#the figures are ambiguous and distorted for reasons that are personal. are you stupid?

[cartoon-skeleton]

IDK WHAT IM DOOOOING IDK WHAT IM DOING IDK WHAT IM DOING FOR MY SENIOR THESIS and I haven’t gotten shit done for it and it’s been fucking one degree all weekend so I really don’t want to walk 15 mins to the studio so it’s just like well!!!!!!!!!! I think what I actually need is for people to STOP checking in with me lol. as crazy as that sounds. Like just leave me alone for a bit and then come back later. like don’t even come into my studio. The constant contrasting feedback is really fucking me up and I need a feedback-less brain for like, jus a bit. Cuz like I don’t even know what my project is anymore. LOL Like bro just leave me be. Driving me up the wall!!!!!!!!!!!

[fantroll-purgatory]

@nxbulaholic

This is certainly one of the more unique profiles we’ve ever gotten… I like the flower flourishes, haha. A few things here… I’m not sure who Darcan is? You didn’t really clarify. I googled the name and all I came up with was this Broken–Pieces rp group? Which uses the same flower quirk that you do, so I’m assuming you’re working on a character for that! In fact it seems like you might’ve already submitted her? But that’s fine, we’ll get working. 

So the basics of this character are that she’s someone with anger in her heart. She seems guided by intellect, but she’s actually guided by emotions. She’s a conspiracy theorist, dodgy, and involves herself in drama…. Alright, I think I can work with that. 

Xamona Orcigo 

I’m sure it’s uncomfortable to get a name change suggestion for an established character, but maybe… Ustakl Krygaf. 

Ustakl functions as a reference to the Üst akıl (mastermind) conspiracy theory in Turkey, which expresses the belief that some external actor is attempting to systematically weaken and dismantle Turkey, up to implying that ripped jeans were a form of “code talking” and even that the external actor is responsible for the 2017 Turkish earthquake. 

Krygaf is a reference to the etymological root of Crytology. It would basically mean Code Creator, which is in a way a reference both to her conspiracy theorist nature And the title I’m going to later recommend for her (because she doesn’t read as a breath player to me). 

 Age - 8 sweeps

 Pronouns - She/Her

 Nicknames / Other known Names - Mona

I think this can stay even if you change her name, because- get this- Mona Lisa conspiracy theories? Surprisingly common. And ambiguity is a common theme around the Mona Lisa anyways. Maybe there was a troll Monalisa in the ancient times that is a famous painting today and she’s nicknamed after it because of some of the uncertainty surrounding her and her smile.

 Wriggling day - August 13th 

 Title - Mage of Breath

I want to make the argument that she’s a Sylph of Mind. She passively creates ideas from whole cloth by interpreting information in unique ways. She might be able to inspire action in others through these ideas and threads of logic that she’s creating. The people around her might be pushed to move in certain ways depending on the information she gathers and asserts. 

Her inverse would be Prince of Heart, which is also fitting. This inverse implies that she would destroy Through heart as well as destroy heart. She would actively use her emotions as a tool to smash with and would hurt other’s feelings in the process. Destroying all these feelings in the way thus inspires people to act in certain ways or come to certain conclusions, wrapping back around to her passively creating thought. 

Discourse also has a bit reputation with Romance Drama so her calling out her exes would be another way of Passively Creating Thought by actively destroying hearts. 

 Dreamer Class - Prospit

Considering her tendency to close off from others/not let people know her true colors, her involvement in a rebellion, her anger towards purples that presumably stems from her past, and her interest in discourse, I’d say she’s probably actually a derse dreamer!

 Symbol - 

Libus

 ~ Sign of the Vibrant

Which means I’ll be changing her sign to Libza, the Acute. I think this is a fitting title for her, because it means shrewd, but also means present in a painful or overbearing amount.

 Blood color - Teal 

I think she makes a really good teal. I think you should emphasize her ethical center, though!. Does she fundamentally believe people can’t change? If someone was called out 10 years ago will she continue to hold them in exile? Does she value a sense of moral superiority over the basic tenants of kindness and mutual respect? Is she one of those bloggers who is like, a total dick to people for no reason but never gets called out because she’s like, technically got good politics, but GOD she’s a dick? 

 Alignment - Darcan’s Rebellion 

You should definitely elaborate how she found out about him and why she decided to join in your backstory.

