A/N: I was having fun with this one. It's such a random mix of all the different mythological references I could possibly throw into one story. Please, enjoy this dose of sugar craziness that my mind concocted for a contest.
Rose Colored Glasses
Rose colored glasses show you what you want to see, not necessarily what's there. At least, that's what my older sister had told me. I wouldn't have known an hour ago. I'd never been allowed to wear them. I had to wear my stupid black rim glasses that give me headaches. Jessica says that they wouldn't if I'd just wear them all the time like I'm supposed to, but they're uncomfortable and always sliding down my nose and make my eyeballs ache and throb like they're gonna pop out and then I'm going to have to use wooden eyeballs like that guy from the pirate movie and I'll turn into a skeleton when the moon comes out and Jessica'll never want to hug me goodnight because my guts'll be hanging out and I'll be all dirty and she hates it when I'm dirty.
I never knew why anyone would even want to wear the dumb things in the first place. Why would you possibly want to wear something that won't let you see what's right in front of your nose? I thought glasses were supposed to help you see better, not make you blind. I swore to myself that you wouldn't ever see me putting those things on. Not in a million billion years. Even if they are pink.
Jessica doesn't think they're pink. She says the glasses are more "maroon" – whatever that means. One time, I asked her why she calls them "rose colored" instead of "maroon colored" if she thinks they're maroon. She just looked at me in that really annoying way--you know, over the rim of her maroon/rose glasses. (Only she can do the Look right. I practiced once for two hours in front of my mirror during one particularly rainy afternoon, trying to get the Look, and when Connor caught me glaring at my reflection with my glasses hanging off my chin like a beard, he laughed at me for a week.)
Even if I couldn't do it, I knew the Look meant. It said: "Stop asking me silly questions and get out of the Library and do something useful for a change instead of skulking around the shelves annoying me."
So I did.
Since it wasn't raining and I'd done all my morning chores, I decided to visit Connor on the Lawn. Don't think lawn like "I'm gonna cook a barbeque and show off my blue-green grass to my jealous neighbors" kind of lawn. Look "lawn" up in a dictionary, and this definition's at the very bottom: "a glade." (I guess that's more like a synonym than a definition. That's when a word has the same meaning as another word. Jessica taught me that in my English lessons. I never really understood why we have to have an entire hour every day devoted to learning about the language I speak every day. When I told Jessica this, she asked if I wanted to start Greek early, because she was more than happy to teach me. I haven't brought it up since.)
In any case, the Lawn uses the old definition and is a glade in the back of the Library. It's really old – maybe that's why it uses the old definition – and humongous. Connor and me would race back and forth across the field and be tired after two laps. We'd flop in the very center of the Lawn, where there's this little hill, more like a bump in the ground, really, just enough to look out across the trees and the lake and the clouds and wonder if we threw a rock high enough if it would actually cut through the clouds and if you'd be able to see the tiny hole where it pierced through the fluffy whiteness to the blue sky above it, like a giant cotton donut.
On this particular day, I didn't feel much like racing or cloud watching. When I got to the middle of the Lawn, I flopped to the cushiony grass with a deep sigh. I wasn't surprised when Connor materialized at my elbow, seemingly from out of nowhere. (Though of course that wasn't true. I probably didn't hear him coming.)
"Whatcha doin'?" he asked in singsong. His wolf ears twitched cutely (not that I would ever tell him that to his face – he'd never let me hear the end of it) and I couldn't help but reach over and scratch right at their base. His eyes became half-lidded as his fluffy tail thumped the ground with pleasure. I giggled and Connor glared at me because I was "treating him like a girl" again – his words, not mine. I stuck my tongue out and he reached out to swat the back of my head. I didn't move away, knowing as well as he did that he would never hurt me; my werewolf friend would never hurt me.
"Nothin', really." I sighed the long-suffering sister's sigh. "Jessica's grumpy."
"Ah." Connor clucked his tongue knowingly. "She's stuffed up in that Library of hers again?"
"Yeah. I don't know how she stands it!" I ran a hand through my short limp hair and grimaced as my fingers caught on a tangle. I tugged at the knot as I continued, "You'd think that she had nothing better to do than to sit and read through dusty, boring textbooks all morning. D'ya know what she was reading today? I caught a peek before she kicked me out. How to Treat Boils: Yee Oldie Cures for Skin Lesions."
