AN: This fic, along with "The Corruption of Roses" was written more than a year ago, but in the course of the time I have become aware that my first editing of them was not entirely successful. Thus I'm editing them both again. ^_^ I've found that I'm not really pleased with them anymore but for the moment, except for typos and a few grammatical errors (though most of them, to my own chagrin, I'm leaving alone for now, provided they are not too ridiculous), I'm leaving them rather unchanged. I would like to extend much gratitude to everyone who reviewed; your comments were greatly appreciated. Now for my obligatory excuses: Some people have commented to me (mostly through emails) on Rosiel's anatomical androgyny in this fic. The reason I made him like this is because, as his flesh was taken from his sister, there are certain parts she could not give him. This is just my opinion, of course. Secondly, I would like to offer my apologies to anyone who is put off by my use of "Sir Rosiel" rather than "Rosiel-sama." The reason for this is that I was first exposed to Angel Sanctuary by way of the English dubbed anime rather than the manga, so that title stuck. If you are offended by this, please just imagine the little suffix "-sama" in place of the title "Sir."

Again, thank you to all who reviewed. ^_^

The Perfection of Roses

Crimson petals all around him, crimson petals covering him as though they, like small shields, could protect him. Crimson petals like tiny pools of blood. So delicate, these petals, against the inhuman paleness of his skin, like the flesh of infants. He could have wept for the beauty of it.

The frail being that once been known amongst all the hierarchical ranks of Heaven as the great Inorganic Angel Rosiel turned on the bed and plucked another rose from the vase, clutching its long smooth stem gently between his long violet nails. There had been more than twenty roses in the vase when he had become aware of its presence; now there were only four. The corpse-petals of the others lay in the silken sheets around him, on the silken taut skin of his chest.

He caressed the blossom with his slender fingertips, silently relishing the feel of the petals. He brought the flower to his lips and with a flick of his tongue tasted its blood-colored petals, ran it over his face. Such a loving gesture for one who desired only to be loved.

He did not know when the roses had been placed in this room, or where the vase had come from. Stolen, perhaps. And the hand-cut roses that had each been meticulously deprived of thorns? There were only two who would make such a gesture for him and the latter he could not imagine wasting his time doing such a thing. Kyrie, then. Yes, of course she would have done this, in an attempt most likely to win his attentions. Wretched girl. Such a poor excuse for an angel.

But would she have removed the thorns as well? No, she would not have thought to do such a thing. That was undoubtedly Katan's doing.

He took a single petal between his fingertips and plucked it out, then another. Slowly, he robbed this flower of its petals as he had done to all the others, letting them fall down onto him. Let these roses make a cover over him, to protect him, to love him. There was no one else who would.

In the candlelit darkness, he whispered her name. There was no response. There could be none. She wouldn't hear him. Could she hear him when he had spoken to the boy? Of course she had, unless she refused to. And why shouldn't she refuse? What was his voice to her but the foul screeching of a hellacious beast?

"Alexiel," he whispered again, his voice high and unsteady. "Why must you do this me, Alexiel? Why must you torment me? Why, my dearest sister?"

He looked up from the petals as though he expected to see her before him. Beautiful Alexiel, robed and watching him as tenderly as he had once, eons ago, watched her, desiring only one endearing word from her sweet lips.

"Why?" he repeated hopelessly, desperately. The empty stem fell from his grasp. "Why do you do this to me, my dear Alexiel?"

Because I love you.

A small gasp escaped his lips, and, lost in the dazed stupor that had claimed him hours ago, he did not realize that the voice had been heard only within his head and not with his ears.

He looked directly overhead and there she was, beaming a subtle celestial light, floating above him with her face (his face his beautiful face) unveiled and her sword with its seven blades sheathed, his sister, his twin, his lover. There was no expression upon her ethereal face as she looked down at his pitiful form, lying naked atop luxurious sheets that provided him material comfort but could not warm him, and he merely stared at her, unsure of whether he should be afraid or fulfilled.

"Alexiel."

