Stuff to pacify the lawyers: The characters, situations etc used in this fanfiction remain the property of Kaori Yuki, Hana to Yume comics, Hakusensha, several animation and distribution companies and god only knows how many others who hold the foreign rights. I am making no money off this and even if I did. I would send it all to these guys and let them scrap over who got to keep the $3.97.

Author's notes: Wow, once I get going it's so much easier to write these things than it ever was to do Zetsuai/BRONZE fanfiction. Maybe because I'm more into this series because of what it is rather as it could be, or maybe I've had more practice and can just write a bit better now.

I'm very grateful to those nice people who left me such nice remarks about my first Angel Sanctuary fanfic. Thank you for inspiring me again, guys - I've been in a bit of a slump lately and your kind comments have really helped me get motivated. I'd like to hope the time and setting of this piece will be fairly obvious to any reader who is familiar with the Angel Sanctuary manga but, just in case it isn't, think round about chapter twenty-two or twenty-three. The ending of this fic will, I think, be different in tone for those who have read the entire series and know what happens in Volume Twenty than for people who have not yet got that far.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And there was a place for everything and everything was in its place…

In the beginning, once upon a time.

But time passes, time always passes. That was then, what of now? Order was imposed on chaos, imposing itself on chaos: God created something so close to perfect that perfection seemed there for the taking, but the universe has a way of pushing back. Things change, whilst outwardly remaining in stasis, unchanging, unmoving… and by the time the flaw was spotted, the break in the pattern noted, it was already too late to do anything about it. Flaws and breaks. Imperfections. Surely that was what led to downfall, to inevitable decay?

Surely.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.

Surely. But to be born faded… what then? What was he but an imperfection? A stain? A break in an otherwise harmonious pattern, a flawed duplicate of something that, alone, had been both beautiful and good, something so close to perfection that it had almost been obscene… what was Rociel if he wasn't that? No wonder she could do nothing but despise him, and all he could do was love her.

God help him, he had loved her, and still did love her. Loved her so much it made him angry, loved her so much he came close to hating her for it. Why couldn't she love him back? Why couldn't anyone? But how could anyone, let alone her, be expected to feel for something as essentially unlovable as he had been? Youth calls to youth, beauty to beauty: then he had possessed neither and not even a good soul beneath it all. No wonder she could do nothing but despise him, even later on she could do nothing but that. He didn't know why he'd expected her to. What did she see when she looked at him? To exist as a poor reproduction of a harmonious whole was a curse, surely, but how much more of a curse to have to live with a flawed copy of yourself? That was something he would never know. No wonder she couldn't see him as anything other than flawed. All she must have seen when she saw him was herself. Herself, but somehow cheapened.

No wonder she had hated him.

Should he feel sorry for her? Pity her for having to tolerate his presence? He wasn't capable of that. He saw no need to feel sympathy.

He had smiled without any trace of humor and knew without having to look or ask that it was a smile like a knife edge, like a razor blade. He was beautiful now but, in the brief moments when he was really aware of anything, he knew it to be a terrible beauty, terrible as chaos. Her face, but twisted and subtly changed, features finding new patterns, new expressions that he had never seen on her, that she would have no need to register. His better, more complete half. Her absence was a daily pain that Rociel tacitly acknowledged but pretended not to.

How hard not to grow cruel when all you have known is cruelty. How hard not to end up unfeeling when your feelings are always disdained. Was it not an impossibility to become caring when nobody has ever cared for you?

He didn't know. Honestly and truthfully he didn't know. An impossibility for him, maybe.

Maybe.

Ultimately he'd realized he would never really be able to have her and so, tired with waiting, with pining away from devotion he knew she would never return, frustrated with his longings and knowing, deep down, that they would never be fulfilled, Rociel had sought a substitute. Obviously, he could not take a different lover. His own shortcomings had left him incapable of such a thing; besides as an angel, albeit a deeply flawed one, he was not supposed to wish for such companionship - just because some did it didn't make it any less wrong. Such a thing would have been sinful. That had mattered to him once. Once upon a time he had been pure and placid and beautiful as the morning. What had gone wrong?

