Offshore side stories
To drown alone
"Even now, as yesterday, the tides did not drag her down." Jinai struggles to cope with everything.
This story describes a suicide attempt and suicidal ideation in detail. I'm serious, it's not just a passing mention! It also contains spoilers for Offshore Chapter 13.
She wrenched her head under the seafoam, one kick at a time. The sun ribboned over her face as her toes dug into the sand.
She snapped her eyes shut. It’ll be easy, she thought gently, as the seaweed curled around her ankle. Tangle my foot, breathe the water in. Breathing in is the important part.
This time, she thought as she knotted handfuls of fronds around her ankle, she would not thrash. She’d go quietly—gold dancing with blue, lights trying in vain to pry her lips apart.
Five knots, six, each one a prayer to make this swift. As she worked away at the vestiges of her breath, her shoulders ached. She watched her vision bruise, felt the air go still in her lungs.
Then she breathed.
At the first skull-aching shock of water up one nostril, her air-hungry body snapped.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, it screamed, thoughts and visions and feelings blurring into one. She was puppeted by her own muscles, legs and lungs spasming, tearing, bucking, wresting her up through the water column, faster than a rising cork.
She only began to sputter when her face broke the briny bubbling surface. Not one second sooner.
Every sinew roared with tremors. Saltwater stung her eyes, tasting like a broth on her lips. The dry blue sky spun, not one cloud within her grasp, and she screamed without tears.
She was sprinting through the night mist, watching the top of the Tienshi Tower dip in and out of the fog above, and for seconds she longed for the warmth of someone else.
Millions across the world watched the sport, so millions knew her face. A sixth of the Helfi populace supported their team. Hundreds of thousands of fans—straining at the cables, breathing on the glass. They vivisected every one of her sentences, speculated upon every frown.
But here, in Wulien City in the dead of night, there was no one. Times like these were the only ones when she could do anything she wanted. And she mostly spent them trying not to fall apart.
Her bag bumped on her shoulder as she tore through the streets, stumbling and shivering in the wind between the skyscrapers. Through these neon-washed alleys and all their hard edges, silhouettes breathlessly swung in the windows, but here, there was no one.
She couldn’t—no, she wouldn’t—tell her team anything. What would she say? That she had tried and failed yet again? That even in this, she couldn’t succeed?
Her feet chose this street to stop on; there was no saying why—under a flickering shop sign that lit her hands blue. She crumpled on the drain cover and howled like a wounded dog, the clarity of every sensation—the biting air, the edges of clouds, the cigarettes at her feet—as much accusation as solace. Every sob hurt like drawing water into her lungs.
It never brought her any comfort to think she had been through worse, yet invariably her mind clung to the thought, like a half-drowned survivor to a rock.
Back at eighteen, when she had seen before her two paths—stay put in the warm embrace of her parents' home, or chase a scintillating hope on the horizon so bright she couldn't look away—she had cried three nights, making her choice at the ticketing booth, and again, and again, with each step up the gangplank.
She had split her life in two right then, like a cliff split by lightning, or gourd on a beach on a summer day, broken to quench a parched throat.
She'd broken her life again when she had told the company she couldn't work with Oojima any longer. And now she had found another way to break it, when Josa had left without collecting his things. Yet for her team and for the world, she had to continue to pretend to be the rock, not the one drowning at sea.
The first drop of rain hit her square in the middle of her head, and in that same moment, a window creaked. She glanced up through tear-frosted eyes—a third-floor window had slid open, and a face peered down, head shaven bald, a security officer’s epaulettes on their shoulders.
“Oi, you down there,” they called down, their voice bouncing off the facades. “Whatever’s going on…not worth getting caught in the storm for.”
As if hearing the augury, she saw the raindrops thicken, bringing the blur of city lights with them.
She stood there as they began to soak her—felt the ghost of seaweed ripple up her legs, the saltwater pierce her throat.
“Come on, ma’am, get out of the rain!”
“Who cares?” she screamed back, raindrops hitting her eyelids. “I’ve been through so much worse! So much fucking worse!”
They muttered something, but did not pull back. “If that’s true, then you deserve better than a 2 A.M. storm.”
Their words twanged her heart. Reverberating with the ache, she turned tail and dashed away, up the street while the drops kept pelting down, soaking her t-shirt and jacket, soaking her to her bones. Her hair lay in heavy tangles on her shoulders, stray curls plastered to her neck. Shivering and gasping, she stumbled into a skyscraper lobby and curled up into a dusty corner, among the granite pillars.
