Unhelpful Summary: In modern day Tokyo, no one believes the legend of the bamboo cutter... A goddess and a jealous man... But a sleeper wakens, and a conspiracy is forged in the Mikage Co.—Before Aya there were others… this is the beginning… Mainly Wei/OC, with Aya/Toya eventually, and Chidori/Yuhi eventually
Expect madness, love, sex, and murder.
Rating: G for this chapter; eventually up to NC-17
Genre: I suppose. Drama/Angst/Romance.
Disclaimer: I don't own Ceres!!!
Notes: The Prologue is nothing but an intro that builds on the plot before the actual story begins in Chapter 1. It will be a very long fic and I have a lot of developing to do with all of the characters. Don't be surprised if some chapters focus only on one character or flashback into something else. I promise everything I do is important and has meaning. And I always appreciate reviews and comments, no matter good or bad. P.S. I change view points a lot but I will always put at the start of the chapter whose view point is in if I do first person. Anyway enough babbling. Enjoy!
Marigold for Memory
An Ayashi no Ceres Fic
-Part One
Every moment marked
With apparitions of your soul
However swiftly moving
I'm trying to escape this desireThe yearning to be near you
I do what I have to do
The yearning to be near you
I do what I have to do
And I had the sense to recognize
That I don't know how to let you go
"Do What You Have to Do"
Sarah McLachlan
Prologue
When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Wei had often dreamed of her floating dead beneath the trappings of the iced glass, but tonight, for the first time, he envisioned her pushing her way out. He could see the jewels of her eyes, narrow and Hazel; could feel the rough scratches of her round fingernails against the surface of his skin. Then, with a shuddering breath he was awake. There was no glass—no white rooms… only night. There were no wild hands beneath the calluses of wide palms, just his own warm skin. But once again, there was someone on the other side, fighting to be free.
Shakily Wei raised himself from the cocoon of his sheets, leaning backwards until the back bone of his neck rested against the solidity of his headboard. The stable surface reminded him where he was.
Green neon light flashed across the bands of Wei's eyes as he tilted his gaze sideways; dark hair sliding across sharp features as the clock flashed 12am. Through thick quilts and silk sheets he can feel the numbers as they dig beneath the tender soil of his memory, branding there presence into his mind as he turned away from the acidic teeth the clock bore. The puddles of green ran across the sleeve of his sheet like water, spilling over to the empty space on the other side of the bed. In the radioactive green light he pretends it makes her outline. Carefully he places a hand on the tightly folded sheets on the other side… her side, letting his hand adjust to the shape of someone who is no longer there. Feeling emptiness instead of warm skin beneath his hand Wei felt a pang of grief so deep he jerked back as if burned, placing an empty hand across his chest to hold himself together; dismally he looked to the calendar on the far wall, a black square hastily drawn in a sea of white by weak hands. The black box grows larger beneath his eyes like a disease, and silently he thinks to himself this is it.
He threw back the covers weakly, the cold air hitting his bare chest as his feet padded across the floor to the tightly sealed window. He leans against the skeleton of the window frame, careful not to touch the center where she once stood and mapped the sky with her boned hands, the center where her legacy was left untouched.
Her memory was here, trapped in a panel of stained-glass she had made; one of pink and white peonies, blooming petals pasted on red seas trying to catch the memory of sunlight within its embrace. The brightly lit panes filtered through the shadow cast by hastily drawn back curtains, branding the colors on the mattress in a garden of red. In crimson, puddled reflections Wei can see the last happy memory the color embodied...the one thing left in his room that held a never changing memory of her.
A grim smile etched itself upon his lips as he looked to the swollen sky that held the promise of rain. Through gray veils he can see the faint outline of Andromeda, the princess offered to the sea, of Hydra swimming in invisible waters.
She had taught him those.
The cold eye of the moon watched Wei through smudged glass as pain etched itself into his face; the silver circle mocking in its unchanging path as the colored shadows of stained glass scattered around the room like memories, staining the wood paneling of the floors in perpetual scars. They were always there; even when the night would pass and the sun would fling itself through the bay windows of his apartment, the shadows remained, hung like bodies in the corners of his eyes.
They haunt his life like ghosts… like her.
Golden eyes shut at her recollection; tightly sealed safes, but for the barest of moments between closing and opening, of the lost and the found he lets something crack and crawl out. And Wei lets himself remember… words of stars and wishes… of a future…
"Make a wish Wei…" an echo that has lost its way.
And then the phone rings and he loses her again.