Her dreams were full of images, like quicksilver, she was unable to hold on to them. Also like mercury, she didn’t want these pictures within her mind in her hands. She semi-frequently dreamed. Normally they were either happy or surreal, rarely bad. Even fewer were the nightmares. This night was a full-on night terror.

  She clutched her chest at the unknown force strangling her from within her lungs, burning against her throat. Thrashing against the dream, she managed to tear her pajamas.

  It was this tearing sound that brought Suki dashing into the bedroom, leaping onto the bed. Her human was in a dream again. And not a happy one, she quickly assessed. It was probably one of the easiest things she ever deduced.

  The cat tried to break the dream the only way she could; she wrapped herself around her human’s head and started purring as hard as possible. She hoped that the vibrations would penetrate the dreams and bring comfort. She failed.

  Seulgi started mumbling over and over, “No!” Louder and louder. She started thrashing harder. Whipping her head back and forth, she dislodged her best friend who escaped to the end of the bed to keep watch.

  No! was repced with other words or names. Some the cat knew, others she didn’t. There was no way for her to know the names of long-dead friends and cssmates of her human, who were already long gone, decades before her own birth. Suki may be a genius, but she is not cirvoyant.

  Suddenly, she scared the taunt companion badly enough that she broke and ran when she shouted “OPPA! DON’T GO INTO THE WOODS!” She finally managed to tear her voice this time. She didn’t know it, but she was now bleeding from the force of the shout.

  Once she tasted the blood from her own vocal cords, she immediately quieted. But, she did not get released from the dream. In fact, the night terror increased. However, instead of filing around and calling out, she curled up into as tight a ball as she could possibly make herself be. She was trying to hide from her dream, within her dream. Her very loud vocalization a moment ago was repced by a broken whimper. It was so piteous that these sounds broke Suki’s little heart. She wanted to go back and comfort her human but knew she was too small to be effective. Seulgi, in her dream state, might inadvertently hurt her for real.

  This was one of the very, very few times that Suki wished that her human had a love life. Someone to help through nights like this. This was one of the only times that she looked at her human with consternation.

  More words tumbled out of Seulgi’s lips. Shoe. Shirt. Leaf. Blood – she trembled at this word. Knife; barely whispered.

  Finally, her first sentence: “Ning? No! Please, not Ning!”

  Seulgi did not know that she was reliving a very old, tightly repressed memory from her childhood. It was buried so deep that not even her parents knew about it.

  After an hour, she was finally released from the night terror. Her bed was a disaster. The pajamas were a mess. Her chest was a mass of bleeding scratches and bruises. Her arms and legs fared no better. The oddest of all of these was the double handprint bruise around her throat. The size of the hands was easily doubled and more of her six-year-old self’s hands and still nearly half again the size of her hands today.

  Her sleep returned, with no more dreams that night. But, with the trauma that she just relived, she got no rest of the sleep.

  Seulgi woke up in pain. A lot of pain. Pain like she has never experienced before. A half-hour before her arm went off, she turned on her bedside mp and gasped. Her bed was trashed. Her pajamas were torn and bloody, she was not sure if they could be salvageable. Worse of all were all the lines of dried blood. The bruises. Somehow, someone had beaten her very badly.

  Having been abused this badly, she felt herself to make sure that all of the abuse was physical and nothing sexual. She was relieved that there was one part of herself that was not aching.

  She went into the bathroom while stripping off her tattered pajamas to get to a mirror to see what damage there had been done. It looked ghastly. Being naturally a milky pale, the scratches and bruises stood out starkly. She could swear that some of the ‘scratches’ looked more like bdes than anything else.

  The soft and scared ‘Mew?’ from behind her nearly broke her heart. Then that same heart jumped into her throat when she saw blood on the cat. Ignoring any and all possible damage to herself, she lept and slid on her belly to her best friend and gave her a very thorough inspection.

  She was relieved to find that all of the blood on the cat came from her and the feline was unhurt. They cuddled each other on the floor of the bathroom, taking comfort in each other. There were some tears mixed in with the blood as well. And some fresh blood as well from where Seulgi tore open what had only recently closed. But, so long as Suki was OK, she didn't care about anything else.

  Seulgi pulled her scraps of self back from a yawning chasm of madness that she nearly jumped into. Instead, she pulled herself up from the floor and walked over to the sink. She turned on the taps and got some warm water running and a soft hand cloth. She started her morning by cleaning her own blood off her cat. That was something that she never thought that she would ever be able to say.

  Once the cat was more pink than bck blood red, she turned to look at herself. She knew that she would have to talk to someone about this eventually, so she got a bra and panties on and found her camera. She took pictures. Lots of pictures. Full body, front and back. Close-ups of each limb. Of her throat. The images were disgustingly thorough. She never wanted to look at them again, but knew she would have to, eventually.

  Once she was satisfied – if that was the word for this travesty – and went to go throw up in the shower.