green is the planet from the eyes of a turtle dove / 'til it runs red, runs red with blood

hen she sees the doll placed on top of the table littered with throwaway possessions, Aghavni decides that she, alone, must have it.

It has been a long time since she has felt this way, this quickly, about an object. There is always the rush of nerves that tingles up her spine, little cat paws skipping up the vertebrae and layers of skin, followed by the swell of satisfaction, deep as an ocean, when the object is swallowed up by the silk folds of her scarf.

She likes the first part best, though—the actual taking, that shot of electric adrenaline, comes a close second. Only because the first feeling, the first rush, is always the most thrilling.

The doll has a porcelain face and a cloth body, its cheeks as red as apples, its eyes cornflower blue and dotted with white varnish. It is not the finest doll in the world (seven of those sit elegantly on Aghavni's shelves in the Scarab, dusted by a maid every night, untouched ever since she had received them as gifts from Father, one for every visitation he missed) but still it strikes her, because it had clearly been loved, and oh! 

How she aches to have it.

And then a girl walks up to the table and Aghavni's eyes flit towards her, callous at first, until they stick. Through pale, milky lashes she marvels at the girl who has waltzed out of the woodsmoke like a music-box ballerina. She is lavender and cream, as pretty as a perfume bottle with a thousand facets—prettier, Aghavni corrects, as her eyes trace the spirals of the horn gracing her dainty head, a goddess' blessing, draped in winking sapphires. 

She is like a doll herself, Aghavni thinks. Petite, beautiful, loved.

Aghavni is almost sorry that this doll, living, gazes so dolefully at that doll, cloth and dabs of paint, sitting crookedly on the grimy tabletop. She is almost sorry because she is still going to take the doll (cloth) even if the doll (lavender and cream) wanted it too.

First, though, she needs a distraction.

"Hello," she calls out, to the merchant who is barely out of boyhood tending the stall. He looks too sullen to be here by choice—more likely his mother threatened him, and because he was still just a boy, he pretended not to listen but did anyway.

She likes the ones like him the best. They were the easiest to fool. Smiling, Aghavni looks carefully over the rest of the abandoned belongings until she finds a brooch in the shape of a rose, its gold clasp (painted pyrite) carved with rough vines, and nods towards it. "I'd like that. Would a copper do?"

A copper was too generous for a brooch like that. She knew it, and the boy knows it too. Yet who is he to barter down? So he grunts, slides the copper piece towards him, and turns to fiddle with the ledger his mother told him to list all purchases on, done in his best handwriting.

Aghavni stretches out her neck towards the brooch. As her emerald scarf flutters gently over the tabletop, the cloth doll slips like a sigh into its silken folds.

When she straightens up again, she pins the brooch to her mane, catches the lavender girl's pale, silver eyes, and winks.

Once, secretive, daring.

{ @Mesnyi "speaks" notes: Aghavni being the klepto I've always believed her to be c': }