Chapter Text
we have found each other
thirsty and we have
drunk up all the water and the
blood,
we found each other
hungry
and we bit each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us
-pablo neruda
“I didn’t think the Pan had much interest in females,” the captain said, sprawled in his rich leather chair, hooked hand tapping against the wooden table lined with assortments of map and star charts.
“He’s not. His shadow grabbed me by mistake.”
“Ah.”
His accent made a pang of homesickness resound in her breast, in ways she hadn’t felt before. She recognized the fall and raise of his words; her father spoke in a similar gait, a nuance of words that spoke of some learning, Eton in his vowels. She was lulled by it, but Wendy knew better than to trust him—he was a pirate, after all.
It was his first mate, a Mr. Smee, that had brought Wendy the tea that now warmed her chilled palms. Her feet dangled inches above the carpeted floor, obscured by the frayed hemline of her gown, and Wendy felt the beginnings of embarrassment stain her cheeks. She knew the pink gown was not only overly big on her, but that it had been torn by the Pan’s callous hands. It hadn’t mattered, when she had been running, and she hadn’t given much thought to appearances among the lost boys, who were always covered in mud and caked blood.
Now—she could feel her world encroaching on this one, in the guise of a leather-clad pirate with mocking politesse in his words. Wendy didn’t know how to feel about it, didn’t know how to feel about anything—least of all the Pan, from whom she had fled, whose fingerprints she could feel on her body like scorch marks.
“There now, miss,” Mr. Smee said with an uneasy, fatherly warmth. His fingers patted the back of her hand. “It’ll be alright now.”
It wouldn’t be.
Wendy burst into tears. The pirate captain stood, unconcerned with her grief or having no wish to be around a woman’s tears, and crossed to the wide, railed windows at the back of the room.
“What’s your name, girl?” he asked.
“Wen—Wendy,” she managed to hiccup. “Wendy Mo—Moira Angela Darling.” It was such a strange feeling to say it, after having gone so long without even thinking of it.
The Pan didn’t know her real name, she thought, nor did the lost boys, but they hadn’t given her a name like they had given ones to each other—the Pan, and Felix, and Nibs, and Tootles; silly names, but ones that created a sort of camaraderie among the boys, bond them tightly together. Sometimes she thought she heard the boys referring to her as a bird because of her ungraceful landing, when they weren’t calling her mother, but those weren’t names. She had never belonged to the group, never invited into the secret circle that the Pan claimed as his own. Even if she had wanted, she had never been allowed to be apart of it.
It made her cry harder.
“There now, Miss Darling,” the captain said. “There’s no crying on the ship of Captain Hook, you hear?”
She nodded fiercely, afraid he’d make her walk the plank if she didn’t obey, and messily swallowed her next sobs.
“Aren’t you—are you from London?”
“London? No. But I’ve been north a time or two.” Captain Hook rolled his shoulders. He was a handsome man, but there was something about him that made her uneasy—some kind of flinty, rawboned anger in the hollows of his cheeks. The Pan was angry, but in an almost playful way, in this man there was something far more deadly, a rage that was honed by grief.
“Please,” she whispered, voice warbling out over the watery remains of her heaving sobs. “Please, captain, take me home. Please take me home. I want to see my family again. I want to—”
His hook cut through the air, effectively cutting her words. “Sorry, love, you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a savior.”
She had heard that before, Wendy thought, her tongue burning with something bitter.
“Why not?” she demanded hotly, fingers balling over the fabric of her ill fitted gown.
“The Pan may make it seem easy, but it’s a bit of trial getting into Neverland—once I leave I might be able to get back.” Lots to the miasma of his own thoughts, dark ones by the sharp glint in his eyes, the captain lifted his abbreviated hand, the silver of his hook gleaming harshly in the lamplight. “And I won’t let this all be for naught.”
Wendy didn’t inquire about the strange statement. She didn’t care, not bout whatever had put that look in his eyes. She didn’t wanted to be dragged down into Neverland’s secrets any more than she already was. She didn’t want to hear anything about his pains, about what unfair hand life had dealt him, this pirate with a hungry look in his eyes and hate in the strong line of his jaw.
Mr. Smee had left them some time ago, and Wendy belatedly remembered lessons by her governess—it is not proper for a miss to be alone with a gentleman, less others think ill of her and it reflect poorly on her family—but what did all that matter? There was no such laws here, Neverland operated with its own savage customs, and she had been made the Pan’s heathen queen, even if it had been just for a lark. She answered to no laws higher than her own.