 Typing Style - all in lowercase and always uses prefered and more obtuse vocabulary, TYPES IN ALL CPAS WHEN PISSED OFF AND MAKES A FUCKTION OF SPELLING MISTAKES 

I’m sorry to say that this is kind of an overused quirk by this point, especially for characters with explosive tempers. I think if you want to make a character who co-opts the social justice scene for her own social benefit and to manufacture a feeling of self-worth, you should look at the communities of people online who Really Do That, those people who take the sjw language for themselves and mutate other community’s language and smash both into a condescending bullshit pile. 

Example: if you think goldbloods are just purple shills you. are. valid. unu

uhm okay you stupid fuckboy. purplebloods are inherently violent but go off i guess???? unu

OKAY LISTEN UP YOU MOTHERFUCKERS. YOUR HEMOELDER IS GONNA LEARN YOU A THING unu.

Use the ‘unu’ emoji at the end of every sentence and distort actual sj conventional speech as much as you can, basically. 

 Strife Specibi - taserkind

Edit: I really can’t stop thinking about this so I have to suggest it. You could also possibly have her have teakind as a backup? Like a literal cup of tea. For an “And that’s the tea” joke, of course. 

 Lusus - Quetza the 31st (a three headed snake lusii) 

Honestly can I recommend a two-faced golbat-like lusus? 

One of the uhhh bigger names in nasty inconceivable discourse right now has a golbat-themed blog (no namedrops here)- and there’s also the Leelah Alcorn scandal, orchestrated by the now deactivated user, Zubat. Seems like the zubat line is a little cursed by discourse >_>. golbats look like they’re Yelling so it’s great for a character like her who has a tendency to Erupt, and the two-faced nature implies her tendency to not present her True Self immediately. 

 Ancestor - Contessa Blackfin 

I don’t know much about the narrative story you’re going for here, but maybe she could’ve been killed by a purple?

 Personality - Xamona could usually be described as the type of person who would try logic and reason instead of violence, it’s actually the other way around when you get to know her. She has a deathly fear of Purplebloods and is basically racist towards that specific caste, she’s quite willing to go to extreme lengths to prove her points and is rather manipulative towards trolls who don’t know her true colors. If anything she could be compared to that of a conspiracy theorist.. or a Tumblr user with an extreme amount of history relating to discourse. 

I’m guessing things are more egalitarian between the castes of landdwellers in this au in order for the prejudice narrative to make sense? Because otherwise being wary of a class of people who’ve historically exploited yours and who have powers Specifically meant to keep lowbloods down while inside a totalitarian highbloods nation is kind of good sense. Just a little. 

Still though she’s such a dick I love this bad personality. I think she should be the type to hold a grudge and the type who accuses everyone of being out to get her.

Relationships - [TBA]

<strike>Nikalo - Is EXTREMELY suspicious of.</strike> 

 Strengths - 

- Xamona is very agile and could dodge enemy attacks with ease

- Despite her seemingly fragile figure, she could put up quite a fight with those of higher blood than her

Keep in mind that her being a teal is starting to dip into the blueblood range, so she’ll be naturally stronger than Jades and below. 

Also, make her someone who’s really good at preparedness. If she’s paranoid, make her someone who’s already ready for an attack. Make her the kind of person that when she walks in a room, she’s already thinking, “Where are all the exits? What can I hide under? What could I use as a weapon?” This helps her avoid situations where she’s backed into a corner- and makes it all the scarier when she IS helpless.

 Weaknesses -

- If you get her to talk about her plans, she’ll keep talking and talking.. 

- If she’s cornered, Xamona will be at her weakest when it comes to fighting back

 Backstory - [TBA]

Hmmmmm, maybe you could make her have romance drama with a purple that ended in a little bit of turmoil? Some eye-scarring turmoil? 

 Quote - “CALL ME A HIPSERT ONE MORE FUCKING TIME.”

 Voice - 

Mahiru Koizumi

 Themesong - 

Into the Basement

Design: 

There really wasn’t a lot I felt the need to edit. I gave her horns that look more like her new symbol. I know this au isn’t especially concerned with canon compliance, but blind eyes are bright red from what we’ve seen! So I edited it to that. And I moved her symbol and changed it to the new one. We’ve seen that on Alternia, symbols always appear in blood color and never another color, even a neutral one. 

