some things even Mina cannot evade.
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
So much red. A peek of bone. The map of the arteries in the human body.
Nayeon recognizes this as the femoral artery. Fumbles for her phone with one hand and with the other slides a pillow under Mina’s leg to elevate it. This is survivable. Mina has minutes, but if Nayeon works quickly to stop the bleeding, this is survivable.
Mina will live. Nayeon can’t let her go.
Because they made a promise once, a promise of together, and after Mina had said it Nayeon had thought, this is it, this is what I want. Even if together is nothing like it used to be. Even if promises are only immaterial things at their heart; the invisible, intangible fabric of this relationship woven and intertwined like strings of fate tinged red at the tips.
Now her sheets are stained the very same color, and Nayeon will never be able to wash it out. She doesn’t care. She’d been so certain then, of everything and nothing, with no knowledge of what the future held but the brazen confidence that they would last, the two of them— not as a superhero and her sidekick, not even as a superhero and her best friend. Just them. Nayeon and Mina.
Mina.
What did she really want?
Nayeon wants Mina, to live. That is the only thing she is certain of now. The confidence that she can fix this, that she’s learned to because of the irrational, pathetic hope that if she could save people she could stay in Mina’s world. And Nayeon’s been so preoccupied by hope that she never considered the possibility that she’d have to fight for Mina to stay in hers. So it’s come down to this, Mina as the only one she has to save, her first patient found not in the sterile white of hospital rooms but the cramped, familiar space of Nayeon’s apartment where they’ve clashed and cried and cared so often.
Why had she not seen it, the obvious truth, that they’ve lived in the same world all this time?
Nayeon starts to dial a number as she flings open the first-aid kit and turns back to the girl on the bed, whose breathing is coming in short, labored bursts; she’s going to apply pressure when—
The phone falls. On the keypad: 9-1-
Nayeon stares blankly. She can feel the sticky heat of the blood that’s already spilled out and nothing else. The gauze is limp and futile in her grip. Her hand passes straight through the wound.
How do you save someone you can’t touch?
/
An hour after dawn, in the face of rising daylight, the stars have faded. Mina glows. Her cheeks are flushed from the brisk morning, from youth, from the delighted victory she’s just earned by pausing for suspense only to whisper in an anticipating Nayeon’s ear, “No.”
“What!” Nayeon exclaims, the sound of her voice ringing clear and bright in the morning air, glancing off the silver-blue surface of the water like the stones they’d just been skipping. It skims over spreading ripples and shatters the stillness; several birds flee squawking from the trees around. “Every superhero has a sidekick! Like Batman and Robin, Cap and Bucky, Iron Man and War Machine. I could go on forever.”
“You could go on forever about anything," says Mina. She laughs, and smiles. They’ve snuck out of the tents to hop a few stepping stones into the shallows of the lake; their parents are still sleeping off the exhaustion of yesterday’s drive. “That doesn’t change my answer.”
Nayeon winds an arm around Mina’s waist under her sweater, revels in the feeling of Mina's warmth against her cold fingertips; Mina shivers but doesn’t pull away. “Why not?”
“You’re not my sidekick,” Mina tells her. “You’re my best friend. We’re in this together.”
Mina’s recently developed a knack for being cheesy. It might be all the Disney movies she’s seen in these first few weeks of summer; but then again, Nayeon isn’t nearly as much of a sap, and they watched those movies together. She cringed through them for the sake of her best friend.
“We should head back inside,” Mina says eventually. She scoots towards the edge of the rock, sucking in a startled breath when her toes dip into the frigid water, but she steps in anyway. “Let’s go.”
When Nayeon stands to join her, she promptly loses her balance on the slippery stones underfoot.
The breath is knocked right from her lungs. From the fall or from the return of Mina’s laughter— this time more surprised than anything, floating down to Nayeon through the haze; Nayeon’s limbs are going numb in the water, washing out the dull pain of impact. Her heart aches with affection.
(After the fall...)
The lake is so clear that when Nayeon looks down she can make out the chipping purple polish she'd so attentively applied for Mina at their last sleepover. When she looks up, Mina's there, a smattering of droplets scattered over her cheekbone from the splash, grazing the edge of an irrepressible smile.
(...something had changed.)
“You okay?” she asks, and holds her hand out for Nayeon. “Come on, I’ve got you.”
Yes, Nayeon thinks. They could go on forever.
She reaches up and takes Mina’s hand.