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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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.]

Upon trillions. Worlds as numerous as the grains of sand upon the sea...or somesuch. I can't remember how he told us to keep count.

He. [A chill passes over her. Something is missing. She can't even begin to wonder.] Who?

[This is really disturbing, even to Lucifer, who should find it hilarious. He would, in fact, if this wasn't his sister.]

God.

[The answer unsettles her, and she (unusually) lets it show in uncomfortable shifting of weight and something young in her expression.]

That word has no meaning to me.

He was our Creator. But it should have no meaning now, since He's flown the coop.

[... :c she doesn't like not knowing.]

I don't understand.

...I don't know how to make it any plainer, Raphael.

He was the chicken before our eggs. He created us the way we create...well, anything we want.

No. I hear the words you are saying and I know the meanings of them. I know what you are trying to say.

But it makes no sense to me.

[There's a deeper reason why, but she's not saying. It's part of the reason that a connection with Michael makes no sense to her.]

[Lucifer tilts his head, worried, waiting for her to explain. If she even can. If not, he's sure she'll change the subject.]

I have no context. [She starts worrying her vessel's wedding ring- a highly unusual tic for her.] Nothing. I have inferred that Michael remembers an unusual bond for us, but his face means nothing. This "God" means nothing.

You talk about him leaving- as if he was ever with us.

[It's not real. He knows that. But it still makes his vessel tense up.]

Then what do you remember...?

Nothing. I remember nothing to indicate that I have ever been anything but absolutely alone.

...Your first memory, then, where was that?

Adstringéndum.

[Lucifer is honestly horrified by that. It's no wonder she was so baffled by him.]

Then you know what the Animus can do.

[The biggest "duh" look.]

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