Rociel had sought relief from his own incompleteness, from knowing that he missed his sister and could not even take relief from having her near. For a time he had even found it. He found it not by taking a lover but in the unconditional love of a child - a different kind of love, one that even he was capable of responding to.

That had been him. Katan.

Though he was Rociel's child Katan had been different from his father from the very start. No matter how imperfect he himself was, no matter how flawed, Katan had somehow come out very unlike him and for that Rociel had never been anything but grateful - he wouldn't have wanted to be responsible for the creation of a child who was nothing more than a copy of a defected copy, even more watered down and imperfect than he himself was. But Katan hadn't been affected by the failings of his father in any way other than indirectly. He hadn't had his father's burdens. Perhaps most crucially Katan was nobody's other half; he didn't have to live up to anyone's expectations, he was free to be his own person without anyone comparing him unfavorably to a far more accomplished, far more skilful - and far more beautiful - sibling. He hadn't had to live with the knowledge that he was fundamentally incomplete. That he was, essentially, an afterthought.

And for him Rociel had tried to change. He had tried to look after Katan, after his fashion, tried to become thoughtful and gentle, things he so manifestly was not and given the way things had turned out for him never could have been, simply because he wanted to believe that he could care for Katan. He needed to believe that he was capable of sustaining something good and true and so fundamentally normal. Perhaps he had even loved him, if such a creature as Rociel was capable of feeling such a thing for anyone other than his own mirror image, capable of loving in any way that wasn't twisted and wrong and tied up too closely with hatred for him to feel that love was anything other than a wholly destructive emotion. Maybe that had been the point, maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why things had gone so badly awry.

Had Katan never lived in any but the most rudimentary sense of the word, the way he would have done had Rociel never taken matters into his own hands, if he hadn't - what else could he call his own actions if he weren't to speak so plain? - interfered, would he have been any happier? Such an existence as the one his child had been leading (to call it life would have been a fallacy) would, to Rociel's mind, have been nothing short of hellish but Katan would have known no different, though he may have longed vaguely for something he could never have. And could he truly say that Katan's life, lived with him, had been happy? That he had treated the boy as well as he deserved to be treated? No. Of course he couldn't.

No matter what else Rociel could fool himself over, he couldn't pretend to himself that he had made Katan happy, or even content. He could pretend that, in spite of all she had done to prove she hated him, Alexiel loved him really, even if she didn't know it. That way all his attempts to gain favor in her eyes wouldn't have to be totally futile, the way Rociel knew they would be if he admitted to himself even for one second that she had always resented him and could do nothing but resent him. He could pretend that he had to do nothing more than revive her and everything would be okay again (Again? The way it had once been? No, things hadn't ever been okay between them). But Rociel pretended it was; he was good at deceiving himself. He had to be for the sake of the tenuous hold on what little sanity he still possessed… but over this at least he held no illusions. He had wanted to, wanted to desperately… but since when had his wishes made any difference to the way things were? They never had.

Rociel knew he had, at the very least, cared deeply for Katan. And look where that had got them.

He had watched him die.

It hadn't occurred to him at the time. Rociel hadn't really realized that what he was seeing, back then, was the death of his only child and of the only person aside from her whom he had even come close to loving. At the time he hadn't known Katan was dying, or hadn't let himself know. He'd fooled himself again, completely, into believing that there was still something that could be done for him - something that Katan had wanted no part of and, even on the brink of death, had struggled against. He hadn't wanted to live under those circumstances. Rociel couldn't understand it then, still couldn't understand it; life was life however it was lived, surely. He knew better than anyone what taking the pill would mean for Katan and he'd known from experience that the boy just didn't want to live like that. But he'd hoped that Katan, faced with the prospect of life under those conditions or death, would choose life.

No matter how calculating he may have been with regards to those damn pills before, no matter what taking them would have meant, that hadn't been the only reason he had wanted Katan to swallow one then. The other reason - the real reason? - had been that he didn't want to lose him. Couldn't bear to lose him. He couldn't lose Katan too, surely. But Katan, it seemed, would rather have been lost.

