Disclaimer: I don't own Angel Sanctuary; I only wish I was that creative. The creative genius is, of course, Kaori Yuki - respect her. For all copyright lawyers: this is a fan work written strictly for pleasure, not profit. Angel Sanctuary is actually the property of Kaori Yuki, Hana to Yume, Hakusensha, the company who made and released the OAV even if they did change quite a bit and various foreign companies who hold the translation rights - lucky them!

Author's notes: After doing two fanfics dealing with Rociel's views on Katan I thought it was about time to take the opposite point of view, so to speak, so this one deals with Katan's first impressions of Rociel just after his resurrection (chapter 4 of the manga, for those of you who want to know). It's also another one that kept me up much, much later than I intended because I wanted to get it finished before all my inspiration died. I'm on a real streak again at the moment and I've still got one more pretty well-formed idea that I want to play with, but that one's going to be a bit longer than this, so I thought I'd get this done first. C&C welcome but please, no flames!

And so night fell on the city, the shadows like a shroud. A place that never slept had been plunged suddenly into unexpected darkness, darkness that had caught its inhabitants unprepared. They were used, after all, to the unnatural light laid on by the city council, but tonight the artificial stars of streetlights and shop windows (a light that was, when viewed from a distance, baleful in a strange way, the lights, though beautiful in themselves, were nothing but one of the signs of man's desire to completely master his environment) had been, for once, replaced by the real thing. Real starlight, real moonlight. A light that was both beautiful and cold. It had seemed, somehow, strangely suitable.

Beautiful and cold. How apt, Katan thought. He must have appreciated it.

Why night? Why had he chosen to do it at night? It showed a flair for the dramatic that he had not suspected he even possessed. Of course, the chances of there being enough power then had been greater, far greater than during the day when all but the most antisocial were forced onto the streets and into the capital's schools, colleges and offices. During the day the lonely had their isolation brought home all the more forcibly by the crowds, by having to confront head-on a world which to them no doubt seemed full of the happy and fulfilled, a world in which everyone else seemed to have found their place. He knew the feelings, he had felt much the same after he'd lost Rociel; he had wondered, as they must have wondered, how anyone could reach contentment in such a world. But by night the lonely people would have nowhere to go but home and little to do when they got there.

How convenient that had been for him. How convenient for the plan he had formulated and now carried through. Terrible that he had thought of them just as disposable parts, as useful only for a time - so too Rociel must have thought of them - but maybe, if he hadn't thought like that, Katan wouldn't have been able to go through with his plans. No matter how dubious he might have felt about the detail, the way it was enacted, he was acting for the best…

From Katan's viewpoint it would have been quite a spectacle, if he had but been in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, if he'd had the kind of mind that could find enjoyment in such a thing. Of course he felt that such an expenditure was justified - or at least he hoped that it would ultimately turn out to be. For all his loyalty did he have any way to validate, even to himself, the saving of one life only at the expense of so many others? And even if he could have did that mean that he had to find pleasure in the means as well as the end? If only he could have forgotten what the price had been, it might well have been just as spectacular to him as it must have been to any other watcher… but how could he? How, when he had been the one to lure those lost souls to their ultimate deaths?

How could he, when he'd been the one to kill them? When he'd been the one to provide the means to their own end? All they had been was lost and lonely. No matter how self-indulgent and self-pitying they may have been they hadn't deserved to pay such a price for it. But then nobody could truly be said to deserve death, and surely Lord Rociel had been worth it.

Hadn't he?

Maybe he had. But maybe he wasn't any more…

Even though their meeting, only recently passed, had been brief Katan had come away with the feeling that he had changed. Rociel had changed, subtly but yet somehow fundamentally, since the last time they had spoken - had forcing himself to fight Alexiel and the weight of the subsequent years changed him so much? Katan remembered him, but he wasn't sure he recognized him. How many times in their meeting had Rociel said something that seemed somehow essentially wrong, done something that Katan hadn't expected him to? Reacted in a way that didn't seem like him, spoken in a way he couldn't remember his master having spoken before? Once or twice Rociel had even managed to frighten and hurt him; that didn't seem right.

They had known one another a long time and yet the person he had met tonight had been, in some ways, almost a stranger. True, memories could sometimes be at fault.

