Chapter Text
"I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you."
-catherynne m. valente
She landed with far less ceremony than she imaged she would, had imaged all the artless grace her mother possessed would cushion her gentle drop to the ground. Instead, the cool, ghostly hand dropped her, indifferent to her scream of terror. Wendy scrambled for air, clawed at it, as if to find some perchance there but tumbled down, crashed through brittle branches that snapped beneath her thrashing legs, down down into the dark earth.
The moss was oddly buoyant, more like one of the decorative pillows on the parlor’s settee than ground. She could feel it rippling beneath her weight. The air smelled different, electric, charged and she thought there was an odd glow at the corner of her bleary vision as she blinked her eyes open.
Wendy rolled to her knees, muslin sleeping gown crinkling beneath her. Her hands slipped along thick moss, wet and warm.
A sword—to her throat.
Wendy stilled and remembered Baelfire’s warning—for the first time. Her magic boy, seemingly sprung out from the secret fantasies Wendy had always kept locked up tight inside her, released only in the safety of the nursery, acted out in childish games.
Baelfire who said—magic is evil.
Impossible, Wendy had thought, and scoffed at him. He didn’t understand. Magic was wonderful, magic was everything, magic could stop her from growing up, from doing terrible things like entering into society and finding a husband and having children. She didn’t want to understand the world of secret kisses hidden away at the top of her mother’s curling lip, endless nights of balls with ideal chatter about nothing important and nothing interesting, boring operas about sad stories in a language she couldn’t speak (except, of course, she did; playacting in a nursery did not quite satisfy the way it had and she woke up sometimes in the most quiet, darkest parts of the night with an odd, nameless ache between her legs and she was too ashamed to ask her mother if it was normal, because what if it was not? What if she was defective somehow? Wrong?) Magic could make her right. Baelfire was wrong.
Except there was a sword at her throat.
A boy—a man? He seemed to transition between the two, like a candle flickering in a wind, hard and soft all at once, never staying long enough to make a term stick.
He smiled. Hard and cruel, his teeth rows and rows of sharp needles, like the ones she pricked her fingers on when she embroidered.
“A girl?” he called it upward, to where the shadow had let her fall. “What use does the Pan have for a girl?”
Wendy was not indoctrinated into this group of misfit boys with dirt on their cheeks and blood under their nails. She hadn’t imaged lost boys, had filled her head with lovely mermaids with seaweed dresses and pirates in bright hues of red and purples—if she had she would have imaged children, as wild as the woods but kind.
When the Pan dropped her into their midst they jeered with ill humor, tossing her about. Wendy shrieked and clawed and that pleased them more; it was a game of some sorts, the way full grown predators would play with their evening meal. A boot smashed into Wendy’s shin and she screamed, the hem of her dress rent up its side but they took no note.
The Pan watched it all from his claimed position against a hollowed out tree trunk, reclined as a king would on his gilded throne.
“Oui! Enough! Enough!” Hands shoved boys aside, grabbed at hoods, smashed faces together until Wendy could breath, and breathing hurt and terror made her legs heavy and back into the mossy ground she sunk, trying to stifle her heaving sobs.
“Leave off, Tink, we were only having a bit a fun!”
“I’ll show you a bit o’ fun!” A yelp, something and hot splattered across neck her. When Wendy swept a hand through the slick liquid it came back dark red.
“Alright, alright.” The Pan’s voice was a blanket of calm descending them all, commanding instant obedience. She felt a stillness in the air, like the whole world braced to leap. “Tink, you’ve made your point.”
“What were you thinking?” Unclothed knees dropped into Wendy’s view and she still commanded enough of her senses to be scandalized. She followed smooth, tanned legs to a bright green skirt so short Wendy could feel her cheeks heating. The face the shameful clothing belonged to, at least, was round and lovely and warm, not like skeletal Pan with his knife-smile and glinting, dark eyes.
“What you get for giving a job to a shadow, suppose,” Pan laughed, coming to his feet, as fluid as a dancer. He came closer and Wendy bumped into Tink’s legs in an effort to hide. “I wanted a boy—a very specific boy. What good is a girl for?”
“Well send her back,” Tink said. Her hand pulled at one riotous curl clinging wetly to Wendy’s cheek. “You can’t keep her, Peter.”
A laugh, harsh, nothing jovial at all—but dark and twisted and it made the muscles in Wendy’s stomach knot, like those nights when she’d awaken to the sounds of her brothers breathing and feel that restless rumination in her legs.
