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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Michael has been having a bad week. Actually, longer than that; he's been having a bad while, ever since the disastrous break down of his family's careful alliances and truces that had kept them all at peace. He'd had to break up altercations and had missed even more of them, and despite what his siblings apparently thought, he was not an endless source of patience that existed to keep them from their immature squabbling and lead them all around by the hand.

This event was turning out to be the last straw, too. Of all of them, Lucifer seemed to be the only one besides Michael that knew who they were, where they'd come from, and what they'd all done. Raphael, who Michael was closest to, looked at him with unfamiliarity and though that alone might've been distressing but ultimately okay, there was an additional issue. With the Hellfire corrupting her grace, she was unpredictable even outside of events, and while she barely even knew Michael, he was distantly concerned through his calm confidence. Anger, as well, simmered below the surface though it was directed at Lucifer, who had caused this issue to begin with, and for what? Wounded pride?

So Michael had been spending as little time as possible around his siblings; he was, like most angels, restless at best so it wasn't all that strange that he would fly aimlessly around the city. And it's not like Raphael would notice he was being more avoidant that usual.

He was perched on the top of a building, watching the city idly when his PCD beeped to alert of a new message to the network. As usual, he checked the device out of curiosity, a little surprised that it was Raphael; she rarely posted to the network, after all. But after viewing the message, he was displeased. Maybe leaving her alone wasn't the best idea, if she was so oblivious that she was playing with an archangel sword. And so, Michael flew home immediately, striding in through the door with no need to announce his presence. He was hard to miss when he wanted to be.

Raphael continued spinning the sword in midair, not bothering to look up to greet him. The wound was a little bigger now, and the bright glow coming from within fascinated her. It was a bright, strident pain to cut through the constant burn that even now ate away at her being and strained her insides. Anything different was welcome.

There was no greeting, friendliness, or familiarity from her. If anything, Michael's arrival made her frown, shoulders shifting with displeasure at the too-bright presence now pressing at the walls around her. His presence was like a low-grade migraine to her. In fact, from her stalking this week of the other so-called angels in the city, they all were- except one. But he was the one that she knew she had to have caution around. The untrustworthy one, the bastard she distinctly remembered plunging his hand into her Grace and trying to rip it out, leaving behind this horrible, constant screaming agony inside her.

She had nothing to say to any of her alleged brothers.

[She doesn't understand a lot of what Raphael's trying to say here; what sticks out to her is the simple concept of not knowing loved ones, family.]

But don't you think we're missing out on our chances to be with them, too, if we can't remember them right now? [Are there things she's forgetting? Is this why she finds herself so drawn to her roommates? Why it feels like something's missing she's just not sure how to define?]

The memories will return at the end of the event. There are strains of influenza that last longer than this amnesia.

It is potential for objective action that's more rare.

[She really, doesn't want to put together that Raphael could mean against her brothers.]

Do you mean being able to do something about the Animus together?

Michael was not impressed, and he didn't know what she was doing with the sword; the Raphael he knew would not be treating a dangerous weapon so callously. The sight of the grace bleed, as small as it was, bothered him and he didn't even have to move to mentally reach out and pluck the sword from her telekinetic grasp, it flying to his hand for him to catch it easily.

"It isn't a toy, Raphael." He said, voice tight; he wasn't snapping or losing his cool, but he wanted to to the point where it was creeping into his tone.

I mean action in our own lives. This is a glimpse of clarity. The chance to look at our paths of action without bias.

She was on her feet at that, instantly annoyed. Only now did Raphael see fit to look at him, feeling with a disturbed pang the metaphysical hurt of being near him and his kind.

"Give me my sword." Pause. "It is mine." That was doubt, but she wouldn't admit it.

I wonder about that. I feel sort of like I don't have a reason to do anything lately.

Michael tossed the weapon back at her when she demanded it back, acquiescing because his point had been made already. "Then don't misuse it." He warned, striding casually further into the room. The ridiculously barren room, which he didn't bother to restore to it's usual decorations just yet.

Raphael caught it easily and sheathed it again in nothingness, watching curiously as it slid seemingly into her sleeve and out of sight. Then she turned to him again, ignoring the burst of cutting pain from her hand. On top of the agony of Hellfire, nothing else seemed to matter.

"I'll do whatever I want." That felt right on a level she couldn't quantify, so she pressed on in the direction that made sense. "You are in no position to tell me otherwise."

A flash of irritation passed through Michael, but he continued his lazy walk into the room. He couldn't even blame the outright defiance on the event, considering she'd done it before, but he tried not to let it get to him as he responded. "As far as you know." He commented lightly, in the airy tone of someone who clearly didn't care what another thought of them, because they were wrong and it didn't matter if they knew it.

Raphael appeared right in front of him, wings folding closed.

"No, you are right. There are many things I do not know." Her gaze was very deliberately unwavering.

He tracked her motion easily enough that he wasn't surprised by the sudden flight, staring back at her evenly. "That's the event's doing, as you know. If you have a question, ask it."

"I have one, but you could answer it."

She backed off a step, eyes narrowed but thoughtful. "I fail to see why I try to be around you at all."

Ouch. That hurt worse than Michael was willing to show, so he didn't, face as neutral and calm as ever. "What do you find so dislikeable about me?" He turned the question around, both because he wanted to know the answer and because it let him control the conversation.

[He can't argue that, can't even begin to. How many times in Hell had he thought something similar? That if he'd lost his family he would have been free? But he can't shake off the love he has for Michael and the others no matter how hard he tries. He will kill them if he must, yes, but he will love them even after their blood stains his hands.]

Raphael, what have I told you about running with scissors?

I would not know.

[softly] You're being foolish.

It was a fair question, she supposed, given that this person barely identifiable as her same species was her brother. So Raphael answered it, barely keeping a lid on herself through the sting of presence before her that she couldn't even identify as holy.

"Being around you is physically painful. I cannot begin to imagine why I inflict it on myself."

[Irritably] I'm uninterested in your opinion of me.

It's not an opinion, Raphael.

Where are you?

[Unconcerned (because she knows it's probably true, given the event):] Near the Outer Wall.

Oh, that. Michael nodded, looking a little more somber. "It's unfortunate, and recent. We're still working on a way to fix it."

"I know." She remembers that much. "Our brother inserted his hand inside me and lit my being on fire. Looking at you and being in a room with you is singularly unpleasant, and I have yet to acclimate to it."

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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video; BACKDATED to Wednesday

[Offline] Log format because I do what I want. 8|

it's your hot body you do what you want.

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I run with twelve gangs and we only commit hate crimes

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I ran for Congress and won

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SHUT UP BITCH~

I'M SO BAD I DIGITALLY PUT JABBA BACK IN THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS MOVIE

I'M SO BAD I DON'T REMEMBER ANY MORE LINES

I'M SO BAD I LOOKED THEM UP YOU LAZY SLUT

I'M SO BAD I WAS ACTUALLY DOING THEM WITHOUT CHEATING 8| /ALL ENTENDRES INTENDED

I'M SO BAD THAT FUCK YOUR MOTHER.

I'M SO BAD THAT YOUR FACE

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