She peered listlessly about. The lobby vaulted high above her. The blue glow of the sleeping floor-to-ceiling screen gleamed off the terrazzo, just beyond the glass wall.
The noise of the rain muffled out the sounds of anything outside, and she could hear only herself—her heartbeat and the irregular metre of her breath. Now, it began to sink in that she had chosen this. She had severed herself from them, methodically as slicing skin with a scalpel, and she had decided none of them needed to know, if she simply chose to disappear.
So how foolish that anyone thought she deserved more than to be trampled by the storm. She should have stayed and taken her punishment. And yet she could not bring herself to return to it. So instead she lay down and hugged her legs, letting the wracking shivers swallow her.
It took one missed training session before Anqien started asking where she was.
It took four before she replied.
Sorry, I’ve just been having the worst two weeks, she wrote.
Do you need help? Or anything else?
Staring at the screen, she couldn’t tell if they’d figured it out: why she’d been hiding, what pain she was crawling through, all the junk she now had to donate away. But she sat there and studied their cursive writing, mouth slightly ajar.
What difference did it make now? With Josa and Kaori out of the picture, Anqien was her best friend. Why shouldn’t she let them in? Hadn’t she had enough of nursing her wounds alone?
That is what she had thought, anyway. But she had failed to anticipate just how quickly seeing Anqien on the inside of her apartment, among a week's worth of dirty clothes and food wrappers, would turn into messy bawling on her couch while they, quietly and lost for words, held her by the shoulders.
"Jinai," they said, voice too kind for her shattered-glass sorrow. "I didn't know there was so much happening. But please…" They paused in a way that pulled her gaze to them, as if a string had tugged her head upright.
Sitting in the shadow of the skyscraper lobby, she fought to draw a steady breath, the marble smooth and cool against her cheek. You deserve better. She had never thought so; she didn’t think she deserved much more than to melt into the rainwater and never be seen again.
But someone had. What quality of hers could they have seen in those ten seconds of quarrelling, that they should think so? Skill? Beauty or charm? No, they had seen a stubborn, crying wreck and they had said, get out of the rain.
Her teammate's eyes glistened wetly, like an ocean bay that could harbour another ship yet.
"Don't do it again, please?” they pleaded softly. “The world is better when you're in it."
Yes, she had been through worse. By all rights, she should be used to it by now. Lifetimes had come and passed like so many storms battering the seaside cities, and tsunamis had visited these old coasts that could only be dreamt of by the newcomers.
Yet even now, her body came up for air. In those seconds, flung by the waters, her feet felt nothing, and she hung weightlessly adrift, rippling in the cool around her. Even now, as yesterday, the tides did not drag her down, and her body floated, yearning for the sky when she did not.
It was irrelevant, she thought, whether her life was better than it had ever been, when she was sleeplessly lost in a city she did not know, collapsing into the hollow that had opened in her.
Then the waves were rolling her towards the shore again. Once upon a time, this coastline had been a cliff. The sand was all that was left after centuries of waves had worn the stones to nothing.
It was warm and rough against her palms and knees, shells cutting, grains scouring, warmed by the spring sun. She was the sand, crumbling in the sun. And she lay there and sputtered and kept gasping for air, and there was no one—no one but herself.
🥺
(Don't worry, she's ok)
Jagged Depths (April Fool's)
April Fool's Day chapter for Offshore.
Anqien woke up to a filogram from Jinai. Meet me at the beach darling, it said. Who cares about training? I want to see you.
This didn’t seem typical of Jinai. But the use of “darling” and the forcefulness of her words blew every last drop of logic out of their head. “Anything for you,” they sighed, already dressing up for the unexpected outing.
Watching the scenery pass on the train to Wulien, began to Anqien notice that the landscape had radically changed. The skyline of Wulien did not emerge from the horizon, but rather a radically different landscape: one of jagged mountains cracked in a hundred different ways, red skies, and torrents of volcanic lava.
Thankfully, the Muli Bay beach was still right where it had always been, never mind that every single human had been replaced by a red husk and the promenade had now been replaced by rows and rows of tents, decorated with black-and-purple banners.
Across the sand, Anqien spied a person about the height of Jinai, watching them closely. They began towards her, until she vanished.
“Jinai?!?” they cried out.
The air warped. A person materialised beside them, grinning entirely too widely, but it was not Jinai. Pink hair in a topknot. Tattoos under her eye.
