Rei gets some drama
So, in trying to fulfill Theme 5, here were some rejects….
5 Traits Rei Never Knew the Origins Of
1. The first flower that Rei's father gave to her mother was a Casablanca. It was a promise to her from him, not of beauty or grandeur, but of a white house. A house with opened windows and the breath of a salty sea fluttering through pale, evanescent curtains. A house with long, green grass and small, effusive violets dotting the lawn. A place they could call home.
The Casablanca was, once upon a time, her father's favorite flower...
The promise he couldn't keep.
2. Her name was her Grandmother's choosing. Her grandfather was the one who sat by her mother's bedside and held her hand since Grandmother was too sick to come herself. Her mother had been so distraught by Grandmother's health that she had not had time to settle on a name with her husband past a few boys' names.
"Rei," her father had murmurred speculatively behind his father-in-law, who told them of Grandmother's suggestion. Her father tested it out as her mother turned her face into the pillow.
"It's alright with me," she said in a tired whisper.
Grandfather's eyes worriedly traced what little of her averted features he could see before turning to look at the man standing behind him. "It's a good name," her father had said with solemn gravity, but happiness tilted his lips when he met Grandfather's stare. "Hino Rei."
The two men smiled at each other and missed the single tear silently hitting her mother's pillow as the other closed her eyes.
3. Her Grandmother died a week after her birth. Rei would not remember the soft, lingering touch of a frail hand when her father brought her to the dying woman's bedside. It was also just too little time for her mother to have recovered enough to be allowed by her doctors to visit herself. Rei would never know that it was years before her mother could forgive herself for the reminder Rei brought every time she looked at her daughter.
Forgetfulness and forgiveness were both difficult acts for the women in Rei's family.
4. The first few months Rei was born, her mother would not even touch her.
She would not remember that it was father who clumsily figured out how the diaper was to be changed and what brand of milk she liked when her mother refused to feed her. It was her father who took her out on evenings when he came home from the office, introducing her half-opened gaze to the objects of the world. Her father and her mother had quite the fight over whether or not they should hire a nanny to watch her in the day. Over her cries of distress, they finally compromised to only have someone come in during the day time since her mother refused to look at her if she could help it. At that time, he was still not yet completely caught up in his career, so it was he who sat by her bedside throughout the night the first time she got sick. Her father was the one who swaddled her body and kept her on the bed his wife refused to sleep with him and their baby in.
The first time Rei smiled, it was at her father. The first one see her roll on to her stomach and crawl, was him. The first word she spoke was "Paaa".
She was just too young to remember it, but she was first a Daddy's girl.
5. The first white dress Rei received was from her mother. She had wanted a summer smock like the other girls in school, but her mother had bought her a traditional kimono instead. Her father had just returned from days away from them, campaigning in Kyoto for his party as one of two rising stars in his organization. She had stubbornly refused to wear it when she found out what laid waiting for her in the white box and then sulked about not having a modern dress. Her mother only rolled her eyes and her father had even managed to look both weary and sheepish and terribly young as the maid scolded Rei about manners.
The kimono had flecks of cherry blossoms, pale pink and hot red against the white of the cotton. It was her mother's favorite pattern. She had thought it terribly hot and uncomfortable, not to mention the robe was at once, to her fledgling senses, both old-fashioned and impossibly childish. It was a struggle to wrestle her into the frock but she was vain enough to reluctantly smile in delight when she had seen herself in the mirror, twirling before the exasperated maid and her amused mother and father.
Later that evening, despite the heat of the summer night and dazzled by the fireworks and fairytales of Tanabata, she had refused to take it off. The maid chased her around the apartment but her mother was the one who finally caught her, struggling with the hired help to get the kimono off of her. Her father had laughed at the whole ordeal, much to everyone else's chagrin and his helpless delight.
"Next year, we'll get you a white dress," he promised her with a wide grin, ignoring her sullen pout as she sat in her underwear and refused to put on her night clothes.
Rei doesn't remember that night or the teasing oath her father made to her, but her father remembers it and often thinks to it as the only promise he had managed to keep.
5 Girls That Rei Will Never Be (WIP)
1. Father - Makeup
A rolled up skirt and almost one button too many undone on her school uniform. Large socks that emphasized the slimness of her pale thighs and rouged, pouty lips, crimson for temptation. Painted nails from cheap salons or her own reservoir when her funds were cut. Rei smiled at herself icily in the mirror at the perfect, traditional features made gaudy by accessories.
She looked on the edge of something: Someone who was just about to cross the thresholds of a tanning salon and come out permanently marked. A golden tattoo on her skin of her status as a girl with a penchant of meeting lecherous, cheating salary men in bars with fake IDs.
