I have held back no water in its season

Fic post from my archive.

Dance on the Grave

Lucifer gives Alexiel a present. Written for the OTW Online Con Hodgepodge Challenge, with the prompt: Angel Sanctuary: Alexiel and/or Lucifer, revenge is a dish best served cold. Total Crack, I-1

Alexiel stared. "But why...?"

"Revenge is supposed to be served cold, isn't it?"

She gave Lucifer the look she'd perfected as a teenage boy. "It's a metaphor."

Fic post from my archive.

Homecoming

Alexiel finally returns, to the interest of all and apprehension of some--particularly Lucifer. Romance with Drama, I-3

Belial's estimation of Alexiel rose. Maybe this would fail to be a catastrophe after all.

It finally occured to me what Angel Sanctuary reminds me of: the Sandman.

AS has none of Sandman’s sheer scope, of course, none of the literary hide and seek. The dialogue isn’t near as subtle or ravishing. But the tone struck me as very similar, particularly to Season of Mists, and the whole thread about heaven and hell in Gaiman’s world. Even moreso if you add the short story “Murder Mysteries”.

I’m reasonably sure part of that is simply a case of a common source text. Yuki Kaori really did take a good deal straight from Judeo-Christian texts, particularly the Apocrypha. So did Gaiman. The hallucinatory aspects come through pretty well intact.

More than that, though, the sense of world-shape seems similar. One major shape being that Jehovah is a puppetmaster, especially when it comes to Lucifer, and that the only real way to rebel is to step outside the continuum of heaven and hell entirely (as, for instance, Gaiman’s Lucifer and Setsuna do). The idea that there really isn’t much difference between those two extremes is stated in both stories. Yuki makes God a more explicit selfish bastard, but that reading is certainly available in Gaiman as well.

The fascination with gore is quite alike, too.

No wonder Belial keeps nagging at me to write something.

In the entire Angel Sanctuary cast, no single character fascinates me more than Belial/Mad Hatter. Belial condenses the ambiguity of the story as a whole and performs it more vividly than any other character. And, let’s face it, I’m a sucker for butterflies and I love Belial’s tattoo.

The more I think about it, the more that butterfly interests me, particularly since it’s used as a metonymy for Belial so often. Japanese symbolism has a range of associations for the butterfly: the soul; transformation; women; sexuality.