It was a tactical error. Wendy recognized it, and the woman must have too because she stiffened.
“Can’t I?” He swept his arms out in an arch. “This is my kingdom, fairy. I am the only master here. I will keep whoever I please.”
Wendy swallowed bile, swallowed her tears, pressed her face into the woman’s knees and gripped the flesh of her calf tight enough to leave half-crescent marks in her flesh.
“She stays,” Pan said, with thundering finality.
Tink—Tinker? Tinkerbelle? Wendy wasn’t sure. Everyone seemed to have a multitude of names, and none of them really theirs; they never ask her and she wondered what they called her—proved her point, that she was willing to shed lost boy blood if they got rough with the Pan’s latest catch, and so Wendy was left to her own devices.
“Sorry, pet,” Tinkerbelle had said, disentangling Wendy’s grip from her legs. “But you’ll need to look elsewhere for a savior. I’m not much in the way of—well, anything actually.”
Tinkerbelle left her—abandoned her—but Pan lost interested the moment the fairy left. He had only wanted her because Tinkerbelle had told him he couldn’t have her, and Wendy spent countless days curled up in the hollow of a mossy, mud-slick tree with her face in her knees, alternating between sobbing and begging to go home.
No one listened to her.
Every so often one of the Pan’s lost boys brought her a meal, cooked meat that Wendy didn’t ask about, but otherwise paid her little attention.
Neverland (Tinkerbelle had called it that) was sticky and hot, but Wendy shivered in her nightgown, felt her stomach churn at the feeling of mud caking between her toes, at the grass and leafs in her hair. She used to dream of wild nights in the woods, streaking through the trees like one of those antique wood nymphs, just out of the reach of a greedy god.
Now she just wanted to go home, and she sobbed and sobbed until there were no tears left and then she heaved, emptying her stomach over and over again. The lost boys never gave her a glance, and at least saved her from the embarrassment of being so violently ill.
And then she slept.
“I remember girls,” a voice whispered above the heavy blanket of sleep descended over Wendy. “Only I think they were called mothers then—I had one, I remember.”
“Shuddup—what if Pan heard ya? You know we’re not supposed to talk about before we got here. Whatdya think he’d do?”
“Gut you like a pig,” one boy was happy to supply. “Spill all your insides out and let the mermaids have a grand feast.”
Everyone left, Wendy flailed out of her dream at the gory image, screaming, throwing her hands out. She clipped one of the boys in his nose, felt bone crunched beneath her knuckles, and he yowled, flopping backwards.
More wild laughter, jeering at the other boy, cheers when the nose was discovered to be broken. Wendy stared in abject horror at their lust for violence.
Undeterred, the boy who had first spoken, his nose shoved up towards his eyes, lips pulled unevenly back over his teeth making him look like a mouse, said, “I’m just saying—think about it. Since she’s here and the Pan says we gets to ‘ave ‘er why not make her a mother? They do things, I remember, like cooking and cleaning and—”
“Shuddup up!” More serious this time, one boy clapped the speaking one over his ears. “Or I’ll put me sword through yer belly meself. What if Pan hears? Then we’re all in for it. He’d—”
“Think it a grand idea.”
Wendy shrunk back against her allotted tree as the Pan sidled up, long legs stretching in each stride, giving him an awkward, gangly swagger. His knife-grin cut his face from ear to ear as the boys made hasty room for him.
His fingers reached for Wendy. She hissed like an offended cat and swatted at him, drawing her nails down the back of his hand hard enough to draw a beading line of blood. Pan’s eyes darkened, his lethal smile turning downward into a fierce, angry scowl. He reached for her again, lightning fast, fisting a hand in her hair and dragging her forward.
Wendy stumbled awkwardly to her feet, pulled against the lean body, inhaling the strange mixture of sweet and earth and fresh grass on him.
“Like I was saying,” he barked into her face. “Mother. And mothers do all sorts of things—the cooking and the cleaning, telling bedtime stories, caring for injuries, singing us songs, and—”
“—commanding the obedience of her children, because they love her best,” she snarled into his face, the spark of anger and hate in her heart giving a bravado in the face of his cruelty. She jerked her head back to meet his eyes, ignoring the whine of protest from the roots of her hair. “They do as she says. They listen to her. They protect her from harm. So that means you have to listen to me, Peter Pan.”
