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Open Book A Yami no Matsuei story Odile Hisoka's acknowledgement of his past is something that's included in almost every story in which he gets together with someone. Yet very rarely, in my opinion, are the full ramifications of his death/rape looked over. More often than not, it's just a simple, if well-phrased, 'I know what happened was terrible, but it's not like that now.' Well, I don't think it would be that easy.
On the other hand, the angst lies a bit thick here.
Emotions are intensely personal things. Formed of a lifetime of experiences, shaped and reshaped as we make such abstract concepts as jealousy, hatred, and everlasting love in our own image, the only figure we can truly understand. Reading them is like translating one of the romance languages, you have the root, but the exact meaning is lost until someone grabs you by the shoulders and screams in your face, and you’re suddenly pretty certain that whatever’s being said, it’s not a complement. Hisoka’s been perfecting his skills. He can usually get the general idea if he works at it. Or if the feeling is strong enough. He still gets hung up on some of the softer emotions though. He wasn’t exactly familiar with them in his lifetime, after all. What he’d really like to do is have some sort of... test subject. A textbook of sorts. Elicit a response, then carefully note down exactly what that emotion looks like. This is the color of affection. This is tenderness, joy, amusement. This is love. This is lust. See the difference? Sometimes he tries to imagine what that would be like. He never manages to be very scientific about that part, though. It comes out as images of heat and half-heard sounds and the feelings of cloth on cloth shifting to skin on skin and he, himself, fingers trailing over the length of the other’s body with whispers- ‘what do you feel now? How does this make you feel? and this? And this?’ and then... tentatively, because even in his mind this part is terrifying, ‘... this?’ And then he tells himself firmly to stop daydreaming, because that’s just wrong. He tries not to think about who the other person could be. Sometimes it’s impossible not to know. Like the times when he forgets his carefully planned research question altogether, because the other participant is responding in kind, reaching up to him with those deft fingers and pulling him down, so that in the end it’s just two bodies tangled together, and kisses that don’t end but just melt into each other. And at that point he really can’t pretend, not even to himself, that he doesn’t know the body under his as if it were his own Sometimes he even wakes up with the name rising to his lips. The first time it happened, he had to throw himself out of bed and run, staggering, to the bathroom. He spent the next half-hour in miserable illness, cheek pressed flush against cool porcelain as his stomach performed the most amazing aerobics and forced him into wretched dry heaves. He knows that his reaction to this isn’t normal. But then, how could it be? Sure, he is (and always will be, in this manner) a teen-aged boy. Boys… think things like this. Well, maybe not quite like this, most of them, but close enough to count. He’s just starting a little later than most. Five years ago, he would have sworn that he’d never be able to think about another person this way without total revulsion. Hell, he would have wondered why he would want to think such things at all- how anyone could feel this way without total disgust.
The resilience of the human mind is a terrifying thing...
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