Because I love you, she repeated, smiling now. I loved you, Rosiel. I always loved you. I loved only you.

He uttered a small cry. Two warm tears coursed down his face as she outstretched one of her elegant hands to him.

Slowly, tentatively, he took it. The warmth of her suddenly washing over him like a calm sun-kissed wave, her hand curling to envelop his own. His childish sobs cutting through the silence.

She knelt on the bed beside him, took him into her arms.

My dear, sweet, beautiful Rosiel, don't weep.

"Sister."

He buried his face in her shoulder, shuddered against her as she embraced him.

My lovely brother, let me hold you.

"So beautiful," she whispered, her full lips moving against his ear. "You are so beautiful, Rosiel, so very beautiful. More beautiful than Heaven itself."

His arms drew tighter about her, his dear sister who had at long last come to him. "Am I?"

She favored him with a soft laugh. "You were always beautiful."

He shuddered again and she pulled him tighter about her. "No. Not always." God, but his voice was that of a child.

"Don't talk of such things, brother. Please don't."

She pulled away from him enough to look into his eyes. He bit down on his lip to stifle his crying as he beheld her face. Two halves of the same sacred whole, both looking into a mirror.

"My beautiful brother Rosiel," she said, and she brought her lips to his. Oh, the sweet taste of her lips, sweeter than the roses, as her arms wrapped protectively over his back, as his arms held fast to her clinging to her. His lips parted at the guidance of hers and he moaned softly as he felt the brief touch of her tongue.

"Please, Alexiel, my dear sister," he whispered, and clutching strands of her dark hair like a small, frightened child he moved to return her kiss.

She accepted him willingly and cradled his head in their passionate kiss. So long he had waited for this, desired it, so long had he wanted her that a part of him still did not believe it was happening. So many years, so many centuries, sealed within the desolate coldness of the Earth, longing only to be comforted in her embrace. So long, loving her.

"Sister, why have you come now? Why did you deprive me for so long only to come to me now?"

Her lips broke contact with his.

Please, my sister, more.

Again she embraced him, laying her head beside his. "Because you called me."

But I've been calling you for centuries. "But what of the boy?"

She laughed quietly. "He is nothing to me. He would rather sin with the girl than acknowledge me. You have always acknowledged me, Rosiel."

"Sister."

His weary head fell on her shoulder, and he felt her image shudder beneath him.

"Alexiel?"

Her eyes met his and as he moved to touch her face she caught his hand and laid her head in his palm.

"This cannot go on forever, Rosiel. You must not allow it."

He gave a small grunt of confusion, but she did not explain what she meant.

"Take me away from here," she said, suddenly grasping his hand and looking desperately into his eyes. "Take me away from this place of pain and corruption."

"Yes," he agreed instantly, returning her tight clasp on his hand. Perhaps his answer was too hasty. "Yes. To Atziluth. Katan says--"

At the mention of Katan's name, she pulled away.

His hand went fearfully to his lips. "What is it, sister?"

She rose from the bed and took a single step toward the large stained-glass window, then vanished.

"Oh."

His hand tightened, driving the edges of his nails into his cheek. His eyes stared futilely at the spot where she had been only moments before.

"Oh."

Gone. As quickly as she had appeared, she was gone.

"Oh."

A voice, a cry erupting from his throat as his hands tore at the sheets, scattering rose petals over the floor. Falling like so many tiny drops of blood, so many crimson tears. Falling like so many illusions from his tattered mind.

"OOOHHHHH--"

Gone. Never there, never really there.

"ALEXIEL!"

But he had seen her, had touched her. He had tasted the salt of her lips.

"PLEASE, SISTER, DON'T!"

He licked at his lips, urgently furiously. Salt, yes, the salt of his own skin and the faint lingering taste of rose petals. Nothing more, nothing more.

"My dear sister, Alexiel…"

She had held him. He had felt her, felt the soft warmth of her skin and the silk of her clothes. Please, no, not again, not—

He collapsed on the bed, tangling his body in the ripped sheets. Breathe in, breathe out. The scent of roses all around him. Pretend it is her scent.

