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.]

Comments

[expunger]

[Inelegant. Unwieldy, as Lucifer has always been, but she says nothing. The nothing rings out in the vacuum as invasive as a church-bell's chime.

The creature struggles for a long, long time, bleeding out slowly and unable to move without excruciating pain. Raphael watches its throes for five, ten, fifteen silent minutes before finally making a movement. Steps, two, ten, to the dragon's head, moving sluggishly now in the blood loss and pain. She holds out one hand to its forehead, her own skin sizzling on burning-hot scales. With a thought she shares some of her own fire, the fire that still hasn't stopped burning, that hasn't let up the agony a single second of a single day of a single week of three agonizingly long months of her life. The bellow it lets out sears the landscape, vibrating the rocks and scaring off any approaching vermin for the time being. One eardrum nearly bursts, but she doesn't feel it. It doesn't matter, not really.

She steps back again and watches it scream.]

[thelightbringer]

[He doesn't even speak up to warn her that sharing the fire may make things worse--not in spreading the embers, but because sharing that agony is a large step down a very dark path.

But no. She'll learn on her own, and he doesn't have it in him right now to care what happens to her. Not beyond keeping her alive. Michael is gone. The peace is gone. The hope, the plans. He's not back at the beginning but it sure as hell feels that way.]

[expunger]

[It takes twenty minutes to die. Twenty very long, very slow minutes. When it stops coughing and shuddering, Raphael makes no motion to face him. Let him speak first, the needy brat.]

[thelightbringer]

[But he doesn't.

Michael is gone. Lucifer can't reach him; he may never reach him again.

There is nothing in the world that he can say in the face of that, especially not to her.]

[expunger]

[The silence stretches on interminably, as Raphael stares at the corpse and wonders. Her vessel's stomach is churning sickly, but she can't figure out why. Her steady hands tremble infinitesimally when she moves them, every part of her coiled and quivering to strike.]

It is unnatural to be made to mourn the same loss twice.

When we make our way out, I will burn this world to the ground.

[thelightbringer]

Good. It deserves your wrath.

[Rare as it is to get Raphael angry. He takes a breath to say more, but doesn't. Confiding anything in anyone has the same appeal as chugging curdled milk.]

[expunger]

I am surprised you haven't destroyed the city already.

[thelightbringer]

You have such narrow expectations, brother.

[expunger]

He was one of the few threads tying you to stability.

[thelightbringer]

[And how he wants to tear her wings right off for bringing this up. But he just moves away from her, to inspect the carcass.]

Yes. He was.

[He keeps his voice as level as he can, never betraying the panic he's felt ever since Michael simply disappeared.]

[expunger]

You will have to live with no shadow of Michael in your life or at its edges.

[And Lucifer has never done that before. Even for Raphael, at first, it was hard.]

[thelightbringer]

[He wants to snap that he's done that, in the Cage. He was entirely isolated there. But he'd had the promise of seeing Michael if he could survive long enough, if he could keep himself together and escape.

If he escapes this he has the Apocalypse and abandonment.]

Well, so do you.

[expunger]

I have already accepted that I will never see him again.

[The corpse begins to burn.]

Have you?

[thelightbringer]

[He doesn't move a muscle, but the corpse abruptly explodes into frozen-but-smoldering pieces.]

Of course you would just give up on him.