Connor snorted at the title before looking thoughtful. "Huh… I would've never guessed she was that creative…" He trailed off.
"Whatd'ya mean?" I sat up quickly to stare eagerly into my friend's tan face. "What's so creative about boils?" I made a face, but he wasn't paying attention to me. "Hey, Connor?" I waved a hand in front of him. He was zoned out, looking across the trees.
"What?" Connor snapped back to earth. "Whoa, sorry 'bout that."
"Whatever." I brushed him off. I had more important questions that needed answering. "What did you mean about Jessica being creative?" I snorted in disbelief. "Though the day Jessica's creative, I'll eat grass."
Connor's head whipped to face mine. I saw a manically happy expression flicker across his amber eyes before they cleared of anything but ultimate innocence. "Can I hold you to that?"
I flapped a hand at him, disgusted with the conversation and already forgetting my question. "What, eating grass? Sure, whatever. It'll never happen, anyway."
Connor grinned, showing more teeth in a most werewolf-ish way. I was about to ask him what was going through that evil mind of his when I heard Connor gasp. Instantly, I was worried. "Connor! What –"
"Duck!" And with that, he shoved my head down so hard that I heard the bones in my neck pop. He threw his body down beside mine. I could hear his ragged breathing. His heart sounded like a base drum, it was so loud.
"Uh, Connor, what are you doing?" I asked in what I thought was a reasonable tone, given the fact that my best friend was attempting to fuse my head to the ground.
"Shut up!" he hissed, and continued grinding dirt and grass and who-knew-what into my hair. I squirmed to get free, but he just held me down harder.
"Stop it!" I cried, and I wrenched myself free from his grip. I flipped my hair over my head in a brown spray of dirt and saw Connor flinch as some dirt hit him. Good. "Now look," I yelled in my I-am-woman-hear-me-roar voice, "you made my hair all dirty! Jessica is gonna –"
Z-z-zing!
I stared at my fingers. I couldn't help it. I been holding a long lock of my (granted, dull and otherwise uninspiring, but still mine, and so I had to be in a rage about it) brown hair in my fist and shaking it at Connor as blatant proof of his stupid and downright rude behavior when it had disappeared. Where I had held maybe ten inches of hair before, there was nothing but ragged tips.
Before I could recover, someone chuckled in the woods. It wasn't a very nice sound at all, like a chuckle was supposed to be—it made the hair on my arms prickle like a porcupine's needles and Connor's ears flattened against his hair. His lips peeled back in a silent snarl, and he very slowly got to his feet, crouching very low to the ground like he was going to start running any second.
A strange lady strode onto the Lawn. I shivered. She was really pretty, with long black hair and paler skin than paper or the sheets on my princess bed, but she seemed really cold to me, like how I had felt after falling through the ice on our small skating pond last winter. She wore a weird skirt and shirt that looked like they were made out of tons of tiny metal rings. The lady carried a bow in her fist with an arrow in her other hand, as if getting ready to shoot.
The lady started to walk towards us, and a flash of white skin drew my eyes to her feet. She wasn't wearing any shoes.
I couldn't help it. I giggled. If only Jessica could see this grown-up lady walking around half-dressed…!
The lady's head whipped to look at me, and the giggles died instantly in my mouth when I saw the furious look on her face.
"At whom are you laughing, mortal?" she hissed.
I didn't answer her. Connor's lips pulled back even farther, making the points of his teeth glisten in the sunlight.
"Answer me!" she commanded, and the air around me grew cold as ice.
"J-Jessica said I-I'm n-n-not sup-p-posed to t-talk to strangers," I stuttered through numb lips. She was close enough now that I could see her hands trembling on the bow, like she really wanted to just shoot it but was trying super hard not to.
Connor's stance relaxed a smidgen and he barked a laugh. "You just keep it that way," he said fiercely to me, still staring at the strange lady.
My natural indignation at the command thawed my frightened paralysis. "You can't tell me what to do!" I told my friend hotly before I rounded on the stranger who had interrupted my afternoon with Connor and who'd cut my hair without my permission and made me look like a lopsided freak. "And what're you doing here? You're not allowed here, lady!"