She knew that the girls in her Catholic school all whispered and stared after her, too afraid of her icy demeanor and vindictive personality to say things to her face. They were cowed by the name of her politician father who funded much of the school and the status she bore as an only child to such a powerful man, one reinstated whenever she stepped out of the limousine that dropped her off. She sensed their cowardice that made them frown behind her back when her panties flashed the staring police men while her saunter pauses the rest in the streets. She sneered at them, jealous cowards with eyes blinded by status and money and shallow, hypocritical ideas of righteousness, her eyes cold like frost while her heart thudded with the rush of an inexplicable rage shimmering beneath her skin.
Father with his disapproving eyes and voice soft with the subdued anger of someone who had long given up, his shadows lived inside of her. His disappointment had always felt like a fist in her gut but she smiled with the same sarcastic glint in her eyes and the wall of too much pride despite it all. Her mother would wring a different handkerchief each time beside him, all those silk and pristine clothes, crumpled and stained by tears that could no longer touch her heart.
Look at me, she say without words, I am your creation. Those silent things were all for the man who lived beneath the same roof as her but has never bothered to pay attention unless she comes home smelling of alcohol and too much smoke or gets herself splashed in the evening gossip columns. They are wordless actions used to shock a woman too blinded by a weakness that some called Love and the other's own helplessness to act or change anything at all. She hated the cage of a house they've created, one where no one lived in without masks and lies and pain. She wants to push their limits until they broke, and perhaps, only then, something will finally change.
Mother had tried to pull her aside when she was younger and reprimand her ways, thinking she was still naive enough to listen. But Mother was a burden too. Frail bones and a too pretty face, no spine beneath those limpid eyes and a mouth that's forgotten how to smile. Those eyes on a face so like her own that it made her grit her teeth and her heartbeat would quicken when she met those still vulnerable eyes. She resented the woman who wore it and marred the same skin as her own with tears. Mistress after mistress would get their faces splashed upon the papers with the evanescent titles of secretary and staff. They came and went with their faces young and words, sharp with reprimand and mockery when Father brought them home like show dogs before a helpless judge and a useless daughter, people who can only weep at the indifference stashed in plain sight.
She was tired of crying and asking why. She was tired of seeing a mirrored face look away and hopes crushed beneath callous apathy. She was tired of screaming without being heard, of the endless assistants that came in and out of her life, like bones thrown at her feet to appease the starvation in her heart.
She was tired of men like her father who teaches protégés like Kaidou, and the faceless young men after him. She was sick of those smiling, careless males who knew only where and how to strike when a woman was at her weakest and use them till they were too spent to be anything but trophies on an arm in a sparkling dress on gala nights. They were just men who spewed words of love and made stabs at guileless hearts with disarming expressions and apologies they didn't mean. She won't ever give them that type of power over her, not the way her mother does. She won't be used until there was nothing left to give and nothing more to care about. She would not act as if the waves would stop battering the rock if it would just hold still long enough.
So she slants her eyes at men with wives like her father, in restaurants she's too young to visit. She plays piano and flashes the paleness of her skin in all those forbidden places, a sophisticated girl with eyes cynical and cruel (but her prey rarely ever looks up to meet her gaze). She ruins their lives with rumors and marks them in her little black book, playing half the perplexed girl and half the woman too bitter to take in love or care for justice.
She wants vengeance and thirsts for blood, because she's tired of playing Prey.
Beneath the glitter of her makeup, she's not a doll but an arrow waiting to pierce the grayest of hearts, ones that have long forgotten how to beat.
2. …
5 Things That Rei Has Never Known About Family (WIP)
1. Father - Obligations
"Rei," her father's voice reached her over the distance of seas and continents. "Your mother's appointment is today, so I need you to look over the left-over preparations for the party in her place. I've already arranged the necessary staff, but she won't be hosting the party as previously planned."
Hino Rei grimaced but told her father she'd handle it. After all, he had called her instead of having his secretary do the deed. It meant the evening was important, so she would have to deal with it regardless of her preference.
Of course, the call came two hours before the dinner was to start. Rei gritted her teeth and told the staff that there was an emergency she had to deal with. The disapproving look one of her father's staff gave her as she was walking out the door, gritted on her nerves. It was a look that only started appearing after a talking cat and some Juuban girls came into her life and made a mess of it. "I'll be back," she promised. She hoped this battle would not be her last, irritated as she felt, she still sprinted some ways from where she had instructed her driver to drop her off.
