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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[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)

[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.

[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?

[She stares at him evenly, maintaining her self-possessed body language and inwardly wondering at a distant flicker of satisfaction, to see him submit so.]

It was not intended.

[He glances up at her at that, again a little more assured she doesn't plan to harm him.]

I didn't believe it to be.

[He isn't sure why, but he feels like it would have been a lot less simple and quick if she'd intended to kill him.]

It was a simple error of judgment that would not normally have occurred.

Oh. I... Alright.

[Is she... Apologizing?]

I would normally know not to throw a human into a wall that way, but you know I was not myself and have not been, not really.

I am... Aware of your difficulties. It's... I don't blame you.

[Not entirely, anyway. And not like he's say otherwise.]

It is good that we could have this conversation. We're normally so incapable of reasonable speech.

Yes. I'm not entirely certain why.

Neither am I. I know that I consider you very dangerous, but the reason escapes me.

Do you remember our conversation when you found me mutilated by Lucifer?

[He nods slightly, uncertainly, but doesn't speak.]

video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

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