by Austin Chant
With a gasp of disbelief, Peter stretched out to catch the fairy in his palm. It clung to his fingers with furred, segmented limbs, its white silk wings fluttering in the breeze. Holding his breath, Peter leaned back inside. The fairy crouched in his hand, antennae shivering.
"Hello?" Peter asked. He had to be dreaming, or worse, completely mad—dressed as a boy and talking to an insect. Maybe it was an unfamiliar species of moth, blown here by a strange wind.
Then the fairy opened her eyes. She had dozens of them, each glowing like a gas bulb. Her wings fanned suddenly, faster than he could follow, producing a shimmering sound like bells and chimes.
Without knowing how, Peter knew the sound was his name.
"You know me?" he asked.
"Of course I do," she said. Her wings shed a silty gray dust that gathered in his palm. "Don't you remember me?"
He shook his head, but as he did, a memory tugged at him. He knew her voice. This was the same fairy who had appeared, long ago, to take him to Neverland. He dredged up a name: "Tink? Tinker Bell?"
"That's more like it," she said.
She had changed. He remembered her fur being bright gold, but it had dulled to the steel gray of his grandmother's hair. Several of her eyes had gone dark or filmy white, but those that remained were glowing with impatience. "Are you ready to go?" she asked.
"Hold on." Peter took a deep breath, turning away and staring into his dim bedroom. He blinked hard and turned back to find Tink looking quizzical. "Am I dreaming?"
"You said the same thing last time," she said.
"You're going to take me back to Neverland?"
"As soon as you stop dithering, yes."
He lifted her to eye level, breath trembling in his lungs. "Can you promise me it's real?"
She gazed at him for a moment, something in her demeanor softening. "Yes," she said. "It's all real. You're not dreaming. Here, I'll show you."
She pinched his hand with two of her hind legs, hard enough that he yelped and clapped a hand over his mouth. From down the hall, he heard a creak of bedsprings, and his mother called: "Wendy?"
Panic shot through Peter and he stared at Tink, afraid she hadn't known. She just made a tsking noise and flew up to his shoulder. "Better go now," she said.
He heard his parents' door open and his father said, sleepy and suspicious, "Wendy? What was that?"
"Out the window!" Tink ordered, and Peter scrambled up on the windowsill. The sky seemed closer than ever, but the height of his window was as frightening as before. He made the mistake of looking down, and his stomach turned.
He shrank back inside. He heard his father try the door and find it locked. "Wendy!" A heavy fist slammed against the door, and Peter flinched, looking at Tink beseechingly. "I don't remember how to fly."
"Happy thoughts," she said curtly. "Fairy dust."
She flew above him in a rush of silk wings, showering him in silver sand. It slid over his cheeks and spread across his shoulders.
Peter stared at her. It seemed so absurdly childish, and so impossible. "Happy thoughts?" Neverland was a world away, buried in his memories, and there was nothing else.
"Think about going home," Tink said.
Peter shut his eyes. His father's fists hammered on the door like distant thunder. He didn't think of home; he couldn't picture it.
He thought, One way or another, it'll be over.
Then he twisted toward the window and leapt.
*~*~*
"Oh, dear," the queen said.
Peter didn't remember falling to his knees, but he found himself looking up at her, his eyes blurry and his chest aching. The world around them had dimmed, everything gray and faraway except for the queen. "What did you do to me?"
"I wanted to see behind that shield of yours," she said. "Now I understand why you keep it up."
Peter swallowed hard, trying not to cry. An awful, drenching awareness had overtaken him. He found he was shaking, both with anger and with a bone-deep fear he had forgotten about until that moment. It hit him, again, that his skin didn't belong to him, that he was a puppeteer moving a stranger's body. That he was playing a character, while the real, lonely, frightened Peter was buried inside him.
"I didn't want to remember," he choked out. "Why did you make me?"
The queen studied him like a scientist with a specimen. "This world is mine to protect, Pan. Dreamers are always welcome here, whatever their reasons. But you seem insistent on tearing the world apart in all your fantasies."
