Age 7
He fell in love with her the day that she was born. She was small and frail, with brown skin and tiny hands that clutched and reached for him and eyes like his. She was four years younger than he was, and he loved her more than the universe itself.
Hazel loved her. He loved everything about her. Even when she would cry or throw tantrums, he would still love her. He was only a few years older than her, but his father's words rang in his head every morning because they were so damn important to him. That was what his father was like- always full of advice and bits of wisdom he was so eager to pass down.
On the day of Gretchen's birth, Hazel's father had sat him down and told him rather clearly that as an older brother, he had an important responsibility to look after Gretchen. At the time, Hazel didn't quite understand it, but for months he'd been excited- excited to meet his little sister and see the person that she would be. Even if they couldn't play with each other or talk really just yet, he'd been excited.
It was a responsibility, a duty which Hazel accepted wholeheartedly.
After all, she was his little sister and he loved her. He wanted to keep her safe more than anything else in the world.
Gretchen grew, and soon enough she was always there, toddling or walking after Hazel, and Hazel always kept his eyes peeled and his attention sharp just in case. He didn't know what he was afraid of, but he knew that he was.
The two of them would go out and walk together, often outside and often straying perhaps a little too far from their family's home. That hadn't mattered though, because they were little, and the worst they would come home with were cuts and bruises. The forests where they were raised didn't have much in the way of monsters, normally. The people in the villages nearby made sure of that.
One day Gretchen fell off of a log that she'd been balancing and had scraped her knee, deep and bloody- sure to scar. She had cried, and Hazel didn't know what to do at first, so he sat with her there in the forest. For what must have been hours he sat by her whispering comforts in the hopes that the two of them would be able to go home. He ripped off a part of his shirt sleeve to act as a makeshift bandage, and tied it on as securely as he could manage. Once Gretchen had calmed, Hazel gathered her up and carried her home on his back because he had always been bigger than other boys his age.
The two of them got home far too late, and Hazel was scolded for his failure to keep an eye on Gretchen, while Gretchen was spirited off to be cleaned and taken care of, fed and comforted. Hazel would get that treatment as well, but only once his father was through with him.
His father reminded him every time that something of that sort- Gretchen getting hurt, Hazel not doing enough to protect- happened of the facts. He was an older brother, and that meant that he had a duty to look after Gretchen because she was too little to do so herself. Every time, Hazel reaffirmed his position, and he only ever vowed to do better.
Gretchen would want to go out to play, and Hazel would follow after her. She was the more rambunctious one, always ready to run through forests and splash in streams than he was. Hazel would follow because he needed to know that he was doing his job right and that she was cared for.
He carried her home more times than he could count.
Every time, Hazel was scolded or spoken to for his failure, even when it was in circumstances he couldn't have easily controlled himself. Even when they were situations that his sister had dragged them into without much thought towards the things that could go wrong.
It never made him love Gretchen any less than he already did.
He never let her know about that.
Age 14
The Vytal Tournament came to Vale in the dead heat of summer, and somehow Hazel and Gretchen had been able to convince their parents that it was worth it for them to travel out to the city to see the event in person.
It was an expensive trip, the sort of thing that their family had to save for some time to be able to pull off. It required for Gretchen and Hazel to forgo birthday gifts for the year- which they'd both been more or less okay with because of what would be there to replace them.
The two of them were instead in love with the allure of the city itself. They wandered the streets together and when they found and street vendor that was selling sweets and candies, Hazel decided to put down the money from months of his saved allowance so that the both of them could share. He didn't particularly care for the treats, so half of his ended up going to Gretchen anyways.
She enjoyed it all thoroughly.
That was just how things were for him. When Gretchen wanted something, Hazel usually found some way to give it to her. Part of the reason for the trip to the Vytal Festival had been because Gretchen's birthday had been coming up, and there was some sort of allure to the promise of watching the protectors of their world fighting in an arena.
The sounds of gunshots had been so loud that they had echoed through the city streets. There had been something about it which Hazel had found almost distressing, but he didn't know what it was specifically.
Hazel did his best to ignore it, because the two of them had come to Vale to see the tournament. When his sister dragged him to the stadium, he went behind her while watching out for anything that could hurt them along the way.
She clutched his hand in excitement as they watched the fights from the nearest seats that they could have gotten. Gretchen's eyes lit up in pure joy and interest over what she was watching play out there in the ring, like it was a dream of her own. Hazel had watched as well, but had done his best to ignore the way that it felt like there was some sort of impending storm looming over them. Something which made made it feel like the earth was shaking despite nothing of the sort happening in real life.