A cruel laugh, a hot blast of air in her face, and Wendy shivered. His free hand pinched at her side punishingly. “But I’m not going to be your child,” he said, face coming in close hers, peering at her like a wolf looking at a rabbit. Something at the back of Wendy’s knees trembled. “I’m going to be the father, and everyone knows the mother has to obey the father.”
He made her sit in his lap at their makeshift table, pressing small pieces of food to her lips, pinching her side when she refused to open them.
“I’ve seen mothers and fathers do this,” the Pan informed her, the look on his face smug, pleased with his knowledge.
Wendy liked it better when he ignored her, found no interest in her, had only wanted her as a passing stubbornness against a fairy. She doesn’t like the hungry gaze he fastened on her. It didn’t matter that the Pan looked at everything like he was starved for it, that at everything he gazed there was always a direct, unflinching need there. She didn’t want those dark eyes on her.
“No you didn’t,” she snapped at him. “That’s not what mothers and fathers do—that’s what husbands and wives do.”
He didn’t seem to understand those terms, didn’t understand that mothers and fathers were interchangeable with husbands and wives, and she lorded this information above her, her superior knowledge to the Pan. He only understood wild things, brutal things, and she preened with the understanding of the secrets of adulthood, secrets that an always-boy would never have whispered into his ears.
With a grunt he shoved, and Wendy fell out of his lap. Instead of laughing the lost boys were stunned into silence, as if they are already thinking about the lessons Wendy had thrown at them—children love their mother, protect their mother.
The Pan stalked away.
The littlest of the lost boys brought her a bustle of flower the next day. They seemed to have all forgotten the Pan’s anger, though Wendy refused to. She let her own stew inside her, twisting around the tattered remains of her nightgown, letting it side like bile on her tongue, never swallowing. She didn’t want to forget in this place that seemed to carry amnesia in its very air.
“I remember I used to bring flowers to my mother,” the boy said, the crinkle in his brow suggesting that he was not quite sure how truthful he was being.
How can a boy forget the touch of his mother, the warmth of her hand? Wendy yearned for her mother, for the safety of her arms, for the hidden kiss just above her lip.
She took them, clutching them until the thorns of the wild roses cut into her palm. She wanted to toss them into the flames, but she was not that cruel, even she did occupy the role of makeshift mother to the Pan’s monstrous children. And James is the nicest of all the lost boys.
“Thank you,” Wendy forced out.
“It wouldn’t do for a father to come without a present, I suppose,” said the Pan, reclining into the little alcove of the small tree she and the other lost boys are camped out in, watching the exchange with an odd glint in his eyes.
The rains splattered fat and cold on the ground, and those the lost boys are happy to spend their days covered in mud and leafs, even they don’t want to be washed away.
The Pan tossed his gift at her, a frothy mess of pink and white, the frills and laces ruffling with the sudden explosion of movement. Wendy sputtered at it as it closed around her face, and she heard the laughter of the other boys—and pulled free with a red face.
“Don’t like it?” That cruel smile was back.
Wendy had just begun to be initiated into the secretive world of womanhood, had only just stood on the cusp of it, when a shadow had stolen her away. But even she remembered governess lessons and whispers behind her mother and her friends’ hands. A woman must not accept clothing from a man who wasn’t her husband or she would be one of those sorts (it didn’t matter that Wendy didn’t know who those sorts were; she knew they were bad).
But her nightgown was in beyond repair.
She clutched the dress close to her breast. “Out,” she muttered.
“What?” the closest boy at her elbow asked, peering close.
“Out!” She whipped the dress at them like a lash and they jumped back. “It isn’t proper for children to be in the same room as a changing lady.”
They exchanged look and Wendy tried again. “Your mother orders—!”
They left. All except the Pan.
“You have to go, too.”
He unfolded himself from the alcove, landed softly on his feet, graceful as a panther. He stalked to her, and Wendy pulled the dress tight against her breast, like it was a shield against him. That seemed to amuse the Pan, and he laughed, one finger hooked into the silky fabric.
“Don’t fathers stay with mothers when they remove their clothes?”
There was only a curious look in his gold-rimmed eyes. He poked at the dress, as if it were some animal playing possum, and he wanted to see if he could coax it into revealing its game. He had no interest in her, not really. She was a novelty, and a passing interest. That made Wendy angry, somehow, though that was foolish. She knew that there was a whole collection of gazes in which a woman was to be wary of when a man looked at her, and she should be relieved that she did not see one on Pan’s face.