"That's right," Peter spat. "I'm here to fight. I'm a boy."
"So you are," she said. "When do you intend to grow up?"
Grow up. Peter heard the words echoing in his father's voice, and it was too much. Fury overwhelmed his fear, burning the awareness away in a red haze. He lunged at the queen, only to have the world come back into focus around him in a surge of color. He realized he was surrounded by the queen's retinue, and all of them were bristling with stingers, barbs, and poison teeth.
"Be careful, Pan." The queen had not moved. "Much of this world will bend to your desires, but I will not. How would you like to be banished from Neverland forever?"
"No," Peter snarled.
"Then calm yourself," she said. "I will leave you to your dreaming, so long as Neverland survives it. Think on that."
She rose, and the other fairies went with her, returning to the commune tree. The moon was climbing behind them, a glaring white disc in the night sky.
Ernest gave an excited shout from the tree and came hurrying back to Peter, cradling a star-shaped white flower. A well of silver dust trickled through the petals, streaming his Ernest's fingers. "This is it!" he said breathlessly. "Look—isn't it beautiful?"
Peter looked, but found he couldn't share Ernest's enthusiasm. The quest felt suddenly stale, a story told so many times that the outcome was obvious.
The flower was a joke; the healing magic was just fairy dust. Tink had known it all along.
"Of course," Peter said wearily. "Let's go home."
Three
"I want to visit the mermaids," Curly said, and the Lost Boys let out a cheer. It had only been a day since Curly had drunk the flower tea, and he was already feeling well enough to get up and walk about, color back in his cheeks.
"You ought to take it easy," Ernest cautioned him. "You nearly died."
"Yeah, Curly," Tootles said. "Let us kiss the mermaids for you."
A friendly but violent tussle followed this exchange, with Ernest wading in to stop the fighting and remind everyone that Curly was still too newly recovered to be beaten up. Peter sat on a branch above, watching the exchange and playing listlessly on a set of reed pipes he'd discovered in the hideout.
The Lost Boys had fully warmed to him after he and Ernest had returned with the magic flower, treating Peter with the same reverence they had when he was a boy. That was the trouble. It was the same reverence. Nothing about them had really changed in the decade he had been away.
Ernest was the only one with any backbone or authority, and even he had started treating Peter with friendly regard, deferring to him more often than not to keep the peace. He had said nothing more about their encounter with the fairies, except to describe the fairy queen and her retinue in awed tones. The Lost Boys wanted desperately to see the next fairy commune. Peter never wanted to see one again.
In fact, there was nothing he really wanted to do. Peter knew all the games the Lost Boys played, all the places they visited, all the beasts they battled. They still had fun, but it was the same fun. They had no real fears, no want for anything new. Peter had no explanation for why, unlike the rest of them, he had been struggling to sleep—no explanation for the anxious buzzing in his head.
Only Tink seemed conscious of his foul mood. She had been quiet, studying him like a phenomenon she didn't understand.
She flew up to join him on the branch when she grew tired of watching the Lost Boys brawl. "You're sulking," she said.
Peter shrugge
d her off his shoulder. "Am not."
"If you're so bored with the Lost Boys," she said, "why don't you kill them?"
Peter stared at her.
"Or do something else. But stop moping."
"I'm not moping," he said. He watched her crawl over his knee, then stared off at the mountains.
"What do you want?" Tink asked. "What would help?"
"If I could forget everything." His memories had retreated to a distant haze, but they had left him with a nagging awareness he couldn't shake off and didn't understand. Every time he caught a glimpse of his reflection, something in him flinched.
Tink said nothing, but sat there cleaning her fur. Peter had the feeling she was at a loss, and he hated it. It reminded him of something else he didn't want to remember—the feeling of people who cared about him unable to understand what was wrong with him, unable to fix it.
*~*~*
"I want to be Peter Pan today," John said.
"And I wanna be Captain Hook," Michael said in his gummy, four-year-old speech, holding up one of his little hands with a single finger bent in the shape of a claw.