Why? What had Rociel done that was so wrong? Was the person he was turning into, unwillingly watching himself be turned into, that hideous? Didn't Katan realize how much he meant to him or didn't he care about that any more?

Rather death than life as someone else's puppet…

When he'd first seen what that bitch Alexiel had done to him Rociel had wanted to kill her. The feeling had passed - such impulses, where they concerned his sister, always did - but Rociel knew that if he'd had her there at that time he would probably have tried, no matter how ambiguous he normally felt toward her or how much he knew he loved her, to kill her for what she had done to him. At that moment his hopeless, desperate, one-sided love for her hadn't mattered one bit: all that had mattered was that Alexiel had hurt Katan. Alexiel had hurt his child. He'd been furious with Katan for sacrificing himself in his doomed bid to rescue Kirie who had never been anything more than disposable in the first place - hadn't he realized that Kirie hated him? - but most of all he'd been furious with Alexiel.

How could she? (Never mind that he'd ordered the same.) How could she dare to do something like that to Katan? (Did it matter that the child Sara also lay dead at Alexiel's own feet?) Didn't she know what he'd meant to him? (He'd known full well what Sara meant to the person who Alexiel thought she was but he'd ordered Kirie to kill her anyway) But Rociel was the flawed one; such things were almost expected from a man like him. But from Alexiel?

It must have hurt him terribly. God, what it must have felt like to be caught up in that… blast or whatever it was… It was a terrible thing she had done to him. Terrible, and what was worse it had been totally avoidable. Getting caught up in it was stupid, Katan. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You had no need to be anywhere near there! Look what you did to yourself. Look what she did to you! Just seeing it had been terrible enough. Nobody should have to see their own child in such a state. Nobody, no matter who they were, no matter how terrible their own crimes, should have to watch their children suffering. See them in terrible pain. Nobody should have to know that the only thing that will stop their child hurting is their death.

Do it to someone else. Do it to me. Just spare him. Please, spare him.

He hadn't really realized that he had been watching his son dying until it was over and the hope that there was still something he could do for Katan whatever it was, that there was still something that could be done, was gone. When he was sitting beside his body and crying without really realizing it and thinking that all the things he had heard about the faces of the dead were true. Death was nothing new to him nor was the knowledge he had been the one responsible for it, but death had never touched him so personally before. Katan had looked peaceful there, his face solemn as a sleeping child. He'd looked untroubled as Rociel had always heard people would look in death. It had - the stories were correct - been as if he was merely asleep. He'd looked, to Rociel's eyes, beautiful… but then he always had.

At first, once the shock had worn off, it hadn't seemed to matter that much. He had been able to kid himself that it wasn't really all that important, that he had coped alone before and would be able to do so again. Rociel had other things to occupy himself with; he'd kept himself busy and the loss hadn't seemed quite so keen. After all, what would the point of the life he had been given back (and at what cost? He wasn't too sure about that one though Katan… he had been told that it was great) if he had done nothing with it? He had a plan to fulfill, there were things he had to do to get things back to normal, back to the way things had been before. When there were still things that had to be done Rociel hadn't allowed himself the luxury of thinking overmuch about what had happened then, back on Assiah. Some day there would be a reckoning, he thought, but not now.

For now the best thing he could do was work to get things back to the way they were and then he could see what he could do about… if there was anything to be done.

But that hadn't been important. Or rather it had been terribly important but he had forced himself not to think about it. All his endeavors since losing him could have been seen as nothing more than displacement activity, a period of almost frantic action to stop himself from having to think. Things that could have waited, might have worked even better if he had been prepared to leave them for a while, had suddenly become things that had to be done now and never mind how many enemies he made in the process… but that truly was a matter for another day, though; Rociel didn't think he'd ever not had enemies, no matter how hard he tried he couldn't think of a single period in his life when at least one person didn't want him dead. Well if they wanted to hate him, let them. They'd soon realize why that wasn't a tenable position.