I also did a new ref sheet? 

Though not much changed there.

Thank you for sharing!

-CD

[myfriendpokey]

futures market

(ed. note: stephen died while writing this, may his sinful heart now rest in peace)

I think that every work implies an audience, i think that projected audience will be perpetually dreamlike and strange since it's drawn not from human consciousness but from a form of same which has been distorted through embodiment in alien material. Refracted by some "medium" and then existing as a transferable, reproducible object and living an object life separable from the human circumstances by which it was produced. And I think that when we evaluate a work part of what we evaluate is this audience and the prospect of belonging to it, the possibility of a community with those assumptions and those values. The saying "give people what they want" always confuses me in this context because surely part of what they want is the possibility of wanting something else, of being a person who wants something else. Advertisements famously sell not just a product but also the prospect of being the kind of person who likes that product. Even the most conservative works pull a bait and switch in this regards in that part of what they suggest is the prospect of being a person who already knows what they want, of having character and qualities that persist in time rather than being a shapeless blob of experiences.

Avant-garde work could be said to be that which prioritises the formation of new audiences, or the possibility of forming new audiences, above any actual qualities which those audiences would have. It draws on the utopian aspect of creating new social structures, new communities, where whatever form they ultimately end up taking the fact that they can be made at all is in some way a celebration of agency and the possibility of new futures. But the other side of things is that even as the appeal of these imaginary communities comes partly from their distance from our real ones, they're also evaluated on the basis of their feasibility - their power comes not just from a list of bloodless alternities but from possessing a transformative quality, the real possibility of enactment which is used to make demands on the contemporary. Not just a future but one already germinating in the present. And though I like and respect a lot of these works it's also hard, for this reason, not to feel a little uneasy about them - because the imagery of an imminent, transfigurative break from the present has been so co-opted as a way to conceal the fundamental limitations and eerie inertia of capitalism that I think it's hard for anything drawing on that tradition to escape lending credibility to it, even when its interests are directly opposed. 20+ years of an increasingly threadbare neoliberal consensus  in the face of problems which grow more and more obvious mean the notion of an unexpected, miraculous shift in the causal order grows more and more central, from the vague sense that someone will invent, like, a moss or something which will stop global warming in the nick of time to the idea that the same clumsy, stupid videogames we've been bonking against invisible walls in for decades now will any minute now transmogrify into the effortless freefloating virtual lucid dreams of legend. And in fact videogames provide a constant running example of just how profitably this perception can be managed - - from a medium which from inception built upon a certain futuristic quality coming both from the historically new level of consumer access to computer technology and from decades of science-fiction representations of same, and which leveraged that into a perennial suggestion that the bright new day was always just around the corner - that by playing videogames now you were securing a kind of early-investor bragging rights to the media singularity to come. If there's anything historically new about videogames it's the extent to which the very suggestion of potential developments to be had later on was finally recognised as more profitable than any intrinsic qualities of the form itself.

And I think all this raises some problems when we think about avant-garde and experimental videogames, not just because in replicating some of the assumptions of the industry they risk being assimilated by it - you can't game-design your way out of late capitalism, there are no final aesthetic solutions to economic problems etc - but because by repeating those assumptions they risk being judged by the standard of contribution to this same monolithic vidcon future, and then discarded accordingly when "the future" changes according to stockholder diktats. I mean that when you see these works as yet more expressions of "the medium" it's harder for them to survive when that status is taken away again, and that at this point it's difficult to conceive of a future of videogames that doesn't in some way just flow back into the orthodox one still being sold.

Why does this matter. I think the videogame market will crash again because that's what markets do, and when it does I believe it'll be blamed on small engines, on unity and rpgmaker, on asset-flipping and joke simulators and walking games and political games rather than e.g. the incessant boom-bust cycles of capitalism or the fact that the particular interactive media singularity that videogames have invested so much image, money and energy into identifying themselves with looks more and more dated and less likely to happen. I think there'll be more gamergate bullshit from people who invested in the stupid, stupid videogame dream and got told by youtube millionaires that it was being undermined from within by sjw fifth columnists making pug dating games. I think that just as places like YouTube have shown a willingness to quietly cut down on who's able to make money through their service places like Steam will do the same thing, particularly after already raising the prospect of exponentially increasing the cost of using the store for small developers already. I think middlebrow columnists at the Atlantic will cash checks saying well, a lot of those games weren't pushing the medium forward anyway, and that the whole thing will end up being recast as a morality tale about an overcrowded, overdiverse market, and that a lot of valuable work people are doing now will be just wiped from the record in the same way as a lot of pre-2007 indie games were, or flash games, or interactive CD-ROMs, or whatever the fuck.