It happened so fast that I couldn't even see her hands move. One second, the bow was at her side—the next, it was pointed at me. Which wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that there was an arrow on the string. Which was bad.
We were still for a second like that—Connor and the lady and me, just looking at each other, not breathing, not moving. And then a bird chirped, and everything happened at once.
Connor leapt in front of me, and suddenly all I could see was the back of his t-shirt. I was yelling at Connor and the lady was shouting at me and Connor was snarling at everybody and that stupid bird was still singing and through all of that, I still heard the arrow's feathers whistle through the air as the lady shot it.
I screamed, though I don't think I said anything: I just screamed. I was terrified that the arrow would somehow swerve around my friend and hit me. It never occurred to me that it wouldn't be me who'd be hit, that it'd be Connor instead.
I heard a dull thunk as the arrow slammed into my friend's chest. The force of the hit made him stumble backwards, falling into me. For the second time that day, I was crushed to the ground, but I didn't care. The wind was knocked out of me, and I gasped for air like the catch of the day. Connor didn't move at all. His hair ruffled as I tried to breathe again. Some strands got caught around my tongue, and I couldn't spit them out again.
The lady leaned over Connor and me—me gasping, him still as a corpse— to examined us as if we were only a mildly interesting rerun. She frowned slightly. Bending her head over Connor's chest, she reached for the wooden shaft of the arrow sticking out of my friend's chest and heaved. With this hideous sucking sound, it pulled free of his body. The sharp, tiny point of the arrow was shiny and black, and when I realized what the shiny stuff was, I wanted to throw up.
The lady wiped the blood on the shoulder of Connor's t-shirt. The arrowhead sliced through the fabric as if she'd dragged a razor across it. She laughed again.
"Do not trifle with me, little mortal girl. I am your goddess, and so the judge if you live or die."
She was going to say more—maybe say that I was supposed to die, too, I dunno—but a great whoosh of wings and a loud whinney interrupted her. Jessica's voice split the air like thunder, and I privately smirked as the lady's face blanched at her tone.
"Begone, Diana!" The lady's face became even paler.
"This is no place for you!" Jessica continued. I couldn't see her, but her voice was getting louder. "Away with you, goddess of myth! You have no power here!"
And just like that, the lady was gone.
I heard Jessica begin to run towards us. I had managed to wiggle out from beneath Connor's heavy body by the time she reached our little hill. She hugged me tightly, speaking almost faster than I could understand her. "Taylor! Are you alright? Did she hurt you? Oh, I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner, but I had to go get Celeris and—"
"Connor!" I shrieked into her head. She jumped, startled.
"What?"
But I was now crying almost too hard to be understood. "That lady!" I sobbed. "She killed Connor!"
She wiped away my tears with her sleeve. "No."
I stopped in mid-hiccup to stare at my sister. "No?"
"No."
"But I saw it!" I wailed, and turned to look at my friend--
--who was no longer lying there like a corpse, but was sitting up and pounding on his chest. If his t-shirt hadn't been filthy with half-dried blood, I would never have guessed that he'd been shot.
I threw myself at him, knocking us both to the ground. "You're alive!" I squealed in his ear.
"I'm deaf now," he grumbled, but he didn't push me away.
"How?!"
He winced and gently turned me so that I was facing my sister again, who was still kneeling on the ground where I'd left her. But beside her was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—and that included my sister in a dress.
"He did it," Connor told me.
He was tall and smooth and silky, like somebody'd taken moonbeams and milk and soft serve vanilla ice cream and mashed them all together to make a horse. But they must've thrown a dove in, too, because the horse had wings. He was as pale white as the lady had been, but the lady had made me cold. This horse made me feel as warm as if I'd just chugged an entire mug of hot chocolate.
Connor laughed. "You can close your mouth now."
"Like you were any better the first time you met Celeris," Jessica said mildly.
"I have no idea what you're talking about, ma'am." I raised an eyebrow skeptically at my friend—I knew that tone very well—but he kept his face completely blank.
