Author's Notes: Not meant to be religious, so take no offense to any of the content. Please R&R. Thank you. Enjoy
Disclaimer: Rurouni Kenshin belongs to Nobuhiro Watsuki. Bow to him.
The angel was falling. Into a perpetual chasm he had been tossed, abandoned.
Falling.
Knowing what he wouldn't find, he reached for the silken familiarity that had always sprouted from his back and…
Nothing.
Falling.
The severity of his punishment was deepened by the presence of the others, the spirits known as the Damned. From out of the darkness, their tortured faces materialized and unfurled like smoke from a fire pit, welcoming the newcomer with an anguished cacophony that spoke of their undoing.
They let him see- forced him to see- the pain, the brutality, the inhumanity- or rather, the humanity- that merited their punishment. They wanted his pity, or his fear, or they wanted to thrust some of their misery onto him in an attempt to lessen theirs. And the angel did feel these things, but worse than their torment was the emptiness that pressed dreadfully up his back.
His back…
Bare. Incomplete. Falling.
There was something, however, that kept the slightest amount of hope in his heart. At the highest point of the chasm was a narrow break of light that filtered through. The angel reached for this proverbial light as if there were a possibility that he'd be forgiven and saved, perhaps even be lifted back home. As the break of light became increasingly narrower, however, and the emptiness that already stretched into eternity seemed to dreadfully stretch even more, the angel's hope sputtered out.
He was damned to fall forever.
Damned to be forever trapped in darkness and in pain among these piteous creatures who in their mortal lives had committed acts of atrocities while he…
He'd lost his faith in the Creator. Had doubted and disobeyed. Perhaps he did deserve to be here. But he was not prepared for this. For people cast into Damnation, there would never be closure, or even resignation. Suffering was all they would ever know.
Just when the last glimpse of light would seal and forever enclose him in darkness, the break widened. Golden light poured in, and from it a pair of arms descended. They grabbed hold of his wrist and pulled him upward. He allowed himself to be lifted, let himself be guided towards the light until he passed the bridge of consciousness…
He came back spewing water from his mouth. He spurted and coughed and rolled onto his fours. Then, proceeded to spurting and coughing and choking some more, all the meanwhile he was distantly aware of a strange noise and something tapping (more like thudding) his back. When the last of the acrid water had been projected onto the dirt, and his breathing had slowed into an unleveled but steadier pace, he fell and spread himself onto the ground, staring dazedly at the mild sky overhead. Something like wind in a cave tore in his ear. Through it, indistinct words filtered through. The noise was most unnerving, but it was quickly forgotten when a large shape appeared overhead and blot out the sky. At first, weighed and lethargic from a near-death (or after-death) experience, he thought the person looking down at him with concern was one of his sisters.
She was cupping a side of his face, haloed by a dull shine of light behind her. She brought her face inches from his and said something he recognized as not being the language of the heavens, but a language of the earth. Upon looking closer at her face, he saw her imperfections and gaped. A scream stuck in his throat.
He sprung up, and a wave of dizziness hit him. Almost out of his own volition, he brought his forehead down onto his palm.
"Easy, there," she said, easing him to sit upright, her voice breathy by the energy she had expended on rescuing him, "you're okay now." He felt her stiffen as her hands traced something elevated up his back., and heard her gasp at what, for the briefest instant, he thought were his wings. The lack of weight on his back was enough to indicate that it was bare. In fact, all of him felt bare, exposed to a foreign atmosphere he did not exist to adapt to. A shiver ran down him, part of which had nothing to do with the weather. Afraid and not knowing what else to do, the fallen angel folded into himself, and began to pray in his language, finding that he could no longer speak it. Instead, it came out as an incoherent stream of noises. He was no longer an angel therefore he was no longer entitled to speak the sacred language. Forgetting about the girl, he wept in silent abandonment, hearing but not processing her words.
He felt her shaking and reluctant hands on his shoulders. "It's alright. You're safe now…"
He flinched away.
"I won't hurt you."
The fallen angel lifted and angled his head towards the young human, catching her eyes. They were blue, blue as the skies above, and skies he was very familiar with. Her dark hair stuck to her forehead like vines on stone, and there was a blemish on her chin that she had noticeably been picking at. From the small space between them, he could see the faint pores of her skin, traits so human and mundane he had to look away. Not that she was an unsightly creature, in fact, she was rather lovely, but he could not stomach her humanity as she was a blatant reminder of where he now permanently was. Of what he now was.
"Is there someone you'd like me to contact?"
The fallen angel stared intently at the ground. The dirt was dull and grainy, unlike the sand of his home, where each grain blinked like an individual star. He shut his eyes, shaking his head not so much as a response to her question as it was an expression of unmeasured sorrow.
"Do you speak English?" The girl asked in the language she inquired him of.
He remained silent.
"Wait here," she resumed in Japanese, "I'm going to try to find help."
He did not look up to see where she was going. He remained closed in on himself, breathing shakily as he struggled to calm his anxiety. The unnerving smell of damp earth and fish pervaded his nostrils as he inhaled, interrupting his attempt at self-composure. How odd. Though he was familiar with the countless smells particular to this world, this aroma stroked his olfactory sense differently than it had before.
Peering over his enfolded arms, his keen eyes slowly roved over his surroundings. The river ran its course in deceptive leisure, unaffected, as if his soul had not nearly been forever entombed in its waters. As he his eyes tuned into the currents of the river, the layers of the leaves, the groves carved in bark, he realized with a dawning mix of awe and dread that, along with his sense of smell, his sensory view of the world had changed. Prior to his fall, every once in a millennia the fallen one would descend onto earth and wander and muse over whichever area of the world fetched his curiosity. He'd been a foreign object then, an alien creature witnessing its complexity but never truly feeling its profundity. It was as if he had been looking through a glass door and had finally stepped over that door and was now part of it.
The fallen one all but hurriedly crawled towards the river, leaning into the water but careful not to lean too near. The water churned with dirt, smoggy like fog on windowpane, yet he could see his distorted reflection gaping back at him. He touched his face. The person gawking back at him looked similar to the being he had once known, except something was missing. The inner-light. To anyone else, the being that was frantically examining every inch of his flesh was by all rights splendid, with hair as rich as pomegranate and sun-kissed skin to die for. To him, however, it was merely a fleshy hide, no longer alight with the beautiful golden hue of his kin but dull and lackluster like the dirt beneath him.
And the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Man had been created in God's image, yet the only image his mind could fully gather was that of his surroundings, of himself, of the human that had rescued him. The Almighty's face was already fading, like a corroded photograph where the most damage was on the face of the one you'd most loved.
He cried out in anguish.