I think that when this happens experimental games or avant garde games or alternative games will be seen less as possible alternatives to the mainstream tradition than as offshoots of it which got pruned, and I'm not sure how much help they will really be to anyone trying to figure out ways to make these things without getting pulled into the endless churning blood rotor of existing videogame culture.

I've written before that the game scenes which interest and excite me most are things like FNAF fangames, Undertale fangames, Unity horror games, RPG Maker games, hyperspecific utility pieces like the Prosperity Path orbs, less for any particular aesthetic or design qualities than for them being videogames which manage to escape some of the awful binary of Producer/Consumer and the ideas of "importance" which evolve later to help justify that perverse dynamic. Like what does it mean to experience a game if it's just part of a big stack of almost interchangeable things and anyway you're only absently going through it when searching for more stuff to steal for your own interchangeable thing. Which is healthier and more interesting than "art". But I think part of it too is the sense of having a specific audience to bounce against, even if it's just of people looking to take your Secret Of Mana midis, and the way that the concreteness of that audience helps defuse the kind of creeping tendency towards cultural speculation that comes with the belief in a big medium-wide payout somewhere down the line that'd justify the time and energies of everyone involved. I don't think it's enough to say people should make an effort to criticise games for what they are as opposed to what they might be, or whatever, insofar as that's even possible. I think being able to appreciate what they are is dependent on recognizing that they have an audience which is similarly settled, similarly "just there". And I think working towards constructing that kind of space would mean, yes, a sort of concession of "the future" to the stockholders of industry, renouncing the right to eventually reap that dread crop. But in the process being able to better engage with the present and all the disparite forces and strands within it who have similarly been lopped off that grand narrative, or were never part of it to begin with, and navigate all the ambiguities and potentials of that space. I think the future of videogames is the same kind of desperate, self-willed dream as those years worth of Twitter shares, for a company which has never actually been profitable, or the horrible locked-down image of infinity that sees new Rocket Racoon movies coming out every year til 2099, I think those dreams are ones that emerge and grow stronger as the actual basis for them either materially or affectively grows ever more decrepit, I think however overwhelming they get they can only really be strangled in the present.

As they say... no futur-what! what are you doing in my house! no-aieee!! (manuscript abruptly cuts off)

[kylosrehn]

the architecture of loss

For @plinys. Also on ao3.

Ophelia watches as Leopold stands up, smooths a hand down his suit jacket, and moves to cross the room, summoned into his office by the shrill ringing of the phone. Taking advantage of her husband’s momentary distraction, she reaches for the tablet on the coffee table, the screen glowing to life as she unlocks it.

She casts a quick glance behind her shoulder, Leopold’s voice distant and distorted across the hall, before turning back to the tablet. Pulling up a browser window, she slides her fingers across the keyboard, typing in the name Ward had given her. A beat, and she’s looking at the search results for one Richie H.

The Hydra database doesn’t offer much to go on, implying that this Richie, whoever he may be, knows how to stay off their radar. She hadn’t expect anything less from Ward’s contact, one he’d fervently vouched for.

Surprisingly, the online browser yields better results. There’s one hit that seems legitimate, spawning a minimalist website and matching the Philadelphia address Ward had mentioned. The name listed is different though, an Amadeus as opposed to a Richie. There’s no phone number or even email given, only the address and a zip code, which Ophelia saves on her phone before turning her attention back to the tablet, fingers dancing across the screen to delete the browser history. She powers down the tablet and slides it back onto the coffee table just as Leopold falls silent.

Ophelia re-assumes her previous position, hands resting lightly on her lap, listening to the sounds of her husband’s footsteps as he crosses the penthouse, joining her in the living room moments later.

Silence stretches on in the space between them, in this house that’s not a home.

They don’t speak.

