made in the projects
slave to my progress
slave to my progress
Iwould ask first, the girl says, and O smiles because it is not true. Fair enough; she herself has never been the politest of children — from birth she has been O the trouble maker, pretty girl, evil thing, prone as much to gnawing on bones as necklaces. She cannot pretend to hold any moral high ground and isn’t even sure she’d want to. There is no power in pretending she cannot be savage, not when it fuels her as much as her father’s blood.
She follows Aghavni with a careful step and eyes swiveling back and forth over the length of the hallway, not unnerved so much as duly curious. The place reeks of luxury, almost to the point of being nauseating — O would be more comfortable on cobblestone than this sickeningly soft carpet. But the darkness, at least, is something of a comfort. Here she can be nothing more than the suggestion of a girl both tender and sharp, a collection of gold, of iron, of teeth moving like a wraith through the arching hallways behind someone who, for once, might have something to teach her.
(It has been a while since she was willing to learn; O’s inordinate self-confidence can be educationally crippling, but this is real world experience, she tells herself, infinitely more valuable than the stories Bexley tells her before bed.)
They continue down a length of hallway that seems almost never-ending, though it must be partially the slow pace they take and the ominous darkness that streams from overhead. She follows Aghavni with unusual patience. There is a lot to take in — the stink of incense and alcoholic perfume, lanterns glittering with hard light from their sconces, the strange looks the servants give her as they pass in opposing directions - and she absorbs most of it with no more than a pensive blink. Composure has always been her strength.
She meets Aghavni’s green eyes with perfect determination as they come to a stop by the velvet curtains. It is impossible to tell whether her remark that O is not the typical visitor is meant as a compliment or not; she chooses to take it as such, in a bizarre reach to assume positive intent. Her only response is an easy smile. They turn into the Floor, and —
O shudders at the touch of the curtains on her hip and forces her step to continue. The room splits wide open: in the dim light tens of patrons surround tables stacked with decks of perfectly-cut cards, wares of gold and silver ready to be bartered, servers in coats of deep, cool blue; their many shapes shift like mirages in the half-darkness, as if O is watching through a circular hoop of deep water that pushes and pulls at the dimensions of the regular world. Pretty as it is unnerving. She sucks in a breath through her teeth.
“Perhaps,” she offers Aghavni in a low murmur, and leaves out the perhaps not.
@aghavni | "speech" | notes: <3
