Hai friends! I've been wanting to write about young!Hazel for a while now, so I wrote this very late... or early, depending on how you measure these things.
It happened quickly.
A little thing, she was, quiet as a mouse, slipping out without notice or fuss. Her mother had been asleep, as she always was, and the girl become adept at moving unseen through the shadowy streets of New Orleans. And she knew the way by heart.
She wandered the vacant midnight streets alone, no direction in her mind but a desire to be away from home, because her mother had changed and the girl hated it. It scared her and she hated that she was so scared. Diamonds and rubies littered her footsteps, grown from her worry and fear. Emeralds, sapphires, nuggets of gold and silver.
Some of the houses glowed with friendly light, or leaked excited family chatter or smooth, soulful jazz. The girl couldn't stop herself, padding light-footed over to one such window and staring in, golden eyes reflecting the warm light but not holding it.
Her golden eyes were wide with wonder, molten metal in the firelight. They were so happy. A mother and a father, working and cleaning but still happy. A grandmother and grandfather curled on the couch, reaping the fruits of their own long labors. Three children sprawled on the dirty floor, playing without toys and oblivious to the minute size of their home.
Watching the pure happiness embedded in the scene, the girl felt sick. She stumbled away from the window, almost having to wrench herself away, and sat on the curb, crystal tears dripping down her cheeks and into the gutter, where they were lost amidst the endless river of filth flowing beneath the city.
She cried for what she could have had and what she had never had and what he mother couldn't appreciate, mourning a future that had died before it was born.
If only, if only, if only, but it didn't so any good to think like that.
The girl dried her diamond tears and hugged herself before standing up and continuing on her lonely funeral walk. The black dress that marked her as an outcast swisher around her ankles in the hot nighttime breeze, blurring her shape into indistinct nothingness against the shadows that stretched up the old brick walls, tortured and emaciated shapes crying out for freedom.
Like me, the girl thought, but this time she stopped herself before the tears could rise behind her eyes again.
A man, one of the first people she'd seen since beginning her lonely walk, seemed to look up curiously as she passed and squinted for a moment with drunk, red-rimmed eyes before he saw her, and his eyes filled with a sick and twisted sort of hunger. He tried to get up, but the pool of shadows around the base of the box he was using as a seat seemed to stick to his feet and ankles, weighing him down.
The girl swallowed her screams and kept walking. The stars glittered in the sky above like diamonds cast carelessly across blue-black velvet by some careless god. The only kind of diamond that didn't hurt.
I wonder if for their jewelry, the gods wear strands of stars.
The moon inched lazily across the sky, silver surface locked with the craters and imperfections that made it beautiful instead of perfect, which didn't seem such a difference until one realized just how hard it was to be perfect when beauty was just something that was everywhere.
A cloud with feathered edges passed over the moon, momentarily muting the harsh silver light that poured like liquid onto the brick and wood rooftops, bathing the streets of New Orleans in quicksilver. The moonlight so bright it was almost daytime but too cold and soft for that drew long and pitch black shadows around the buildings, spilling into the streets, drawing bold lines between light and dark that grew hazy and indistinct when the cloud floated silently past, plunging the black and white midnight world into grey nothing for a terrifying moment before it passed.
The girl kept walking with no where to go and nowhere to return and eventually she found herself at a place she knew well. She had reached the stables. Crawled through the hole in the rusted fence and ducked under the inner gate, the chewed and beaten wood soft against her hands.
She collapsed into the pile of hay, sending plumes of dust and wheat flying up into the air, blurring the hot clear summertime night sky. The holes in the ceiling where the thatched roof had rotten away over many years, criss-crossed by the bare naked wooden planks that supported nothing, presented her with a clear view of that vast expanse of black and silver, velvet and diamonds.
She kicked her feet with the expensive shoes tainted with bitterness up onto the well worn fence hemming one of the five horses into its stall. The shoes were a gift from her mother in that she had given them, but really, as with all of their small poisoned luxuries, they were funded by the girl's curse. Just thinking about it made her heart thunder in her chest, and she heard a sharp crack as a miniature ravine materialized in the hard-packed dirt she rested on, barely masked by the thin layer of hay.
The diamond that the earth had spat out in response to her agitation was cold against the girl's fingers, biting at her like ice.
But the horse behind her nickered and a long, heavy muzzle rested on top of her head. A giggle escaped the girl's lips, the ones that had been sealed shut with fear and anxiety and uncertainty opened themselves for the first time in too long. Something hard and cold came loose in her chest and dissolved amidst the warmth of the blood pumping through her veins with renewed vigor.
Acting on impulse alone, she pulled a saddle and bridle down from where she knew they always were on the walls and saddled the horse by moonlight, hands moving on autopilot. The little gate clicked open and the horse trotted out, guided by the girl's hands on the reins. She grinned wildly, hyper with anticipation and the exhaustion that should have been present evaporated into nothing, as she tugged her mount out of the stables and swung up onto his back with practiced ease.
They flew across the grass gilded silver by dew and moonlight, too fast for fate or curses or mothers to catch them, and rode and rode and rode, with no one but the diamond stars for company.
I wanted to do something with no dialogue and focusing on a single character but I'm not sure how it turned out. It was fun to write, though, so I may write more for the rest of the Seven. I don't know. Review pretty please? *puppy eyes* I must know if it's any good!