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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[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.