expunger | video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

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video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

[Raphael, this time, looks less like the bleeding pile of shit she did last time and more like a meditative businesswoman with dry skin who hasn't slept in a while. She is seated Indian-style on the floor of what is obviously a run-down house; her normal illusions of nice drawing rooms and furnished libraries are gone. Forgotten, even. There's a tenseness around her eyes, a flickering darkness and she has the distinctive sallow-faced, corrosively-dry-skinned unhealthy look of Lucifer himself.]

I have heard talk and complaints about this latest event. People think they have been robbed of their identities, stripped of their selves.

[She looks vaguely disdainful at the concept, but so contemplative.]

The empty places within us call for something to fill them. Can you not wait a week? If you insist on squandering this.

[A blade emerges slowly from one sleeve until Raphael is holding a short sword in one hand. She brings it up to chest level and holds it gingerly between her two index fingers, so it rotates slowly in the air like a rotisserie.]

We do not know our own families. [One hand returns to rest on her knee, and the sword turns up until it's turn in mid-air like an impossible basketball, the sharpened point hovering centimeters over her outstretched finger.] I find it difficult to divine my motivations for my own actions.

But we have no ties that bind us from action or blinders to shield us from essential truths.

[The sword touches her finger and she looks to it slowly- curiously, like she's never seen it before. It presses down harder until drops of bright red blood well around the blade-tip. Raphael seems fascinated when her blood shimmers and tiny but dazzlingly white beams of light strobe from the small wound. Anyone looking at the sword can see creeping veins of rust spread slowly up the blade.]

In the absence of prejudice, clarity is easily grasped. The irrational contradictions we tolerate fall away.

We are not stripped. We are free.

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Michael has been having a bad week. Actually, longer than that; he's been having a bad while, ever since the disastrous break down of his family's careful alliances and truces that had kept them all at peace. He'd had to break up altercations and had missed even more of them, and despite what his siblings apparently thought, he was not an endless source of patience that existed to keep them from their immature squabbling and lead them all around by the hand.

This event was turning out to be the last straw, too. Of all of them, Lucifer seemed to be the only one besides Michael that knew who they were, where they'd come from, and what they'd all done. Raphael, who Michael was closest to, looked at him with unfamiliarity and though that alone might've been distressing but ultimately okay, there was an additional issue. With the Hellfire corrupting her grace, she was unpredictable even outside of events, and while she barely even knew Michael, he was distantly concerned through his calm confidence. Anger, as well, simmered below the surface though it was directed at Lucifer, who had caused this issue to begin with, and for what? Wounded pride?

So Michael had been spending as little time as possible around his siblings; he was, like most angels, restless at best so it wasn't all that strange that he would fly aimlessly around the city. And it's not like Raphael would notice he was being more avoidant that usual.

He was perched on the top of a building, watching the city idly when his PCD beeped to alert of a new message to the network. As usual, he checked the device out of curiosity, a little surprised that it was Raphael; she rarely posted to the network, after all. But after viewing the message, he was displeased. Maybe leaving her alone wasn't the best idea, if she was so oblivious that she was playing with an archangel sword. And so, Michael flew home immediately, striding in through the door with no need to announce his presence. He was hard to miss when he wanted to be.

Raphael continued spinning the sword in midair, not bothering to look up to greet him. The wound was a little bigger now, and the bright glow coming from within fascinated her. It was a bright, strident pain to cut through the constant burn that even now ate away at her being and strained her insides. Anything different was welcome.

There was no greeting, friendliness, or familiarity from her. If anything, Michael's arrival made her frown, shoulders shifting with displeasure at the too-bright presence now pressing at the walls around her. His presence was like a low-grade migraine to her. In fact, from her stalking this week of the other so-called angels in the city, they all were- except one. But he was the one that she knew she had to have caution around. The untrustworthy one, the bastard she distinctly remembered plunging his hand into her Grace and trying to rip it out, leaving behind this horrible, constant screaming agony inside her.

She had nothing to say to any of her alleged brothers.