Once

Once:

The floor shook, the night acting as a harshly muffling cloth to the sounds within the lightless room. The place felt vast, and empty: like a collection of stones had been drawn up all around this spot, to mark the ending of some age. A monument, with cold, high pillars and walls that absorbed the voices of those trapped so well within its inescapable barriers.
Before the voices vanished into the vastness of the stone graves, piled high and towering well into the clouds from the vantage of a set of eyes and a pair of lips that spoke only wishes into its stale air, voices shouted.

“You clumsy whelp!”

The voices hurled mostly unintelligible insults, the fury reeking from their mouths almost as unnatural, inhuman as their deep, sunken eyes and perpetually harrow faces.

“Father…please…come back,”

He knew he spoke only wishes. That was his fate, after all. He knew his wishes…dreams, hopes and yet the moment he dared to utter them, they became nothing but a dashed thing in his heart.  Another broken glass in his collection of fragile figures, all poised and ready to rise at the slightest inkling of that far away, continuously alluding thing. But hope, like crumbling stones ground into a fine dust, or glass shards worn under the footprints of the public eye would flow through the air, farther than even the deepest, most earnest dreams could touch.

Legend has it that the boy leapt over that stone, piled so high into the clouds, that they could almost touch the stars, but the truth isn’t known. The stone borders that held that place; that point in space and time captive has since been washed into the oceans of a summer tide.
~
“Boy, come here. Show me what you’ve got there.”

In a dirty, crowded city, rain drenched shale and asphalt littered the streets. On a dirty, crowded street sprinkled with gray mud that oozed up from between the feet of the walkers, exposing large footprints like open, oozing wounds every so often; a visually young boy stood.

His eyes were invisible to the passerby; arms huddled in the mass of a rain-sloshed child’s coat that had probably long outgrown him, his arms held something tight, and near to his thin chest.
The man was sitting with another; whom exuded the kind of unfriendliness equated to vagabonds or runaway servants. Servants from a cruel, very much upper-class master.

“You deaf, boy? I said come here,”

The boy made no visible notice of the man, making an attempt to slip into the crowd as a man in a large, black coat came from the beckoning man’s direction.
Before the words could leave his mouth, the boy knew them. He slipped the object into his shirt and simply ran. There was danger everywhere. Everywhere, there was danger…in every direction, from every height: the danger of those blue uniforms, the copper badges with them, grew.

It wasn’t very long before again, he was on the run. He could feel the quickness of his breath, the random spurts of oxygen being shot through his lungs by the increasingly acrid air of the green-grey alleyways.
There wasn’t much time left; and now there was nowhere to run.
Nowhere left for his escape.

The hands had him pinned to the wall before he could react; two large men with sagging guts and sunken eyes; taking pleasure in the breathless fear and the aura of threat they leaked out from their every pale inch.

“Now…boy, hand it over.”

A dull thud came as the package slipped from his shirt. The beckoning man had arrived there just in time to unwrap the little thing from its dirty cloth covering.

“This is all? A little glass bird?”

With a disappointed sigh, the man tossed the bird into the green-black gutter just yards away from where he was being suspended.

“Pitiful. Can’t you people at least have something valuable?”
More so than the panic of breathlessness, tears poured out from the boys eyes as he stood there, suspended. Waiting for the order to come: waiting for the worst of his punishment to arrive.
“The girl, bring her.”
Things became quiet and dark for the girl, as she received a cold blow to the head; the man pausing a moment before setting off, the twins in tow.

Once again:

As expected, she’d been found out. Still, as she opened her eyes and saw that her guise: the poorly sized coat and trousers had been taken: replaced with a young woman’s dress, chest visible and shoulders bare, horror fell through her.
She clapped her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming, tears of shock rolling down her face. Her short hair, which she’d let grow due to the cold of the coming winter months, was exposed for all to see. Dark, small curls that shook as she tried to quiet herself, biting into her palms and feeling the full force of her heart throbbing in her chest.

“He’s been worried, you know. His newest pet, out cold for a whole three days…”

This time she couldn't contain her fear, as a woman approached from behind the deep shadows of the solid wooden walls. The girl let out a shriek as she approached, covered in little more than a white linen robe.

“Stewart said you were a strange one…running around in those filthy…things.”

The woman, who was probably no more than thirty stopped moving forward, but nodded toward a pile of torn things that hardly resembled clothing anymore—black and burnt.

“Well…say something, pet.”

She had slender, pale arms that stretched one another across her torso; her feet clothed in something soft and white. The girl looked towards her own feet; covered in those same soft, white slippers.

“…where?”

“In a safe place for the moment, miss Scarlett.”

“That’s…that’s not…”

“Feel privileged. He’s given you a name that lets you into the parlor.”