The sheets soon became damp with his tears as he sobbed into the bed. No one would hear him now. No one. He could call for her until his inhuman throat was rent and ruptured and still he would receive no answer, no consolation. He was completely and utterly alone.

"Alexiel, my sweet sister…"

All was darkness to him then, and all was darkness for some time. The remaining roses kept a silent vigil over him.

When at last he awoke, his face was still streaming with bitter tears but the sound that came from deep within him was not sobbing but rather laughter, a high, shrill laugh in the quiet night, like water ringing off shards of broken glass. He felt his face and realized that it was soaked and this caused him to laugh harder. Tears. A sign of sadness, of longing. Of being able to touch something for one moment and then having it ripped away. Why had he been so sad? What had happened to him to warrant such dreadful pain? Of course. She had come to him but it wasn't really her, only an image projected by his own desires, his desire to hold her, to touch her, to lay his pain at her angelic feet and hear her say that she loved him…

"Enough!" he cried to the empty room, where none would hear him save for the four remaining roses and the corpses of the their companions. He sat up and gathered the sheets around him, a sea of white and crimson petals.

So beautiful, she had been, and yet she called him beautiful without reminding him that he was only a mirror image of her, born of the bisected power of the Holy Living Creature Adam Kadamon but molded in her form. Always so beautiful, but it was a lie. He had not always been beautiful. Once he had been nothing but a lump of withered flesh, hideous and unable to live without being fed the vitality of another. Once he had been absolutely horrifying to the eye, an offense to Heaven, and mostly an offense to his sister.

A voice, not that of his sister nor of himself, so far away now.

I am the only one who will ever love you, Rosiel, Inorganic Angel.

Who had said that? And why, though it filled him with such fear, did he long to hear it again?

Sometimes he could remember, sometimes he could not. Sometimes the memory of it made him cower in the arms of his dear cherub for fear of it.

He rose from the bed and walked, half-dazed and half more aware than he had been for ages, to a large full-length mirror that hung on the opposite wall, stood before it naked and trembling violently. Yes, he was beautiful, every inch of him, every part that he had taken from her, perfectly flawless as the roses that watched him from the vase.

His eyes went to the reflection of the roses. Of course Kyrie would have collected and brought them to him. She would have thought that he would like to look at them and Katan would have agreed. But why had he cut away the thorns? He would have told himself that he did it to keep Rosiel from inadvertently cutting one of his perfect hands, but this was not the reason, not the reason at all. His thinking would have been that to give Sir Rosiel roses with thorns would be akin to giving a child a knife. Katan, ever the loyal servant.

Accursed mirror. Liar. A beautiful reflection, a beautiful body. But what underneath? If he were to cut off a ribbon of his skin, what would he find underneath? Alexiel's flesh regenerated? Or a horrible mass of twisted, withered tissue?

Rosiel, come to me.

Walking, his angelic robes casting white shadows over the floors of Entemenanki. Kneeling before the enthroned figure. Yes, Lord.

The hand touching his head, bony fingers running through his lavender hair. Such a hideous creature, my Rosiel. Do you remember what you once were?

Submission. Yes, Lord.

So ugly, so hideous.

Please, Lord, stop it.

Flicker of a shadow as the other hand was raised.

"Don't touch him!"

A small sound of surprise from the enthroned being, a familiar voice behind him. Turning away from the figure even as the hand came down and struck him, catching a bare glimpse of the fleeting shadow running away, the hint of three wings as he fell to the ground…

Do not look, Rosiel. I am the only one capable of loving something as hideous as yourself.

Three wings. Gift of the divided Seraphita, like his own. Could it have been? And why did these memories assault him now, these delusions of masochism?

It was no matter. Yes, he had been so very hideous once, but now he was beautiful. As beautiful as Heaven itself.

Rosiel smiled and studied his body in the mirror. Yes, beautiful. Yes, divine. Yes, anything you could ever ask for, Sir Rosiel.

