if i close my eyes
Kim Minji is a high school girl in rural South Korea who dreams of life in the city and becoming a pastry chef. Kim Bora is an idol trainee in Seoul who is troubled by bouts of loneliness and a mysterious recurring dream. One day, Minji and Bora wake up in each other's bodies. As they struggle to navigate each other's lives and deal with their own nightmares, the two girls form an unlikely friendship that could just possibly change their fate.
[A JiBo AU based on Kimi No Na Wa/Your Name]
Read the first chapter on AO3 or read below
“Once in a while when I wake up, I find myself crying. The dream I must have had I can never recall. But the sensation that I’ve lost something lingers for a long time after I wake up. I’m always searching for something, for someone. This feeling has possessed me I think from that day when the stars came falling. It was almost as if a scene from a dream. Nothing more, nothing less than a beautiful view.”
Gangnam District, Seoul June 1
‘Krrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiing~’
As the bell signals the end of the school day, Bora is the first out of the classroom, sprinting down the hallway with her backpack bouncing behind her and a pencil still holding her bright purple hair in a messy bun.
Here at Kirin High School, Kim Bora is just a regular student: attends classes, hangs out with friends during free period, drives her teachers crazy with her deadly mix of sarcasm and boundless energy, makes a reasonable amount of effort to study, just enough to land a place in the honors class every year. But once those bells ring, once school is officially over, Bora takes on another identity as a trainee at Dream Catcher Entertainment.
She scurries down the school’s exit ramp and breaks into a wide smile as she easily spots her ride.
“Good afternoon, Miss Kim! How was school?” The driver asks Bora as she settles into the backseat beside another girl, who’s also smiling at her.
“It was fine, Mr. Choi, thanks for asking, and how many times do I have to ask you to stop calling me Miss? I’m not rich like Princess Handong over here,” Bora quips, making her two companions laugh.
The other girl, Handong, heaves an exaggerated sigh as Bora straps on her seatbelt. “You’re right. Maybe I should be a Princess instead. I bet princesses don’t need to go through dance training.”
“Aw, come on, Handong it’s not that bad! You know you enjoy it.”
“I do enjoy dancing, but not until one in the morning, thank you very much,” Handong replies with a pout.
Bora doesn’t say anything and simply pats her friend’s hand in consolation. Being an idol trainee is hard, but she knows that both of them still feel lucky for even having the chance to debut in a few years’ time. As Bora idly watches the cityscape outside the car window, her mind drifts to her usual worries: Math homework, the family she hasn't seen in weeks, the trainees’ monthly evaluation, her mysterious recurring dream. As she thinks of the dream she had last night – colorful beams of light, the smell of pumpkin pie, a girl with short black hair and sad eyes, a lingering feeling of yearning – she finds herself shedding a tear again. She wipes it away and snaps herself back to reality. She pulls the pencil from her bun and put her hair up on a proper ponytail. She has hours of vocal and dance training ahead of her and she needs all the concentration she can muster. Her weird dreams can wait.
Haenam County, South Jeolla Province June 1
Thirty two steps north. Turn left. Twenty seven steps forward. Another left. Continue straight for about fifteen minutes until you reach the corner store.
Minji doesn’t even have to look up from her book to get home safely. There are barely any cars here that she can walk on the main road instead of the sidewalk (which is mostly used by bikes) and she has been taking the same exact route for almost 10 years that she can do it without looking. Besides, the book she’s reading is far more interesting than the long stretch of identical trees lining her path.
Minji loves her hometown, that’s for sure. She loves her school, her best friends Siyeon and Yoohyeon, her sister Gahyeon, her grandma, the bakery. She loves the shade of the trees. She loves the town’s annual celebration of Chilseok – that quiet, subtle transition from hot summer to monsoon season, the sweet scent of melons and pumpkin and rain wafting in the air. Most of all, she loves looking up at the clear night sky dotted with stars, like a huge canvas embroidered with a million little cherry blossoms, like a heavy blanket folding over her as she drifts off to sleep.
But Minji has dreams, too. She dreams of the city, of skyscrapers instead of trees looming over her head, of train rides and coffee shops and music shows and the taste of vanilla macaron on her tongue.
Her mind is still busy imagining what a city train would sound like when she is startled by two warm hands covering her eyes behind her glasses.
“Guess who?!” The voice behind her practically screams directly into her ear.
Minji drops her book in surprise and tries to pry the intruder’s hands from her face. “Ya! Kim Yoohyeon! Take your hands off of me or I’ll give Siyeon all the melon bread!”
Yoohyeon immediately releases her hold and when Minji turns around, the younger girl is already pouting guiltily. “It was just a joke, you didn’t need to threaten me like that,” Yoohyeon says under her breath.
“Well you didn’t need to startle me like that!”
Siyeon interrupted the two girls by darting towards the direction of Minji’s family bakery and dragging them behind her. “Aw come on, you guys, stop fighting. Grandma’s already waiting for us. Hurry up.”
“Grandma? Psh, you guys act like you’re the grand daughters,” Minji complains, but her laughter says that she already feels a million times better.
As Minji spends the warm summer afternoon with her two best friends eating mounds of leftover bread in her Grandma’s bakery (and teasing the hell out of Gahyeon), thoughts of the city begin to dissipate. But that night as she lies down on her rooftop watching the stars, she feels a tear roll down her cheek and an inexplicable nostalgia for something she can’t quite place. She closes her eyes and a vision of stars falling from the sky flashes before her: tiny pieces of the universe, flecks of white and pink and silver in a luminous cosmic rain. And then she’s asleep.
More than three hundred kilometers away in the heart of Seoul, a girl named Kim Bora passes out on her bunk bed still wearing her training clothes, dreaming of the same streaks of silver and purple and pink, not knowing that her life is about to change.
When Bora wakes up, her first thought is that she’s going blind. She opens her eyes and all she sees is a blur of colors and vague figures, and no matter how many times she closes them and opens them again, or tries to rub the sleep off, she still can’t make out anything. Starting to panic, Bora flails her arms around and her hand accidentally lands on what feels like a pair of glasses on her bedstand. She doesn’t remember ever having glasses but she puts them on instinctively and her vision immediately clears.
Finally fully awake and with functioning vision, Bora’s second thought upon waking up is, what the fuck? She is clearly on another person’s bed, in another person’s bedroom, and everything around her looks unfamiliar. Even her own body feels unfamiliar. She finally realizes that something is wrong when her feet instantly hit the floor after she flings her legs off of the bed, when she usually needs to jump from the mattress. Bora stands on her (suddenly long?) legs and walks to the dresser, where she lets out a piercing scream.
In the dresser mirror, the image of a girl with jet black hair, feathered bangs, thin lips, and a pair of surprised eyes beneath her specs – a girl Bora has never seen before – screams back at her.
