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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[Her eyes follow his before flickering back up to meet his softer ones.]

I know.

[Nobody can help her. She's sure of that. The entire concept of healing is alien to her.]

Then come here and let me fix it.

[His tone is quiet, but commanding and firm]

[The tone bothers her on some level, and she remembers enough of herself to know that she doesn't like being ordered around. Except- no, there are strange and complicated reactions to that, all of them so muted and quiet that Raphael isn't sure what to do with it.

But at the very least, Lucifer doesn't get to. She knows that, and returns his look evenly.]

I should not trust you. You have done nothing but cause harm.

Then don't give me reason to harm you. You haven't yet, so...

[he gestures with his hand: 'come here']

[She looks at him sternly, face still a mask of harsh mistrust, but she steps forward nonetheless, extending her hand.]

[Lucifer doesn't say anything about it. He just takes her wrist gently, and covers her wound with the palm of his other hand. He lets it linger there for a moment, painfully even nauseatingly homesick. She doesn't hurt to touch. She doesn't hurt to look at.

He almost doesn't want to heal her; but then he does, with a soft sigh.]

[The sensation is so not painful that it's shocking- she expects something strange, something unpleasant, but gets a wash of renewing energy that smooths away the bright, strident pain from the strange wound in her hand. Raphael almost doesn't know what to do with it; the addition of something in her world that isn't painful makes no sense to her. When she looks up, she feels more acutely some kind of loss. Her missing memories must have meant something.]

You do not hurt.

[Lucifer can't fully hide the emotions washing through him. The strangest, the most alien, is regret. He can't even accurately identify it. But he did not mean to hurt her and he never, not for a moment, wanted her to burn the way he burns. It doesn't matter that her injuries are like a sunburn while his would land him for years in a burn ward. The slightest bit of Hellfire is too much and he did not want to spread that pain to someone he loved. Loves.]

Neither do you.

[She pulls her hand back, but does not move away.]

I grew tired of that particular pain.

...Yes, I suppose you would.

[It's easier than saying the other pains will be just as bad, just as enduring.]

It was easy to cut out. [And so was he.] Unlike anything else in my world.

[A trace of resentment. This is your fault, you fucking jackass.]

[He frowns, and steps closer.] What was?

[She says it evenly, like it makes no difference at all.]

Michael.

[His expression doesn't change much--but there's a slightly more ashy quality to his complexion.]

Why did you remove him?

His presence was corrosive and pointless.

[Corrosive he understands; it hurts him to be around nearly anything. But pointless?]

I suppose if you have your own agenda now, yes.

You would not agree with me. I know.

I fail to see why I would inflict that on myself- so I left.

[She sounds vaguely bored. Why are they still talking about this?]

I might. You and I agree on more than you seem to realize.

Really.

[So skeptical.]

Try me.

I do not want to play games with you, Lucifer.

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.

[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.]

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