[P] put an axe in my baby's head

[Apolonia]

I'M GONNA DO TIME BUT SHE LOOKS GOOD IN RED -

O’s gaze on Veer is as easy as it is unimpressed. 

She was not raised to be afraid of men, tall and dark and overbearing though they might be.

She watches him with heavy lids and a smile so faint it is almost phantom riding over the soot of her lips, directed mostly to the gryphon at his side - it could be said she is more interested in him than in Veer, how he sparkles in the dim light, the sharp curve of his beak. It reminds her a little of the honed edge of her own blade. Not bash, she corrects him, and tilts her head, dog-like.

An empty space follows where she could announce any sort of phrase - something to make him laugh, or a more truthful telling of how she would take him apart, not with clubs and rocks but with the discipline and exactness of a surgeon - but instead her smile widens slightly, and the glimmer in her eyes flares to a peak, and she only watches him with a little more humor.

His laugh almost matches the way mirth glitters like mica against the mottled blue-yellow of her gaze, but not quite. 

A drink, O repeats. She is not quite foolish enough to expect that it could really be just a drink. You forget my age. It seems stupid, improbable, even, that a girl with all her sharp teeth and edges could still be young enough to find herself incapacitated by a drink, but the truth is that she is still a child, nevermind all the ways O fights against the ministrations of her youth.

And even if she weren’t a child, she would not be foolish enough to take a drink from the likes of him.