She wasn't an idiot. Even though she would have preferred to have left this in the hands of the police, she was well aware that the things that bumped back in the dark may not necessarily be stopped by bullets or the threat of a uniform, or even jail. She would have liked it to be someone else's problems, nontheless.
The battle was not long, but it was a good forty minutes before it was over. By then, she was at the end of her patience with the blonde girl on her team. Tsukino Usagi had let go of a sigh of relief before beaming at her after the battle was over, there wasn't even ashes to bespeak of their struggle but moments ago. "Why don't we go for ice-cream? Get to know each other better, Re--"
"No names," she cut in coldly with a firm shake of her head. Mizuno Ami, still in her Sailor fuku like the rest of them, winced behind her still functioning visor while Usagi, behind her mask, looked hurt by Mars' tone of voice. "I agreed to help you guys out, but I still have other obligations and none of them include being your friend."
"But--" Sailor Moon tried again, her face imploring.
"No buts, Sailor Moon." She said the other's title with considerable emphasis before turning to check the clock in the park. "I don't have time for this," she muttered with building irritation. "You might not have other obligations, but I do." Father would not be pleased if he found out she was late to the dinner party she was in charge of hosting.
The talking cat, Luna, frowned. "You guys need ot work together, even you, Sailor Mars," the older voice instructed with a gentle reprimand. "The monsters you've been fighting have been getting tougher and stronger, you'll need to learn to rely on each other."
"I'm sure that is all entirely possible without getting to know one another," Sailor Mars answered back. "It's not possible for me to spare time I don't have," Sailor Mars shook her head and turned to go. "I'll help you in this attempt to save the world, but it's not my only responsibility. I am willing to help you find this princess that can supposedly take out all the monsters, but after that, if I'm no longer needed, I'll go. I have other things to attend to, and being a hero, in another life-time or not, has never been on my to-do list in this one." Without waiting for a reaction, she took off.
"That girl," Luna said with a sigh.
"She's so different from her powers," Ami observed later, as they were walking to the arcade. "Her tone is always so cold."
"She seems incredibly lonely," Usagi answered with a forlorn sigh, plucking at her uniform skirt. "It's almost as if she's afraid to be friends."
Ami smiled. "I can understand that," she told a frowning Usagi. "But you changed my mind Usagi-chan, I'm sure you can for Hino-san as well."
"You think so, Ami-chan?" Usagi asked, perking up. At the other girl's encouraging nod, Usagi broke into a smile.
5 Traits Rei Never Knew the Origins Of
1. The first flower that Rei's father gave to her mother was a Casablanca. It was a promise to her from him, not of beauty or grandeur, but of a white house. A house with opened windows and the breath of a salty sea fluttering through pale, evanescent curtains. A house with long, green grass and small, effusive violets dotting the lawn. A place they could call home.
The Casablanca was, once upon a time, her father's favorite flower...
The promise he couldn't keep.
2. Her name was her Grandmother's choosing. Her grandfather was the one who sat by her mother's bedside and held her hand since Grandmother was too sick to come herself. Her mother had been so distraught by Grandmother's health that she had not had time to settle on a name with her husband past a few boys' names.
"Rei," her father had murmurred speculatively behind his father-in-law, who told them of Grandmother's suggestion. Her father tested it out as her mother turned her face into the pillow.
"It's alright with me," she said in a tired whisper.
Grandfather's eyes worriedly traced what little of her averted features he could see before turning to look at the man standing behind him. "It's a good name," her father had said with solemn gravity, but happiness tilted his lips when he met Grandfather's stare. "Hino Rei."
The two men smiled at each other and missed the single tear silently hitting her mother's pillow as the other closed her eyes.
3. Her Grandmother died a week after her birth. Rei would not remember the soft, lingering touch of a frail hand when her father brought her to the dying woman's bedside. It was also just too little time for her mother to have recovered enough to be allowed by her doctors to visit herself. Rei would never know that it was years before her mother could forgive herself for the reminder Rei brought every time she looked at her daughter.
Forgetfulness and forgiveness were both difficult acts for the women in Rei's family.
4. The first few months Rei was born, her mother would not even touch her.
She would not remember that it was father who clumsily figured out how the diaper was to be changed and what brand of milk she liked when her mother refused to feed her. It was her father who took her out on evenings when he came home from the office, introducing her half-opened gaze to the objects of the world. Her father and her mother had quite the fight over whether or not they should hire a nanny to watch her in the day. Over her cries of distress, they finally compromised to only have someone come in during the day time since her mother refused to look at her if she could help it. At that time, he was still not yet completely caught up in his career, so it was he who sat by her bedside throughout the night the first time she got sick. Her father was the one who swaddled her body and kept her on the bed his wife refused to sleep with him and their baby in.
