scream your H E A R T O U T ||OPHELIA||

[CASEY BRIGGS]

Casey roared up to the base of the old elementary school, skidding to a hard stop in front of it, just short of the low wall encircling the place. After a moment of staring at it, she reached up and lifted her motorcycle helmet off her head; she didn’t really put much store in ‘safety equipment’ as a general rule, but the helmet served a different purpose. It made her anonymous. Behind the tinted visor, with her hair tucked up inside it, no one could tell who she was. It kept the New Order goons from knowing who to go after; she could outmaneuver them on her bike any day, and when she wasn’t riding it they had no idea who she was. Casey grinned to herself; they barely bothered chasing her anymore, since she tended to ‘disturb the peace’ more with her evasion tactics than she did simply with the sound of the bike’s engine rumbling through the streets.

Her blonde hair cascaded down her back, stopping around her waist with a slight bounce. Casey shook some strands out of her face, but otherwise ignored it as she cut the engine on her bike and wheeled it into the school grounds, concealing it in some bushes by the entrance. This was where she had gone to school, back before she was orphaned. It was the last education she’d gotten; she hadn’t gone to middle or high school, though she had self-taught herself what she needed to survive. Who needed reading when there weren’t any more books? And she knew what math she needed to do simple things, and what she didn’t know how to do in her head she used a calculator for. Even without ‘proper’ schooling, she got by. She certainly wasn’t going back to school now that the New Order controlled everything.

But she wasn’t here for nostalgia’s sake. She was here because she’d been tipped off that there was some valuable information hidden on the roof of the school, and she’d come to pick it up. She would have come via freerunning, but it had been too long since she’d taken her bike out for a spin. And since there was no meeting involved in this, stealth wasn’t as much of an issue as it normally was. She moved to the edge of the building, contemplated it for a moment, then began to scale the side. It was easy, almost like someone had designed it for a traceur to be able to climb it with ease, though she doubted that was the case. It took her only a few minutes to reach the roof of the three-story building.

It was sloped and shingled; an older building, to be sure. There must have been storage rooms or something under the peaks, Casey thought, since none of the upstairs classrooms she remembered had sloped ceilings. That, or she simply hadn’t noticed, which she supposed was possible. That hadn’t exactly been the first thing on her mind back then, nor had she been the most observant little kid. She’d been almost depressingly naïve until her parents had gotten themselves killed. Then she’d had to grow up real fast.

She shook thoughts like that off abruptly. No sense in dwelling, after all. Just keep moving forward, keep finding things to occupy her time. She moved across the roof, searching for a spot where something might have been hidden for her to pick up. She soon found it, tucked away in a corner, and slipped it into one of the myriad pockets inside her sweatshirt. It was sealed into one of the tubes she carried messages in, and addressed to Eria, which meant she would deliver it unopened. She wasn’t a snoop, after all.

She moved to get back down and head back to the base, but the setting sun caught her eye. She wasn’t one for emotional shit, but… even she had to admit it was nice. She didn’t see sunsets much anymore. She could wait a few minutes to watch it, she decided, settling down on the roof with her legs braced on the shingles in front of her and her arms wrapped loosely around her knees. She’d head back after, when it was dark. The message could wait a few minutes; it obviously wasn’t urgent, considering how she’d been tipped off to it. She rested her chin on her arms and gazed at the sun, eyes distant. It was quiet here, and she was alone (she thought). She liked that.

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[OPHELIA WEISS]

Ophelia jumped across the city skyline, the troublesome strand of hair that always seemed to be in her face tucked behind her ear with a yellow rose. The rest of her hair had been plaited and rolled up into a bun, a difficult feat indeed, but necessary when free running. The girl jumped to a convenience store, landed gracefully, and did a little bow to the chimney in front of her. She skipped along the edge of the flat roof, singing jovially.

The temperature must have been less than thirty degrees, in the dead of winter, but the frail girl wore a sundress and no shoes, showing no signs of chill. After all, her Berettas still burned at her sides after having been so recently used, and they warmed her as the sun began to fall and give way to the night. Ophelia continued her journey without aim.

