i'm gonna admit i'd miss you when you're gone

@"ReD"

Regeneration was a bitch.

Here's the nitty-gritty details of how Gabriel the avatar's "immortality" worked: his energy disperses and dies, and the sum of him gets dragged into Hell. The bigger him, the Mikhainon that was all armor and tentacles, would nag his ear off while he reconstructed another soul for him to use.

He didn't like that. On the list of things Gabriel hated, getting talked down by the more powerful Mikhainon was at the very top.

He returned to Manta Carlos very, very angry.

At the dark of night, near the lake at the school, the ground opened up. Mikhainon — the weaker one, the avatar, the creature often referred to as Gabriel — crawled out of the pits of hell with his barely materialized fingers clawing the earth. The sand rose up to construct his skeletal system, then the organs, muscles and finally, skin.

Instead of the usual startling red hair, a sea of blonde gushed from her head. Her bare body was suddenly covered with a tattered, black funeral dress. She exchanged the usual form for the woman known as Cecilia, but she kept the golden catlike eyes that glowed faintly in the dark. In her right was her signature silver dagger, as freshly made as her new body.

She turned into a raven and followed the instructions of a minor demon she assigned to follow Lochlann around to find out his address. The apartment building was unimpressive, and so was the view of the apartment from the inside, just like his Lochlann's hairstyle and general fashion sense. God, she hated him so much.

She entered the building as a small mouse and crawled under the door. Shit, this place smelled. She turned back into Cecilia.

She sat on his waist abruptly, to make sure she shook him awake, and pressed the cold blade against his neck.

"Baby, why didn't you call?"

Lochlann was waking up.

Good.

Mikhainon hummed. She pressed his head against the mattress as her knife lightly grazed across the skin of his neck and trailed down to his collar bone. It left a small, red trail on it. She enjoyed how it marked her skin.

Rationally, she knew the end result — her getting killed and presumably eaten — was all her fault. She pushed him. She gave him drugs and an incentive, and she did it all for her entertainment. It was damn funny too if it weren't for that end part. That part just made her angry.

She always acted on her impulses when she was angry.

"How are you, Lochlann? How's life treating you?" Her bright eyes flared dangerously. She raised the dagger and spun it expertly in her hand. It glinted a couple of times when the moonlight met the reflective metal, as if giving him a few seconds warning for what she was going to do next. "Up to anything fun lately? Watch any new shows, eat any new girls? Because —"

With a swift motion, she hopped to the side and sunk the dagger deep into the area next to the scar she remembered him having.

"— I just got back from the dead, asshole!"

She twisted the blade for emphasis.

The kick connected to her gut and between her boobs, knocking her off the bed back first onto the floor below. The impact of it all was worse when she landed on the mouth of a random, empty bottle.

Jesus' tits, that knocked the wind out of her. It took her a few moments and furious head shaking to get her vision back right in order. It was then she realized what he was trying to do.

She got up and attempted to reclaim her dagger from his leg.

Mikhainon was at the foot of his bed, tits visible from the low collar and bloody dagger twirling in her hand. She grinned, pearly white teeth visible in the dark.

"Really? I'm here looking at you with bloody murder in my eyes and you think your dick can get you out of this?" She slapped him on the bloody leg once and hopped off the bed. "Well, you guessed right. Good job."

She left him for a moment so she could walk over to his fridge, lifting her skirt to sheath her dagger strapped to her garter. He has — booze. Predictable. Not even good booze. She picked a bottle up, opened it and took a long swig. She coughed.

"Ugh. Shit apartment. Shit booze. Shit life. How can you live like this, Lochlann?"

She threw the booze over her shoulder, spilling alcohol everywhere and smashing the bottle into a thousand pieces. She picked up another one. She tasted it, again, and threw it over her shoulder.

"You know, back in the Roaring Twenties, I met a handsome businessman that was killing it at the stock market. He was also a serial killer that loved to keep hot women in his basement as sex slaves. That part, he wasn't too famous for. Anyway..." She opened another bottle and took a swig. That one was pretty good. Tequila? "He took me as one of his girls and accidentally strangled me to death while he fucked me silly. Whoops?"

She smashed the bottle on the sink, letting she shards cut her palm and fingers. "I came back a week later, of course, you know what I did? I fucked his wife and took custody of his kids. Cheated him on the stock market. Won all his assets. By his forties, he was a ruined husk of a man whose only joy in life was watching his tiny ant farm inside his shitty studio apartment. I destroyed that too."

She smashed the remaining bottles on the ground and walked over back to the bed, stepping over the shards with her heels.

"I think we're gonna have a lot of fun, Lochlann, you and I." She reached out to pinch his cheek, and then she slapped him across the face. "You're gonna wish you were never born."

Well, that just meant she should double her efforts, then.

"I'm still hot and you know it."

Mikhainon pressed a soft kiss to his lips. Before she could take it further, she took a few steps back and headed to his closet, flung it open and pulled out two belts.

She'd been to his mind. She saw everything, from his boring farm life to his dirty little secrets — the scope of his addiction, his hopes and dreams, and, most importantly, his fears. She climbed on his lap and raised her dagger with a grin before ripping out a strip of his blanket.

He was weak. He couldn't run or make a break for it, but he was being kept steady, she supposed, by the concept that he could. She attempted to bind his hands to the bed post using the belts she pulled out of his closet earlier.

[ ooc: took a few liberties here. if you want me to change something let me know~ ]