expunger | 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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[...]

No.

[No, seriously. What.]

It is because though we all claim to be "angels", I have no reason to believe that I am anything like you. The only one who I can sense to be like me is Lucifer.

[She leaves it at that delicately. Part of her knows very strongly that being like him is nothing desirable, and she knows she wasn't always like this. She remembers.]

I have no memories of having ever had family who mattered.

Never said you weren't.

[...he remembers an argument and few conversations but.]

...I guess? I don't remember much about you.

Strange. What do you remember?

[That raised eyebrow means 'your point being?']

Probably not, no.

Let us hope, then, that the truths people discover in themselves, the clarity they receive, are things which will be appreciated when our memories return. Would that such things turn out favorably for everyone.

But you speak wisely, Lady. A chance for reflection and betterment is always a good thing, is it not?

Just because you don't have the memories don't mean the feelings aren't there. Maybe you just don't wanna feel it.

It's not a game, Raphael. I'm the only person here who will really listen to you. I'm the only one who knows how it feels to be burning to ashes, every moment you exist.

[He isn't sure about contacting her. He knows they hate each other, that she killed him, that she tried to before and that she tore out his grace. But he can't, at all, remember why any of these things occurred.

Eventually, curiosity prompts him to reply, if a bit hesitantly.]

An individual's entire being is based upon their experiences. Without them we have a chance to begin again, but we are not ourselves.

Edited 2011-09-22 22:12 (UTC)

[In that moment she feels suddenly young, despite knowing on some distant level that that dynamic is subtly wrong. It's not as wrong as it felt around Michael, but something is off about feeling so very small in front of him- and not for the reason she thinks. Some subconscious part of her that has lived and watched and waited and slowly starved to nothing over the long countless centuries is protesting that she should ever feel less experienced than the one of their number who has truly seen nothing- but it's so subsumed that it manifests as nothing more than a feeling of unease.

And a feeling, one she allows herself to experience, with more emotional freedom than she's had in centuries- though she doesn't know it. To her it just feels uneasy, and simply so.]

Under the event I find myself thinking very simply. Those around me are either my kind or not my kind.

[A pause that seems to go on forever.]

Only you are like me. [Maybe only you can understand.] Michael did not understand. Gabriel is flippant. I suspect he always is.

[It's left unspoken: but you are different.]

[Lucifer is piecing together what she means, what she feels. What she thinks he is, or was, to her.]

Yes. I am. Out of the trillions of lifeforms we have seen, you are the only one like me.

[He had meant that to be manipulative, to nudge her in the right direction. Instead the truth of it socks him full in the gut and he is abruptly silent, pensive. Startled.]

[Raphael appreciates some fragment of the significance of that, to be sure- she feels the full weight of isolation; indeed, is almost drowning in it. But there's no sense of magnitude, nothing weighing down the suffocating sense that she is and has always been utterly alone.

After a moment of silence, something he said has her looking at him curiously.]

Trillions? [Surely he means hundreds.]

Perhaps I don't. Or perhaps the memories I do have make less than no sense to me.

Take yourself, Gabriel. I know you are significant, but I utterly fail to see why.

[Mm, Castiel. The w- wait, what? Why would she think of him so strongly? He's done little to her but have the severe misfortune to be affected by an event while she was mentally compromised. Raphael can hardly remember why she hates him.

It makes no sense to be hostile in her reply.]

You are yourself, and I am me. We are ourselves stripped of one sense.

I'm damn charming?

This is how I know I have nothing, Gabriel. I leaped into a fire for you and I still cannot fathom why I would act so foolishly for so little a reason.

So that means you don't find me even a little bit charming, right? [He is grasping at wordplay straws. NO FEELINGS EVER.]

Not much, some arguments. Bout it.

[The lack of threats or harm encourage him a bit, at least enough to reply with a careful disagreement.]

We don't remember what has brought us to this point. Why we make our choices. Wrong and right. They're gone, without our histories to shape them.

You call it history. I call it baggage. I myself am proof of that.

[There are more things he wants to say, but he doesn't. He knows better than to speak of volatile subjects to this being, too gunshy about how she might react to broach them. So instead, they're reworded carefully, more generally.]

Is it easier for you now? Without memory of what happened before?

Yes. It is.

There is a subject we have never discussed. This may be our only chance.

[He's hesitant, at that.]

What is it?

Your death.

[His third death, but they don't know that.]

Oh.

[He ducks his head slightly, a very normal angel gesture of 'I'm not challenging you, don't hurt me', despite not knowing where such an instinct would have come from.]

What do you wish to discuss about it?

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