Beautiful but incomplete. His body had been taken from that of his sister, but there had been one part he could not receive from her, the one part that would make him a truly male creature. He could not receive it from her, and there had been no other from whom such a thing could have been taken. Would he have had use for one if he'd had it? Perhaps, perhaps not. He was damned to never know. Damned to live not as a female but not as a complete male either.

Sometimes he thought that he was, in all regards, damned.

But such things mattered not to him. She was all that mattered, only she, only his dear sister Alexiel.

"Why do you deny me?" he inquired of the face in the mirror. Her face. Her face with his own twisted smile. "Why, sister, do you refuse me?"

How could she refuse him? How could she, when she knew that all he desired was her? Not to threaten her, not to harm her, but merely to be held by her, to hear her say that she loved him. He had refused to return to Heaven for this, for her. Why would she not understand this?

So hideous. A monster masquerading under the flesh of an angel. Was that how she saw him, his beautiful sister? When she looked at him through the eyes of the accursed boy, was that what she saw him as? The horrible, shriveled thing that had pleaded for her love and then a moment later had ripped from her beautiful face one of her perfect eyes?

He studied the reflection in the mirror, unaware that his breath was exploding from him in great, desperate gasps. Yes, he could still see the same thing he had been once if he looked closely enough. Behind those eyes, beneath that flesh, all of which he had stolen from her as she made no move to retaliate. Beneath it all there lay still that hideous monster.

I am the only one who will ever love you, Rosiel. The only one.

"No!" he cried, pounding a long-nailed fist into the glass of the mirror and shattering it. Fragments of broken glass like tiny blades fell at his bare feet and lay amongst the petals of the roses, the perfection of the roses. "No no no no no no NO NO NO ALEXIEL!" He viciously plucked a shard of glass from a cut on his hand and gouged at his chest, shredding the delicate white skin and streaking it with crimson. Sharp delicious pain like petals being ripped from a flower.

"I…am…beautiful…I am…beautiful…Alexiel…my dear…my dear sister."

And then he saw himself, saw himself as he once had been, desperate, desiring only her love and suspecting some great deception behind the sweetly-tainted words of the Enthroned One; he saw himself as he once had been, finally beautiful, finding the formless angel and falling in love with it, so deeply that at times he was able to forget about his desire for her. The only one who had ever truly understood him. The only one who had refused to leave him.

Glimpses of truth, glimpses of sanity, of possessing sanity. Glimpses of the blood on his hands, blood taken in moments of leaving that precious awareness.

Oh, God, what had he done?

With a frantic wordless cry he sprang from his slumped stupor and fled from the room, naked and bleeding, into the dark frozen corridor. The room he sought was only a few doors from his own.

"Katan!"

He flung the door open and burst into the darkened bedroom as though propelled by some explosive force. Katan sat up on the bed with widened eyes, startled from whatever ethereal dreams had lighted upon his mind as he slept.

"Sir Rosiel." Such reverence, and still such love.

Beautiful Cherub Katan, who had always remained loyal to him.

He fell on the bed before Katan was given a chance to kneel, caught from causing himself further injury by the cherub's arms.

"Please, Katan."

The cherub tried to speak and could not, too stunned by his master's screaming intrusion. This would not be the first time this had happened, however, and his recovery was quick, and without another word he gathered the fallen angel into his submissive embrace.

"Katan," Rosiel whispered softly, clutching onto him desperately, burying his face in his beautiful one's shoulder. "Katan, what has happened to me? What is this I've done?"

A shudder from his beloved cherub. Katan would rather see him strong and mindless than like this, he supposed.

"Please, Sir Rosiel, you must not do this to yourself."

"I saw it," he continued, heedless to the cherub's pleading. He did not need to explain this. Katan already knew what it was he saw that caused him such pain, even more than his desire for his sister did; the visions of sanity and it being ripped away from him, and the knowledge of what angelic crimes he had committed, the epiphany that even these moments of awareness did not cause his sanity to return. Such damnable things they both already knew.