It was probably that. His recollections must have become, over time, somewhat idealized. He had been without Rociel for a very long while now and, no matter how much he cherished the memories, memories never did the person so remembered complete justice. Certain things were forgotten, odd quirks and traits that made them what they were and yet were somehow disagreeable could be happily forgotten if they didn't fit the image that was being created. Maybe that was what had happened. There was no way that anyone, even Rociel, could live up to the impossibly admirable creature that selective memory could create.

Or maybe they had both changed.

Katan didn't know how late it was; midnight, maybe one or two o'clock at the most. Up here, presiding over darkness (Tokyo, normally a crystalline burst of artificial starlight when viewed from such a spot, was now nothing more than an ocean of darkness in which the only bright spots were the headlights of the occasional car and the slower-moving specks that told of groups of people making their way home with the help of torch or flashlight) he had no way of knowing how time had passed since he and Rociel had been reunited. There had been time enough to think things over though, time enough for him to grow concerned.

"You weren't yourself tonight," he murmured to the darkness. "You're not yourself."

Lord Rociel, you frightened me, he wanted to say. But even though he knew that Rociel couldn't hear him, probably wouldn't have been listening anyway - his master was still, after all, very weak compared to the way he had been at the peak of his powers and he had a disguise to maintain, at least for now - he didn't want to say anything even to himself, for fear of being overheard. He had felt many things around Rociel before but fear had never one of them anything more than fleetingly and had normally been fear for him, not fear of him; now, hours after their meeting, Katan still felt somewhat shaken. Tentatively he reached out and touched the cut on his cheek, flinching slightly when his fingers brushed against it. The wound still pained him somewhat, it still stung. It was not, he thought, a good sign that bare moments after finally seeing one another again he had managed to rouse Rociel's anger to such an extent that the man he idolized had seen no way forward but to lash out wildly at him.

His confidence in the ultimate rightness of his actions, always somewhat uncertain, had been, he admitted, shaken further by their meeting. Rociel had undeniably changed.

That wasn't a comfortable thought either but it wasn't one that he could discount so easily. He was prepared to believe that he had been the one at fault, that his memories had been wrong rather than that something was the matter with Rociel himself, but still… he could feel it. Something was very different now. Something about it all had been, probably it still was - even thinking those treacherous, insidious thoughts made him feel horribly guilty for having them in the first place - wrong. He didn't know what it was but there was something, something he couldn't quite place.

Katan sighed, staring out across the darkened city. There was very little to see but he looked anyway; all he wanted was some kind of proof that life was still going on out there. Why was he still here, when he was chilled to the bone and, though he'd barely allowed himself to admit it, exhausted? Why was he still here watching over the sleeping city? To reassure himself that it really was only sleeping? That the power surge, the power cut, hadn't been responsible for wiping out the entire city (how foolish of him, when he could still see the flicker of torch light on the streets and the headlights of the roaming cars; faint signs of life in a city that seemed otherwise still and dead) He didn't even know how many lives had been lost to save Rociel. How many people he had killed.

He had never been happy about taking life even when there was no way round it - and he had, try though he might, thought of no other way out of it, no other way to achieve the same thing without the cost being much the same or even worse. Alexiel had done a thorough job, a job that even he had to admit had been carried out well, if the result had not been desirable, and it was all he could do to release Rociel this way. Like it or not things weren't the way they had been before the war but, from the evidence of tonight, neither was Rociel.

Katan could remember that girl. Some, indeed most of them he couldn't remember; anonymous faces, strangers to him, but that young girl whose body Rociel had ended up occupying he remembered. She had been young and upset and frightened; exactly the kind of person he had favored. He remembered how she had looked at him. She had been afraid of him too, not of him personally but of the kind of man she must have assumed he was, the person he had represented. The kind of man who accosted young girls on their way home from school, the kind of man who did things to reluctant women - Katan was not that kind of man and yet to her he might as well have been. She had been rather pretty in a quiet kind of way, but it had been a strictly ordinary prettiness of the kind you ran into over and over again during the course of a single day. Shy. Scared though she was, she hadn't thought of running - not until the boy came, that familiar stranger who had pulled her away.

Such an innocent. Rociel had, when taking the form of that shy, quiet teenager, made her look very different. The girlish timidity, the look of mild fright, had been replaced by an unusual languor and a cynical, feline smile that had never seemed out of place on Rociel's lips but looked wrong on such fresh, uncomplicated features; her vague, conventional attractiveness had already been replaced by Rociel's terrible beauty. Poor little girl, Katan thought. Spared from whatever had happened to the others only to lose her body to his master. What had happened to her soul?

