A Pooka Perspective

     It was the silver antennae curling over the edges of his book that finally made Aeneas put the novel down. With a faint sigh, he gave Coriline Ferrington a weak smile and reached out to ruffle her soft golden hair. "What’s up, Cori?" The sidhe managed to keep his voice from being tiredly patient, even as he put his book aside. The butterfly pooka’s brilliant smile didn’t dim in the slightest as she drew a plate of cookies from behind her back and offered them to him.

     "Andrew showed me how to bake them. Would you like some?" Her voice was soft and lilting, with an accent no one had ever been able to pinpoint. It was a mingling of the soft Southern from her raising in Virginia and some other tone, heralding to Coriline’s origins that Andrew and Bertram were notoriously close-mouthed about. Her silver antennae perked as Aeneas took a cookie from the plate. Setting it aside, she picked up his book and peered at it, one delicate eyebrow lifting curiously. "What’s Angel of Darkness? Charles de Lint? Didn’t he write those urban fantasy stories you read to the little ones?"

     "Yeah, he did," the sidhe said, delicately extracting his book from her grasp. "It’s kind of a darker urban fantasy. Creepier, you know."

     The pooka looked puzzled as she sat back on her heels, tilting her head to look at the book’s cover. "Why would you read anything dark and creepy? You’re not Spider."

     Aeneas laughed softly at her reference to the Gothic bookseller, a frequent visitor to the freehold and someone he’d long had a crush on. Shrugging, he reached for another cookie. "I don’t know. The world’s a dark place, Cori. No use pretending that it’s not. Even in books."
 
     Eyes the color of platinum looked up at him, framed by soft, dark gold lashes, with an expression just short of utterly confused. "It’s not dark. It’s daylight outside."

     Her absolute conviction made him laugh, even as the earnest tone of her voice did. Aeneas chuckled loudly, and then tried to silence himself when he saw the hurt dawning in her eyes. It always felt…wrong to see that expression on her face. The butterfly pooka was so gentle, so innocent…the entire freehold was always in a sort of conspiracy to keep the harsher realities of life away from her, something Andrew and Bertram had begun years back when she was a child, that everyone played along with out of the instinctive protectiveness she incited in most people. With a faint sigh, he reached out again and stroked her hair gently, curling one careful finger in her antennae.
     "Not dark outside, Cori. The world’s just…kind of a big, mean place sometimes."

     She frowned, watching his hand in her antennae, and then pushed the touch away. "It’s not mean."

     Aeneas sighed as he tried to think of a way to phrase the issue that wouldn’t upset her. Coriline was so touchy sometimes…pooka and their weird reactions. He’d never understand them. "Cori, honey…the world isn’t all about cookies and playtime, you know. There’s a lot of scary things out there. It’s just…smart to realize that."

     For a moment, it looked as though, no matter how delicately he’d tried to phrase it, Aeneas had managed to trigger the pooka’s temper. Then her antennae wilted a bit as Cori picked up the plate of cookies and fiddled with one.

     "The world is what you make it. It’s just that more people see the scary stuff than the good stuff." Her silvery eyes glazed a bit as she looked at the cookies, a frown lingering on her soft pink lips. "It’s not hard to see the pretty side, Aeneas, but no one tries. It’s just easier for everyone if they say the world is a bad place. Then they don’t have to try and change it. Saying the world is the problem makes it not their thing to fix."

     The sidhe tried to close his slack jaw, but found it amazingly difficult. He blinked…and blinked again, before ruffling his hair and managing to yank his wide-eyed gaze away from her. Aeneas looked at the cover of his book, then back at Coriline, still astonished. "How’d you figure that out?"

     Coriline smiled, a soft expression tinged with a sadness he’d never seen on her before. "I do listen to people, Aeneas. I listen a lot. People want a pretty world, but they think it’s too hard to make." Shaking her head, she sighed as she rose, balancing the plate of cookies. "I guess no one ever thinks that they could make a prettier world for themselves if they’d just stop looking at the scary stuff all the time." She looked at Aeneas’s book, and then shrugged one tan shoulder. "Or maybe everyone just wants to be scared all the time. I don’t think I’ll ever know." The butterfly walked out of the room, leaving the sidhe sitting on the couch. Aeneas watched her leave, and then looked at his book. There was a furrow in his brow as he turned the thing over in his hands, and then he closed it. Rising, he stretched a bit, and walked to the patio doors. Within moments, the dark-haired sidhe was out in the sunlight, heading for the picnic table where some of the freehold children busily erected a Lego castle.