Jessica gently took my hand and tugged me to my feet. Clumps of dirt and grass and who-knew-what-else fell from my clothes, and I flushed. Compared to the pure coat of the horse not ten feet away from me, I looked like a complete ragamuffin. I wouldn't have complained (for once) if Jessica would've insisted for me to take a bath before meeting the horse again, but that didn't seem like it was an option.
"Taylor," Jessica said gravely, "Taylor of the Americas, Muse born of the New World, may I present Celeris."
My eyes widened when I heard Jessica's words. I momentarily forgot about the magnificent creature in front of me in my confusion. "What're you talking about, Jessica?"
She sighed heavily, lines appearing on her face when there weren't any there before. "We're Muses, Taylor."
I tried to remember where I'd heard that name before. "Like from the Hercules movie?"
Connor's snort quickly turned into a laugh when Jessica glared at him. She turned back to face me, her rose colored glasses opaque with glare for a second before becoming transparent again. The lenses cast wine-colored shadows against her skin and darkened her eyes until they were pitch-black. I suddenly realized that I had no idea what color Jessica's eyes were: they were always hidden behind that dark filter.
"Yes, like that, I suppose, only they're fictional and we're…not."
"So which one're you?" I demanded. "The fat one?"
Connor couldn't cover up the laugh this time.
"No. I am the Muse of History. Well," she amended, her mature manner quickly becoming more abashed, "we're descended from Clio, anyway. And no," she interrupted before I could ask, "I don't sing."
"Yes, you do," Connor interrupted with a smirk.
Another glare silenced him.
"This is great and all, but how does this apply to me?" I complained.
Jessica's face softened. "You've passed your test."
"What test? I wasn't told to study!"
"Calm down!" Connor grabbed my hands before I could jump up and pace around in panic (my habit before examinations—Jessica's were brutal!). "It was a—a pop quiz, okay? We had to make sure that you wouldn't be intimidated by your charges."
"My charges? What are you talking about? And I was intimidated by that creepy lady before you egged me on!"
Jessica frowned at Connor. "You provoked her into standing up to Diana? But that isn't—"
"Yeah, well, she passed, didn't she?" Connor said hurriedly. He turned to me. "A Muse's job is to inspire other people, right? Well, the Muse of History draws from old stories and myth and reminds people to look to the past for inspiration. But she also protects the creatures and people from the stories that no one has read about for a while, so that when artists want to believe in them again, the Muse can re-introduce them."
"You mean…there's other things in the woods besides Psycho-Lady?" I gulped.
He just smiled, showing his teeth.
Jessica quickly picked up where Connor'd left off. "Some of the older residents are a little bitter that they've fallen so far in human memory; Diana's one of them. She saw you, a mortal girl, and decided to take out her rage on you. Frankly, I wasn't expecting any of them to find you for a few years yet, but…" She trailed off, looking at the white horse again.
"So," I said. "What'd you call this horsie again? Celery, right?"
The horse snorted and pawed the ground, tossing his head agitatedly.
"This winged horse is Celeris."
I wrinkled my nose. "Celery?"
"Celeris."
"It sounds like Celery."
"I don't care what it sounds like! It's Celeris! Not Celery—Celeris!" That last shriek drove the birds from the trees.
"Feeling better?" I asked after a long pause.
She took a shaky breath and nodded. "Thanks."
"No problem."
Connor looked at me and at Jessica and back at me before saying to the air, "I have no idea what just happened."
"You don't need to." I shrugged. "It's a sister thing."
Celeris ignored all of us and trotted right up to me. When I swung my head back to face Jessica, his big velvety snout filled my vision. I yelped and jumped backward, almost running into Connor.
The winged horse edged up closer to me, slowly, trying not to startle me again. His eyes, I could see now, were blue—no, red—no, purple—no, blue! Every shift of his head, every movement or breath made his irises ripple into new shades. It reminded me of a sunset I'd seen once with Connor, where there were colors that I'd had to go look up on Jessica's color wheel.
He nickered and lowered his head until the tips of his ears tickled my chin. I could see his great wings, flexed in two great feathery arcs above his back. The wind picked at the fringes of the wings like it was a skirt, making the feathers lay funny against their neighbors. My fingers twitched; I wanted to make them lay straight.
