Unveiling Emotions was a contest hosted on Quizilla by MinkyBlue a long time ago. While each fic can technically be read on their own, I highly recommend reading them all in order even if you don’t know the fandom, since they are kind of interconnected. This is a reader insert series, but the reader doesn’t appear in the first fic or so.
Status: Complete/Uploading
#1Rain ~ Tsunayoshi S. (Katekyo Hitman Reborn) & Kiba (Wolf’s Rain) / slice of life, fluff
“Behind me, not whispering, but low, his voice spills down my collar… and I’m not prepared for it, not braced, not ready for the unshaven fall of it, for the red ivy crawl of it down my spine. I am wet wood thrown in the flames when he says my name. I am taken apart by his tone, I am smoking all over, I want to be split open by that voice, I want to be bent over and driven in that fire.”
I dislike uncertainty. Take no pleasure in the element of surprise. I’ll carry the clipboard and checklists around at my own birthday party. No need to leave anything to chance.
It was my son’s idea of course. There was a plastic pirate out front and the promise of treasure at the end. I paid, then shuffled behind, his voice ringing out, follow me—
All glass and mirrors. I saw myself reflected a thousand times all of them weary, impatient. Some days motherhood is just din and obstacle. I was thinking about
the letter I had received. Another dead end in my family search. No contact information, no forwarding address. No one—no one—had been looking for me.
At a certain point, I stopped trying. Extended my arms and felt along the walls for edges. It was cheating maybe but plodding along without pleasure or intent doesn’t get you to the end any faster.
It’s been forty-five years. My mother, my father, they are not getting any younger. Perhaps I waited too long. Perhaps if I had started earlier there would have been other options. Other
people to reach out to. I read once in my file that I had a “very good memory,” that I memorized the names of all the neighborhood dogs. I would like to know them now.
I saw him before he saw me. He was looking around and pacing not panicked yet but on the verge. I stopped and watched him for as long as I thought he could bear. He turned when I emerged at last
and ran up and showed me the flag he had won for making it through first. You were so slow, he told me. It was so easy. Next time, don’t take so long.
All night my fear like a candle not bright enough or hot enough to do much damage but ambient flickering and spitting a thick wisp of black smoke licking the ceiling: dreams of my undoing.
While the sun warms the world you start to unspool. Set anchor lines from flowerpot to wooden step, to railing, to siding with calculation, tension, balance. Work your way from ray to ray, don’t worry about running out. Remember: before you even began, you consumed yesterday’s efforts, what worked and what did not, and they supplement your spinning today. You can spin all kinds of lines – mostly nouns, but also sticky adjectives, frizzy adverbs that easily catch, taut verbs at junctures. Don’t worry about falling: these words can bear your weight, the weight of your spirit on days when merciless birds with hungry beaks and blithe dogs with careless tails roam everywhere. It’s a silk that could take you anywhere, can float between trees, span the distance from house to garage, impressive and a little frightening dew-beaded like a mourning shawl. But here, in the little lyric web connecting pansies to steps, each strand shines in sunlight.
We will call you “Agua” like the rivers and cool jugs. We will persuade the clouds to nestle around your neck so you may sleep late. We would be happy if you slept forever. We will tend the slopes we plant, singing the songs our grandfathers taught us before we inherited their fear. We will try not to argue among ourselves. When the widow demands extra flour, we will provide it, remembering the smell of incense on the day of our Lord.
Please think of us as we are, tiny, with skins that burn easily. Please notice how we have watered the shrubs around our houses and transplanted the peppers into neat tin cans. Forgive any anger we feel toward the earth, when the rains do not come, or they come too much, and swallow our corn. It is not easy to be this small and live in your shadow.
Often while we are eating our evening meal you cross our rooms like a thief, touching first the radio and then the loom. Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.
How can we live like this? We need to wake and find our shelves intact, our children slumbering in their quilts. We need dreams the shape of lakes, with mornings in them thick as fish. Shade us while we cast and hook— but nothing else, nothing else.
I left the metaphor of myself I like best in the rabbit warren and went to the office to seem like the kind of person another person might hire because it is a true fact that some committee of persons hired me and this because I pretended to be a Professionalism 4 once for an afternoon and that metaphor was convincing enough to calcify over the flesh of itself with a stiff-sleeved shirt and knee-length skirt, and become the myself of myself now who owes the office better than a Professionalism 3, since the office is not the one who pretended their way into this. The office is not the one who didn’t realize people really believe you are how you pretend to be. The office is not responsible for the fact I think curse words bring flavor to any conversation and gossip is a form of social capital essential to the building of relationships because it makes a person vulnerable and powerful with information at the same time and forges a feeling, if not the fact, of trust and authenticity. In pursuit of Professionalism 4, I use a lot of smiley faces and exclamation points in my discourse to iron myself disarming. Professionalism 5 needs no emoticons, for it is already ironed. I’m sorry not sorry I left the metaphor of my uncomfortable work clothes in the rabbit warren and decided to wear jeans every day to every meeting regardless of the pomp because no one asked at the interview what I think about pomp. I think pomp is maladaptive. That is a Professionalism 2 sort of opinion to hold. And anyway, I think pomp is fucking maladaptive. I don’t know why it is Professionalism 4 to keep that sort of opinion to ourselves. I don’t know why it is Professionalism 5 to love pomp. What if I fucking love pomp? Would they have to create a box for 6? Every little box is a warren and I try to stay inside, but my haunches are itching springs and I want to fuck over everything like it is May and the oak leaves have just uncurled to the size of squirrel ears. They billow more open, I think, to try to hear the wind of all the discarded metaphors for what I am and you are too. The whole green lawn around the cinder block of our days is buzz and bloom for somebody to, I want to say Kick up a tempest of themselves getting fired, but really I just mean Tell me something I don’t already know and must swear never to repeat.
Ben. Rey. A cabin in the woods. Both looking for solitude and instead finding something more.
Chapter 8 preview:
Rey was dreaming.
Fragments of images – feelings, really – filtered in and out, like shafts of light dispersing through the shutters of an open window. Within her, she felt the ebb and flow of tranquility and peace, pleasure and comfort. Security. Warmth.
There was a pleasant heat against her back and the tickle of cool air on her brow. A soft rasp against the nape of her neck. Goosebumps rose up on her body.
A restlessness grew. It caused her to shift and sigh, even in sleep. The pressure against her back grew more insistent. She felt a tightening around her chest and over her stomach; the sensation of being secured further against a solid surface. She sighed again, eyelashes fluttering, a red glow behind her mostly-closed eyelids signalling the start of a new day.
Experimentally, she moved her feet, brushing them against another pair of feet – significantly larger than hers – that shifted as she moved. Dragging her toes upwards, she felt the crisp, sparse hair of a now-familiar shin. The legs under hers adjusted, trapping her feet between them. She bit her lip on a smile, feeling that same rasp on her neck, followed by a soft caress.
Awakening further, she became more aware of her surroundings. The cabin. The ancient space heater that was still on, emitting a low, uneven warmth throughout the room. How the majority of her warmth was coming from the man at her back – Ben – who, she remembered with a wriggling internal thrill, was also responsible for the pleasant soreness between her legs.
The luxury of lying there in bed, warm, contented. No alarms going off, nowhere to be – this feeling was what she’d needed all along. The absence of responsibility, of being held accountable for every word, action, decision she made, even the very action of making decisions – this was what she had sought when Luke had first dangled the carrot of this cabin, this retreat.
And it had taken a few days. It had taken some finagling, some turmoil, quite a bit of Tylenol and tears – but she was here.