Throwing himself wholeheartedly into such a period of frenzied activity… why had he done that? Though he hadn't realized it at the time, still didn't really understand the reasons behind it, he had his suspicions, suspicions he had no real way to describe as of yet. There was something inside him that knew full well why he had been so keen to do what he did; wanted to prove you could get by alone, didn't you Rociel? You never used to need anyone to lean on. Anyone except her of course, damn her, and that didn't really count… even if he needed her he'd never had her.

Anyone would think that he had been Katan's child. His actions had been those of a son desperately trying to prove to himself and the world that he was every bit as strong and capable now as he had been when his father was alive. He wondered when exactly things had changed so much that the parent now felt and acted more like the child and vice versa; had he even noticed the change, before now?

Or maybe he had been trying to prove something to Katan as well as to himself. His decision to carry out a plan that could have been (hadn't been, but could have been - deep down Rociel knew that it hadn't been all down to him, he'd just got lucky) such a spectacular failure… maybe it had just been a grand gesture of defiance. See, I don't need you any more. If I can do all this alone then what do I need you for? What did I ever need you for if this is what I can manage when I'm working by myself? I don't need you any more, Katan. So what if I can't have you? I wouldn't want you round me any more anyway.

He hadn't believed it for a moment…

And the old order changeth, making way for new.

It had been simple. In fact, almost too simple. Rociel had anticipated something more of a challenge than he had ultimately got. Sevotharte had, in the time that he had held power, made enemies too, enemies who were more than glad to see him toppled; a child whose main confidant was a stuffed rabbit could never have posed much of a threat. After so many years away most people had forgotten what Rociel himself was like; maybe after an infant and the man who worked the child's strings, he didn't look so bad. At least he was of an age, at least he was experienced, even if his experiences had been far from uniformly good.

He'd known things had changed and not for the better but if his own heyday had been thought of as somehow superior… never mind the war and the mistrust and the chaos and the suffering it had caused and her… what did that say about the position he had reclaimed? About the place he now had dominion over?

But once Rociel had regained the power he had lost, what then? Bare hours after it was all back to something that felt like it was at least approaching normal and he was able, almost, to kid himself that the awkward period on Assiah had never been, even that the war had never been and that nothing had changed and she was still around and out there somewhere and that she was still herself, he'd started to think, to realize what it was that he knew he had lost, that he finally let himself acknowledge the loss. And with that knowledge came realization that things would never be normal again, not whilst he was gone. Though Rociel knew it not to be the case, though he knew that he had survived without Katan before and would, if it came down to it, survive without him again it felt like he had always been there.

He had always been there and now he was gone.

The room, like the church it was contained in, was large and solemn, grave and high-walled; it stood empty, save for the coffin. What little light penetrated the gloom came from a single high window. A mausoleum, suitably dour and funereal. Rociel hadn't expected anything more from this place. The air - cold and heavy, smelling of piety and mourning and the ghost of long-dead incense - was dusty, dust that had been agitated by his own motions, unexpected in such a still, quiet place. To move at all had almost felt like a disturbance, not just to the room's awful tranquility but to the rest of the man whose body lay here. If only, Rociel thought, that was all it took…

Any sound in here - footfalls, the noise of the door closing behind him - became preternaturally loud, even the sound of his own breathing, the sound of his heart or whatever passed for it in such a creature as himself. The only obvious signs of any life in this desolate, comfortless room were the result of his own presence there. Rociel couldn't imagine a bleaker place to be. Maybe it was just because of his own bleak mood but simple knowledge didn't help alleviate it, didn't make him any happier in this ghastly place. Why was he still here even though he despised it, even though it was doing nothing than disturb him further, make his loneliness even more pronounced? Grief perhaps, or the desire to be close to him once more even though he knew that it wouldn't be appreciated or even noted. Or maybe it was some kind of misguided notion of penance. Penance for what? There were too many things that it could have been for him to be able to say what it was for sure.

