Warnings: This contains spoilers for the entire manga series of Chrono Crusade which mostly deal with the last chapter and the epilogue of volume eight (chapters fifty-six and fifty-seven for those of you that read the scanlations). This piece is also going to be fairly lengthy, so if you're one who enjoys a quick read, this fic may not be the one for you. If you decide to read it anyway, I applaud your efforts, and will try my very best to make sure that they do not go unrewarded.

A/N: I am aware that Chrono's fate is never stated explicitly in the manga, and therefore I know that there are many different theories out there. For the intent of this fic, though, Chrono is still alive (although he is healing slowly).

Initially, this was going to be a one-shot focusing on Chrono's struggle with grief in the years following Rosette's death. However, as I thought about the idea, I realized that I wanted to know how Azmaria, Joshua, and the rest faired in the absent of Rosette as well. I knew that they were able to move forward with their lives, but I wondered how they had gone about it. It couldn't have been easy to cope with such a loss.

This is only part of the results of my musings.

Acknowledgements: To my manga-obsessed friends, and to my two unofficial betas. Thank you very much for the encouragement and critique. I couldn't have done it without you.

Disclaimer: I hereby disclaim all rights to these characters. They belong to Moriyama Daisuke-sensei. I just happen to enjoy playing with them.

EDIT: I fixed one minor error. Thanks to Kesa Ange for pointing it out! ^^

The date was March 15, 1933. Today was the anniversary: the day that signified one year had come and gone since March 15, 1932.

Within the passing of that single year, Joshua Christopher rediscovered loss, although this time, it felt more certain. This time, he knew that his loved one was never coming back with a finality that could not be challenged.

Before, he hadn't known what had become of the person he cared about. All that he had known was that he missed her, his Fiore.

In the four years they worked together, she had become precious to him. In the quiet times spent with her when he was close to being lucid, he felt almost human.

When he learned that she had disappeared, he yearned once again for her companionship: for her to stay by his side as she had before.

Time marched onwards, and he continued to wait. Still, she did not return. Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months turned to years.

Waiting slowly became more difficult to endure, but he persisted. He threw himself into his work, to atone for his mistake: the lust for power he did not possess. Ultimately, this sin led him to take that which was not his, and in the process, his mind descended into a state in which he did not notice that he was leaving his sister behind.

His sister…

"Rosette…" Joshua's fists clenched at his sides, and he felt the thorns of the fresh roses he held dig into the soft flesh of his right hand. It wasn't supposed to be this way. But there was nothing he could do about it now.

Rosette had sacrificed everything for her only brother, searching for him faithfully. In an attempt to repay her, Joshua visited as often as he could.

Often times the sweet Angel that had been stolen away from all that she knew accompanied him on these pilgrimages. He had known the girl for a short time, before everything he had thought he'd known fell apart with the arrival of his half-forgotten past. He listened as she told stories of her own 'before,' and found that he could smile when she did and pretended not to notice her tears when the tales she wove weren't so pleasant.

Joshua eventually grew to know her as well as he had known the one he missed. He knew she could never replace his flower, but he had noticed long ago that her soul possessed a pure song of its own. With this, he realized that he could continue to wait. After all, Azmaria had been by his side waiting quietly for him.

It was soon after this epiphany that Joshua lost Rosette, who had fought her way to him despite all odds. His sister had never given up, even when he had refused to recognize her for who she was.

It was because of her that he had awakened from his dreams of chaos. Her influence permitted him to embrace his humanity again, and atone for all the sins he had committed while he still occupied that sacred place in his own personal Dreamland.

Joshua wished he could pin all the blame for Rosette's death on her former partner. It was Chrono who had stolen her time and Chrono who had caused her pain when he left. He was the Sinner: the demon that had drained the life from his sister's body.

And yet…he couldn't. As much as he wanted to, Joshua couldn't bring himself to do it. Yes, he had called Chrono a monster, and truthfully, Chrono possessed little innocence in the matter of his Contractor's death. However, the blame did not belong solely to the demon, either.

Chrono had tried to persuade the girl that there were other options. If Rosette would only wait, they would surely be able to find a solution that worked. The consequences of her choice would affect her for the rest of her life. He had told her of them: more than once.

Rosette doubted they had any other options. If there were, she knew it would be too late when they finally found the right one. They did not possess the time to wait. She refused to care about the consequences, even when Chrono repeated them to her.