What had her name been?

Too late to go back. What was done was done. Katan had blood on his hands and the stain would never, ever shift.

____

They had been children, mostly. Children who, with a child's self-centeredness, thought that the world judged them far more harshly than it did, that people cared about them more than they did (like it or not most people an individual meets in the course of a lifetime do not impact on that individual's life very deeply or for very long), that the world hated them when it was in fact merely indifferent - and was that actually better or maybe even worse? Lonely, confused, young, they'd cried out for something or someone to make them feel important and Katan had handed them something that did just that.

They couldn't even meet the world halfway and so when they'd finally been given, in the bizarre format of a computer disc, a friend who really did seem to care for them, who knew what made them happy and what made them sad, who promised that no matter what happened they would help them, it took hold of them like a drug. At first it would make a positive difference, make them happier and more confident, secure in the knowledge that their secret friend cared and would make things better; it was insidious like that. That ghastly game ate away at their lives, straining the ties with the few people they did have but who didn't know them so well as the infallible game did. And then it killed them.

No wonder so many had fallen victim; how many he had no way of knowing. Maybe nobody would ever know for sure. All he knew was that most of them had been young and foolish. Easily led. Easily deceived. Easy to manipulate someone who had such a desperate need for something that they had never possessed; friendship, intimacy, love. Or maybe it had just been acceptance that they wanted.

And what, Katan thought, did I want from all this, if it wasn't his acceptance? His love?

His own actions … what had they been but those of a child who couldn't move on? He was a parentless child, an orphan desperately trying to recapture the affections of someone who had died years ago even if they existed in potentia. He hadn't moved on; the coaxing and urging of those few who had cared for him, who hadn't been put off getting close to him by the fact that he was Rociel's child and his only real confidant, that he was devoted to him, hadn't been enough to break those ties. Some can find a new fulfillment even after a loved one's death; for Katan, the alternatives he had been offered were none of them anywhere near good enough to make him leave his old attachments behind. Nobody had even come close to replacing Rociel.

So he'd jumped at the chance when it was offered and brought him back, but at such a cost! Such a heavy cost that even at the time he had wondered if maybe all this might not have been worth it just for the one man…

And now he'd done it he wasn't even sure if the result pleased him.

He was glad to have Rociel back - more than glad; he'd missed him terribly, missed just knowing that, even if they were apart, he was somewhere - but he wasn't sure that the comfort the resurrection had brought him, assuaging his childish desire to see him once more, had been worth so many lives. The deaths had been terrible and Katan knew it; he would, for the rest of his life, have those deaths on his conscience. He had murdered those people surely as if he had held a gun to their heads and no matter how lonely they had been in life the deaths of so many would touch so many more - classmates, workmates, friends, families… he knew the pain of losing a loved one and knowing that he had caused such pain to so many others distressed him. But he had done it to save a man he loved. Didn't that in and of itself go some way, no matter how small, to justifying his actions if not the consequences? Even now, if something had gone wrong, he would have been prepared to start over.

Hadn't it been worth it to rescue Rociel? Why was that even a question? This was what he'd wanted! This was all he had hoped for all those years! So why had even one brief meeting with a man he knew he still cared for deeply been enough to inspire such misgivings?

That was easy. It was because Rociel wasn't himself any more, he wasn't the person Katan remembered; something about him had changed, however subtly, and Katan knew him well enough to be able to spot that change. He had been able to feel momentary disappointment in Rociel for his failure to live up to the person his own memories had transformed him into but had felt embarrassed by the thoughts almost immediately afterward. No matter who Rociel was now he was still Rociel and Katan was still indebted to him; he had a duty to him that he couldn't not uphold. Nobody could have lived up to the high expectations that Katan had held, not even he could have managed that. He may have fallen short of Katan's memories, but did that then give him some kind of excuse to abandon Rociel, did it give him the right to be any less loyal? Of course not. He was living with the real person now, not some romanticized dream figure he could imagine to be any way he wanted, anyone he wanted. It wasn't his image, his illusions, that were important. Rociel wasn't a pleasant daydream that he could turn off at will any more; he could no longer pretend to himself that the object of his affections was unflawed.

But his child still loved him, and surely that was reason enough.

~fin~

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