He knew that, even if Katan wouldn't have wanted him there, even if he had finally tired of the destructive dance the two of them had been trapped in for so long, he wanted to be close to the boy again. Just once more. The wood of the coffin was hard and cold and unyielding under his fingers, warmed only by his own body.

In public he had pretended the old ease; nobody who didn't know him - and who did know him now Katan was gone? Who else would remember him the way Katan had done? - would have spotted that Rociel was troubled, restless, hurting inside. He kept up the pretense that there was nothing wrong, that he was quite content and feeling nothing more than quiet satisfaction with the way things had turned out. Nobody looked behind it: apart from Katan who would have thought to? Rociel was, he knew, isolated by his position, a position that his hold on was as yet no more than tentative (though here and now the thought was unwelcome and unimportant Rociel knew that before he could feel anything like secure he would have to fend off at least one attempted counter-coup from Sevotharte and his minions). It hadn't really bothered him before and it wouldn't have occurred to him to be bothered by it. After all before now he hadn't really been isolated, had he? He'd had Katan.

And now he didn't.

Several times in the last few hours days weeks (how long ago had it been that he'd lost him? Rociel hadn't been counting but it felt like forever) Rociel had caught himself looking for Katan, found himself wondering where the boy was. Kept half-expecting him to walk in with that diffident, awkward look on his face as if apologizing for his presence, for daring to intrude on Rociel's time in the first place. God, how Rociel would have longed to be intruded upon now! No matter how irritated he had sometimes acted with him, no matter how many times he had pushed Katan away since he'd been awoken, no matter how poorly he had treated the boy, Rociel had never resented his presence - or, even if he had, it was a fleeting feeling, a new feeling, not one that he could recognize. He couldn't remember feeling like that about Katan before and oh, how he wished he'd never felt it at all.

But what did it matter how he might have felt about Katan once, how irritated he might have been with him for… what? (What had Katan done to make him resent him so, even briefly? what had ever done?) Did it matter? All that mattered to Rociel now was that he wanted to see him again, to talk to him again, to touch and be held by Katan again. He had to. There'd been a lot that he'd never told Katan. He'd never told the boy how much he needed him, how much he cared for him even if he didn't and just plain couldn't show it sometimes… he'd never told him how much he loved him and now, Rociel realized with a sigh, he never would. Not unless a miracle happened, and Katan hadn't been interested in the promise of resurrection; even now Rociel knew that he was fighting it. Why? Why the hell wouldn't he come back?

What about me?

It was selfish, Rociel knew, to think about himself. He wasn't the one who was lying cold and dead. But that would have been easy compared to this. How much harder to be the one who had been left behind, the one who had to cope with all the what ifs and if onlys. The unwilling survivor, the one who had to live with the knowledge of what he had done and of what he hadn't done. Guilt, grief, shock, resentment… if he was selfish for wanting Katan back wasn't Katan equally selfish for wantonly seeking his own extinction when he could so easily have been spared? Oh, of course there had been a price! But wasn't that a price worth paying when the alternative was extinction? When the alternative was leaving him all alone again?

Rociel knew that he should have told him, before it was too late, how much he needed him. How much he had truly wanted to care. How much he loved him because he had loved Katan, after his fashion. Of course he had loved him. Katan was his son. Why hadn't he told him? Did Katan think he didn't care? Had Katan died thinking that he didn't care for him, that he hated him? Was that why he hadn't wanted to be saved?

What about me? What am I meant to do now? Don't you know I love you, Katan?

Oh god, he should have told him somehow. Even if it was as good as impossible Rociel knew he should at least have tried. Even if he hadn't been able to tell him so plainly to his face, Rociel knew that he should have done something to prove how much he truly cared. He should have treated Katan differently, treated him better, proved to him that he loved him by his actions if he couldn't manage it by his words. He shouldn't have hurt him and gone on hurting him over and over again, by inaction, by negligence, by his fits of childish pique which saw him lashing out at anyone regardless of whether or not they deserved it simply because his rage wanted a victim. Maybe none of this would have happened if he'd just been open with Katan and honest with himself. If he'd just managed to restrain his temper and stop himself from abusing and pushing away the only person who had ever loved him in the way he so desperately wanted to be. Perhaps things would have been different.