They never do anymore, not properly, not outside of the occasional perfunctory courtesy; of the necessary conversations required to cohesively run Hydra. There’s too much hurt and suspicion and anger between them for anything more than that — there’s nothing but the pinched corners of Leopold’s mouth and the wide stretch of reproach that sits behind his eyes.

Ophelia takes her time, finishing her cup of coffee as she absentmindedly flicks through a magazine, not caring for the content of the glossy pages. Still, it’s easier than looking elsewhere, than looking up and meeting her husband’s gaze.

And — husband. Something like laughter bubbles in Ophelia’s chest, painfully tugging at her lungs and catching in her throat, desperate and hysterical.

She glances down at the ring, sitting heavy and oppressive on her finger, feeling less like a promise and more like an obligation.

Ophelia uncurls on the sofa, pushing herself to her feet when the ache in her chest becomes too sharp, too difficult to breathe around, and she’s filled with a sudden longing to be as far away from here, from him, as possible.

She doesn’t miss the way Leopold tilts his head in her direction. He doesn’t move, rooted to the spot by the vast windows that overlook the city, hands in his pockets.

“Heading out?” He asks with a strained kind of indifference.

“I have a few errands to run.” Ophelia answers, deliberately vague and nondescript as she shrugs on her beige trenchcoat. She pauses to fish a set of car keys out of their designated glass display, careful to pick those belonging to one of their less conspicuous cars.

It gets easier to breathe once she’s in the car, engine purring beneath her as she pulls out of the underground parking lot. Still, her stomach twists with something like nerves, skin itching at the thought that he’s watching her as the sleek black Audi emerges out of the darkness and glides across the bridge.

Ophelia pulls up outside a simple red-brick building in Center City and idles for a moment. It’s a decent neighborhood but still urban enough that even one of their less extravagant cars looks downright outrageous among the others parked along the curb.

She cuts the engine and steps out of the car, pocketing the keys and casting a glance at the plaque fixed on the outside of the building. Ophelia’s brows pull together in a frown, unsure as to why Ward would direct her to a small lawyer’s office in Philadelphia, but she moves towards the entrance regardless, deciding she trusts him enough to want to find out.

A head snaps up as she pushes the door open and steps inside — a man sits by what Ophelia assumes is meant to serve as the reception desk, dressed a little too casually to be the employee of a respectable law firm.

He sits up straighter when he catches sight of her, allowing her to get a clearer view of him. She takes in his appearance; the long, narrow face, the smooth dark skin, the mop of black hair, pushed back into a quiff. His brown eyes widen at the sight of her, whether out of fear or recognition, she can’t tell.

Ophelia takes advantage of his shock, mouth gaping but silent.

“I’m looking for Richie.” She says evenly, hoping to cut corners with the use of the alias Ward had supplied.

The stranger behind the desk blinks, a pained sort of expression crossing his face, as if he’s contemplating whether he should give Richie up or not. After a while he clearly figures she looks important enough to divulge information to, standing up and motioning for her to follow him.

She obediently trails behind him as he leads her through the office space and out past a double door onto a narrow corridor that looks like it should belong to a different building altogether, all linoleum and fluorescent lights and insulation pipes. He pauses outside a metal door, mouth twisting at the corners as he pushes it open.

Ophelia’s not sure what she’s expecting but — well.

There’s a man sitting in the middle of the small dark room, feet stretched across the wooden desk in front of him, a beer bottle sitting in his hand. He’s attractive in a rugged sort of way, everything from the hair to the beard to the t-shirt and jacket combo suggesting he’s no stranger to moral ambiguity. There’s an air of nonchalance about him, in the way he holds himself, like he’s seen everything and nothing can surprise him anymore.

“Idaho, mate, what—?” He drawls in a British accent, jerking in his chair when he catches sight of her.

Ophelia is suddenly struck by how utterly outrageous she must look, standing there in a cashmere sweater-dress and high heels in a dark, dilapidated warehouse-turned-office space. The first man — Idaho, she amends — uses the momentary distraction as his cue to slip out, leaving Ophelia alone with Ward’s contact.

“Richie, right?” She asks, crossing the room and sliding into the seat across from him.

“Depends who’s asking.” He says, mistrust creasing his brow as he watches her, eyeing the silver briefcase she’d brought with her with interest, and taking a languid sip of his beer.

The corners of Ophelia’s mouth lift into a smirk. She knows he knows who she is, outwardly at least. There isn’t a person in this country who wouldn’t recognize her face. Still, she appreciates the pretense.