“No,” she said, her voice soft. She swallowed rapidly over the strange lump formed at the back of her throat. “No. That’s husbands and wives.”
He didn’t like the reminder that there may have been something out there that she knew more about than him. He retreated a step, then another, then spun on his heel and pounded up the steps. The door slammed behind him.
Wendy rushed to the back corner the room, eyes squeezing closed as she peeled the destroyed sleeping gown from her body. She was naked and alone and for an odd moment her fingers stole of their own accord down her neck, down the blooming curve of her breast. She shivered as a finger ghosted across the distended point at the center, a strange jolt of electricity slamming into her, settling between her legs, uncomfortably warm. An unwelcomed but familiar sensation, like the ones she had felt a handful of times in the nursery like the one she had felt when the Pan—
Wrong. There must be something terribly wrong with her, and she pulled the gown over her head. Even with the pale, white sash ruthless tied into a tight knot it sagged on her. It was meant for someone taller than her, and wider, fuller.
It was meant for a woman.
Wendy’s fingers trembled as she fastened the buttons up to her neck. She had never wanted to grow up, had never wanted the title of woman attached to her, had only wanted make believe adventures with her brothers in the nursery, had wanted to play pirates and knights and dragons and never worry about silly adult things.
Now she was nearly floored with the craving. She wanted to run home, wanted her mother, wanted her to whisper all those secret womanly things into her ear. Wanted to know—understand waking up at strange hours in the night with an undeniable ache.
Wanted a husband. Wanted children. Wanted to be a mother.
She turned, and the Pan stared back at her.
Now there was something hungry and dark in his eyes and Wendy realized he must have been there the whole time, must have never left. It was likely meant to be another cruel jest from the Pan, but he seemed as unnerved as her, dark eyes moving from the pink fabric that swept against the dirt floor and up to her where her lips moved wordlessly.
Then he spun, and left, and with him he took all the air—there was nothing to keep Wendy from collapsing to her knees.
The Pan returned to ignoring her. The tension boiled between them, and made the other lost boys uneasy. Felix, who Wendy didn’t like at all, took to sneering at her—as if this was all her fault.
She stayed in the tiny room beneath the tree, curled up on the hammock, refusing to be moved. Some of the younger lost boys stopped by, tried to coax her out and into the sunshine, but she simply kept her back to them, and her hands clamped over her ears.
Until the Pan came.
He shook her fiercely, and when she refused to acknowledge him dragged her out of the hammock by her hair. She screamed and clawed at him, and felt so alive, so brutally alive. She struck his chin, and drew blood. There was a wild look in the Pan’s eyes that Wendy knew had a match in the look in hers. She suddenly didn’t care.
“What are you doing to me?” he snarled in her face, shaking her so heard her neck ached with whiplash. “Did the fairy teach you some magic? Some spell? It won’t work. Not on me. This won’t work on me.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but felt no need to tell him so. Let him sit and stew, let him think her dangerous. She felt dangerous, and wanted to be. She wanted to be a predator, she wanted to be the wolf and the dragon and the monster.
“I’ve seen it before but—I didn’t care.” His voice was garbled, not wanting to reveal to her whatever vulnerability he perceived was her fault. It was wise of him. Wendy would have driven a dagger into his heart if she could have. “Now I—now I—”
“I want to go home!” she thundered at him, kicking him in his shin. The Pan yelped and she wanted to crow with satisfaction.
“No!” he snarled right back into her face, his breath hot like a sticky Neverland night against her cheeks. “No, you’re staying! You’re mine!”
“Selfish, horrible boy! I don’t want to be here!” She thrashed against him, but he held her firm. It made prickling tears of loathing and grief collect at the corners of her eyes. “I want to go home! I want my mother! I want my father! I want Baelfire, and my brothers—”
“Brothers?” His gaze shifted, like a hawk sensing a rabbit, and landed back on her face. “You have brothers?”
Wendy’s eyes widened in horror as she realized her fatal mistake. “No.” She only had strength for a strangled whisper.
The Pan laughed and pushed away from her. Wendy stumbled backward, hip crashing against the tiny table. “At first I thought the Shadow was punishing me—sending you and making me want to—but you have brothers! They were the ones who were supposed to come here, come to me. Not you, you stupid girl!”