The night that the tournament ended and a winner was named, Hazel and Gretchen had been brought home by their family, back to their quiet life in the forests.
That night, his little sister, his dear sister that he cared so much for, whispered to him that she wanted to be a huntress.
The next day, Hazel threw himself into research to find out exactly what that would mean, and what the risks were. He knew that he wasn't going to have much of a say in things, but he was going to do his best to make sure that he could actually talk to Gretchen about it before she made a decision.
In the end, he ended up being able to make some decisions.
All that it took was an attack by a small flock of grimm on one night when there had been an argument that had gotten particularly nasty, and while he and Gretchen hid out of sight, their parents were slain whilst running in search of some sort of help. Slain because they just wanted to see to it that their children were going to be safe and would be able to live.
After that, their lives changed almost completely. Hazel and Gretchen moved to Vale with what money they did have, and they did their best to establish a life there. Hazel found work as soon as he could selling Dust in small shops, while Gretchen went to school and worried constantly about him as well.
She found out about Signal Academy, and she began to beg, and beg, and beg.
Hazel tried to reason with her, tried to tell her that she couldn't do it. He couldn't let Gretchen go when he knew how this could end- with her in the ground or without remains just like their parents had.
She had been adamant.
Because he loved her, Hazel gave in, just a bit.
He wasn't happy about her going to Signal for so much as a second. But his life would go on, and Hazel did what he could to care for his little sister from afar.
He didn't have to be happy, so long as she was safe. Besides, it was just Signal- it wasn't as though she would be fighting grimm herself. It was just a place to learn how to defend herself. In the future, she could keep herself safe- though Hazel knew he'd be there still.
But Gretchen was happy, and Hazel could live with that.
Age 21
The news made it home to him on a Thursday, early in the morning on a day where the sun was shining over Vale like there was absolutely nothing wrong. Like there was nothing wrong in Remant, or like it was just any other day.
Just a day, where the world span on for everyone else and nothing was wrong.
Except for him- whose universe crashed down in one fell swoop.
It had come in the form of a call on his scroll from Beacon Academy, a few words of condolences and not much else. They would send home what was left of Gretchen, which wasn't much if the call was anything to go by.
Hazel spent the entire call without so much as a single thing that he could come up with to say.
Nothing could ever match how devastated he felt.
The last months of his life had been difficult. Gretchen had wanted to go to Beacon, and he had fought her and fought her and fought her on that wish. But Gretchen had a dream and she was strong and that was something that she had been able to prove.
Hazel had still fought her on the topic, because all that Hazel had been able to think about was the possibilities of what could happen. He remembered what had happened to their family years before, and he knew how most huntsman ended up. Hazel hadn't been able to consider letting her go through that.
He couldn't just let Gretchen go. He was her older brother, and he had a responsibility to look after her, just the same as their father had said on that day when she had been born.
And now Gretchen was gone.
Gone, without so much as a friend at Beacon, without having even been able to go through so much as a single class. Gone with the only goodbye that either of them had having been a nervous hug at Beacon's docks, and when that had happened Gretchen had said she'd call once she was settled in.
But the phone call wasn't from Gretchen. Because she hadn't made it far enough to be able to do that.
All that Hazel knew was that he'd failed. He hadn't been able to stop her or protect her, and-
He'd failed.
Gretchen Rainart, at the age of 17, had been killed during Beacon Academy's initiation exercise. There were next to no remains to be sent back to him aside from a mangled bow and the bag of luggage that she had taken with her to Beacon.
Those would go back to Hazel.
That was all that would come back of her.
But Hazel was hurt and upset, and he started to look for help wherever he could. He needed answers because all that he knew was that Gretchen, his little sister, a child had been allowed to go to Beacon- because he had caved into her demands. Gretchen had been killed in what should have been an exercise with no stakes. One that she shouldn't have been in in the first place.
Hazel found himself gripped by a certain sort of desperation though. He needed answers, something to fill in the blanks and take some of the onus of what had happened off of himself. After all, Beacon had to have people involved in the exercise. There had to have been some sort of supervision, something that was meant to prevent needless deaths.
The answers that Hazel found were ones that he didn't like.
On the day of her death, Gretchen, his Gretchen, his responsibility had gone to the top of Beacon Cliff and had been flung from it with little instruction. She had been flung into a forest which was widely known to be infested with Grimm by just about everyone in Vale. Hazel had heard enough about it at work in between statements about how he should have been a huntsman, because he was large and strong, and with a good sense for danger.
