The Corruption of Angels

By: Hiza-chan

Chapter one: Wanderings of Old

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters. Nope nope. Though I do own Hikari Tsume.

Angels carry me,

Lift me,

Battered and broken

From the ground.

And they soar to heaven,

All the while holding me.

My soul aches.

My heart is torn.

My own wings,

So very, very worn.

And he greets me,

Spreading his arms

Radiating joy.

And I fly to him,

And forget the pain.

And we are forever joyful,

My Savior and Me.

-My mother's Day present to mum

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Date begun: 5-21-05, 5:05 PM

Date finished: 5-22-05, 2:10 AM

Was that really me in that reflective glass? I stood shaking and naked as I looked at myself in the 'mirror'. The miracle that came in the form of a demon was messing with some metal gadget that sprouted forth water and seemed to be trying to adjust it to the proper temperature. How he was doing this I did not know. I was far too preoccupied with staring at the body that I was in.

All the things that woman had said, that nurse… Now I knew why she had looked saddened when she had said them. I was no longer that majestic being that she had described to me. I was now a horrible wraithlike creature, hideous to look upon. My wings… however could this once have been what she had described?

My wings now drooped, obviously mistreated, broken in so many places that I feared they would never mend, and they were no longer white, they were dirty and flecked with filth, scum coating them so thick that the color was no longer distinguishable. My hair was no longer a rainbow of warm colors, but a filthy oily mop that hung well past my shoulders. If ever my eyes were blue they were blue no longer, they were a deep gray with only the subtlest hints of blue and my skin was white beneath the filth.

I was disgusting to look at.

I started as I felt the demon's hand close around my wrist and I glared at him, but allowed him to pull me over to the small pool of steaming water. Without ever opening his mouth to speak he gently eased me down into the liquid.

It was painful. Though the water was merely lukewarm it felt flaming hot and ignited every pore in my body with a searing pain. I clawed at him, attempting to get out but he merely held onto me and pushed me into the water so that I was up to my neck in it. I hissed and spat at him, clawing his arms with my nails that had grown into sharp pointed things at the lack of them being cut. He winced and in the end, had to climb in himself, clothed and all to calm me.

With time my body, which had been so terribly cold at having entered the water, grew warm and now the water did not pain me but was actually rather pleasant.

I relaxed in the water, finally stopping my thrashing and allowing my wings to droop into the water. The demon threw me a reproachful look before getting to his feet and stepping out to undress himself. This interested me greatly because while I had been clothed in little to nothing he was clothed in garments that looked rather complicated. I found that guessing which garment he would remove next quite amusing.

After what felt like ages of removing his clothes he was left naked, standing there like the Fallen angel he was. He grabbed a cloth and a tube of what looked to be clear greenish liquid. He climbed into the water again and opened the tube, drizzling some of the liquid onto the cloth. At catching its scent I pounced on him, submerging him fully for a moment before he surfaced, sputtering.

I reached for the rag but he held it out of my grasp, frowning at me yet blushing as well. I pouted at him and mewled.

He looked from me to the rag and began to laugh, then began to speak in the same tongue the nurse had used. I attempted to make sense of the language that he was speaking in before speaking in my native Latin.

"I do not understand."

Of course he understood me, all members of the Fallen and all members of the Blessed knew the language. And of course, he smiled at me, and spoke instead in Latin.

"You can't eat this, it isn't food!"

I frowned and protested that it smelled like a fruit that grew in the tropics. He shook his head and let a small laugh escape his lips before telling me that it was something called 'soap' and merely smelled that way so that it would make me smell good. I nodded though I was still extremely confused and allowed him to rub the cloth against my skin.

True to his word, the liquid did cleanse me and my skin was no longer dirty and now gave off the same scent as the 'soap'.

After my skin was clean and shone as white as a porcelain dolls he grabbed another tube which he told me was called 'shampoo'. This he poured directly onto my scalp and I yelped at the coolness of it. He merely laughed and began to massage it into my scalp. This I decided was very pleasurable indeed, and I found myself mewing in pleasure and leaning back into his hands. He laughed and gently dunked my head into the water, after instructing me to close my eyes.

He repeated this process several times until the water was no longer clear but a deep gray. He grimaced and drained the water until we were sitting in an empty pit as tall as I was when sitting down. He stood and began to mess with another metal gadget until great raindrops began to fall on us. I shuddered but decided that this 'rain' would not harm me. I was of course still seated so he crouched next to me and grasped one of my wings gently.

He must have dabbed at my wings for nearly a day, it felt so terribly long. (Of course later I found out that only about three and a half-hours had passed.) But when he was done, I was surprised to find that, though they were still broken they were now a delicate shade of white, exactly the way that the nurse had explained. He looked delighted now when he looked at me and I found myself rather hot in the face for some reason.

He led me from the 'bathtub' and towards the mirror again. I was still just as white, and my wings still just as broken, and my eyes still just as gray, but I was now clean, and no amount of filth coated me anywhere and I could see a bit of what the nurse had described to me in the reflection. The demon, this saintly demon, led me from the cleansing room and we came to a room that smelled like him. I assumed of course, that this was his sleeping room.

From here, we went to a door that held only clothing and he clothed me in a thin material, which he told me were called 'boxers' and clothing for my upper half, a 'T-shirt'.

