[AN: This occurs after Rosiel's "death" and the main battle of Volume 20 when, badly injured, Setsuna sees Rosiel and Katan's spirits and asks Rosiel for help. The interpretation and sequence of events borrowed from the manga correspond to the official English translation, not the fan translation. Setsuna's line that is only excerpted here is "My astral power...feels like I've used it all up. Think you can lend me some of yours?" The one that is skipped is "It's okay...I can stand on my own. It's strength I don't need anymore" I find afterlife(?) Rosiel's hesitation in responding striking, so this fic is the result of that. Borrowed lines and honorifics are also taken from the official English translation.]
There is pain - immense, immeasurable. His rotting body convulses. The cursed cells collapse and explode-
- and then nothing
- and then nothing
- and she touches his face one last first time. With fingers calloused by war but warmer than he'd ever imagined, she lulls him. The mercy of not-God.
Her hair mingles with Katan's in his hands. Yes, my loves, yes, be with me-
Then the darkness overtakes him. He sinks into it like a child, floating down, down … until he is no more.
The voice seems to come from a great distance. He does not recognize it as words at first. A series of strange sounds, not shouted but calmly uttered, echo quietly around him. He feels a slight movement behind him and takes comfort in it.
"... some of yours?"
The words have their own discrete meanings that he struggles without confusion to put together. Once combined, they form a question. Is he expected to answer?
He begins to recognize form again, all that exists against Void. Long legs like unblemished marble dangle over the precipice. Are they his? Could this flesh be his own?
The question: astral power. His own? That distinct sensation of power over time and space and distance. What use has he of such a power?
He sees the eyes that look up at him from the ruined floor of the tower. They match his own but they are not HERS. This is the boy now, emptied of the other soul, the one he so longed for. Mudo Setsuna, alive but mortal, sworn to hate him for eternity.
"Yes," he whispers. What the boy wants is trivial now, no great sacrifice for the dead.
"Can you just return Sara to the Earth for me?"
"Yes."
His own eyes are different. From the precipice he sees the tower's ruins. He sees the Garden of Eden before the fall of Man. He sees the razed slums of Shamayim, the flattened Anagura. He sees the Earth wanting to shake in its precarious artificial stillness. There. There at the center of the planet's devastation is a good place for her, warm and open in spite of the broken concrete, a new Eden where she can lie in peace.
With two effortless gestures of his fingers, he removes the girl's unconscious body. Though he cannot feel that immense divine power anymore, it is as easy as moving an insect. In that other plane, he sees her sleeping on the ground, waiting for the world to move again.
It is finished.
He closes his eyes, opens them again. The boy disappears. The ruins fall away. His feet (pearlescent, perfectly shaped) seem to float above a great nothingness. But the nothingness is not the Void of annihilation. Something exists below him but it is as the bottom of the ocean, a mystery beyond his reckoning.
The figure behind him moves again, a slight shift like a feather falling. He turns his head slowly to look over his shoulder. The man in the long coat looms over him, his pale hair gleaming in the light. He lifts a gloved hand. The hand waits in the air, inviting. The creature that was once the Inorganic Angel Rosiel leans forward, offering his face. Yes. This is the hand he wants, not that Other.
But that one belongs to a distant nightmare, and his nightmares do not belong to him anymore.
The gloved hand beckons. He places his own hand into it. A cool shudder passes through him. It's as if no one has ever touched him before. This touch soothes his new flesh and he feels as if he is falling, tumbling off the precipice and into that empty space where he might fall forever.
The hand pulls him up, gently guiding him to his feet. The unfamiliar/familiar body trembles and nearly falters. Then those arms go around him, enveloping him in their warmth and strength, protecting him as they've always done.
He tilts his face upward and looks into the eyes of his beloved.
Memory eats away at the edges. Memory's sharp teeth drive images into his brain - a pool of blood, fatally wide, that lovely face separated from its body, the cheek growing cold under his fingers, the lips unspeaking…
No no no NO
"Lord Rosiel?"
It's the voice of those lips but those lips aren't moving, what has he done -
"Lord Rosiel, stay with me, stay-"
Voice pierces memory. The dead face, very much alive, looks down into his. The lips offer a tender smile. "There you are. Stay with me. You're safe here."
"Safe…"
The arms tighten around him. Those beautiful eyes seem to glisten with tears.
"K… Katan?" The word feels like a talisman on his tongue.
The smile widens. "Yes, Lord Rosiel. You gave me that name."
"Katan…" A laugh escapes him, not the mad giggle that has shaken inside him for so long but a true laugh. His Katan, his only knowledge of perfection. His eyes blink against grateful tears.
"Please don't cry, Lord. Rosiel." The voice splits into two, one the same, one younger and higher. He feels those arms about his waist now. Their embrace becomes a paradox: the taller man with the kind eyes envelops him while a child with the same hair and features hugs him almost too hard.
"You said you wanted to go back," the man says, as the child implores, "This is such a beautiful place, Lord Rosiel. I wish you wouldn't cry."
One of his hands lightly falls to the top of the child's head. In this place he understands that their bodies are one, that to touch one is to touch the other. "I…"
What can he say now, after what he did? He has sinned against all of creation, against his sister, but most of all against this creature, who had only ever sought to please him. The pain of his own crimes presses a sharp ache into his chest. For a moment he wishes for the release of insanity again, to not know his own evil, to not see that face going pale on the floor.
The man smiles slightly; the child giggles.
"Don't apologize, sir," they say together. "We're past that now."
"I can feel what you feel, " the child says. "Remember? And I want to be happy."
Another soft laugh escapes him. It's the same laugh the child used to elicit from him, back in those days when the secret they shared could make him forget his madness. How large the little cadet's eyes had been, still full of wonder and hope as he asked about every corner and crack of the realms that had once been forbidden to him. How light his voice had been, how miraculous his hands as he held one out to a bird, how beautiful his laugh when the bird alighted onto his fingers.
The man presses his lips chastely to his forehead. The former Inorganic Angel leans into the kiss. Yes, this is all he ever wanted, a love that does not feel like torture.
The beaming child merges with the man again, the man who is smiling as he hasn't done in years, perhaps centuries. "I'm not sure where we go from here, sir."
He realizes he doesn't know either. He has never known anything beyond the limits of the Creator, his false Father who had designed him to suffer for all the world.
He looks once more over the precipice, at once seeing the tower's floor and the empty expanse. He closes his eyes and sees his sister's body. The warmth in his flesh, he knows, is her blood.
The creature who was once his servant and once a cherub takes both his hands now. The gloves dissolve away. He trembles as he feels Katan's bare skin against his own.
"Should we...just go, Katan?"
"Yes, sir. Let the Savior have his own life now. It's nothing to do with us."
He nods against the warm body that holds him. Nothing to do with them. He isn't needed in Heaven or Earth. The eyes of the Creator that once seemed to follow his every step seem nowhere near him. He has nothing to destroy.
Sister, I still love you.
But he feels in her blood that she wouldn't want him to linger here. They are both free from the damnation of their purpose.
He breathes against Katan's chest and unfurls his wings to wrap them around their bodies, sealing their embrace. But I love you most.
"Forgive me."
"Yes."
Their wings entwine. The suffering world falls away beneath them, no more important than old, broken glass. He squeezes his beloved's hands.
"Stay with me, Katan."
"Yes."