Beacon Academy's headmaster Ozpin had overlooked the exercise, throwing children out to die with some vague directions that made little sense about retrieving relics from temples. Like it was supposed to be some sort of twisted fairy tale.
When Gretchen had met trouble against something (and Hazel hadn't been able to get the details on it, just that it was a grimm and that there were no remains left,) Ozpin had let her die.
Ozpin, who was one of the most powerful huntsmen in all of Remnant had done nothing when a child had been attacked.
Ozpin could have intervened without so much as breaking a sweat, and did nothing.
Ozpin let Gretchen die. And Hazel had his doubts that she was the only one to have met such a fate.
For what felt like months, that was the only thing that Hazel could concentrate on. His sister was dead and Hazel had only been able to give her the bare minimums. The people in power at Beacon Academy, namely Ozpin, had allowed a child to die.
Hazel had fought tooth and nail to keep his sister from going for a reason.
It was a nightmare that had been plaguing him for years. When Hazel had given his sister permission and supported her in going to Signal it had been different. The stakes had been about her learning to protect herself, not about going out to fight monsters and risking her life.
In the end, it was all too much. Hazel's heart was too broken and he was too angry to be able to do much of anything. He couldn't stand the look of huntsmen coming through the dust shop where he worked anymore. He couldn't bear listening to them talking about how Beacon was doing such great things.
They had no idea how wrong they were.
They supported the idea of children being sent off to die.
Not a single one of them realized just what they were doing. Or perhaps, they just didn't care.
In the end, Hazel didn't know and he didn't exactly intend to find out. He knew his pain, and was becoming intimately familiar with it. When work became a burden, he turned his back on it and left because that was what he felt he had to do.
After that, he needed to find a path forward.
Looking for justice for Gretchen was all that felt right for him to do.
Age 28
When Hazel had been a boy, having come home from an adventure out in the forests with Gretchen, he had come with scrapes and scratches that had covered most of his legs. His mother had sat him down rather sternly, and she told him point blank that he needed to keep the injuries cleaned and cared for because otherwise they would get worse, and he would get sick because they'd been allowed for fester.
It had been seven years since Gretchen had been killed because of the negligence of Ozpin's negligence.
For seven years, Hazel had only been able to find it in himself to drift. Vale had stopped feeling right for him to live in, so Hazel relocated. He needed to get away from the hurt that seemed to fill every street of the city, and from the anger that he felt when he was forced to live with Beacon Academy looming over his life.
Hazel did the bare minimums that was needed to live a life alone out in the forests of Vale. He trained his body enough that he would be able to defend himself, picked up a basic weapon that would do the trick in the pinch, and he left. The place that he went back to was the old cabin where he and Gretchen had been raised.
It too hurt to be there. It too was filled with pain and ghosts of the past that Hazel would never be able to exorcise.
In the end, it felt like the most fitting place for him.
Despite everything, Hazel did what he could to make a home of it, even as he sank lower and lower and lower.
Out in the forests, alone and surrounded by what he had lost, Hazel got angrier. The anger that he had already been feeling grew stronger and more insistent, and Hazel started thinking differently.
Ozpin had been the one to allow for his sister, his Gretchen to die.
What made Ozpin's life worth more than hers? Why was he allowed to keep on ruling from atop his tower in Vale, when he had the blood of children on his hands? Why did the people of Vale so gladly turn a blind eye to the evil that Ozpin was?
All of those questions ran through his mind, night after night after night.
Suddenly, Hazel was beginning to find a new purpose.
He went back to Vale for one day, and tried his best not to be overtaken by the heat that was filling his body with frustration.
Hazel didn't know what he had been planning to do- whether he had been planning to go looking for revenge against someone that he couldn't have possibly beaten. Whether he was looking to expose others to what had happened to Gretchen. Whether he had gone into the city just because it had been necessary for him to get supplies for his home.
Late at night, Hazel found himself venting over a problem that had arisen years before. When someone asked him why he didn't do anything, Hazel didn't know.
Once again, he thought back to his father, and the advice that he had been slipped alongside recommendations to clean and care for wounds, or the statement that he had responsibilites for his sister.
His father had told him once that he shouldn't let himself be stopped by small obstacles.
Gretchen was not a small obstacle. His sadness was not a small obstacle.
Ozpin was a large obstacle, and one which Hazel would be sure to beat.