“’Jinai!’ Listen to yourself,” she drawled. “I’m not Jinai. It’s time for you to come with me.”
“What?!”
“Oh, of course, I forgot to get you up to speed,” she sighed. “I’m Liss. And I’m told you have particular…abilities.”
“A-abilities?” Anqien sputtered.
“Yes. I understand that you are ridiculously easy to fluster. To such a degree that it bends reality. The universe conspires just to create cute situations for you and your crush.”
Anqien felt like they were about to pass out. This was too much to take in. “H…how did you…”
“I have reason to believe the Being, the supreme deity if you will, has crafted your universe—or shall I say, your story—for that very purpose. And it will continue, on and on, and on, hanging the tantalising fruit of requited romance just out of your reach, but you’ll never reach it. We are alike in that, you know,” Liss went on with a smirk, “except in my case, my universe was simply made for me to win. Do you to understand?”
“No!” That was it. They had to take a stand on this absurdity. “What are you talking about? What supreme universe-crafting being?”
Liss simply stepped back and smirked. “Well, just watch.”
And right then, Jinai fell out of the sky and landed before them. “Anqien?” she gasped, scrambling to her feet. She sprinted to them, startled but also overcome with relief. “Anqien! Help!” she cried out. “I saw this girl named Liss who told me the universe was designed to make me miserable, but I’m so glad you’re here…”
She snatched up their hands, looking right next to a breakdown, and suddenly she was close enough that they could see every freckle on her face.
The sky instantly took on a sunset glow, and shophouse lights (from what shophouses?—a question they did not ask) illuminated her face at just the right angle to set her skin aglow. A mysterious dramatic wind swept her curls over her face, and when she blinked, her eyelashes sparkled like something from an advertisement.
Advertisement or no, Anqien felt their entire face go hot beneath the heartbreaking, gorgeous intensity of her stare. “I…you…glad, yes, me too, I, aaaaaaaaaaa!”
A laugh resounded from behind Jinai. “What did I tell you?” said the voice of Liss.
“She’s here!” Jinai’s voice came in a stricken gasp. “There’s only…there’s only one thing we can do to fix this! We need to defy her. Do something that will never happen in this ‘story’. Quick, kiss me!”
Anqien stared at her. “Come again?”
“I said, kiss me. She said that that would never happen, because the ‘story’ would end if we did. Come on, let’s—”
Well, if Jinai herself had said it, then there were no more excuses they needed, or wanted, to make. They closed their eyes, leaning gently forward. From the pressure of her fingers, they knew she was doing the same. They could feel her breath against their lips. And then—
Happy April fool’s day!
Vehicular Swanslaughter
Anqien should never have let Jinai near the bumper cars.
Well, really, there wasn't a thing they could have done to prevent this. Jinai would get in whatever ride she pleased, and Anqien would be too nice (and too smitten) to let her go alone.
Rollercoasters? Sure, they could handle screaming themself hoarse and feeling queasy for half an hour, for Jinai’s sake.
Blowing half their budget on rigged arcade games? Totally fine. Even though all they had to show for it were a few crushed chocolate bars and a soggy frog plush.
Gallons of cotton candy? Actually kind of amazing. The opposite of a problem.
The bumper cars, however.
This ride had a reputation among Lotus Park's attractions as a death arena, and it hadn't been immediately apparent why. Each of the garish animalesque vehicles only admitted one rider. As the station master with their humourless smile had raised the barricade, Jinai and Anqien had each chosen their own from the car bay: Jinai, a tacky grinning naga—classic choice—and for Anqien, what looked like a bizarre cross between a possum and a ginger cat.
The steering wheel, like so many other things at this park, had been sticky and slightly candy-scented, but they had tried not to think too hard about it as they had careened out onto the glossy floor.
Now, they were two minutes into their round, and Anqien was pretty sure they'd already lost a couple of years of their life.
Amid roars and screeches of drivers and cars alike, their girlfriend's maniacal laughter veered closer and closer. Like an apparition she flashed into their peripheral vision, and they cried out, stamping on the pedal. The two swerved in parallel across the dome, and Anqien's valiant attempts at dodging were futile at last.
"AUGH!"
Her rubber bumper smashed into their side, throwing them against the edge with a jolt. Before the stars had cleared from their vision, she'd shot off in a trail of laughter, chasing down her next victim.
