A/N: Ello, there. If you're reading this, congratulations: you've begun reading an awesome collection of drabbles and oneshots, if I do say so myself. Please note that none of these will be in chronological order and none of them will have sequels. Please remember to review! Even a single word means a lot.

This first one was originally a drabble and a half (150 words) but after reading it over recently I realized that it definitely wasn't my best work. So it got a makeover and became a oneshot-type-thing! Hurrah. I hope you like it better than the original. And now, without further ado, the REVISED version of Art.

Everything seems more certain when it's on a canvas. (Rachel)

Art

Rachel groans, massaging her temples with two fingers. She accidentally adds a streak of blue paint to her copper hair, but she doesn't notice (or care, for that matter). The images splashing in her mind make her dizzy and the headaches she gets are killer.

Since becoming the Oracle, the dreams and visions have become a constant factor in her life. There isn't a single moment when she's not seeing some moment in the future. Fractured scenes flit across her vision. Blurred faces haunt her during the night.

Sometimes the visions are happy—a wedding, a small child in the arms of his mother, a couple walking on a serene beach. Every few flashes of life, she glimpses a friend's face. These are the kinds of scenes she doesn't mind, aside from the migraines.

But most of the scenes are horrible. Burning and crumbling buildings, screams on a battlefield as two fierce armies clash, a woman sobbing as she clutches a corpse. And blood—there is an overabundance of blood. It's visions like these that make her regret ever becoming the oh-so-privileged Oracle of Delphi. Forget Apollo, forget prophecies, forget glory—she didn't want this.

So she paints, to escape the pain. Colors (especially red—she uses far too much red) splash across the pristine white square on her easel. The scenes come together; the faces become less blurred. Everything seems more certain when it's on a canvas. Once something is out of her head, once the headache is gone and her eyesight is clear, she can analyze it from a more distant perspective. It won't change unless she changes it, because now the scene is firmly present and visible to all.

That's another difficult part of this whole Oracle deal: people don't get it. Yeah, occasionally people say stuff like, "It must to suck to see all the awful stuff that's going to happen," but they rarely mean it and it's a one-in-a-million occurrence if they do. Even then, they don't understand exactly what her duty entails. They don't know the feeling of sitting in math class and getting clobbered with a vision of the next great catastrophe. They don't know the feeling of having to tell people their coming trials and failures. They don't know the feeling of constantly being asked about the future (no, people, the apocalypse will not happen in 2012 just because the Mayans didn't feel like continuing their calendar ad infinitum).

So when people ask her what it's like, she says something noncommittal and vague, like, "It's weird, but I deal with it." And whenever people ask her why she paints, she replies, "Because it helps me see."

Love it? Hate it? Review!