I say nothing / we sink
At length, they are taken away. The bodies, one by one, are carted off. "I don't care what you do with them," you say, and then add under your breath, when nobody except you and me can hear it, "Sevi knows I finished them off anyway."
Eventually, the blood is wiped clean, the marble floors are pristine and white again.
At last, even her body goes. We take it out together, you and me. As we walk, it strikes me as ironic that we've wrapped her broken body in your discarded cloak, but I say nothing. We bury her in the garden, and one day, the tiny white flowers of heaven will bloom over her body. Just as she said.
Dubbiel has left. The maids have left. And now it is just you and me, in the garden, looking over her grave. "Are you sad?" you ask me, eventually.
"She was pure," I say to you. "Purer than you or me could ever be."
"You could have gone with her. Left me." A little dart of jealousy. I can see the twitch at the corner of your lips, and the way you hood your eyes and stare at the ground. "Why didn't you?"
I don't speak for a moment -- perhaps I'm too happy that you care -- and even when I do, it's not to answer your question. "I chose to stay."
You exhale, suddenly, like you've been holding that breath for an eternity, a warm wind that brushes along my cheeks as you turn to face me. "Katan," you whisper, and the way you say my name sends shivers up my spine. You cling to me, your incomprehensibly beautiful face buried into my shoulder. "Katan, say it."
For a moment, I am silent, and your grip on my arms tightens.
I say it. I always do. I cannot refuse you. "You are beautiful," I say slowly. "So beautiful... nobody and nothing is as beautiful as Rociel... his beauty outshines the heavens." And it is the truth.
You sigh, the tension easing visibly from your shoulders. "Katan." Your voice is like that of a puppeteer's. The most beautiful and the most frightening of all puppeteers. Even before I took the pill, you could mesmerize me with that voice. Really, now is no different.
I am silent, I stare at the top of your head.
"Katan," you say again, and I catch, I think, a hint of pleading in your voice, tremulous like a child's, though I might be imagining it, "You're mine forever now, Katan, aren't you?"
"Yes," I say quietly. "Forever."
What you don't understand is that I have always been yours forever. Sad, the passing away of this child, Tiarel? Yes sad, but I tell you, Rociel, the saddest moment in my life by far was in the long hallways of Aziluth, when I saw you (you, standing tall and graceful, with your hair draped over your shoulders) and you, Rociel, pretended not to remember me. Cruel Rociel, you took advantage of me, a boy whose only desire was to see you once more. To thank you.
I touch your hair -- your beautiful hair, like glass, like crystal, surpassing all things in its beauty -- and shifting, you pull away, eyes dark beneath your long eyelashes. You stare at me for a moment, and I stare back. Then, suddenly, you stand up on your tip-toes (when did I become so much taller than you? when did you become so frail and child-like?) and kiss me.
It is not the first time you have kissed me. Probably, it is not the last, either. You, who throw your affection to the world haphazardly, you must take particular delight in how something so small, so insignificant to you, can mean something so much to me.
This kiss, it is remarkable. Remarkable in its inelegance, in its lack of the usual grace, the usual deliberately calculated accidental brush of eyelashes on cheek. There is nothing gentle about you, you have your arms around my neck, and your lips pressing like a brand onto mine. Your kiss -- it burns. It bleeds.
This time, there is no feather, no pill. But then, I have already eaten it, haven't I? You kiss me, and something in me hopes that maybe this time, you are just kissing me for the sake of kissing me.
Eventually your slender hands trail from neck to back, from back around to chest, and I feel your fingers pulling out the ties on the cloak I'm wearing. One by one, they fall to your fingers, silently undone. My cloak slips from my shoulders, and though it's sunny out, I am cold.
No, I want to say. No, this is wrong. Angels cannot... must not... love... not like this, I want to say. No.
But I say nothing. Nothing I say would mean anything to you. Perhaps today you would let me go, pull the cloth back over my shoulders, smile that strangely deliberate smile of yours, and we would walk back into the mansion speaking of other things. Or perhaps not speaking at all. Silence, between us, is not unusual. But there would come another day.
There will always come another day with you.
So I say nothing. I lift my arms and wrap you into my embrace -- I can feel the warmth of your laughter, a cruel laughter deep in your soul (you knew I would let you, didn't you? you knew, you always know), though you make no sound even when my fingers touch your smooth shoulders, brush the wayward strands of hair from your cheek, even when I -- of my own accord, Rociel, you see, of my own accord -- tilt my head forward to kiss /you/.
I hold you to me like you are the only thing I have. You are the only thing I have.
Your body is warm, your hair fragrant; the flowers, the garden around us, though white and beautiful, are icy frigid in their purity. I know, through what hazy perception I have left, that Tiarel will sleep beneath the flowers alone.
"Katan," you whisper into my skin. Delighted. Delighted in my agony.
"I give up," I tell you, voice equally low, though in reality, I have given up long ago.
The words, three of them, satisfy you. We sink to the ground. Together, we sink into sin.