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It’s hot and it’s dark and it’s sticky. There’s something holding her down, but Bibi doesn’t know what. That’s okay, she thinks. She doesn’t need to know what it is. Her heart is hammering at a hundred miles a minute; she tries to open her eyes, but she can’t see very well, and something in her chest seizes.
After years of practice, this comes to her naturally. The fear that courses through her veins is comforting in its familiarity, like an old friend come to visit. She draws on it until the adrenaline flows through her, and then, with as much force as she can channel into her legs, kicks upwards—writhes like a cornered animal, bites down on her tongue to muffle a building scream, struggles tirelessly against this invisible foe—at her own bedsheets.
Her vision finally begins to adjust as the comforter falls back down at a gentle, almost mocking, descent. Her surroundings come to her. The mattress she is laying on is stiff; the soft pillowcase supporting her head is of smooth, delicate silk. She makes an attempt at raising her hands to cradle them at her chest to find that there are, quite obviously, no restraints holding her down, no ropes binding them together. All that remains are the faint scars of a past that only she remembers, if even that. She rubs at her free wrists. The repetitive motion is soothing, somewhat, the stroking of her damp palm on her clammy, marred skin.
There is no cold metal, and there are no pounding footsteps.
It’s just her, Bibi, alone in the dark.
She tries to remember what happened. Night terrors, the doctor had said, but she’d ignored the rest of the spiel. She’d been too busy staring at that long, draping white coat. The exact lecture hadn’t been important to commit to memory, but Bibi understands the basics of what it means: it’s another entry in the long list of things that are wrong with her, a single item on a never-ending list of failures on being well-adjusted, on being normal, on being human.
The bathroom light is blinding. She squints her eye, stifling a hiss at the overwhelming luminance. The monster gazing back at her looks miserable, so miserable she almost feels bad for it. There are dark creases under Bibi’s eyes. The room’s white tint causes the harsh pallid color of her skin to appear even more pronounced, already coated in a thick sheen of sweat. Her hair, loosened from its usual ponytail, frizzes out wildly, tangling itself into inevitably painful knots.
Bibi spits into the sink. It comes out red. “Well,” she mutters, testing the waters of her voice. It’s scratchy and stiff, as if she’d been crying, or screaming, or both. “Shit.”
She rinses the blood out of her mouth while trying to focus on assessing the situation. Treat it like a case: who, what, when, where, why. A rhythm establishes itself; twist open the tap, pick up the cup, put it to her lips, drink, swish, spit. Repeat. There’s not much to it. She must have bitten her tongue by complete accident and not even noticed until it was too late. This is good, she thinks, a sign that her pain tolerance is still higher than expected. What good is a dull blade?
Bibi gathers the pieces in her head. It’s not difficult. There aren’t many of them to begin with. She’s had some kind of nightmare, but she can’t remember about what, which is… a welcome blessing, of sorts. It aggravates her to not know what it was that pushed her to wake up in a frenzy, but if it’s like any of the other dreams she’s had in the past couple months, then Bibi should probably be happier to not remember any of it.
Anything she might remember is fleeting, at best. Flashes of anxiety, despair, the seemingly ever-present thrum of stressful excitement in her muscles as they tense, bracing for impact. The need to escape fuelled by selfish cowardice—Bibi doesn’t want to be in pain anymore—which she forces herself to swiftly replace with justified anger, a dying need to… to do something. To run, maybe, or to hide. To protect. She’s still trying to cut the habit of gutting her own sense of self-preservation; she doesn’t know whether to call that glimpse of brief panic a sign of marked success or failure. Either way, it feels like she’s letting someone down.
When her spit starts to run clear, Bibi opts to shift gears. This means leaving the horrifically bright world of the bathroom, returning back to the daunting world of the dark. In hindsight, Bibi muses to herself, she should be more scared of this, but she’s not. As much as the dark is not her friend, it is neither her enemy. If she stands still for long enough, learns to hold her breath, and strains her other senses, she can become a shadow. She can become invisible.
And Bibi loves that part. She’s good at what she does. She’s good at being a shadow, she’s good at being invisible, she’s good at making herself small and unseen. She’s an excellent spy and a bad human and an even worse sister, an even worse daughter.
It’s a little past four-thirty. This means that it is too late to go back to sleep, but too early to really get up and move around. She flits a glance towards the window. It’s a new moon, hence the lack of light. Tokyo remains quiet in the absence of a watchful eye.
She doesn’t want to go back to bed. Going back to bed means going back to the nightmare means going back to whatever it was that roused her in the first place, which is a guaranteed way to lose both sleep and sanity in one fell swoop. No thanks. Bibi will take her losses standing up, not lying down.
Only figuratively, that is. The bedroom closet is tight, so Bibi sits down and draws her knees close to her chest. This sensation—shutting out the rest of the world to stew in her own silence—is calming, peaceful, reassuring, but most of all, embarrassing. Marco doesn’t need to see her like this. Marco doesn’t need to know about this. This will be a secret she keeps to herself. Nobody else has to know.
She finds Mizuki’s number all too quickly (what, like it’s hard?). The list of contacts in Bibi’s phone is small and those with actual names attached is even smaller. Her thumb hovers over the call option. Mizuki is smiling back at her through the screen; it's a cropped photo of a recent outing on the beach, where her sister had stood against the crashing waves on the Atami shoreline.
Don’t call her. She doesn’t need this.
The line rings, and rings, and rings. Mizuki will not pick up. Mizuki will never pick up. It is almost five in the morning and she’s away on some kind of business trip. She’s flying back in a day, where Bibi has already made arrangements to pick her up from the airport. If it were her, though, she’d pick up in a heartbeat. All Mizuki would have to do is say the word and Bibi would come running, rain or shine, at any hour of the day.
It’s a nice fantasy. Her shame simmers in her stomach.
“At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up…”
She brings the speaker to her mouth. Nothing comes out. She can think of a million and one things to say—are you okay, have you slept well, how’s it going, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you—and none of them feel quite right.
There’s only one thing she can focus on, and it’s the sound of her shaky breath puffing out in the air. Her screen brightness is too low to illuminate anything except her trembling fingers. The call timer ticks up at a steady pace.
Bibi closes her one good eye and lets her mind wander. It’s easier to talk to herself inside her head than it is to bring any of her thoughts to life. “It’s late. I had a bad dream again. I think I’m gonna have a hard time eating for a while, I bit my tongue like an idiot. Do you miss being in Tokyo? Date says you should get him a souvenir. He doesn’t care what it is. Bring me back a magnet and we’ll put it on the fridge. I wish you were here. What are you doing right now? What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about me, Mizuki? Are you safe? Are you hungry? Are you well? Come home soon. Come home.”
She hangs up after a minute of silence. 10% battery left, her phone warns.
Bibi shuts it off.