Through a chorus of concerningly loud thumps and vociferations, Anqien drove their possum-cat car quietly onto the oval circuit and did their best to enjoy the strange scenery of hanging lanterns.
Jinai was on some sort of mission, though to what end they weren't sure. Perhaps this was the true curse of Lotus Park's bumper car floor: that it awakened the dormant bloodlust in those most inclined...
Anqien had barely completed that thought, when a bang rocked their entire vehicle, jolting them out of their seat.
"Thirteen!" declared Jinai from her machine of terror. By the time they had regathered their bearings enough to look, she had blurred away like a pouncing snake.
Crash-THUD! "Fourteen!" Some hapless driver screamed in the distance.
Anqien rubbed their temple as their possum-cat pottered along. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before they got kicked out.
By one miracle or another, Jinai and Anqien were not evicted until the full twenty minutes had elapsed. As they clambered out of their vehicles—Anqien a little shaky on their legs—Jinai beamed and took their arm.
“Best ride so far,” she chuckled, and it was hard to begrudge her thrill about the matter, even if they had constituted a third of her "kills".
“Just one thing,” they said as they walked away down the dirt tracks, beneath rainbow canopies. "Next time, I'm not doing the bumper cars."
She smiled oddly at them. "Oh, did I overdo it?"
Anqien braced themself internally. "Uh, it was more than I could handle. Glad you had fun, it just wasn't for me."
She snorted. "Oh, hey, it's fine, you can say if I was being annoying."
"Well, I genuinely thought we were gonna get kicked out."
"Me too." She grinned, then snatched their hand. "Let me make it up to you, though. How about the Swan River next?" A canal wrapped around the entire theme park, and they had been watching the swan-shaped boats migrate past all day.
They nodded. "As long as you don't start ramming the others."
It was a decided change of pace as the pair reached the front of the Swan River queue and were ushered to the boarding bay. By then, the sun was close to setting, and the entire canal, which ran between boardwalks full of chattering pedestrians, glimmered red in the light.
Each of them settled into the poorly cushioned seats, Jinai leaning over to pat Anqien's hand, even as she began to pedal the swan boat out into the canal.
"You sure you don't want me to help?" asked Anqien, pointing at their own set of rotating pedals.
Jinai shrugged. "If you wanna, I can't stop you," she chuckled. “Or you can steer.”
"Even on holiday?” they laughed, as they placed their feet on the pedals, reaching for the joystick between them.
Together, the pair drifted up the waterway, the current bobbing them along. They steered gently around flocks of white boats, all dressed like swans and floating soundlessly alongside. They marvelled at the pink glimmers of the sunset on the artificial canal—a pristine sun-soaked painting whose tranquillity could not possibly be marred...
"It's the crazy bumper car lady! Get her!" The shout smashed the vision to pieces like a gunshot.
In seconds, a large white bird was hurtling towards them from across the canal at full pedal speed—which wasn't very fast, but the visual was made more threatening by the creature's cartoonishly large eyes and the water churning scarlet behind it. Aboard the cygnine boat, a pair of high school kids pointed and bellowed and pedalled like amateur hunters on the chase.
“Uh wow—to port!” Anqien shouted, slamming the joystick while Jinai pedalled for their collective lives. The swan boat jolted left, heeling farther than it was designed to—both lunged out of their seats to rebalance it as its left hull dug into the water. They watched the other hurtle past to their right, the passengers cackling and screeching.
“Oi, kids! Settle down!” It was the first time today that they had been relieved to hear the grown-ups yelling.
As the defeated swan of teens slunk away towards the bridge, the pair sank back into their seats, heaving a sigh.
Jinai shook her head. “These damned consequences for my actions. Gets me every time.”
Three storms, three promises
When it rains in Wulien, fountains overflow onto pavements. Tourist’s guides mention the summer seastorms, but only in the way one glosses over secrets before a stranger. They say nothing of the way the rain beats, turning roads to rivers, or how squall winds sing on storefront strings, the shutter-snaps of lightning before the thunder drops. When it rains in Wulien, it pours.
From the day they first met on the bay, Jinai and Anqien could never forget that fact.
The newborn team had glimpsed each other once before, among Cloud Connectors’ boardroom windows, separated by so many tables. That had been a different light, thinned and filtered by tinted glass and filograph reflections. They could not have foreseen the years that would begin in that room, although both had had a curious inkling, like an ache that portended rain.