“Let’s just say that Grant Ward is a mutual friend. Ring any bells?”

The man snorts incredulously around the top of the bottle. “Ward sent you here?” He asks.

Ophelia nods, eliciting another laugh from the stranger, sharp and mocking in a jarring kind of way.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, love, but don’t you have guys who do this sort of thing up in that big bad snakepit of yours at Hydra?”

Heaving a sigh, she rolls her eyes and crosses her legs under the desk.

“Right. Let’s try this again.” She suggests, extending a hand. “Ophelia.”

He raises an eyebrow but sets down his beer bottle and humors her all the same, hand meeting hers in a brief handshake.

“Hunter.” He says, licking his lips. “Lance, I mean.”

“Figures.” Ophelia murmurs, giving him a small smile. “Look, Ward says he trusts you and I trust Ward.”

There’s still a hint of uneasiness in his eyes when they settle on her face, but Ophelia can see that he’s willing to listen, and that’s good enough for her.

“What do you need?”

Relief floods the space between her ribs, tightness uncurling, and it’s liberating. Like maybe there’s still hope.

“Passport, birth certificate and citizen’s card.” She tells him, figuring Ward already has a sizeable stash of false documents himself.

Swallowing, she tries to ignore the burning irony of the fact that she, of all people, requires a forged Hydra-issued ID card.

She’s sure Hunter must get a kick out of that, but she doesn’t look up to check his expression. Instead, she rummages through her wallet, pulling out a photograph and laying it flat on the desk.

It catches Hunter’s eye and he takes a moment to examine it, touching a finger to the face in front of him.

“She your kid?” He asks reflexively. It’s a stupid question in hindsight, unnecessary when the answer is so blatantly obvious. The resemblance is indisputable, Ophelia knows.

“Yeah.” She nods, throat tight.

“Sorry.” Hunter shakes his head, sliding the photograph back towards her. Whether he’s apologizing for prying or for her needing forged documentation for her own daughter, Ophelia isn’t sure. Either way, there’s a certain softness about his expression the next time she meets his gaze, one that wasn’t there before.

She feels tension in the pull of her shoulders, like maybe she’s mistaking kindness for pity. She clears her throat, diverting her attention to the scratch of pen on paper.

“And the uh, name?”

“Eleanor.” Ophelia supplies.

She’d had time to think about it on the drive from D.C. to Philadelphia and settled on this name in particular, deciding it was the most sensible choice.

Lyra seems like an okay nickname for Eleanor, she reasons — a bit of a stretch, maybe, but not impossible. It’s a good name, a safe name, simple and common enough not to arise suspicion, but close enough to Lyra’s own name for it not to be weird for her. And it has no personal ties to either one of them, making it more difficult to guess, just in case.

Ophelia’s teeth catch on her lip, an ache blossoming in her chest. She hates that it’s come to this — that she’s taking these precautions to keep Leopold from their daughter. Because he’d look for her, send his best agents to carry out a thorough and tireless search, of that she’s sure.

“Is there anything to go with that?” Hunter asks pointedly, effectively pulling Ophelia out of her momentary reverie.

“Isabelle.” She says. “Eleanor Isabelle.” Looks up and holds Hunter’s gaze.

There’s a spark of recognition in his eyes, a mutual understanding that passes between them. He nods, jaw clenched and throat tight, as she duly provides him with the rest of the required information.

“Well then.” He says, and there’s a sense of finality to his words as he sets the pen down. “I’ll see you in a week, love.”

Ophelia balks at that, panic erupting in the space between her ribs. She swallows around the tightness in her throat, trying to ignore the way her lungs suddenly feel heavy, like they’re filling up with water.

“A week?” She asks shakily, and it tastes like a clatter of porcelain in her mouth. Scenarios unfold inside her brain, unbidden, all the things that could go wrong in a week.

Ophelia shakes her head.

“That’s—that’s not going to work for me.” She says, shifting in her seat, resting the valley of her knuckles beneath her chin. “Is there anything I do to...put a rush on that? Say, twenty four hours.”

Hunter chokes at that, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, beer gurgling in his throat. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Twenty four hours?” He barks out a laugh. “Look, I know I’m good, but I’m not a bloody magician, sweetheart.”