The knowledge made her feel uninhabited, fierce and powerful, and she curled her slender fingers over the wrist of the captain’s severed hand. She could feel the bumping flesh there, only just healing, and he jumped, dark brow quirked in surprise.
“Take me home, Captain Hook. Please.” Her lips puckered, a promise she didn’t realize she was making, driven by instinct and some hidden intuition that had always laid dormant in her veins. Tears clung to her thick sweep of lashes, making her eyes luminous and glowing.
Harsh laughter escaped him, and reminded Wendy of Pan’s. “Exercise those feminine wiles somewhere else, love,” he advised her. “I’ve no time and no patience for girl pretending to be women. Even if I still considered myself a man—I’d be too much of one for you to handle. I’ve no thirst for anything except revenge.”
She yanked her hand away as if it burned.
“You can spend a few nights,” the captain said. “But if the Pan comes ‘round to reclaim you, don’t expect me to play knight in shining armor.”
The room that was given to her for her stay was overly small, and smelled of potatoes. There was no cot here for her to sleep on but Mr. Smee had piled enough blankets to fashion a makeshift mat for her.
Wendy collapsed bodily into it, too fatigued to even weep. She simply stared at the rotting wood of low hanging ceiling until she passed out into dreamless, exhausted sleep.
—And woke up to the rocking of the ship. With the ship anchored (she didn’t even know its name) it was a gentle, swaying motion, like a mother rocking her child to sleep. Wendy woke up with sweat collected on the back of her neck, and gathered at her knees.
She felt a restless humming in her throat, in her stomach, familiar aches that she tried to bury, tried to ignore. She couldn’t. Unbidden, the image of the Pan rose up, all sinewy limbs and knife-sharp smiles poking into her. She remembered his hot mouth on hers, opened wide like he wanted to swallow her up, she remembered the heat she had felt pool in her belly. She remembered his hand on her breast.
Her own hand slipped down, curled her fingers around the mound, though it only felt mildly pleasant until she recalled the image of the Pan’s hand there, until she started pretending it was his rough, bony fingers pulling and pressing into the flesh. The familiar ache between her legs increased, causing her to instinctively rub her legs together, creating delicious friction there.
Against her will, Wendy’s eyes fluttered closed and the images played like moving pictures on the backs of her eyelids—the Pan’s dark face, his hungry mouth, his fingers on her. She rolled her hips against the chilly air and before she could think the better of it, her hands pushing her dress to her hips, exposing herself to the night.
But there other concerns, her fingers moving stealthy over her hip, like thief, pressing her fingers into the damp, wiry curls at the apex of her thighs. Wendy bit her lip, as if worried that she would be discovered and punished for doing something so obviously unladylike, but the jolt of pleasure that careened down her legs encouraged her to peruse it, fingers moving over the slick cleft between her legs. A hidden, sacred place she had never dared touched before though she had realized that ache that awoken her in the middle night had originated there.
Now she explored, poking and rubbing, surprised and intrigued by the electric shocks that answered each tentative touch. Once more, the Pan intruded into her mind, and she imaged what his cruel hands would feel like, moving over the slick, swollen folds, imaged the knife-cutting grin as she whimpered helplessly beneath him, desperate and hungry for more sensation.
Her fingers pushed inside her, and she gasped, canting her hips against the heel of her hand, working ruthlessly towards a finish she didn’t understand. The heel of her palm pressed into knot of flesh at the top of her folds and the sensations rioted. Wendy muffled a scream beneath palm.
Something burst beneath her flesh, white-hot, and as she rocked against her hand. The muscles in her legs trembled as they liquefied, no longer able to keep her balanced. She collapsed back onto her makeshift bedding, panting like she’d been held under water.
In the shadowy corners, Wendy thought she heard the Pan laughing at her.
She was left to her own devices on the pirate ship. There were no clothes to mend or food to cook, or bedtime stories to tell, as she had with the lost boys. Her presence made some of them uneasy, but Wendy had heard stories about how sailors thought that women on ships were bad luck. Magic, in its own little way.
Wendy stay mostly in her sequestered room, waiting for the day when Captain Hook told her she had to leave. He seemed to have forgotten her entirely, caught up in his own affairs. Wendy left him to them, and hoped they brought him nothing but more grief, still embittered by his refusal to help.
The Pan haunted her nights, but she refused to weakened and allow herself the indulgence of those touches at they once had. It felt too much like letting him win.