But here, the sun shone through hair, as through photo film, revealing different selves. As they beat clumsily onto the velvet tides of Muli Bay, Anqien began to coalesce a sense of Jinai that was more than a construct of light on a screen. She was real, flesh and blood and freckles on cheeks, and when her searching eyes met the glaring sun, they squinted.
They weren't ready for her, they thought, and they never would be. They thought so hard that neither noticed the sun as it was swallowed by stormclouds. The forecast had said the rain would come, but it was one thing to hear its name, and another to drown in it.
At the first scream of wind on the mast, the fledgling team gybed to starboard, Jinai crying, “Let’s go!” as she waved for Anqien to turn the helm. A breath’s hesitation, and then winches clicked, rope skittered, sea foam surged over their shoes. They swung away from the wind, skidding on the deck, while the mainsail swelled overhead in white and maroon.
As they hurtled back landward, Jinai leaned at the stern and raised her head to the rain with a screaming laugh. “Look at us go!” she cried. “The Cloudlander is back on the bay!”
And gods, if it didn’t make Anqien’s heart soar to hear that sound. “You’re gonna fall overboard,” they called back.
“And it won’t be the last time!” Jinai shouted to the sky as it was rent by rain, despite Telaki’s protests in their ears.
Storms of such a calibre came and went like moods during the monsoon season. It was nothing new to either of them, but this squall was different—the one that struck when Anqien first saw Jinai cry.
It charged into the city like a battering ram, no umbrella a worthy shield from its roaring rain. Lamplight splashed on pavements while the sky churned navy grey.
Her fingernails dug into their shoulder. “Why should I?” Her voice trembled, like a gutter about to burst. “Why should I even bother with my career anymore?”
“Because you deserve a better life than the one he left you with,” they murmured, a far cry from the thunder.
The petrichor wafted through her windows, and the rain rushed down pipes, a strange pair to flood the silence between them.
“We were gonna live here…we were gonna settle. I got this place—for us.” The words were scattered by sobs. But the rain carried leaves down driveways and water curtained the windows, and Josa had given up on her, the way ex-lovers did.
“It might be naive for me to say, but if he had been worth it, he would have stayed.”
“He moved for his dream job. It was what he’d wanted for years. I couldn't have done anything to stop him.”
“And you wanted this for years, too, didn’t you?”
“I bought this place.”
Sympathy clouded Anqien’s eyes, though their face was twisted in a frown. There was nothing they could do but listen to her words, and mute the agony like earth muted rain. And they could keep doing that, if it meant keeping her in their life.
“I wish I could just scream,” she finally whispered. “I don't know how else to cope at this point.”
“You can scream.”
And she did. Wind whistling through gaps in windowpanes, stormwater split by drain grilles, the first storm of summer screamed itself hoarse and she gripped their arm so hard they bruised. But it wouldn't be the last time.
The rain swept it away in a swirl, the sorrow and shame. Jinai held Anqien for the rest of the hour, and then she never held them again.
Oh, they were going to slip up. Oh, it was only a matter of time.
It didn’t take long—one blunder and then another and with comical timing, they realised they were in love.
The big race ended in the birth throes of summer, the way it always did. Anqien watched Jinai like one does a shooting star, staring unblinking as if it might wink out at any moment into the velvet night.
But she fell and fell, and they chased her light, and they crashed together in the twinkle of that blazing blue sky, the apocalyptic collision of a meteor and a moon. And as they did, as was tradition, the sky was swept by glowering grey.
While they kissed under canopies and sighed each other’s names, branches began to whistle their warning. In windows, the sky was shot through with black.
Then with a roll of thunder, the symphony they both knew by heart roused around them, plucking the strings of the bay, the cables and vangs, the guy ropes of storefronts. The weathered walls of Wulien reverberated with the first swell of rain, as if they had been built to do so, an amphitheatre for the storm.
Two fools kissing became two fools sprinting from the downpour, drenched to their toes. Diners peered through the restaurant facades with toasty bowls of noodles, but it was all wind chill out here, and mist splashing their shins.
They laughed, backs to the glass, as torrents cascaded onto the concrete. Pools on granite, rivulets on cheeks, not an inch of Wulien would be dry once the storm was through.
“I told you we'd forget about the rain,” laughed Jinai. “I told you, it always happens.” Ringlets of hair hung damp on her brow and when she grinned, their heart ached for all the joy and tears to come.
“Worth it,” they replied, squeezing her wet hand with theirs. “And it won't be the last time.”