The first time Rei smiled, it was at her father. The first one see her roll on to her stomach and crawl, was him. The first word she spoke was "Paaa".
She was just too young to remember it, but she was first a Daddy's girl.
5. The first white dress Rei received was from her mother. She had wanted a summer smock like the other girls in school, but her mother had bought her a traditional kimono instead. Her father had just returned from days away from them, campaigning in Kyoto for his party as one of two rising stars in his organization. She had stubbornly refused to wear it when she found out what laid waiting for her in the white box and then sulked about not having a modern dress. Her mother only rolled her eyes and her father had even managed to look both weary and sheepish and terribly young as the maid scolded Rei about manners.
The kimono had flecks of cherry blossoms, pale pink and hot red against the white of the cotton. It was her mother's favorite pattern. She had thought it terribly hot and uncomfortable, not to mention the robe was at once, to her fledgling senses, both old-fashioned and impossibly childish. It was a struggle to wrestle her into the frock but she was vain enough to reluctantly smile in delight when she had seen herself in the mirror, twirling before the exasperated maid and her amused mother and father.
Later that evening, despite the heat of the summer night and dazzled by the fireworks and fairytales of Tanabata, she had refused to take it off. The maid chased her around the apartment but her mother was the one who finally caught her, struggling with the hired help to get the kimono off of her. Her father had laughed at the whole ordeal, much to everyone else's chagrin and his helpless delight.
"Next year, we'll get you a white dress," he promised her with a wide grin, ignoring her sullen pout as she sat in her underwear and refused to put on her night clothes.
Rei doesn't remember that night or the teasing oath her father made to her, but her father remembers it and often thinks to it as the only promise he had managed to keep.
5 Girls That Rei Will Never Be (WIP)
1. Father - Makeup
A rolled up skirt and almost one button too many undone on her school uniform. Large socks that emphasized the slimness of her pale thighs and rouged, pouty lips, crimson for temptation. Painted nails from cheap salons or her own reservoir when her funds were cut. Rei smiled at herself icily in the mirror at the perfect, traditional features made gaudy by accessories.
She looked on the edge of something: Someone who was just about to cross the thresholds of a tanning salon and come out permanently marked. A golden tattoo on her skin of her status as a girl with a penchant of meeting lecherous, cheating salary men in bars with fake IDs.
She knew that the girls in her Catholic school all whispered and stared after her, too afraid of her icy demeanor and vindictive personality to say things to her face. They were cowed by the name of her politician father who funded much of the school and the status she bore as an only child to such a powerful man, one reinstated whenever she stepped out of the limousine that dropped her off. She sensed their cowardice that made them frown behind her back when her panties flashed the staring police men while her saunter pauses the rest in the streets. She sneered at them, jealous cowards with eyes blinded by status and money and shallow, hypocritical ideas of righteousness, her eyes cold like frost while her heart thudded with the rush of an inexplicable rage shimmering beneath her skin.
Father with his disapproving eyes and voice soft with the subdued anger of someone who had long given up, his shadows lived inside of her. His disappointment had always felt like a fist in her gut but she smiled with the same sarcastic glint in her eyes and the wall of too much pride despite it all. Her mother would wring a different handkerchief each time beside him, all those silk and pristine clothes, crumpled and stained by tears that could no longer touch her heart.
Look at me, she say without words, I am your creation. Those silent things were all for the man who lived beneath the same roof as her but has never bothered to pay attention unless she comes home smelling of alcohol and too much smoke or gets herself splashed in the evening gossip columns. They are wordless actions used to shock a woman too blinded by a weakness that some called Love and the other's own helplessness to act or change anything at all. She hated the cage of a house they've created, one where no one lived in without masks and lies and pain. She wants to push their limits until they broke, and perhaps, only then, something will finally change.
Mother had tried to pull her aside when she was younger and reprimand her ways, thinking she was still naive enough to listen. But Mother was a burden too. Frail bones and a too pretty face, no spine beneath those limpid eyes and a mouth that's forgotten how to smile. Those eyes on a face so like her own that it made her grit her teeth and her heartbeat would quicken when she met those still vulnerable eyes. She resented the woman who wore it and marred the same skin as her own with tears. Mistress after mistress would get their faces splashed upon the papers with the evanescent titles of secretary and staff. They came and went with their faces young and words, sharp with reprimand and mockery when Father brought them home like show dogs before a helpless judge and a useless daughter, people who can only weep at the indifference stashed in plain sight.
She was tired of crying and asking why. She was tired of seeing a mirrored face look away and hopes crushed beneath callous apathy. She was tired of screaming without being heard, of the endless assistants that came in and out of her life, like bones thrown at her feet to appease the starvation in her heart.
