accidental video;

[expunger]

[Gray. The opening shot is all dim gray and dusky, a boring shot of a concrete wall stained with black ash, before too-bright blue-white light knifes through the picture again, causing horrible screaming static for a brief moment. Everything whirls before the PCD lands, now pointed up at a derelict ceiling. From far off, noise can be heard: footsteps, crackling electricity, a low electric tinny and hard breathing. After a long minute the picture shakes again, lifting and turning around to show Raphael's face.

She looks, for lack of a better word, like shit. For an angel she looks exhausted, with faint circles under her eyes. Her skin has a papery quality that is strongly evocative of Lucifer. Face rot dots her hairline and a small spot on one side of her jaw, again very like what Lucifer suffers from. Despite coming out of a terrible event (for which she was a complete hermit, speaking to and seeing no one), there's obviously something else on her mind.]

The Archangel Michael is gone. You would do well to never speak his name again where we can hear it.

[ooc note: anyone going to find her will find her in the Wastes. Yes, even if they poof to her side immediately, angels. She can hustle.]

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[emptynight]

[It takes a while for Thomas' self-preservation instincts to kick in, to work through all the smartassery and buried self-destruction. But when they do kick in, they kick in hard. Thomas continues watching Raphael, watching as the heat rises, as her skin flushes with warmth... and tries his best to bury the demon and its influence as deep in his tainted soul as he can manage.

Raphael had already demonstrated a complete inability to take a joke, and coupled with the thirst for blood and the fact that he could feel said blood's effects on her already, Thomas didn't want to think about just how many pieces he'd end up in if the Hunger brushed up against that growing lust and sparked action. So he kept that part of him leashed as tightly as he could.

See, he thought. Sometimes.

He looks and sounds more human than he usually did, with eyes storm grey and free of metallic silver] Looks like that blood's disagreeing with you.

[expunger]

[He is presenting as more human, and it catches her attention quickly. Nothing like that ever changes without a damn good reason for it. She walks over to him and grips his chin in one hand, tilting his head up to stare at him inscrutably.]

No. It simply has different properties than blood of my world. The healing is already in effect.

[His eyes are simple gray, with no inhuman glints of silver at all. Voice gentler, more human around the edges, the inhuman sharpness blunted with fear. It does not fool her: she can see the pale blood just under the skin, his pupils, dilated and scared, she can discern the precise effects of adrenaline on his monstrous thing. Which part is which, she wonders. How long would it take her to dismantle him, peeling back skin and pulling him inside out, before she found the part of him that makes him a monster? He is a sinner with seeming awareness of that fact. How long before he crumbled and begged for forgiveness of sins she has no authority to forgive? She holds his gaze for a long, long time.]

It would be so easy.

[emptynight]

[A look of understanding flickers over Thomas' face and is gone as quickly as it came. He shifts slowly, not testing the give on the chains again, but settling warily lest he tip himself over.]

To what, gut me like a pig? I'm getting that.

[expunger]

[She's still holding onto his chin and tilts his face first to one side, then the other, just to get a better look at him. Her penetrating gaze can find nothing but imperfections, nothing but flaws, but... strangely enough, nothing worth destroying.

How strange, when only minutes before she itched to erase him from the face of this wretched earth.

Something calls in her, something urgent and foreign. She wants to take him apart, to find the seams where monster meets man and unravel them, to see how many ways and in how many pieces she could put him back together. She wants to sink deep into yielding flesh and warm blood, to pick through a mind that can't help but give under the pressure, to tease the fear from his grey eyes and a beg for forgiveness from his lips.

The Hellfire isn't bothering her anymore. She has no reason to be here.

And still, she doesn't let go of him.]

To destroy you. To make you afraid once more. You pretend to be so superior, but I know the truth.

[emptynight]

[Desire waxes and wanes, and this close he can almost feel hers ebb, the heat of molten living rock and fire receding from the impenetrable wall of glacial ice. Strange. Thomas can feel that there's knowledge there, that there's something he and the Hunger were missing, but it's hard to tell what it is, as if the language of lust and desire that he breathed with every breath no longer quite applied.

And so it fell back to words. Words and the knowledge that the body holding him captive had his blood working in its veins, whispering of physical desire to flesh. With whatever shreds of self-preservation he had left, Thomas kept his words low, his eyes focused somewhere beyond Raphael. There was truth in his words when he spoke again, a truth that those who knew him knew Thomas never let into the open unless there was real fear in his heart.]

You can try, darling, but I promise you won't do a better job than I'm already doing.

[expunger]

[The Hunger still calls to her, but it's different than in a normal human: there's desire, yes, there's a kind of lust and a kind of need, but it runs through different filters than humans feel, different emotional processes that affect how she feels it. Or at least how she perceives it. There's desire to break him apart in her hands, lust for him in a vicious kind of physical sense, as a lion lusts for its prey and hunts its next kill. If she were a little more human, a little more emotionally sensitized she'd be feeling this in a more typical sense, something more sexual that Thomas would expect, but she is an angel and the heat flushing her skin red feels to her like the roaring heat of battle, the dark thrill of a righteous smiting.

Of course, it's nothing like either one in the slightest. But it's the only basis for comparison she has.

Raphael adjust her grip on his chin unnecessarily, noting the abrasion of skin against skin. A minor detail she usually overlooks, but not today. The look in her eyes is a special kind of hungry.]

I invented torture. Do not underestimate me.