Original Work: In Memoriam

Jan 08, 2006 22:41

Title: In Memoriam
Author: woodra
Rating: PG-13 to mild R depending on an individual
Disclaimer: Mine, with an exception of one line, properly credited.



Why did he ask her to leave? He was strumming on the acoustical guitar, voluptuously shaped, dark spruce and rosewood. The darkness glimmered spectrally, lying on their eyes wide open as a stripe of silk. Touch and smell and sound was all that was necessary for an interesting night - didn't he like it? But perhaps right now was not the time to think about it. She couldn't see his hawkish profile and his long elegant fingers working on the six-string, yet she knew he was smiling a smile that kept on appearing and disappearing from his thin lips at every successful attempt at dragging out the note desired.

"Duke, I love you," she said one moment when he took the best note of the night and was laughing softly in the darkness, the sleeves of his polo-neck touching the bare skin of her hand. It was the perfect moment to let him know she was not leaving without him, if she was ever to leave this beautiful place. "A song that I dedicate to Your Highness," was his reserved reply. She gratefully bowed her head, doubting he'd ever know she had done this.

Then she saw the shimmering shapes of notes flying upward in an ascending formation. Followed E, then maybe D, or B, but she most certainly saw a G, and then an A. Then he mixed everything and she could only see the various nuances of them - white, black, yellow, purple, green and green. Then black and green and yellow following purple, all bundling into one flowery mushroom of Nagasaki. She shuddered at the thought of it. "Nagasaki was when I was twenty years old," she said to Duke, who shrugged in the night invisibly, leaving her to wait for his answer. Wait and wait, while he strummed, continuing to build forms and destroying them with one single strike.

Nagasaki, Nagasaki, in memoriam I sing. Her clear voice rose above into the scintillating darkness, impaled with spectral relicts of comets.

Absence is never the answer, I know, but it serves as my shade...1

She didn't hear him rising to his feet and pack his guitar into its padded holder. Nagasaki, Nagasaki, lost in between the worlds, lost for her and for him, never to be reached by anyone, in memoriam of which they sat there - Nagasaki would never leave her.

"Farewell, Aya," his cold tenor came unexpectedly into her world, ruining its walls as it did so. She flinched, feeling the hairs on her back prick up. Struggling, Aya stood up also, looking up at Duke, who towered above her impossibly high - ten feet to his face, bend down to take one last look at her heart-shaped face. "Oblivion would have been a better solution," he said before bending all the way down and planting a kiss on the petals of her lips.

A kiss, cold as November rain, kiss of a traitor, cold as a snake-skin. She shuddered in disgust, necrophiliac, necrophiliac! The lilies of her spirits high withered, disappearing into Lethe, leaving a faint scent of their sprinkling colour. Aya drew back, trying to pull herself into one tight knot of nerves and intelligence, ready to strike back - but better yet, ready to set out for a long journey of self-abasing and eventual forgiveness. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, shh-shhh, the silence is near.

Duke withdrew his smoothly-shaved face in one swift motion and turned back to walk away. The padded guitar holder clunked merrily behind his broad shoulders, the sound dying down, until disappearing completely. Aya heard him put his hand on the latch of the door, then the click, a brief shock of light, and then she was back into darkness, all alone. Nagasaki, Nagasaki, in memoriam I sing.

Outside the rain was pouring down heavily. Dyel, the plump and short Hunter with fiery disturbance of hair, put his cross and crescent down on the mahogany desk before looking up at the young Japanese woman. "Aya does not want to leave." A short and muffled shriek resonated around the room, as the woman closed her eyes in desperation. Forty years, forty years. Dyel looked around, kneading his neck muscles as he did so, waiting for the woman to realize what it meant and reply. It has been a long night out with Aya.

"Dyel, is there any way to get her out?" the woman asked, finally coming to terms with his news. "She only wants to leave with Duke," Dyel replied, a mug of hot chocolate forming in front of him, as he pronounced a complex set of resonating incantations, shattering the very existence of the unstable Reality M34, while the mental projections of his hands reached for the perfect combination of elements in the Store. "And we don't know who that Duke is and if he is still alive," he added, savouring the delicious scent rising upwards from the mug. The silky substance was halfway through his throat when he felt something else was blocking its way. He opened his eyes, casting them downward in a reflexive motion, to register, for a second, the sight of a ruby-incrusted haft and an apologetic expression on the woman's face.

"Go, Duke, take her out with you."

_______________

1. Line from "A Poem for Byzantium" by Delerium.
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