Hazel was going to overtake the obstacle, and so when he put his energy and his time towards that goal, Hazel did not hesitate nor did he allow himself to hold back. He made his way out of Vale with a collection of supplies and without saying a word to anyone else.
Out in the forest near his childhood home, Hazel created a training area. If he was going to beat down Ozpin, or kill Ozpin, or do whatever he was going to do once he figured out what he was going to do, then he needed to train his body for it. this was something that Hazel knew and understood.
Training himself for battle was difficult- much more than Hazel had realized before. Gretchen had to have been something great if she had made it to Beacon herself, and the dedication that she had placed into her work must have shown for it.
But Gretchen was dead, and thinking about her only served to make Hazel angrier and more and more upset.
Within months, Hazel's body was becoming more used to battle. He unlocked his semblance, and found ways to use his natural size to his advantage.
That didn't make Hazel strong enough, though. Ozpin was still a proper huntsman, with years of experience behind him and powerful enough to be placed in control over an academy. Not that someone as evil as Ozpin belonged in that place.
Hazel began to experiment with Dust. It augmented his strength until he felt that he might have been strong enough.
His hate grew stronger, like a thunderstorm approaching the shore.
When Ozpin fell, the world would shake.
Age 35
Hazel sank. Lower and lower, he always sank, always getting angrier and angrier, and always getting sadder and sadder.
Because grimm were attracted to negative emotions, they came for him. Hazel fought them off every time, learning the best ways for him to fight them off and adapting his fighting style every time. The only weapon that he needed was himself, and Hazel learned to use his semblance. He learned to dull the pains of combat without losing focus on his goals.
In the meantime, Hazel made his plans. He was going to go after Ozpin, and then he would have avenged Gretchen. Ozpin would have finally suffered for his crimes.
On a night in the middle of fall, Hazel watched the universe change around him.
The grimm came for him, but instead of attacking they stood to the side, while Hazel stood in front of his home prepared to protect himself from the ongoing tide.
It had been a very long time since another person had been there. The last person to have accompanied Hazel to that house had been Gretchen herself.
Nobody should have been able to find him.
And yet she stood there, and when she revealed herself Hazel saw that she was no human. She was something else entirely and Hazel had no idea what to make of her.
She approached him, like something between a dream and a nightmare and immediately began asking him questions. All of them came with a certain focus of sorts.
Many of them went back to the same place- Ozpin.
Keeping his hate from seeping into his words had been impossible.
But it had pleased her- Salem, her name was. She began to make offers for him, asking for his aid in conquering Ozpin. She began to tell him that Ozpin could die a thousand deaths, and that she needed someone to aid in killing him.
She wanted for him to be the one to carry that task. She thought that few would have as strong of a drive for it as he would.
When Hazel asked what could be in it from him, he was offered a chance at Ozpin for himself. In addition, Salem promised him that should he help her it would possible for them to do anything.
Including bringing back Gretchen, something that Hazel wanted more than anything else in the world. He wanted her back, and he wanted her to be safe.
It was all that he needed.
Hazel accepted the offer, and when Salem left to prepare for the future, he followed.
He had a future ahead of him, she said.
Hazel was going to grasp it if it meant that he could see Ozpin destroyed, or that he could have Gretchen back to bring some life into his life once more.
A fortress of sorts, far from the reach of humanity became Hazel's home. It took him some time to adapt to how his life was supposed to be. He was surrounded by others, a young man that Salem had apparently taken in as a child, a man roughly Hazel's age that prided himself on being a medical doctor. A girl who only lasted for a few months after Hazel had joined the group.
His days were soon dedicated to training himself in a more formal setting. When he began to make the Dust that he fought with a part of him, Watts was there to make sure that he was okay and put him back together. Their group understood that they were going to need each other moving forward.
On his fourth month there, Salem offered Hazel his first mission alone, to seek out the Shallow Sea. Hazel was ready to refuse it, since he only wished to take down one person.
Salem understood, and Hazel went. He went to the deserts of Vacuo and sought out the Shallow Sea, and when he reached it he picked up a small shell from a place where there should have been no water, and began his mission to bring it back to Salem as proof of his success.
When Hazel returned, him and the others were given clear instructions.
He was a little bit closer to finding Ozpin for himself.
Once he found Ozpin, he was going to make sure that Ozpin paid for his offenses and his negligence.
Hazel was sure of it.
Age 42
In his years with Salem, Hazel's hatred grew stronger and stronger. Salem understood him, and she shared her own stories with him about how Ozpin had wronged her.
In comparison, losing Gretchen was absolutely nothing.