She was tired of men like her father who teaches protégés like Kaidou, and the faceless young men after him. She was sick of those smiling, careless males who knew only where and how to strike when a woman was at her weakest and use them till they were too spent to be anything but trophies on an arm in a sparkling dress on gala nights. They were just men who spewed words of love and made stabs at guileless hearts with disarming expressions and apologies they didn't mean. She won't ever give them that type of power over her, not the way her mother does. She won't be used until there was nothing left to give and nothing more to care about. She would not act as if the waves would stop battering the rock if it would just hold still long enough.
So she slants her eyes at men with wives like her father, in restaurants she's too young to visit. She plays piano and flashes the paleness of her skin in all those forbidden places, a sophisticated girl with eyes cynical and cruel (but her prey rarely ever looks up to meet her gaze). She ruins their lives with rumors and marks them in her little black book, playing half the perplexed girl and half the woman too bitter to take in love or care for justice.
She wants vengeance and thirsts for blood, because she's tired of playing Prey.
Beneath the glitter of her makeup, she's not a doll but an arrow waiting to pierce the grayest of hearts, ones that have long forgotten how to beat.
2. …
5 Things That Rei Has Never Known About Family (WIP)
1. Father - Obligations
"Rei," her father's voice reached her over the distance of seas and continents. "Your mother's appointment is today, so I need you to look over the left-over preparations for the party in her place. I've already arranged the necessary staff, but she won't be hosting the party as previously planned."
Hino Rei grimaced but told her father she'd handle it. After all, he had called her instead of having his secretary do the deed. It meant the evening was important, so she would have to deal with it regardless of her preference.
Of course, the call came two hours before the dinner was to start. Rei gritted her teeth and told the staff that there was an emergency she had to deal with. The disapproving look one of her father's staff gave her as she was walking out the door, gritted on her nerves. It was a look that only started appearing after a talking cat and some Juuban girls came into her life and made a mess of it. "I'll be back," she promised. She hoped this battle would not be her last, irritated as she felt, she still sprinted some ways from where she had instructed her driver to drop her off.
She wasn't an idiot. Even though she would have preferred to have left this in the hands of the police, she was well aware that the things that bumped back in the dark may not necessarily be stopped by bullets or the threat of a uniform, or even jail. She would have liked it to be someone else's problems, nontheless.
The battle was not long, but it was a good forty minutes before it was over. By then, she was at the end of her patience with the blonde girl on her team. Tsukino Usagi had let go of a sigh of relief before beaming at her after the battle was over, there wasn't even ashes to bespeak of their struggle but moments ago. "Why don't we go for ice-cream? Get to know each other better, Re--"
"No names," she cut in coldly with a firm shake of her head. Mizuno Ami, still in her Sailor fuku like the rest of them, winced behind her still functioning visor while Usagi, behind her mask, looked hurt by Mars' tone of voice. "I agreed to help you guys out, but I still have other obligations and none of them include being your friend."
"But--" Sailor Moon tried again, her face imploring.
"No buts, Sailor Moon." She said the other's title with considerable emphasis before turning to check the clock in the park. "I don't have time for this," she muttered with building irritation. "You might not have other obligations, but I do." Father would not be pleased if he found out she was late to the dinner party she was in charge of hosting.
The talking cat, Luna, frowned. "You guys need ot work together, even you, Sailor Mars," the older voice instructed with a gentle reprimand. "The monsters you've been fighting have been getting tougher and stronger, you'll need to learn to rely on each other."
"I'm sure that is all entirely possible without getting to know one another," Sailor Mars answered back. "It's not possible for me to spare time I don't have," Sailor Mars shook her head and turned to go. "I'll help you in this attempt to save the world, but it's not my only responsibility. I am willing to help you find this princess that can supposedly take out all the monsters, but after that, if I'm no longer needed, I'll go. I have other things to attend to, and being a hero, in another life-time or not, has never been on my to-do list in this one." Without waiting for a reaction, she took off.
"That girl," Luna said with a sigh.
"She's so different from her powers," Ami observed later, as they were walking to the arcade. "Her tone is always so cold."
"She seems incredibly lonely," Usagi answered with a forlorn sigh, plucking at her uniform skirt. "It's almost as if she's afraid to be friends."
Ami smiled. "I can understand that," she told a frowning Usagi. "But you changed my mind Usagi-chan, I'm sure you can for Hino-san as well."
"You think so, Ami-chan?" Usagi asked, perking up. At the other girl's encouraging nod, Usagi broke into a smile.