When she landed on the roof of a residence, she noticed that the old building before her looked familiar. She had come across the school a few times during missions, and each time she struggled to stifle the wishes in her chest to see what it looked like inside… She thought of her own childhood, and wondered how it would be if she had formal education. No, no, no, she thought, I don’t need school. I can read and write just fine, yes I can. She tried not to entertain fantasies of a normal life; it was just too late for that.

Looking down to the front of the school, she saw a familiar bike and smiled. The roof she stood atop next to the school was considerably shorter, but she saw a window close to the roof. Without another though, Ophelia jumped and clung to the window’s ledge, then flipped up to reach a foothold above. She clambered over the arched roof with ease and continued to climb until she reached the high ledge, the sides sloping down. With hands out at her sides, she performed a balancing act on the narrow ledge, feeling the old shingles beneath her toes, until she saw the girl she was looking for, sitting and looking up at the sun in the process of its vanishing act.

Ophelia sat down next to Casey, stretched out her feet and wriggled her dirty toes, then took the flower out of her hair. The strand landed between her eyes, and she offered the flower to her companion. "You know, yellow roses represent friendship and platonic love". She tilted her head and smiled. "But be careful; they still have thorns!"

[CASEY BRIGGS]

The sounds of the city seemed muffled somehow, Casey noticed absently as she watched the sun creep down, disappearing bit by bit behind the horizon. Maybe it was just because she was up on the roof, where some of the sound likely was blocked by the building she was sitting on. Or maybe it was this section of town. Casey didn’t come here much, after all. She tended to avoid places that held as much in terms of memory as this particular building did. After all, nothing ever came from dwelling on the past, but when she saw this place where she’d spent her childhood… she couldn’t help it. The thoughts just wouldn’t leave her alone.

She didn’t miss those days. Not exactly. After all, she barely remembered them, and she wouldn’t have wanted to stay an ignorant little kid forever. Sure, ignorance was bliss and all that, but only to a point. Better to be aware of what was going on around you; that way, you would never get any unpleasant surprises, or world-shattering events like the death of her parents had been. Everything had changed that day, though it was hard to say now whether that change had been for the worse or the better. She wouldn’t be the same person she was now if she hadn’t gone through that, but maybe that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It was hard to say, really.

If she’d ever bothered to tell anyone about her past, no doubt they would wonder how she had ended up all alone, instead of in the care of some foster family or in an orphanage somewhere. She didn’t know. For all she knew, in the hubbub of the shooting, she’d merely been forgotten. She’d run off to try and find her parents, and had ended up somewhere strange that she’d never been before, and had never seen anyone from her old life again after that. But it wasn’t all bad. She’d survived, hadn’t she? And now she was tougher and more capable of taking care of herself than she ever would have been otherwise.

She shook off the thoughts at the sound of other footsteps on the roof nearby, and glanced up. She recognized the stride on some unconscious level before she bothered to look, so she wasn’t surprised to see Ophelia, the Resistance’s assassin, making her way across the roof towards her. Casey sighed and turned her eyes forward again. The other girl seemed to be immune to Casey’s relative antisocial-ness, hanging around even when Casey had made it pretty clear she wasn’t interested. But whatever.

The flower got only a brief glance, Casey’s arms not moving from where they were wrapped around her legs. Her sky blue eyes flickered to Ophelia’s face momentarily, then away. ”I’ll pass,” she said. ”Flowers ain’t really useful, after all.” She was not terribly appreciative of pretty things if they didn’t serve a purpose. Machines were beautiful to Casey, all the pieces working together to accomplish whatever it had been built for. Flowers just didn’t float her boat. It was nothing personal, but she didn’t have the social skills to pretend to care.

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[OPHELIA WEISS]

Ophelia knew she would be rejected. She figured Casey wasn’t a fan of flowers, for all the time she spent in the Resistance’s garage. The silver-haired girl merely pouted, and scrunched her eyebrows together to think.
But if anything, she was persistent.

“Not useful, hmmm.” Ophelia pondered this.

She pitied flowers, the way they easily withered and died, how vulnerable they were to adverse conditions. Growing up, she used to steal the seeds from stores and find some place to plant them, little patches of dirt in the city. She liked watched them grow each day and watered them when she had nothing to drink herself.