It was fascinating to watch him 'cook' and I giggled a bit when he put a pail holding water over fire. He explained cooking and bathing and dressing to me then, as we waited for the water to boil.

I came to know my savior as Riku.

Over the weeks he explained to me many things about this Earth, and I was taught the language called English. He of course left for long periods of time and I was left to my own devices, but I never left the apartment which I'd come to know as home.

I slept in the same bed as Riku each night, folding my wings around the both of us. The first time I had crawled in bed with him and wrapped my arms and wings around him he had been so incredibly startled that he fell off the bed.

This had confused me, it had never occurred to me that the Fallen may not have been as close as the Blessed were. Eventually he had grown accustomed to me crawling in bed with him and pulling him close for comfort.

Riku was my savior, and I looked up to him like a chick looks up to their mother. I did not understand the world yet and my mind, once so vast had had to start over again and relearn everything.

Unexpectedly the knowledge that Riku was a member of the Fallen, my most loathed enemy would come to me, and I would shudder and try not to think on it. During these first few weeks I was incredibly childlike, filled with wonder at the simplest of things and Riku taught me everything. I nearly forgot who and what I was, and who and what he was!

But after the first month or two I began to dream of Heaven and My Lady and I could ignore it any longer.

When he got home and saw me sitting in the Easy chair that I had deemed as my own several months back he had known immediately what I was thinking about. He sat down next to me and smiled sadly and it was so terrible to see him like this.

The time had come for me to find out what my lady wanted of me and we would now have to be enemies again. He smiled sadly at me and laid a gentle kiss on my forehead before turning into his room and slamming the door shut behind him.

I didn't see him again for fifty five years.

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I was second in command of our army. Army, stupid word. I was the highest-ranking assassin of the side of the Light. I was God's right hand man so to speak.

And I hated my job.

Killing children is not my idea of morality, and I disliked it immensely. The little girl was staring at me, with her little ebony leathery wings and red eyes, her heritage was obvious and I was instructed to kill all the members of this household. Even the children.

I tried not to think of how her brother had cried out for his mother before I had cleanly snapped his neck or how her father had screamed to his wife to take the children and run before I had whispered a spell that had instantly killed him. The screams of all my victims, Fallen members or not, still haunted me.

I crouched by the little girl and she cringed away from me. I felt guilt eat at my heart as she sobbed and pulled at her little red dress. I cupped her chin in my hands and made her look at me and I stared into her bright crimson eyes and gently lulled her into a sleep she would never wake from.

I pushed the corpse aside and stood, surveying how many I had slaughtered. Maybe ten families like this one had met their end today. My orders of course came from the only man who had a position higher than me. Well, maybe not a man.

Hikari Tsume was the woman in charge of the war. Tall and fair with long silvery blonde hair that hung to her waist and sharp gray eyes she was pretty, but deceptively so. Tsume-sama was the coldest person I knew, not caring who died or in what fashion.

Death on wings that's what I was.

It sickened me and she knew it. That very day I resigned. I wandered the world for a bit, traveling to Egypt and Rome and places like that. That's how I met Cloud I suppose. Now, you know who Cloud is, I've told you before, the story of him and Sephiroth, the tragic lovers who began the war. I met him in Egypt, as I ate a bit of dry bread in a local cafe' in Cairo. He just walked right past the store and turned and looked at me for a moment before turning away. I nearly had a heart attack.

He looked so disturbingly like me that it seemed as if I was looking into a mirror. I had gotten up and followed him about until he had turned into an ally and finally confronted me. I would never forget the fury in his disturbingly bright blue eyes. He had seemed so ethereal, so unearthly that I was surprised that humans didn't stop and stare. His hair seemed to be woven from the rays of sun itself, so many different shades of gold and amber running throughout it. He was bronzed from so many years in the sun and well built.

But it was his eyes that told his story. Ancient eyes that held such exhaustion, such knowledge in them that I was stunned into a silence, of course, that may have been because those very same eyes were narrowed in rage and I very much feared for my life at that moment in time.

After that first argument I became his companion for the next few decades. I came to know many things wandering with my ancestor, I learned the text of the ancient Egyptians and learned the languages of Old. Languages that mortals are not even aware of. I learned of his solitude and terrible loneliness. And of his grief and sorrow and misery. He was no longer troubled by the war, and was miserable that it had started with him. We formed a bond that linked us together, so that I could call on him at any time and he on me. We separated after nearly forty years of companionship. By the time I returned to New York the war had spilled out onto the very streets of the mortal world.

And it was here, in the chaos of New York that I saw Riku again.

A/N: This is more of a second prologue than a chapter, I just started writing and realized that it was not turning out right at all. I don't want this to be so terribly angsty, I want this to be a bit light hearted yet at the same time more of a Romeo and Juliet scenario. Besides it seems to me that Anne Rice's writing style has worn off on me. I feel like I'm talking in bloody riddles. Uhg… Hopefully the next chapter will be a bit more light hearted, I am in serious need of a nice humorous fanfiction. I've been reading too much poetic stuff. 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Odyssey' and Anne Rice. Jeez I'm getting too intellectual and it's annoying me to no end.

Embracing Destiny is coming along nicely but I wanted to get this on paper before the inspiration leaves me. Remember to review! Maybe it'll even help me a bit, heh.