I'M GONNA DO TIME BUT SHE LOOKS GOOD IN RED -
![[Image: apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/4a1e/f/2018/265/e/7/apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png)
The look of pity in his eyes makes nausea roil in Apolonia’s stomach, but you could never tell from the oak-strong stance of her body, nor the cool blackness of her eyes. She is her mother’s daughter, truly - practiced in politics as much as in violent arts. The space that stretches between them is both endless and infinitesimal, so tiny she knows it would only take a breath to cross physically, and yet the effort, the vulnerability required, is insurmountable.
Not that she would want to, anyway.
Forgive me. She won’t. He knows it. And it makes her smile, just a little savagely. In the dark it could be want, or sin, or humor. Either way it is not really meant for him to consume, as much as it is for her to hold over him.
Ha! O turns away from him and angles her small, bright head toward the dancers in the center of the room. She wonders a little if her mother is here, or her father. If they’re together. What they might be wearing. She wishes she didn’t care, that it wouldn’t matter so much to her - but then, for all her savagery, Apolonia is still a young thing in every sense, and she aches to feel a normal kind of content. But you would never know from the glimmer in her eyes and the way she stacks her shoulders when she turns to look at him - Wouldn’t you like to know. It’s confidential.
She winks at him then, brash and brazen as anyone can be in the face of someone dark as death. The dancers whirl and whirl like tornadoes around the length of the ballroom, unceasingly, hauntingly pretty. Veer, continues O somberly, after a little lapse in conversation filled only partially by the lonely sounds of violins singing against stone. Has anyone ever told you you come off a little creepy? She cuts her eyes at him sideways, blinks easy, like a child who does not know, yet, how to be afraid.