Was there something wrong with her? That the Pan’s cruel, gaunt face could cause that wetness between her thighs? That pleasure only came by imagining him touching her in all those intimate, dark ways only a husband should be allowed? That her lips tingled every time she remembered that hard, angry kiss between them—she had done it to save her brothers, to distract him, but afterwards she couldn’t claim that her brothers had remained in her thoughts after. Yet another sin.
But the Pan never came for her, though Wendy often climbed up and looked out at the green stretch of shoreline. She never saw a figure on the beach, or a shadowy entity stalking through the air. Perhaps the Pan had forgotten about her, and she prayed that he had forgotten about her brothers as well.
“What if he doesn’t come for me?” she demanded the captain after an hour spent with her weather-eye on the horizon.
He shrugged. “Not my concern.” He tilted his chin toward the shoreline. “But he will. Don’t know the Pan well myself, but I know enough of boys to know they’re a selfish lot and don’t they care to share. Especially not boys with their first—” His eyes titled toward her, a creeping ghost of a smile crossing his face. “I do feel sorry for you, lass. Truly. Boys are rarely gentle creatures—and I image eternal boy-children are atrocious.”
Wendy thought of the kiss—as she often did, as hard and biting and hateful and wonder what it said of her that she enjoyed it.
The Pan did everything with a bit of fanfare, so it came as a shock to Wendy one day when he merely settled his feet on the railing of the ship and waited.
“You have something of mine.” There was something oddly contained about the Pan, his untamed ferocity caged, controlled, the grip on his sword disciplined. Wendy had never seen him like that.
“Do I? You’ll have to be most specific.” With a sweeping gesture and a falsely amicable grin on his face the captain said. “I’m known for taking many a thing as it pleases me.”
“Wendy. She’s mine.”
Wendy stilled, trying to remember how he might know her name—why he might know her name; Peter Pan who never remembered the names of anyone. But he knew hers.
Captain Hook nodded, the way one would to a hungry wolf so as not to become its next meal. “So she is,” he agreed. “Bring me the girl.”
Mr. Smee at her back, pushing her by her shoulders. Wendy’s mind flashed with images—cruel laughs and mean kisses and his fingers bruising into her hips. Her heart thudded into her throat. “No,” she whispered. “No. Please. Don’t make me go—don’t send me—please—”
“I am sorry, miss,” Mr. Smee said, sounding sincere, and gave her a forceful shove.
She tumbled to her knees on the wooden planks, already scrambling back. The captain caught the back of her gown with his hook and dragged her to her feet, brandishing her at the Pan like a hunk of meat.
“Mine,” the Pan snarled, leaping to the deck. He seemed to be enraged by the way the captain shook her.
“Never would have claimed otherwise,” the captain placating. “And I don’t have much room for girls aboard my ship. She’s all yours.”
Another fierce shove that sent Wendy propelling forward. The Pan caught her, fingers digging into shoulders as he dragged her against him. The captain watch, dark eyes hooded to shield his thoughts.
“A dangerous game you play, boy,” he said quietly.
The Pan’s wild laughter ruffled Wendy’s salt-and-dirt matted hair. “Those are the most fun!”
“Perhaps—but what if some innocent lass gets hurt?”
The laughter turned biting, like an early winter frost. “It’s not your concern, you old codfish. Don’t forget that Neverland is my territory, and if you want to remain here to wait out your crocodile you will only do so by staying on my good side.”
“Of course.”
“You coward!” Wendy screamed, straining against the Pan’s hold. “You coward! You monster! You can’t just let him take me!”
“I’m rather afraid I can, love,” the captain said easily. “And I never claimed to be a hero.”
She would have railed him more but the Pan stepped back onto the railing, and then over the side. They plummeted toward the crystalline waters below the ship, but at the last moment the Pan flew.
He didn’t take them back to the lost boy encampment. They flew by trees and lagoons, everything a whipping blue-green-brown blur. Wendy clung to the Pan, inhaled his earthy scent, her legs pressing against his as she gripped him for dear life.
Night had settled when they finally landed, a circular opening among the crush of trees. Their landing disturbed a nest of fireflies and sent them dancing around their heads, casting eerie green glows on their skin.
Wendy shoved at him, but the Pan refused to release her, fingers biting into the flesh on her arms. She sobbed, more out of frustration and anger than any actual sadness, and wretched one arm free. She slapped him as hard as she could, the force of it rattling up her arms, settling against her teeth.
The Pan looked shocked that someone had dared and Wendy felt a bubble of hysterical laughter burn up her throat. “I want to go home! I want you to take me home! I hate you! I hate Neverland!” Her hand reared back to slap him again.