Rociel felt like screaming give him back to empty air; he knew it would do no good, he knew there was nobody listening to him, nobody to answer any prayer, if that even was a prayer. It didn't make him feel any less like screaming, any less desperate. There was nothing he could do any more, nothing anyone could do except for Katan. If he was even capable of that any more, if he even wanted to and ultimately, that was up to Katan, not Rociel. All Rociel could do was stand and wait and hope and that wasn't something he was good at. He wasn't the kind of person who could easily cope with someone else taking the responsibility for carrying out something he so desperately wanted. He'd always been the kind of person who believed, when it came down to it, in the personal touch.

All he wanted was one last chance! Was that too much to ask? One last chance.

Perhaps it was. Why did he, why would anyone deserve another chance when they had blown it so completely the first time? Why would anyone, no matter how patient or how deep their own love, be prepared to put himself through all that again? Mind games, trickery, deceit, abuse… nobody should have to tolerate that. Even if it came from a man who professed love, because that was no way to show your affection for someone. Love, true love, wasn't supposed to be destructive. Wouldn't merciful oblivion be better than life as the puppet of an insane master?

And perhaps that was why Katan didn't want to give him another chance. By rights there should have been no hope of a reprieve for either of them. Maybe it was better that Rociel didn't hope that there was. He shouldn't pray for a miracle when there was no such thing as a miracle. He shouldn't hope for a second chance when he had no right to. One chance was all most creatures got at life, why should he and Katan be any different? It would be better for the both of them if he stopped playing this childish game which relied on second chances, death and rebirth. He had no right to put Katan through all that again. Katan was too fine a person for that, too fine a man to have to live with such treatment. Better for the both of them if this was forever. Katan would have had a lucky escape and as for Rociel… wasn't he a hopeless case anyway? He didn't deserve Katan anyway and he never had…

But Rociel wouldn't let himself believe that either.

So he hoped. There had to be hope for them. They weren't like other creatures, he and Katan were not like that. Surely an angel's life could not be forfeit so easily? No God who claimed to be a loving God could possibly be so cruel to his chosen ones, surely. No, surely not. Even if God almost certainly wasn't listening any more. Even if, in the absence of God, the only person Rociel could have possibly had to pray to was himself. Even if a sinner like Rociel didn't deserve leniency and second chances, didn't deserve to be allowed to put things right, what had Katan done wrong save be born of the wrong parent? Surely Katan was pure.

He would change. Rociel promised himself, he promised the both of them, that he would change if only he were given the chance to. He would be different. He would be kinder, more caring. He would try his utmost to control himself, this time. He would try and curb his helter-skelter descent into insanity; he would fight it. He even wanted to promise Katan that he would forget his childish infatuations with Alexiel, but even as the thoughts were formed Rociel knew that was one promise that he would never be able to keep, not whilst he remained himself. There was no way to change that, to undo the hasty actions of his own recent past - it was much too late to abandon the path he was already on - but if he was fated to confront Alexiel again at least he could stop abusing Katan, who loved him, who he loved, because he was angry with her and with himself for not letting go of someone who, he suspected (deep down), couldn't care for him in such a way and just wanted a target. Did that matter now, though? No. Alexiel, for once, wasn't important. What was important was Katan.

Katan mattered. He had always mattered and he always would.

Next time, he promised, if God willing there is to be a next time, things will be different, Katan. Things will be better. He would try to be just as good to Katan as the boy had always been to him. He would prove to him how much he meant; Rociel wouldn't let anyone hurt him any more, least of all himself. All he wanted was a second chance; one more chance was all he needed to make things better. He had taken Katan for granted, he realized… well, never again, not after this, not after all the pain that their separation, brief though it might have been so far, had made him feel. Please Katan, Rociel thought - was it a prayer? It felt like a prayer - give me one more chance. One last try to make things up to you.

Come back to me, Katan. Come home.

~fin~

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