Because somewhere along the way, Ophelia had stopped growing. Her body gave up in normal functions, and did not need certain necessities such as food and medical attention. If she got a scratch, she barely felt it. The only thing that kept her alive, especially during the plague, was the fact that she had stopped existing. And though her body looked as delicate as the rose she now held in her lap, her spirit remained strong.

And it was only in caring for flowers, in caring for others, that she found meaning. The help she extended to others kept her grounded even when she thought she was losing her mind. Even when people turned away because of her ramblings, her strange words.

Did Casey connect that way with her cars and tools? Their sturdiness, their reliability. Ophelia wondered if she found some kind of abstract comfort in fixing them, finding the kinks and working them out. Was there beauty even in cold machinery?

“They’re useful to me, because they make me useful,” Ophelia said. “I don’t think there is a reason for me to be alive other than to assist others. Flowers remind me of my purpose and…” She was going to start rambling, she could tell. To catch herself before she went too far off and started talking about cats or thyroid cancer or something equally random, she clamped her mouth closed.

But really, she didn’t think there was anything she could say to make Casey think any less of her, since she didn’t think much of Ophelia in the first place. She always seemed so distant and cold… “Is that why you like being a mechanic? Because it makes you useful?”

Ophelia eyes were wide with curiosity, but when she thought about it, it was a stupid question. Casey was nothing like her. She was confident and sure of herself, not an unhinged assassin who couldn’t sort herself out.

[CASEY BRIGGS]

Casey sat silently, mostly ignoring the girl now sitting beside her as she watched the sun slowly slip further beneath the horizon. She wasn’t one for sappy, emotional stuff. You didn’t last long in the gangs, even one not particularly cutthroat like the one Casey had been in, without learning to push that kind of stuff aside. Casey was practical above all else, almost religiously so. If it didn’t have a practical purpose, she wasn’t interested in it. That included small talk, any sort of trinket, and especially purely decorative things like flowers. She curled her lip ever so slightly, though for the most part her face remained cold and distant. For some reason Ophelia seemed determined to be her friend, though Casey had been pretty clear she wasn’t interested. She didn’t need friends. Friends were just ways to get to you. And only wimps needed someone to lean on.

They must look odd, she thought. Like two not particularly ugly gargoyles, perched on the roof. Two small girls; at least, small at first glance. Ophelia had the frail, underfed look of many street kids, and Casey had obviously had her growth a bit stunted by her lack of decent eating through her teenage years, considering she was even shorter than the other girl. But even so, running with a gang, Casey hadn’t been too bad off, and she he developed properly in other ways. She was short, but relatively curvy, though she generally hid that with baggy clothing since she didn’t want to deal with unwanted advances. Combine that with her bright blonde hair and blue eyes and if she wanted to, she could likely have half the boys in the city after her. But she wasn’t interested in that. She didn’t want to be distracted from her work with the Resistance, nor the ultimate goal of overthrowing Dresdin.

Casey closed her eyes in vague annoyance as the girl sitting next to her started to talk again, rambling a little on how flowers were useful to her. Casey didn’t really care. They weren’t of any use to her personally, and therefore she didn’t want anything to do with them. Couldn’t the other girl see she just wanted to be left alone to watch the sunset in silence? Or at least the second, if she insisted on staying around. She didn’t respond to what Ophelia had said, not wanting to encourage further attempts at talking. Sure, Casey was lonely, not that she would ever admit it to anybody else… but she would rather be alone. Better that way. Nobody could hurt her, or get hurt if she was killed.

Then Ophelia asked a direct question, actually surprising Casey with the perceptiveness of it. Everyone wanted to be useful. Casey didn’t care if she was loved, or even liked (or so she told herself), but she wanted to be of use to the Resistance. That had been her goal from the beginning. And she’d found her niche as a mechanic, and a message runner. ”I guess it is, a bit.” Not the only reason, but Casey didn’t feel like elaborating. Her answer was short, but at least she’d said something. That was a start. But it would be up to Ophelia to coax the reluctant Casey into any further conversation, as her eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

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