His bony fingers encircled her wrist, catching her before she could landed a blow, with a dark, terrible look on his face. He pushed her, sent her sprawling to her back. She would have scrambled to her feet, already hissing her hate at him, but the Pan came down on top her, pressing his palms to her wrists, bracing them against the sides of her face. Trapping her.
She thrashed beneath him, trying to kick him to lodge him free.
“This,” he snarled low into her face, “Is all your fault. Look at what you’ve done to me. I was already—already growing up and now—!”
“I hate you!” she screamed.
He slammed his mouth down on hers. Wendy had seen it coming, had thought perhaps she should twist her head away but couldn’t, only arched her neck to meet him. Her teeth clamped down on his bottom lip and a hot burst of blood pooled into her mouth. The Pan yelped and reared back, staring at her, but she should have known violence would not deter him. He licked his lip and came back down, and she tasted the metallic tang on his tongue as he shoved the appendage into her mouth.
Her fingers clawed at the backs of his hands, but she didn’t want to push him away. She just wanted flesh beneath her nails, and wanted him close. She felt skin whine beneath the press of her fingers, the Pan shuddering above her. His knee slammed up between her legs, but that felt good too, a jolt to her center and she gasped into his mouth. Her hips wriggled, desperate to feel more pressure between her legs.
The Pan’s fingers streaked down her side, pulling at her gown. He bunched it up at her hips and pushed it up and over her head. Without the sash it was easy to pull away. He seemed intrigued by what he had revealed, but reluctant to release her hands. He licked at her chin, at her rapidly swallowing throat, and he craned down farther to lick at her breast.
A cry escaped Wendy and the Pan stiffened, but then seemed to have decided he enjoyed the sounds. His head dipped down again, flicking his tongue over the peddled flesh and she whimpered and twisted beneath him, muscles bunching in her stomach. She didn’t know what she wanted, for him to stop or for him to never stop, but she needed movement. She felt hungry, starving, understood at least perhaps that look of starvation in the Pan’s eyes.
His teeth closed over the point at the center of her breast, curiously dragging it into his mouth. He made loud suckling sounds and Wendy’s cheeks flamed with embarrassment at the lewd noises. He shifted and she felt something hard poke between her legs, but this time it wasn’t the Pan’s leg. That grabbed his attention and he leveled himself off her, glancing down between their bodies, thoughtful frown twisted on his face.
Then he released her. Her fingers battered at his shoulders before digging into his coarse tunic and dragging him against her. He was reaching between them, and she cried out when his knuckles brushed against her damp curls and overheated flesh. That gave him another pause, but the Pan’s concerns were elsewhere.
Wendy stilled when she felt something blunt and hard press against the small opening along her cleft, eyes widening. Some instinctive part of her made her stiffen, but the Pan had little concern for her feelings and he pushed forward, the head of his manhood easing passed her saturated folds.
Pain exploded at his intrusion and everything inside her tightened in defense, doubling the pain. She couldn’t make herself relax, couldn’t find the words to demand he stop, that it hurt too much, could only gulp at the air, her neck arched, as the Pan forged into her, eyes zeroed in on where he pushed and shoved.
The pain didn’t lessen, not even when he was seated fully inside her, and Wendy squeezed her eyes shut and prayed it would over soon.
The Pan eased out, but not all the way. He gave a small, uneasy push back inside her and her nerve endings burned with pain. She whimpered, and he licked her chin again, like a wolf to a wounded pack member, but didn’t stop. The muscles in his arms quivered where they leveled him by her head as he thrust back and forth inside her. Wendy bit down hard enough on her lip to draw a trickle of blood that rolled down her chin. The Pan licked that too.
His shoves became bruising, the force of it scooting her forward on the wet grass. She cried out with each thrust, mostly in pain but the beginnings of sparks began to dance just beyond her reach, odd tingling in her toes that eased upward to where the Pan was buried inside her. Her heels scrapped against the grass until she had pushed into the mud below. The Pan gasped and panted harshly above her, lashes fluttering as his thrust became more and more erratic.
His chest slammed down into hers, stealing her breath, her breasts scrapping against the smooth skin of his as he shuddered above her. She felt some sticky, thick fluid leak out between her legs.
When the Pan rolled off her, she was relieved, the sore pressure between her legs abating as he freed his manhood from her with a wet pop. She would have crawled away, found some dark corner to catalogue her wounds, but he wouldn’t even give her that, wrapping an arm around her waist and lashing her to his side.