The corners of Ophelia’s mouth twist in a smirk as the sole of her shoe presses against the briefcase under the desk, sliding it across the floor and bumping Hunter’s knee. She doesn’t miss the way his eyes light up.

“Money is no issue, I assure you, Mr. Hunter. Just name your price.”

Twenty seven hours and eighty five thousand dollars later, she’s glancing at an envelope on her desk, thick with fake documents and a dreadful kind of anticipation. Several stacks of cash lie next to it, neatly separated off into packages of ten thousand each.

The pen sits heavy between her fingers and she closes her eyes against the way it feels like her heart is seeping from her chest.

Ophelia writes her daughter letters, one for every birthday she will miss, and slides them into white envelopes with the corresponding ages written in black marker. She can’t assure her that her father loves her, but she can remind her that her mother always will.

She heaves a sigh, long and deep and aching, before packing everything up and leaving the room.

Leopold says nothing as she brushes past him and heads for the door, and for that, at least, she’s grateful.

“How are you holding up?” Ward asks, crossing his arms over his chest as he moves to join her.

Ophelia shakes her head, a burst of laughter pushing past her lips.

“Living a double life is exhausting. I don’t know how you kept it up for so long.” She tells him.

It’s been little over a week and she’s already emotionally drained from all the lies she’s had to tell, pointedly avoiding Leopold’s gaze at every turn. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, what assumptions he’s making in that too-bright brain of his, and she’s not sure she wants to.

Ward chuckles, and it’s nice, momentarily, to have someone there who understands.

“Is this the part where you tell me it gets easier with time? Because I don’t believe that.”

His mouth twists at the corners, but his eyes are still bright. “It doesn’t. But you get used to it.”

“Right.” Ophelia nods, looking away from him and back at her daughter on the other side of the glass. She’s talking animatedly with one of the other children the Resistance had brought in, a classmate of hers.

Ophelia tries to picture it then, living like this long term, and decides she can’t. Sometimes it feels like she’s barely holding the edges of herself together by sheer force of will, the determination to keep going, for Lyra.

Out of the corner of her eye she catches Ward’s gaze, the way he’s glancing ahead, straight at her daughter. Lyra must notice it too because her head snaps up, hair cascading down her shoulders. She grins, wide and bright and honest as she waves at him. Ward’s mouth stretches into a small smile, mirroring her motions as he waves back. Lyra watches them both for a moment longer before turning her attention back to her classmate.

“Do you think he’d really—?” Ward asks, smile fading. Ophelia frowns, picking up on his thoughts.

“I don’t know.” She admits quietly. A chill runs down the length of her spine and she shivers, pressing her arms closer to her chest. “But I’m not willing to take that chance.”

There’s a laugh, and it sounds painful.

“I still love him, Ward.” Ophelia says, and it’s more vulnerable than it has any right to be. Bruised, somehow. “Even after everything.” She turns to him then, tension rolling through her shoulders. “Is that bad?”

Ward’s smile is full of pity but his eyes shine with something like understanding.

“No. I don’t think it is.” A pause, and then, softly: “Hold onto that.”

Ophelia gives him a small nod. “Listen, Ward, I—” She swallows around the lump in her throat, laying a hand over his shoulder. “I need you to do something for me.”

His smile fades, concern creasing his brow.

“When—” Ophelia licks her lips. Amends. “If things get bad, run with her. Take her out of the state, out of the country, I don’t know.”

A pause, and then, softer: “You were our best agent. I’m sure you have ways of disappearing.” She smiles sadly, fingers pressed against the throbbing ache in her temple. “I know this is a lot to ask of you, but—” Ophelia starts, lip trembling.

“Hey.” Ward’s hands slide up her arms and settle on her shoulders. It’s nice, she thinks, being held like this. Like he’s steadying her. “I understand.” He swipes a thumb across her cheekbone, wiping away a tear she hadn’t noticed dripping down her face.

“I’ll do everything I can. I’ll keep her safe, okay?”

Ward pulls her into his arms and she makes no effort to resist, burying her face against his shoulder. He runs a hand down the length of her spine in a soothing motion, drawing a contented sigh from her lips.

He holds her like that for a lingering moment, bodies flush against each other, a heartbeat shared, and for the first time in a long time something like hope blossoms in her chest, warm and glowing and radiant like the sun.