Riordanverse Oneshots, Rants and More

Oneshot #3- Tangled AU (MCGA)

"Hmm, I guess no one's here after- AHA! Caught you. Again." Magnus exclaimed, a smug smile growing on his face as he used his hair as a rope to get hold of Jack's tail. His seventy feet long, snow-white hair did come to a lot of use, you know. This was the thirty-seventh time he had caught Jack, who had been trying to hide inside a flower pot, in hide-and-seek. Really, that chameleon was no good at this game. 

Jack frowned. Magnus chuckled, "Come on, Jack. This is fun. Tell me, what else do you want to do?"

Jack raised an eyebrow before pointing his tail outside. "Come on," Magnus said as he went back inside the huge tower he had spent sixteen years of his life in. "It's fun here. I like it, and so do you." he recited the lines like they were a verse of a poem. For as long as he could remember, he and his loving mother Loki, a woman with luscious red curls and a permanent glint in her eyes, had stayed inside the seventy-three-foot tall tower. Sure, it had some moss growing on the walls, but that wasn't the point. 

The living area of the tower was not much to look at, just a huge room with a closet where Magnus liked to spend most of his time, and a small spiral of stairs leading up to his room. The otherwise dull tower was painted with bright yellow swirls of sun and stars on the inside. Yes, he liked to paint out his imagination. What would you do if your mother refused to let you go outside to see the world and stay hidden forever? 

Personally, Magnus thought he had some mad skills wielding his frying pan (he felt connected to it at a personal level, okay?), but his mother refused to listen to him. For her, he had always been her little flower, a fragile thing that could break at the slightest touch. 

So, he spent his hours sweeping, mopping, reading, painting, studying the position of stars, sun and the moon, playing his kazoo, re-reading the books if he had the time, playing hide-and-seek with his chameleon friend Jack, and wondering when his life would begin. Every day was a repetitive cycle, the same old story, the same old song. His mother would come home after finishing her errands late in the evening, and brush Magnus's magical hair, which had the power to heal and let one stay young and beautiful. 

Yes, you read that right. Magical hair that could heal and let one stay young and beautiful.

So cool, right?

No.

No, it was not cool. 

The number of hair products he had to use in one washing was enough to last Loki a whole year. And don't even get him started on the number of hours it took to brush them, not to mention the ridiculous amount of knots he had to untangle. 

Jack found something interesting behind the dresser and left Magnus. The blond roamed around the tower, before stopping at a painting of him watching the lights that used to appear every night on his birthday. That was one painting he had kept hidden from his mother, the painting of the floating lights. He couldn't help but feel a connection to the glowing dots travelling through the sky, though his mother had told him many times that it was just his imagination. He had made up his mind this year to ask his mother about going to see the lights in person.

He was pulled out of his thoughts as he heard someone yell outside, "Magnus, let down your hair!" He hurriedly hid Jack behind the curtains before walking towards the same balcony where he and Jack had been playing earlier.

"Why do we even have a staircase in this tower," he muttered to himself but yelled back, "Coming, mother!"

He threw his hair, securing them on the hook outside the tower and letting it down to the ground. He felt a slight tug as Loki stepped on them. 

She came up grunting like a pig, while complaining, "Darling, you have a bad case of the lice again."

"That's what happens when you use my hair as a rope ladder with your dirty shoes on," Magnus mumbled to himself.