Peter glared at John. Peter was already wearing the green tunic and trousers that constituted Peter Pan's costume in their nursery games; he had even tried pulling up his hair today, twisting it into a knot at the back of his head so it looked shorter. "Michael, you're not big enough to be a dread pirate," he said. "And I'm Peter Pan."
"You're always Peter Pan," John drawled. "It's my turn. Actually…" Actually was John's favorite word. As he said it, he pushed his glasses up his nose with the air of someone being painstakingly rational. "If you're being fair, it should be my turn for the next month, because you've been Peter Pan at least thirty times."
"If you're being fair," Peter said, "I invented Peter Pan, so I get to decide who plays him. And besides, the tunic doesn't fit you."
"Who cares? I can wear something else." John stole Peter's wooden sword from the toybox and brandished it. "Come on, Wendy. I'm sick of being Hook and having you slice me to ribbons." He grinned, but Peter didn't smile back. "Why don't you play my fairy?"
"Give me that sword," Peter said coldly. "You're not playing Peter Pan, and that's final."
"Yes I am," John said, hopping back a pace. "Try and stop me."
Peter tackled him to the floor, knocking John's glasses off and nearly crushing them with his elbow as he tried to grab the sword away. John yelped, pulling on a fistful of Peter's hair and flailing his sword arm out of reach. Michael, who was used to his siblings brawling, watched with interest.
Nana the dog, however, woke from a doze to see her children fighting and began to bark in distress. Within moments, Peter heard their mother's footsteps on the stairs to the nursery. "Children?" she called. "Is everything all right?"
John looked triumphantly up at Peter. "I'm going to tell her that you're being unfair," he said. "And then you'll have to play someone else."
He was right. Mrs. Darling was very concerned about fairness, especially when it came to how Peter treated his brothers. "You must learn to be more gracious, dear," she said worriedly, inspecting John's glasses to make sure they hadn't been bent. "Let your brother play—who is it? Peter Pan? That's such a wonderful name. I think it suits John very well, don't you?"
"It's my name," Peter ground out. "I don't care if it suits John. It's my name."
"Dearest," Mrs. Darling said, "you're taking this very seriously, don't you think?"
*~*~*
Peter jerked upright in the dark, heavy furs sliding down to pool around his waist. The room smelled of dirt and wood smoke, nothing like the soap and pastel paint of the nursery in his dream. Still, Peter reached out for confirmation, and his questing hand found a warm shoulder.
"Hello?" Ernest mumbled. "Peter?"
Peter let out a breath he didn't know he been holding upon hearing his name.
"It's me," he said shakily. He knew where he was. This was the old hideout. In a concession to their new friendship and co-leadership of the Lost Boys, he and Ernest were sharing the largest bed.
"What's wrong?" Ernest asked, his voice thick with sleep.
"I'm bored," Peter said. That wasn't quite true, but he had no other name for his trembling unease; it was a distant panic he was putting off feeling. "Let's go find that kraken that lives under Death's Head Cavern. I want to know if it can really eat a man whole."
"No," Ernest said. "Let's not."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to get eaten."
His calm logic raised Peter's hackles more than usual. "Fine," he said. "Stay here, then. I'm going to do something interesting."
He scrambled out of bed, ignoring Ernest's muffled protest.
*~*~*
At first, Peter didn't know where the impulse was taking him. He flew out in the first light of dawn and caught a breeze blowing toward the water. It carried him far across the clouds until the sea stretched below. It was only when he saw the black sails of the Jolly Roger that he knew why he had come. He had almost forgotten about the war he was going to fight.
The Jolly Roger's sails were full, her course set for somewhere on the other side of Neverland. There was a familiar figure standing at the helm, and Peter's heart cracked open at the sight of him, letting in a trickle of excitement. He pitched himself through the wind and came down silently on the banister behind Hook.
Hook was humming to himself, his hand upon the ship's wheel. He was dressed in a maroon coat this time, embroidered with dark, labyrinthine stitching that occasionally resembled ships' rigging, cresting waves, or creatures of the deep. His hat was trimmed with peacock feathers. Peter cocked his head, wondering who Hook had to impress with that outfit.