Salem understood, though. She reassured Hazel that his anger was correct, she made sure that he would have what he needed to be able to go out and go after Ozpin himself.
When Cinder Fall was given that particular task instead, Hazel was angry, jealous. It had been a given that he wouldn't have been able to infiltrate any of the academies, that he wouldn't have been able to get to Ozpin himself. He was too well known, and in the past years he'd made his own attempts on Ozpin's life a few times over.
But Salem had explained how things worked with Ozpin- there were going to be other opportunities, but they weren't going to arise without some patience on their part. Hazel was going to need to wait and fill other roles until the time finally came where he could act in Salem's interests.
The orders that they were handed didn't line up well with the possibility of Hazel finally getting to kill Ozpin, but Hazel had no reason to doubt them. He went to the White Fang to ensure their loyalty. They were going to need time for Ozpin's reincarnation to appear anyhow.
At a train depot in Mistral, Hazel helped a boy but couldn't shake some feeling that he had missed something, or that he had encountered something familiar. It hadn't made sense.
Hazel moved on, since it was merely a distraction when he had more important things to do.
Somewhere in the deep of Mistral, Hazel found his objective. First he located Adam Taurus in one of the White Fang's roving tent villages, then went with the boy to meet with Sienna Khan to ensure the White Fang's loyalty to them.
Hazel did his job. When Adam Taurus struck Sienna Khan in cold blood, Hazel was unamused and was as clear about that as he possibly could be. The boy was going mad with some sort of power or anger, and Hazel simply did what he could to keep an eye on him.
Adam Taurus was a wild card, and Hazel was unhappy with having been saddled with him. Sienna Khan had not needed to die. He would do what he could to keep the boy under control, but that was something which wasn't easily handled.
As things were, Adam Taurus was merely a means to an end for Hazel. That much he was confident about and he was sure about.
Hazel was able to take comfort in the ticking clock that was the impending attack on Haven. The pieces fell into place, and Hazel did his best to make sure that they did so. He began to hunt the hunters, even though he had no personal grudge against any of them. Someone needed to ensure that Huntsmen couldn't interrupt the attack, and that role fell to himself and Tyrian.
The attack started, and Hazel came in through the front. When students tried to fight him, he did just enough to keep them from becoming a problem.
Adam Taurus was not the only wild card.
Cinder Fall was just as bad. In many ways she was worse, because of Salem's praise and what the Fall Maiden's power represented.
That was a realization which Hazel became intimately familiar with over the time that he'd spent around her. She was likely to throw a plan off, and while Adam was his charge, he wasn't sure that Watts would be able to handle the girl.
But she was the fall maiden, so there was little choice that they had.
Things changed and plans were adjusted. Hazel made sure that he had a stock of dust ready for when it came down to the fight, and waited.
The night of the fall of Haven would come, and Hazel finally got his chance to get at Ozpin. All that he needed to do was wipe him out, destroy him, give him a cruel reminder of exactly the sort of hurt that had been done to him.
But it wasn't enough. Hazel fought and fought, and failed. Even as he destroyed his body and felt nothing, he failed. Somehow the body of a child had been enough to stop him.
Multiple children had been able to stop him- most a little older than Gretchen had been.
Ozpin got away from him and Hazel hated it.
In the midst of all of the chaos of the night, Cinder Fall was killed. Her body locked away in a tomb over an academy which would not fall. Locked away behind pearl-white statues with little chance of ever being retrieved.
Hazel had never spent much time paying attention to Cinder Fall on a personal level. She'd been a girl that was little more than a business associate. In truth his time spent around her was close to minimal because he'd simply had better things to do.
When Cinder's henchman Emerald broke down, and cried, and screeched out in pain as she attacked everyone around him, Hazel had felt something. Not the weight of their failures, but something else. It was something in the way that the girl's companion had reacted. Something in the way that she had looked so small and frail, crumpling where she stood.
Hazel had lifted her up, pushed away every other thought, took the boy, and they ran.
They ran, and ran, and ran.
Somehow, and he wasn't quite sure why, Emerald Sustrai reminded him of Gretchen.
He didn't know if Cinder Fall had siblings.
If they did, he hoped they would never come to learn what had happened to her.
He knew the types of monsters they could become.
But their job wasn't over, and Hazel still lived on hate. He would nurse the girl back to health, and if she grew to be a monstrous creature like him- angry and bent on hate and revenge, then that was going to be a price to be paid.
Salem would be able to help.
In the end, she was always there.
The three of them would serve her. As they had for years.