She wasn't giving up; she could never give up. The one who meant the most to her was gone. He had been spirited away by a powerful otherworldly being: the one Chrono once called "brother."

Before, she could always count on Joshua to be there. They might not have had their parents, but they had always been there for each other. That's why she would do anything to get her brother back, even if the price would eventually be her life.

Rosette Christopher died at the age of twenty-four: the same age Joshua would be in less than a month's time. Still he could remember the way she had looked when she discussed her will with him the last morning he spent with her: her tired blue eyes shining as her lips curled into her trademark smirk, softened with age and experience. It surprised no one that Rosette found good humor even in death.

It was true that she had willingly made a contract with Chrono the Sinner. He had fed silently on her lifespan, the essence of her very soul, reluctantly draining her until the contract was finally severed, but not before he had cost her a significant portion of her life.

However, Rosette had become Chrono's Contractor to save his life. She had never considered him to be a malevolent being; despite the warning he gave the girl and her brother when they met for the first time. He may have been a little quiet and cheerless in the beginning, but he also told wonderful, if chilling stories and he had bothered to listen when she went on and on about the suspicious priest whom she was convinced only wanted to adopt Joshua because of his "power."

Chrono had been her friend: a friend who wouldn't survive without horns or a Contractor. Since the first had been taken by her brother, Rosette decided that as his friend, she would provide the demon with what he needed in order to take back what they both had lost.

But the main reason she made the contract was because of Joshua. She blamed herself for the pain that he had felt.

She hadn't thought that he might hate having to be protected, hate being reassured that he would get better, hate the pity, the worry, the constant talk about him and his so-called gift that took place behind his back. She had only wanted the best for him, and so when he fell, she felt that she had fallen, too.

That was why he blamed himself for what had happened to his sister. Chrono had made Rosette his Contactor, but it was not by his choice. He would've looked for another way if she would've allowed him to.

Rosette had needed Chrono's help to find Joshua: him. If he hadn't been so envious of his sister's strength, if he hadn't accepted those damned horns, she wouldn't have had to make a contract with a demon. If it weren't for him, Rosette might have lived to see 1933.

"Seven years, Rosette. That's all the time I got to spend with you after four years apart. Seven years. And you know what? It wasn't enough. I spent too much of that time working with the Order while you stayed at Seventh Bell. I know I should've visited more, but I didn't have the time. God, why did you have to take away my sister? She was the only thing I had left, and now she's gone!"

Tears streamed silently down Joshua's face, but he ignored them. He had wasted one year trying to ignore the pain, run away from the guilt, and hide from his own anger, losing himself in the process. Now he felt every emotion he had previously attempted to suppress come flooding back, and he welcomed them all bitterly.

His sister never would've approved of this behavior. She was always one to advocate the freedom of expressing emotion; she was a well-known practitioner of the policy. He closed his eyes and the sight of Rosette's familiar cheerful expression twisted into a disappointed frown, her eyebrows furrowing together, greeted him.

'It's not healthy to keep your emotions bottled up like that, Joshua," he imagined she would admonish him. Azmaria frequently reminded him that Rosette did tell him that on a regular basis before she died, but he chose to ignore those comments, just as he chose to ignore the worried glances Azmaria shot him when she thought he wasn't looking. A hint of a smile appeared on his face before vanishing. Az is always worrying about me when it isn't necessary.

"I wouldn't call my concern unnecessary, Joshua." The angelic voice of a familiar young woman greeted him. Joshua's eyes flew open and came to rest on Azmaria, who was giggling lightly at the flustered young man's boyish reaction to her sudden appearance. Upon feeling his eyes bore into her, she stopped.

"I can't read your mind, you know. You simply spoke your thoughts aloud," she teased gently, her eyes twinkling with mirth. Joshua's stare softened and a genuine smile broke his emotionless façade.

"How long have you been standing there, Az?" Joshua asked, rubbing the back of his neck in a nervous habit from boyhood that had yet to disappear.

"It's only been for a few minutes. I heard you yelling, so I thought I might come here to see what about," she said, twisting her hands around the bouquet of forget-me-nots she was holding.

"Az…" He could tell she was concerned.

"I know that you wanted to talk to Rosette alone, and I tried to respect that, but Joshua, you have to understand that when I heard your shouts I thought something might be wrong and I couldn't just leave you alone like that and—" She was silenced when he put a finger to her lips.