Fireflies danced around her legs as the Pan drifted into sleep.
Wendy must have slept too, because without her awareness the darkness of the night gave way to streaming sunlight, burning her closed eyelids. She refused to open them, but could not ignore the aching soreness between her legs. She knew the night could not have been a dream, too raw and painful, but she could have hoped—
Something strange tickled the inside of her thighs, and made Wendy’s toes wiggle. Still, she struggled against wakefulness, too afraid to face the day. Something moved through the sticky collection of blood and fluid on her thighs and between her legs, stroking, making her aching limbs waken.
A finger, she realized, and her eyes popped open.
The Pan crouched over her, a furrow etched into the skin between his brows. He touched her where she was messy from her blood and his release, rubbing, and glanced up at her when a moan escaped from her lips, unbidden. His lifted his fingers up into the sunlight, rubbing the substance between them, and brought it carefully to his extended tongue.
“No, don’t!” Wendy cried out, horrified, clamping her legs together.
She should have known the Pan would have only seen this as a challenge, as another way to exert his perceived dominance over her.
“Quiet,” he said, curling a hand around her knee and forcing her legs apart.
She shook her head fiercely, beyond embarrassed. No man should ever look at a woman there, in that hollow. She knew it, a wordless lesson from her governess. A proper lady would never let a man, no matter how wild and terrible, and she should—
He bent down, tongue swirling around her naval, like the way any animal would to discern an uncertain taste. She shuddered, tried to scoot away on her elbows, but then the Pan moved lower, grasping the inside of her thighs and pressing his tongue to the mess between her legs. She screamed this time, arching against him on no conscious violation of her own. The Pan nosed through her wiry, dark curls, tongue lapping at liquid between her thighs.
Her cheeks flames, but she already growing wet at the attention. The Pan pressed a thumb to her folds, pulling one side back to expose her to him, tonguing the aching flesh. Her soreness still throbbed a dull remainder, but it was being drowned out in sensation. It felt like a whole universe was beginning to unfurl beneath her skin.
His teeth scrapped against the top her cleft, where the knot of flesh throbbed, and she cried out so loudly the Pan was shocked into stopping. Wendy almost screamed with frustration, fingers clawing at the ground, mad with abbreviated pleasure.
His fingers moved over her stomach, rubbing at the jumping muscles. He eased her onto her side, and then again on her stomach. Cupping the underside her hips, he dragged her to her knees. Wendy buried her face into the arms she laid out in front of her.
Like animal. Somehow that felt right, with the trees around them, the jungle teeming with the sound of cicadas and life. But she didn’t want him inside her—except that she did. Despite the pain, she found herself selfishly yearning for that sort of closeness. Perhaps there was something wrong with her.
There was a pinching pain again when he pressed his manhood inside her, but not agonizing and burning like it had been the night before. Her muscles were more relaxed now, used to him stretching her, and lightning seemed to spark each nerve ending inside her. She was gasping and sobbing without realizing it, her hips rocking back into his.
The Pan leaned over her, forehead pressed between her shoulder blades as he undulated against her, not as desperate and forceful as he had the night before. It helped. Pleasure bloomed like the first spring flower at his gentle motions, and she canting her hips upward, clawing at the ground. Her hair spilled over her shoulder, wild and tangled, her breasts swaying with each gentle thrust.
One wide, thin hand curled around a swaying breast, squeezing it tightly, an alarming juxtapose to how slowly and tenderly the Pan moved inside her. The other hand gripped her hip, helping her to move back and forth on his shaft. She didn’t need a guide, though, more than willing to chase her own pleasure, sacrifice the last of her inhibitions and reasonings in the desperate grab for pleasure.
“Peter,” she wept, forcing him to move faster, slamming back into his hips. “Peter, please. Oh, please—please—please—”
The hand left her breast, curled tightly in her hair and yanked her neck back, leaning them both up on her knees. Her back was flush against his chest as he plowed into her. Wendy reached behind her and clawed at his face, but that only spurred him on. His teeth fastened against her neck, clamping down, as he slammed into her.
Her free hand streaked down over her breasts and quivering stomach, to where the place where they were joined. The Pan cursed loudly when her finished brushed over his manhood, but Wendy was more concerned with touching herself, fingers moving through her slick cleft. She pressed her fingers against the distended ball of nerves, rubbing and, when that wasn’t enough, pinching.
The universe beneath her skin exploded into a thousand stars, and a strangled scream escaped her. She fell back to her hands and knees, shuddering, the Pan’s hands on her hips the only thing keeping her upright. Wetness rolled down her thighs, she pressed her face back into the grass, inhaling the scent of wet earth.