“No. Peter, don’t—”
It was only a handful of seconds, but they seemed to crawl by in Wendy’s suddenly hyperaware senses. The Pan lifted two fingers to his lips, and she understand—that was how he summoned his shadow, a shrill whistle, and he would send it out, back to London where her brothers were. The Shadow would bring them here, and her brothers would be lost boys, would turn all twisted and mean and wrong and she—
“No.”
She was on him before he realized what she planned, fingers curled into the coarse fabric of his tunic, dragging him down against her. Her mouth slammed into his a moment before his fingers touched his lips, his knuckles brushing hard against her cheekbone.
It felt like the ground shifted beneath her feet. Everything was still around them. The Pan’s eyes were on hers, wide and something very close to terrified, but Wendy could not take satisfaction in that. She was terrified too, and trembled so hard she thought she would splinter apart.
And then the Pan’s mouth opened, wide over hers, and his fingers gripped her hips with bruising force. She squeaked in surprise, and ruthless as he was, the Pan took advantage of it. She felt his tongue crawl into her mouth, pressing against her teeth. Something inside her stomach jumped, the ache between her legs returned and she felt true, true horror stick to her ribs.
Her eyes closed, her body humming beneath the violent shove of his mouth. It was wrong, surely it was, how vindicated she felt at how rough he was. Her fingers still gripped his shirtfront, and she felt the hard thundering of his heart, like a wild horse brought to a rest. He tasted like the forest, and the blueberries some of the lost boys had brought her only yesterday—he must have had a taste for them to.
The rest of her thoughts scattered when her hip hit the table again, the pain a strange compliment to the hard mouth she was meeting bite for bite. The table didn’t wobble when she fell back against it, she was small and though the Pan was much taller he was reedy and thin. It simply teetered to the left, some stolen chinaware falling to the side and shattering.
An instinctive understanding had Wendy rolling her hips. Something bumped against the apex of her thighs, and it sent a jolt through her, made her limbs feel like they were molten liquid. She aware, absently, of a strange wetness between her thighs, and might have been embarrassed of it if the Pan had lifted a hand and pressed it her breast, curling his fingers around it. She gasped hotly into his mouth.
Then he was shoving away and she was left to stare blindly up at the arched, wooden ceiling.
“What have you done?” the Pan snarled, all monstrous and dark, half a shadow in his rage. Wendy pushed herself up to her elbows, staring into his hate-filled face. As cruel and mean as he had been to her before, he had never looked at her like he hated her. Like she was something vile and horrid. “What did you do to me?”
“I didn’t do anything—”
“You did! I’ve seen them do—do that before and I never cared! I never cared, it didn’t look very fun. But now—” His eyes speared down her body where it rested half on the table. His lips twisted into a snarl. “But now. You’re wrong and now you’ve made me wrong!”
The secret fear in her chest twinged like a pinched nerve. He couldn’t have known how effective his rebuttal had been. She felt stripped bare, a festering wound peeled back and left exposed to the open air.
“I’m not wrong!” she screeched at him. “I’m not wrong!”
She clamped her hands over her ears and ran. The Pan didn’t follow.
Wendy ran. Her dirty feet slipped through mud and moss, her hair tangled in low hanging branches and leafs. She had thought her tears gone, rung out dry the first few days in Neverland (how long had it been? A month or two perhaps, but it felt like an eternity).
She ran. Away from the Pan and his vile accusation. There was nothing wrong with her!
She ran, blindly, splashing through puddles leftover from the rain, ran until she was streaking through the rocky outcrops of a lagoon. She had never been allowed to explore the jungle. The Pan had never let her—
Her ankle snagged on a coarse, braided rope. Wendy tripped forward, and then her world titled. She was flung upward, her leg wrenching nearly out of its socket as she dangled feet above the lagoon. Her dress billowed over her face, and her world became dark.
She twisted her head toward the sound of branches crunching underfoot.
“Peter?” Wendy hated that her voice sounded hopeful.
“And here I was hoping to catch a mermaid,” someone said, his voice rougher, deeper than the Pan’s. The same someone shifted the fabric obscuring Wendy’s view. “You are must certainly not a mermaid.”
This was no lost boy’s face Wendy peered up into. Moonlight slashed harsh and bright across her eyes, and she blinked owlishly down at the cause of it. The man had a gleaming hook for a hand.
“Well, love?”
His voice, and his face, was not kind. Wendy still felt that she was safer with him than she would have been with Peter Pan.