"Shhhh, Az. I'm all right now. You don't need to worry about it," Joshua made an effort to persuade her, but she paid his feeble attempts at reassurance no mind. Azmaria swatted away the placating hand he attempted to put on her shoulder that had formerly been placed at her lips aside. Her ears refused to believe the pretty lies.

"Don't try to tell me that you're 'all right now.' You haven't been all right since Rosette died, Joshua, whether you'll admit it or not. You can't keep doing this forever. You just can't! What would your sister think if she was here? What would she say if she saw that you weren't trying?" Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. Joshua restrained himself from submitting to his heart's desire to brush them away. He absolutely loathed seeing Azmaria in such a distressed state. It was especially so when he was the cause of it.

"She wouldn't say anything, because I am trying," he insisted. "I just…I don't know what to do. My sister's gone, Azmaria, and I'm never going to see her again."

"You mean we are never going to see her again," Azmaria softly corrected with a sniffle. Joshua gave her another genuine, though melancholic smile.

"Yes. We aren't going to see her again. She passed away. Her soul's traveling down the Astral Line now. Maybe she's even reunited with our parents…" Joshua said wistfully, staring up at the "Ring" that contained the remnants of Pandaemonium.

Sometimes, he pretended that he could see the Astral Line stretching out forever beside it, much as he truly did see it eight years ago with Rosette. That was the first and last time he had ever seen the Astral Line, but there were times when he believed that he could sense it. During those times, he questioned whether his powers were truly gone or simply sleeping within him: dormant until a time when he needed them once more.

"Joshua…Rosette may be gone, but she isn't truly dead," Azmaria exclaimed suddenly, bringing him swiftly back to the present. Joshua glanced down at her face in an effort to discern what she meant, but his observations gave him no hints about her ideas.

"Azmaria, what…?" What was she talking about?

"Don't you remember what she told us, Joshua? The day Beth informed me that it was likely Rosette wouldn't live through another fit?"

The light in Joshua's eyes appeared to dim.

"The year before she died?" he asked reluctantly. Azmaria nodded.

"Yes. Rosette told us that as long as we still lived, she would not die, because her memory would continue to live on in our hearts. You remember that, don't you?" Joshua said nothing, but his silence told her all she wished to hear.

That evening, with the cool air of early spring ruffling the rough fabric of the uniform that stood for his atonement, he had hesitantly accepted that his sister was going to die before she reached the age of thirty.

He had known perhaps since the day they were reunited. At the time, his mind had hurriedly skipped over the topic, wishing not to disturb the relief he had felt when his sister's soul was called back from the recesses of the pocket watch where it had taken refuge.

However, the notion did not vanish. He often found it lurking in the shadows of his thoughts when he spent time with his sister. As he grew older, it resurfaced more frequently. More than once he found himself wondering how much time she had left. When he and Azmaria visited, he feverishly hoped it wouldn't be the last time they saw her alive.

The day they learned of her attack was the day Joshua began to build a stone wall around his heart. When the sight of his sister, lying on her bed, pale in the face and short of breath, met his eyes, the fragile glass of his heart fractured. The wall he was building could not protect him from the empty longing he felt for his before: the times he and his sister shared as innocent children, without any care but for their parents who were not yet dead and each other.

He attempted to hide it, but Rosette saw right through him. Her one-time failure to notice his hatred of her sympathy taught her to sense his true emotions when no one else could. Her confrontation turned to his accusation: she had known that her life would be cut short. She had known the consequences of her actions, and she had ignored them.

Rosette's laughter rang out, an impish grin tugging playfully at the corners of her mouth. Although it lacked the strength it once possessed, for a split second Joshua found it impossible to discern the woman his sister had become from the girl she had been.

'Yes, I knew I would be paying this price.' She coughed: a tribute to the illness that her body was slowly succumbing to. 'But without the contract, I wouldn't have been able to see you again. So it was definitely worth it.'

Two years had passed since then, but the moment remained perfectly preserved in his mind as the fracture in his glass heart continued to deepen no matter how high he built his wall of stone.

"It will never leave, will it? This pain," he murmured to Azmaria dully. He heard her breath catch in her throat: the surprise at his open expression of emotion. He had not freely spoken of his feelings to her in what seemed like an eternity. Gently she uncurled the fingers on his left hand, slipping her hand in his when there was enough space. He silently marveled at how slender yet strong her fingers were, easily intertwining with his. At last she spoke.

"The pain will linger, yes. However, I believe it will become easier to bear with time." She gave his hand a soft, reassuring squeeze. He sighed: a heavy sound that carried the burden of his grief.

