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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.
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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"Being around you is physically painful. I cannot begin to imagine why I inflict it on myself."
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Raphael never told him that before. The angel never once gave any indication that being around Michael was anything but normal or, indeed, a little comforting.
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He wondered if it might be best if he avoided her for the event, so as not to put more stress on her, but considering her behavior on the video feed while he wasn't around? No. He wasn't so sure he wanted to leave her alone.
"And the damage you were doing to yourself with the sword was better?"
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"Yes. It provides a distraction from the persistent pain of Hellfire." Depressingly, Raphael never would have been this honest if she had her memories and with them, her hang ups. She never would have told him the truth if she knew her brother. "You sneer because you do not know."
With that, she stepped forward and pressed her uninjured hand to his head, pushing into his mind the pain, the feel of Hellfire that Raphael was even in that very moment enduring: a constant, white-hot burn that never abated and was never any less intense than the first moment it seared her, for months on end without the slightest flicker of abatement. Her skin on fire, her being twisted, the lurching metaphysical nausea of being around him or Gabriel. Raphael let him see in a way that she knew another angel (if he could even said to be like her anymore- she couldn't really count herself as his kind or his species, regardless of family) could appreciate the time span and scope of, and stepped back. All told, she had her hand to his head for maybe two seconds, but she let him see it all.
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When she removed her hand, he lurched forward from shock, catching himself instinctively by grabbing his sister's shoulders, eyes unfocused for a few second as he processed. She had been right; he hadn't understood. He'd tried, but he simply couldn't grasp what she was dealing with, until now.
And he didn't at all know what to do about it. Unlike his sister, he recognized the familial bond, it pained him greatly that one of his most loved siblings was suffering so much, but it wasn't as though he hadn't tried to help before. He wasn't holding back, and frustration and worry were quickly turning to anger. Not at Raphael, but at who had done this in the first place: Lucifer.
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But time was wasting, and even now his presence pressed at her. "Then you understand why I can not stay here."
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"Yes. I do."
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