Everything about Hook seemed a little frivolous, yet perhaps that was the point of it. He was such a dastardly villain that he could stand to do everything in twice as many ruffles as the next man.
He also had a pleasant singing voice, deep and on-key, and the tune he was carrying was a cheerful one. Peter sat listening for a while, until the urge to be noticed became overwhelming.
"You should watch your back, Captain," he said.
Hook jumped. He turned, slowly, attempting to look like he hadn't been startled. "You again," he said.
"Me," Peter said. He slid from the banister. The deck rolled gently beneath his bare feet, the wood polished smooth and glossy. The pirates seemed to have flourished without him; the ship was impeccable.
So was Hook. If being stabbed in the ribs still affected him, he gave no sign of it. He stood there with haughty poise, looking down his hawkish nose at Peter. "I should thank you," he said. "It's been a long time since anyone managed to take me by surprise. It's been a long time since anyone did anything interesting around here."
After what he had seen of the Lost Boys, Peter wasn't surprised, but it warmed him a little to hear Hook say it. "I'll show you something interesting," he said.
He took a step forward, and Hook drew his sword, holding it extended between them.
"If you're here for a fight, I can certainly provide one," Hook said. "But I thought you might have reconsidered dueling me after last time."
"Shut up," Peter said. "It wasn't a fair fight." He was, now that he'd thought of it, itching for a rematch. Just the thought of battle made him feel like his body was coming back into alignment, pushing away the worst of his memories and leaving him keen. He could prove himself against Hook.
Ernest had given him a sword, a long, thin blade like the ones the pirates fought with. Peter drew it from its sheath ponderously, keeping his eyes fixed on Hook, or more accurately on the way Hook watched him. It was strangely exhilarating to see himself observed as an enemy, as a threat.
"I had rather hoped you might be willing to talk," Hook said.
"I don't like talking. I like fighting."
Hook's lip curled in a smirk. "You always were a vicious brat."
Peter grinned and lunged, swinging his sword in a broad arc that should have cu
t across Hook's chest. Instead, Hook ducked effortlessly away, quicker on his feet than Peter had imagined he could be. The next time Peter swung at him, Hook caught his sword at the junction of his own hilt and blade, locking it there and then throwing his wrist out to the side, turning the blow and Peter with it. The flat of his sword slapped Peter across the back, sending him stumbling.
"Surely you can do better than that," Hook said.
Peter's ears burned with humiliation. "I'm going to cut you up," he said, "and feed you to the sharks."
"Well, do it then. Or are you all talk?"
Peter surged toward him again. Their swords met with a force that made him grit his teeth, reverberations running up his arms, his muscles tensing and locking when his strength matched against Hook's and began to give way. He simply couldn't force his way through Hook's guard—and it had never been his style to try, but something about Hook's taunting had made Peter want to meet him head-on, cut through him. Instead, he found himself being pushed back toward the railing, and in a flash remembered how Hook had managed to pin him to the tree before.
He couldn't let that happen again. It was his turn to win, his turn to make Hook sweat and struggle and give in.
He yelled and threw himself forward, slipping through Hook's defenses and nearly managing to stab him in the gut. Hook parried, but he was retreating, Peter chasing him. Then they were dueling in earnest. Peter lost track of everything but the sound of their blades ringing together, clashing so viciously that the impact of Hook's every blow traveled through his body like a shock. There was nothing but the moment, and the next moment, the deadly flash of Hook's blade. Peter's movements were almost beyond his control—as if he were narrating the actions, but his body was completing them on its own, tuned to Hook's advances and reacting before Peter could think to.
Slowly he gained ground, forcing Hook to retreat down the stairs to the main deck. Hook stumbled on the last step, and Peter saw his opening. He locked their swords together, twisted, and sent Hook's blade skittering away across the deck. In the next moment, he caught Hook in the stomach with his elbow and knocked him back against the railing, flicking the point of his sword up beneath his chin.