"I won't ever stop missing her, Az." He was careful to avoid her eyes; Rosette was not the only Christopher who possessed tenacity. Emotions rarely wrote themselves across his face, but his eyes forever revealed the true nature of his current thoughts, thoughts that he did not wish for Azmaria to see.

He was blind to her knowledge of the emptiness he felt. She did not have to see his eyes to know that they lacked their usual luster because her own were close to losing theirs.

However, this did not mean that she was without hope for their future.

"I don't believe I will either, Joshua, but dwelling on the past was something Rosette never did. We have to keep moving forward. It's what she would have wanted." The sudden strength in her voice urged him to meet her eyes: his resolve melted and azure fell to pale pink. Her mouth turned up at the corners in a tiny smile, and he caught a glimpse at how the world looked through her rose-colored eyes.

Hope lived in Azmaria, burning like a fierce light behind her eyes. Though her time as an Apostle was over, the beautiful purity of her song continued to resonate within her soul. If he listened closely, Joshua could hear echoes of it keeping time with the beating of their hearts.

He broke the eye contact to gaze up at the sky. The sun had become obscured by dark clouds, foreshadowing the weather's intentions. The thought of spring showers brought an image of his ten-year-old sister staring out the window of her bedroom at Seventh Bell forth from deep within the archives of his memory. Tap, tap, tap went her restless fingers against the glass as she waited impatiently for the rain to cease its falling.

The long-ago memory was not dissimilar to a more recent time. Rosette had just had one of her last fits. Beth, ever the cautious one, had confined Rosette to her room until she deemed her well enough. Rosette's objections fell on deaf ears: Beth refused to budge.

As a result, Rosette had propped her pillow up on the bed so that she could look outside even while lying down. Joshua found her doing exactly that when he and Azmaria finally arrived after receiving Beth's letter. His sister's expression had been identical to the one she had worn on rainy days when they were younger.

Reflecting on this, Joshua supposed that some things never changed. Looking at Azmaria, however, reminded him that things were different than they had been back then.

"I think I'm ready." His voice rang with the undertone of a conclusion: this meant no turning back.

"Ready for what, Joshua?" Her hopeful tone was also hesitant, as if she was unsure if she could trust his words.

"I think I'm ready to move forward again, Az. Rosette wouldn't want me to live like this forever. Besides, if she were here, she'd probably conk me on the head for being such a wet blanket," he confirmed, giving Azmaria a grin. She smiled in return, giggling.

"You're right, Joshua, she probably would, but it would be for your own good. You shouldn't be so unhappy," she chastised lightly.

"I suppose you're right, then, although that means that you have to be happy, too," he reminded her. The young woman's face flushed a pretty shade of pink.

"I am happy, Joshua. I'm happy that you've finally come here with me. It's a big step forward."

"I guess I'm going in the right direction then, huh?" Joshua made light of his situation, though his eyes shone with tears.

Azmaria chose to clasp both of his hands in hers: an affirmation that spoke louder than any word. Yes, he was going in the right direction: forward, just as she had known he would.

For Joshua had made her a promise, sealed in the form of the golden ring she wore on her left hand. Until his life's clock ceased its constant ticking, he would walk beside Azmaria on the path that their lives created together. Turning back had never been an option.

It was a short while before Joshua spoke again.

"Should we go? I don't want to get caught in the rain…" Plip. Plop. Plip. Plop.

"It's a bit late for that, Joshua," Azmaria noted, her face turned up to the heavens as a light rain began to spill forth.

"Well then, I suppose there's no choice in the matter." Joshua placed his bouquet of roses on the marble beneath the tombstone and turned to leave. "Azmaria, you're coming, aren't you?" He glanced back at her impatiently. Rain made driving a rather unpleasant experience, and he wanted to get on the road before conditions worsened.

"Joshua, do you know anyone else who's visited the cemetery today?" Joshua blinked as he absorbed the information, promptly forgetting his annoyance with the rain.

"…Azmaria?" Her intense gaze had turned from the heavens to Rosette's grave.

"Look." He followed her gesturing hand to a bouquet of flowers resting against Rosette's tombstone next to Azmaria's forget-me-nots that Joshua hadn't noticed before.

"What, those flowers? People do tend to put flowers on the graves of their loved ones."

"No, Joshua. Look." She continued to point at the bouquet of flowers. The young man sighed.

