Flash Fiction - The Moon and the Cherry Tree
Slender moonlight filtered down on him. It whispered to him, calling to his blood, touching him right down to his core. It spoke of how they belonged together. The moon ruled the darkness. Hyperion ruled the night. He was the splendid pale orb that all eyes turned to in the vampire world, looking up at him, seeking his light.
That light fractured into silvery ribbons when it met the ghostly pale blossoms on the lonely cherry tree.
Hyperion lay beneath it, his back against the broad trunk and his head tipped back, basking in the beauty above. A warm breeze stirred the white flowers, spreading their scent on the wind and casting him back one hundred years to the last time he had visited this land. It had been on a night like this that their paths had crossed again following their stormy first meeting and her beauty had arrested his steps and stolen his heart just as the cherry tree captured him now, holding him transfixed and under its sway.
She had been more beautiful than the blossom she had been named for, as delicate as its fragile petals and as soft as its scent, destined to dance away on a breeze and disappear from this world.
Sakura.
Hyperion lifted his hand to the sky, looking at the full moon and cherry blossoms through his splayed fingers. If only he could have grasped her more tightly and held her to him. If only he could have faced the fear of watching her wither and fade away. If only.
He had been convinced that such a beauty would not have survived in the darkness of his world and that it would have been cruel to bring her into it. She had needed light to bloom and feed the warmth in her smile and her heart, and that was something he never could have given to her.
He closed his fingers into a fist and stared at it. She had been within his grasp though, her beautiful smiles and precious laughter reserved for his eyes and his ears. She had given him everything that she had denied her clients, supplying them with hollow imitations of their splendour. He had taken them all, feasted on them. They had been his medicine to ease his pain.
His salvation and his destruction.
The white cherry tree swayed above him, dancing in the wind that stirred his dark hair and caressed his skin, carrying the perfume of the other blooming trees in the grove and the city beyond. Hyperion watched each blossom on the tree above as they performed a timeless ballet that could only end in one way. A single flower caught in the breeze and broke free, pirouetting through the air, continuing its dance until it finally came to rest on his black-clad legs. He plucked the delicate blossom from his thigh and brought it to his nose, inhaling the subtle sweetness of its scent. His Sakura had smelt as sweet as this one. She had worn blossoms in her hair and on her kimono. She had bloomed for him and in that moment she had ruined him to all others.
Hyperion crushed the blossom in his fist and frowned at the moon and the tree. Two different worlds that created such beauty when brought together, but that were destined to remain apart. A cherry tree couldn’t bloom with only the moon as its light. The moon could only watch the tree from afar, longing to smell the sweetness of its fragrance and feel its soft flowers, knowing that it would never be his. The cherry tree thrived on light, but the moon could only offer the gentlest of caresses, a ghostly cold touch under midnight skies that would fade with the rising of the sun, driven away by the world where the tree truly belonged and could flourish.
The world that the cherry tree blossomed for.
Not the moon’s world.
A world of warmth and light. The human world.
A world that Sakura had needed more than him. Or so he had thought. He had surrendered her to the human world, believing that she had no place in his, desiring her to retain her fragile beauty regardless of the pain it caused him and seek a happier life that she deserved. He had carried her in his heart, forever true to her, willing to remain that way until the end of his days. He had thought her long dead, alive only within his memories.
He had thought wrong.
Hyperion closed his eyes and listened to the moon, to the darkness around him. The call to hunt was strong but another desire eclipsed it.
The need to rise to his feet and continue his search for the one thing he had never dreamed he would see with his own eyes again. The woman who had walked back into his life barely two years ago looking as she had when he had left her a century earlier in this very city.
He opened his fist and looked down at the crushed blossom in his hand. Now that it had fallen, daylight would only speed its ruin. Now only moonlight and darkness could preserve it. The cool touch of the night not the heat of day.
Hyperion pushed himself onto his feet, reached up to the branches of the cherry tree and plucked a fresh white blossom.
Someone had dared to pluck the rare bloom he had left to flower in the human world and brought it into the darkness.
As payment for their insolence, he would take their life and take back what was his.
The cherry blossom would bloom again only it would be under the light of the moon.
They would be together again.
This time forever.