Yes, of course, and it was lovely Katan who understood them and who refused to leave still, Katan who had, knowing fully well what a mindless beast he had become, broken the seal over him. Katan, who had once been a lowly grigori without form or name, whom he had recreated as a cherub. The only good thing he had ever done.

"Katan."

His tears, his furious trembling, subsided. Slowly he drew closer to the cherub until their lips were all but touching.

"You've served me so well, Cherub Katan. I am eternally grateful for your help."

"Sir Rosiel."

His hand, streaked with the blood from his chest, brushed against the cherub's cheek. "Of all the things that I have done, you are the only one of beauty. Do you understand, Katan? You are the only truly good thing I've accomplished."

Beneath the gentle grip of his stained hand, he could feel the cherub tensing, trying to resist. Such a futile, painful resistance. He resisted only because he feared that to give in, to experience a quiet angelic bliss for one moment, would usher the pain that had so often accompanied it in the past.

A pained smile crossed his face. "What have I done to you, Katan?"

The only response was a kiss. The cherub's resistance ended and before he could think better of it, he brushed his lips against those of his master. Always such boyish innocence in his kiss, though this had happened countless times between them. Such boyish innocence that Rosiel could not resist it, just as the cherub could not resist his authority.

What a damnably perfect pair they made.

His lips yielded to Katan's and he pressed his chilled body against his. Katan's hands, tentatively fearing punishment, moved upward, one stopping at the middle of his back, supporting him like a child, while the other continued into the lavender waves of his hair, cupping the back of his head.

"Please, Sir Rosiel."

Their lips parted and they kissed now in the manner of lovers, as beyond their attention the blood from his chest began to cease. Beautiful, beautiful Katan.

He moved in the cherub's desperate embrace and began unfastening the coat he wore. The kiss was halted in a startled pause and then deepened, at Katan's urging rather than his own. The coat was dropped carelessly upon the floor.

The remainder of Katan's clothes soon followed, until he was as bare and vulnerable as Rosiel himself.

"I am such a wretched creature, Katan. But you…let me hold you…let me…let me look at you…"

His lips moved away from the cherub's face and down onto the firmness of his pale chest. He could still feel him resisting some, desiring only pure submission, desiring something else that he had denied himself for the service of his beloved Sir Rosiel, but afraid to ask for it.

Such a beautiful body he had given to the cherub, the body of an eternally young male with the very appearance of that belonging to an angel. This was the only thing he had ever done that was right, the only thing he had not deviated with a change in his thoughts. He kissed it as reverently as though in worship of it, letting his lips move from his chest to his arms, up onto his shoulders, up further onto his neck as Katan moaned softly before him, back down to the muscles of his abdomen. He elicited a low, desirous sigh from the cherub when he, kissing one of his perfect hands, licked playfully at his fingertips.

He had not, simply because he himself was, left the cherub's body incomplete. He studied the organ with his eyes and had the urge to kiss it as well, not for the carnality of it but to prove to himself that not everything he had done was evil, but that would have paralyzed the cherub with fear. In the end, he smiled slightly and delivered a soft kiss to the inside of his thigh.

Katan relaxed against him, his quiet lust for what his master had not done having now satisfyingly died.

"It was never my intention to hurt you," he whispered to the cherub, falling against him in another calm embrace. Another tear rolled from his face onto Katan's bare shoulder.

The cherub pressed his lips briefly to his cheek. "You must rest now, Sir Rosiel. All will be well again in the morning."

All would be well? Of course. In the morning his awareness of what he had become would be gone and he would again be the mindless thing that Katan both loved and feared. All would be well in the morning.

Yet the prospect of rest had never seemed so appealing.

He nodded as a child would and allowed Katan to guide him to lay beneath the sheets. He rolled onto his side and pressed his face into Katan's chest, and at some point before they fell asleep their hands found each other in the darkness and clasped.

Let Kyrie find them like this, he thought vaguely before weariness overtook him. He had ceased to care about her jealousy. Let her find them sleeping in each other's arms, and let insanity creep in with the rays of morning and again consume him.

He kissed Katan's lips and thought nothing more of it.

Finis