"I am looking, Az. All I see is another bouquet. What's so strange about that?" He could not detect any abnormality about the other bouquet: her strange fascination with it puzzled him.

Azmaria sighed in frustration.

"Joshua, out of everyone we know, who was visiting the cemetery today besides us?"

His mouth opened, and then closed: silence.

"Father Remington was travelling to another church today, it pains Beth too much to visit this time of year, Sister Kate will be arriving in another two weeks, Bill and Nelly are at school, and Mary, Claire, and Anna came last month," Azmaria informed him. "I've already spoken with everyone else. No one we know was coming today besides us."

"Someone could have said something," Joshua suggested, but the doubt in Azmaria's eyes was contagious, and his own feeble excuse of an explanation sounded false to even his ears.

"In the end, Rosette was held in high regard by the Order for what she did, despite her contract with Chrono. We both know that no one has said anything. It was her last request, Joshua," the former Songstress of Vegas stated.

"Are you sure those flowers are fresh?" he asked, still trying to find a plausible explanation.

"They'd have wilted by now if they were a month old." The matter-of-fact way she said it made her conversational intentions obvious to Joshua. Inside the privacy of his own mind, Joshua sighed. It seemed that Azmaria was going to cling to her desperate hope forever.

"It wasn't him, Az," Joshua said tiredly. He didn't need to tell her who he was referring to any more than he needed to tell her how tired he was of this argument.

"Joshua, please don't say that. We don't know whether he's dead or not," Azmaria pleaded. The hope alight in her eyes extinguished the bitterness that survived in his heart, and he sighed audibly: a sound of defeat. He could not deny the truth in Azmaria's words.

One year after Rosette's death, there was little they knew about the whereabouts of Chrono the Sinner. Azmaria and Joshua had no clue if he had remained on the mortal plane or if he had returned to the Astral Line as Rosette had.

The small amount of evidence that they did have came in the form of the reappearance of Rosette's broken pocket watch that had disappeared mysteriously over seven years before and the peaceful smile of complete satisfaction that adorned Rosette's lifeless face on the day her soul returned to the Astral Line.

"It could just be a coincidence, you know," Joshua reminded her. He was reluctant to discuss the topic of Chrono. Usually he avoided the subject whenever she brought it up, but today, on the anniversary of his sister's death, he found that it could not be ignored.

"I'd like to believe that it isn't, Joshua. Rosette was holding the pocket watch in her hands, and she looked happier than I had seen her in years. Chrono had to have returned the watch to her. I think he must have had it the whole time, because she never did tell me exactly what happened to it," Azmaria mused before shivering violently. Joshua noticed immediately, and was reminded by the way his white dress shirt was beginning to stick to his skin that it was still raining—and getting worse every second that they continued to stand here.

"You could be right, and you could be wrong, but we've got to get out of this rain before you catch a cold. I told you that you should've brought your coat, Az." He could muse about past events at a later date. Presently, his wife was shivering because she had left her coat in the car.

"Joshua! I'm fine!" Azmaria protested when he draped his black suit jacket over her shoulders.

"Azmaria, please go get in the car. I'll be right behind you in a minute." He waved a hand at her. Now that he examined the flowers more closely, he noticed something a little odd about them…

"I'm not leaving until you do." Azmaria said stubbornly, crossing her arms. Joshua smiled then: evidently his sister had inadvertently influenced her younger sister-in-law in more ways than one.

"All right then, we'll go back to the car together. I found what I was looking for anyway," he added when she gave him a puzzled stare.

On Rosette Christopher's grave, there were three bouquets of flowers: a dozen red roses, eight forget-me-nots, and seven white lilies.

Azmaria Christopher wanted her friend to return, but her husband knew that would likely never happen. It would take time for him to completely forgive the kind-hearted Sinner, just as it was taking time to forgive himself. However, Joshua knew that Chrono's remorse far surpassed his own anger with the demon.

Joshua's roses stood for atonement, Azmaria's forget-me-nots for remembrance. The lily commonly symbolized death, but in the case of the demon who loved his sister, the former Apostle suspected that the bouquet of seven lilies stood for an apology.

A/N: I have a few notes before I go. One: thank you all so very much for reading! Feel free to send me a PM or a review if you have questions/comments/constructive criticism. I'd be happy to clear up any misconceptions! Two: My updating schedule is listed in my profile, but it's subject to change depending on real life. I try to update it frequently, so be sure to check back there if I don't follow my normal schedule! Three: I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it!