One feather at the very tip of his right wing twisted free of the rest. I watched, mesmerized, as it floated down to tangle in my hair. Very carefully, I reached up and took the feather out. The tiny feathery strands of feather tickled my fingers. They were rainbow-colored at the edges, shining like the back of a beetle.
"Here," Jessica's voice said abruptly. Her fingers removed my glasses, and the world was fuzzy for a brief second before a new dark pink filter fell into place.
I only saw pink (well, maroon) for a moment. Then, everything was crystal clear, like I was looking through a window back at the Library.
Or was it? I turned to look at Connor, and suddenly I could see multiple Connors, layered on top of one another. There was the Connor who was grinning at me right now, sure, but I could also see a Connor that was pale, blood still seeping from the wound on his chest. I shuddered and blinked, and a new Connor overlapped the other two, one that looked almost normal, but there was something slightly wrong. I peered closer at him, and realized that he had no wolf ears.
Connor sniggered and wiggled his ears at me, and a wave of vertigo had my knees shaking as each of the multiple Connor-images followed the real one at slightly different times. "Like what you see?"
I realized that I had been staring at my friend like he was the best thing since chocolate bars, and I glared at him, quickly closing my mouth. "Jerk!" The bloody-Connor image swam slightly closer to the surface in response. I had to close my eyes against the sudden nausea.
"Taylor?" Jessica's voice was still at my ear. I groaned. "No, you don't have to open your eyes, just listen to me. What you're seeing right now, those are possibilities."
"What?"
A tiny sigh. "Possibilities. It's up to you to pick the one you want to see, and then you have to write it down."
"Write it down?" Poor Jessica. She hated it when I just repeated what she said.
"Yes, write it down. There's a book in the Library where the Muse writes down a story."
Dimly, I remembered a thick leather-bound book that was always open on Jessica's otherwise clean desk. "Oka-ay…"
"You have to write it down with the feather in your hand."
"The feather?" I cautiously opened my eyes to look at the feather that I was still clutching in my hand. My own skin flickered with different shades—different possibilities, I guess—but the feather never changed. I swiftly peeked at Celeris, who was still standing very patiently in front of me, and I saw with relief that he didn't change, either. He was always just Celeris. But everything else… I quickly closed my eyes again.
"History is always changing, Taylor," Jessica's voice spoke on. "It's our responsibility both to maintain and update that history. We must combine what we know is, like the feather, with what we see could have been through the glasses, so that people will understand what was and what will be again, and can take their inspiration through that."
"And that's why we keep the crazy Psycho-ladies around and you're always stuck in the library?"
Another sigh. "Yes, Taylor. That's why." I felt her cool fingers on my head again, and my good old annoying black glasses fell back onto my nose. I opened my eyes and saw with relief that I could only see one Connor and nothing else.
Which reminded me.
"You never really answered my question!"
"What question was that?" He was honestly confused.
"How come you're not dead?"
"I told you!" He huffed in exasperation. "Celeris did it!"
"Actually, I did."
Jessica smirked at both of us as we stared at her in shock. "I couldn't let you die yet, so I picked a possibility that I liked." She shrugged like it was no big deal. "I can't allow Taylor to wander off unaccompanied, can I?"
The rose colored glasses seemed to flash a little from Jessica's hand as she spoke.
"You can do that?" I asked, at the same time that Connor repeated, "Die ~yet~?"
Jessica chose to ignore Connor. "Yes, Taylor, you can. With practice. Speaking of which..." Jessica hitched her skirt up and jumped onto Celeris. He shook his mane and flapped his wings a few times. His front hooves came off the ground a little with each flap. "Come along to the Library, Taylor. We've got work to do."
With a great sweep of his wings, Celeris and Jessica rose into the air. They flew away from us, skimming across the tops of the trees. Connor and I watched them until they disappeared into one of the great corner towers of the Library.
"C'mon," Connor said suddenly. "I'll race you back."
"But Jessica said I had to go back to the Library!" He was already halfway across the Lawn before I could even finish. I couldn't just let him go without even trying! So I ran after him, clutching Celeris' feather in one sweaty fist. And I won.
…Okay, Jessica's glaring at me to fix the record. So maybe I didn't win. But hey, this is my version of history, right? I can win if I want to.
So there.