Disclaimer: Chrono Crusade is the creation of Daisuke Moriyama and owned by lots of entities who are not affiliated with me in any way, shape, or form (sadly). I'm just borrowing his character(s) for a romp or twenty.
A/N: I've noticed that most Chrono/Chrno Crusade fanfiction centers around Rosette and Chrono. Naturally; they are our beloved protagonists, after all. However, at the end of the anime, I found myself wondering about Azmaria: how she comes to grips with her losses, and how she comes into her own. This is my bent on the canon.
"The darker the night, the brighter the stars/The deeper the grief, the closer is God!" Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
The Brighter the Stars
Prologue
In the aftermath of the Ritual of Atonement, Azmaria Hendrick is adrift. Stripped of her curse—and, conversely, her apostolic abilities—she has become an ordinary girl. It bewilders her. What is she, if not a living dichotomy of harmer and healer? Her nature—or what it was, not anymore—shaped so much of herself, and of her understanding of the world, that she feels loose inside the edges of her body. Her soul developed with those spiritual tumors, and now, in their absence, her soul is smaller. Emaciated, she supposes; tumors divert nutrients. She will have to feed her soul, make it fit her body once more. Oh, but it's hard, this change.
The power that had shimmered in her veins when she sang an aria disappeared, leaving behind only the ghostly hum of her blood. It's strange to realize that, in spite of everything, part of her pleasure in singing came from that energy, the way it filled her with brightness and piety. Even in the times when her wings did not manifest, she felt the warmth beneath her skin, turning her bones to pearls. The act of singing, of maintaining posture and exhaling through the diaphragm and rounding her vowels, feels coldly mechanical in its absence. In the shadowed harbor of her heart, where her selfish impulses dock, she mourns its loss.
However, the end of her misfortune, of bestowing sorrow upon others by simply being, transcends any regrets resulting from that forfeiture. She no longer fears metaphysical hands using her as a conduit to commit destruction. This normalcy—of drinking tea in a parlor and no one taking ill, or entering a five-and-dime without someone committing a burglary—unnerves her. She is a foreigner to this existence of common happenstance.
Yet her past has not been entirely content to remain there; like trailing mud across a freshly scrubbed floor, those she encountered before the severance of her curse do not evade its grime. The Church demotes Sister Kate; Joshua is an amnesiac in a dissociative state; and Satella succumbs to injuries sustained in her final confrontation with Fiore. The jewel summoner's death weighs heavily on her small shoulders, a cloak of lead threatening to bend her spine.
Making matters worse, Rosette and Chrono, her stalwart companions and dearest friends, have been missing for months. She prays for their safe return, but the wick from which her flame of hope sways burns ever shorter. Azmaria dreams about the tick-tick-tick of the mystical timepiece around Rosette's neck. She knows it can't stay wound forever, and when it stops…
They're dead. Is it the echoes of her misfortune, their unavoidable destiny, or a little of both? The inconsolable sobs of the Magdalene Sisters offer little insight. No comfort, no apologies. They would be worthless, anyway. She approaches them on nerveless legs, feeling disembodied, wispy. Azmaria can't process this bittersweet tableau. Knowing and seeing is so, so different; she wishes… Well, horses and beggars.
Sitting side-by-side on a porch swing in the rosy glow of dusk, Rosette and Chrono hold hands in eternal repose. With their heads bent toward one another, smiling beatifically, it seems that they have finally achieved the serenity they so desperately sought in life. They fulfilled their contract, she thinks, inanely. Trembling, Azmaria bends down to plant a kiss on each beloved forehead, the saint and her sinner, resulting in a deeper blow. "They're still warm," she informs Sister Claire with a wobbly smile, before her knees buckle under the shock of her loss.
Suffering drenches her face in bitter indigo, renders the world colorless. It feels like a thousand paper cuts scoring her skin, knowing she was so close; if only they were ten, five, two minutes faster, she could have said farewell. This regret burns so luminously in her breast that she cannot contain it; her heart erupts, a veritable supernova that wracks her body from skull to toes, consumes her whole, turns her to dust. Darkness swirls behind her eyes. Everything she has longed for is detritus twisting in the void.