The Pan bowed over her, hooking one arm around her middle, and holding her still to receive his harsh thrusts. The skin on her bottom rippled with each push, little sounds escaping her throat as he plowed into her, buried so impossibly deep.
He hissed into her ear, breath on her skin. She turned her head instinctively toward his, and he caught her mouth, tongue diving inside hers in a mimic of his thrusting below. She knew what his sudden stillness, the tightening of his muscles, meant now, knew the harsh grunt meant he had spent himself inside her.
They fell together back to the mossy ground, the Pan’s weight almost crushing her. His lips moved across her sweat-slick back, licked the dip of her spine when she trembled.
For a long, long moment neither of them moved, or spoke, though Pan would occasionally pluck a wayward leaf or blade of grass from her hair.
A savage marriage ceremony, Wendy thought, and knew she should be more horrified.
When Wendy woke next the Pan was gone. Without him, her embarrassment returned tenfold and she suddenly wanted nothing more than to clean the drying fluid, and proof of their mating, from her thighs.
She walked on wobbling legs to a nearby lagoon, dived headlong into and scrubbed her hands along her sore, exhausted body until her skin glowed pink from irritation. She floated in the waist-deep, blue waters—wondering if there was another world waiting for her if she decided to dive to the bottom of the lagoon and never come up.
But eventually she crawled out of the lagoon. Her hair was clean, and her skin was clean, and she was clean—at long last, after long months being covered in dirt. And she ambled back to the clearing the Pan had left her in.
He was waiting for her, the tattered remains of her nightgown clutched in his hand.
Without preamble he tossed it to her. Wendy caught it, holding it tightly to her naked, clean body.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to me,” he sneered at her, voce as wild and dark as the first night she had met him. “But I’m done. No one beats the Pan at a game. Certainly not some stupid girl. You tricked me—I know you did. I wouldn’t ever—I’ve got no interest in doing stupid, adult things. Especially not that. The spell ends here.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she hissed, dragging her nightgown over her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything.”
He lifted two fingers to his lips and blew—shattering her world.
The shadow materialized against his side. “I want her gone,” the Pan said, not taking his eyes from her. “I mean—take her home. Bring her home, to her house in London. And leave her there.”
“Peter—” She took an aborted step toward him.
“And bring me her brothers,” he snapped, blotches of color making his face glow.
“No!” She lunged at him, clawing at his tunic. “No. Peter, you can’t! Not my brothers, please!”
He grabbed her wrists, disentangled her from him. “The Pan obeys no rules but his own.” His breath was hot and vile on her face, the scowl worse than any of his knife-grins. “I don’t want you. I don’t need you.” He thrust her away with such force that she fell backwards. A wild, near feverish laugh rumbled out his chest as he threw his arms wide. “Goodbye, Wendy-bird.”
The shadow grabbed her arms and yanked her up. She kicked and screamed. Begged for her brothers to be left alone, begged Peter to stop, and swallowed the other words—the ones that wanted to beg him to let her stay, to not send her away. She screamed at him instead, how much she hated him, how horrible he was, the worst sort of monster.
Her cries went unheeded. The straight, stiff line of the Pan’s back was the list thing she saw as the shadow lifted her high into the clouds.
The window to the nursery was still open, as if she had only been gone hours, not months. When the shadow gently lowered her to the windowsill and dissolved into the morning light, everything was still as it had been when she had first, foolishly accepted the ghostly hand of a boy’s shadow.
Wendy realized she hadn’t been gone at all, that those months in Neverland had been but hours in London. She could wept over that too. Each moment in Neverland had meant nothing at all.
“Wendy?”
It was Baelfire, easing himself out of the shadows, innocent eyes wide with shock and careful hope. Her beautiful magic-boy who had tried to warn her. She should have listened.
“Oh, Baelfire. Bealfire!” she sobbed, rushing into his arms. She rubbed her runny nose against his chest. He smelt clean and fresh, like her mother’s washing soap.
Guilt slammed into her, because all she could think about was how earthy Peter Pan had smelt, a living extension of the jungle.
“You got away,” he breathed in wonder. “You got home. What—how?”
“He let me go,” she wept into his chest. She willed her heart to hate the Pan, swore that she would for all her years to come. If she ever saw him again, she’d put a blade in his heart. Whatever she might have done to him, he’d returned the favor. He’d made her as violent as he was. “He didn’t want me.”
And if that was a lie, then only the Pan would know.