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It’s him or them. It is the only way. And yet it makes her chest ache. To abandon one child to save the others. Maybe one day he will learn to not be so volatile, but she can’t allow him to learn it with her.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, and then gives him a push, and the water carries him away.
I take a breath and then speak the words I swore I would never speak: “I don’t believe in fairies,” I say.
“I think you care very little,” she goes on, “because you think that keeps you safe. If you care for very little, you have very little to lose.”
“But you know what?” Smee says. “Caring for so little means that when you actually do care, losing it has a much higher cost.”
you threaten my brother again and it’ll be the last. I’m no artist, but I’m an expert at violence and I will paint a fucking masterpiece with your blood.”
“Time for you to go, Crocodile. Have fun on your quest for destroying everything you touch. When you’re done, I suspect you’ll be standing on nothing but a pile of bones and ash. I hope it’s worth it.”
Tink tilts her head to gaze up at Vane and my territorial inner bitch nearly topples the trees.
Sometimes I wonder what my mother was like before she lost Peter Pan and lost her fucking mind.
A little part of me had always been envious of him because of it. What did he have that we did not, her own flesh and blood? Kas and Tilly and I were just more pawns in her games. Move us here. Move us there.
It's him. It's Peter. Tink is his mom. Calling it now!
But Peter Pan…if we were her game pieces, he was the prize.
“Restoring them to us is just a matter of giving us the vessel. It’s the gifting of it that will unlock the binding magic on the vessel, thereby restoring our wings.”
We want to fly. We want to feel whole again.
“Stop,” Darling says, her voice an eerie echo. She’s straddling Vane, his back flat on the floor. “Or I’ll sweep the floor with both of you.”
“All that time I spent down there with the spirits of the lagoon, you hear many curious things about myths and men, and men who think they are myths.”
It was aimed at me. I know it was. What was she hinting at? That I am not who I think I am?
Never King. Never King. Given light, trapped in the dark. Do you hear us now, Never King?
The palace is in chaos. Not the kind of chaos you can see, like a tornado or a severed head. The quieter kind. Like the buzzing energy of a crowd gathered round a bomb waiting for it to go off. No one is shouting, but I get the distinct impression everyone is silently screaming.
A throne that bore the mark of the Myth Makers. A secret society known to use dark magic to help install and/or keep people on thrones.
I don’t have to look at Tilly to know that she’s bleeding, even if there is no visible wound. And here now is the true sound of a silent scream.
It takes just one decision. It may seem small at the time or inconsequential. But that one small decision can change the course of everything.
Tinker Bell is also Peter Pan’s weakness because I think deep down her betrayal of him is one of his deepest wounds. One that has yet to heal. When his own weapon turned on him, it broke his fucking heart.
Maybe she was even his first kind of love. The kind he gave freely after he emerged from the lagoon, a boy with no name and no story and no mother.
OMFG IT'S TRUE 😱
“I don’t think she knows the language of asking, brother.”
“I got you, Win,” Vane says, and I know he’s tapped into that grief, can feel the gnarled hands of it. “You don’t have to save me.”
“I like hearing you beg.”
“Please,” I moan. “Louder.” “Please.”
“There was a time I wanted you to run faster, so you could escape me.”
“But I don’t think there was any stretch of land vast enough that would have stopped me.”
We are fire and debris from lives lived broken and terrified. We fuck like love is a salve we are terrified of using up.
I am forever changed by him.
I love him. I love him so much it burns,
“I can feel it,” he says, a soft utterance, a quiet secret. “Feel what?” “Your love,” he says. “In my chest.” He kisses my cheek, lingering close. “I can feel your love like a million golden stars in the endless abyss that is me.”
😭😭😭😭 OMFG I LOVE THEM!
“Promise me you will always be there.” He tilts me up to him and kisses me gently. “I promise, Win.”
Even the Lost Boys seem to have vanished. I haven’t seen a single one since I woke.
There was something about darkness…and light… Never King. Never King. Given light, trapped in the dark.
It’s Vane that spots me first and he sobers, shaking off the effects of being in love.
I cannot fucking have peace either.
I feel you, my guy
“You’re coming too?” “I promised Pan I wouldn’t leave your side, so I guess I’m also taking a bath.”
The incomparable Dark One is going to take a bath with me.
Adorable! 🖤
I like this new version of me.
I swallow hard. The thought of craving Peter Pan and not getting him…no wonder Tink lost her fucking mind.
“We may be their found family, and I think we always will be with you at the center, holding us all together.
I like listening to him speak about the others when he’s not trying to hide his love for us. Vane gives so little away, but in this moment, I realize that in his stillness, he gets to know us, maybe even better than we know ourselves.
He chuckles, and it’s the single greatest sound in the world.
Everything happens with purpose.
“Save your sister, Bash,” he says. “And make amends. Otherwise, one day you’ll look back on this and realize you are full of regret.”
“You’ve changed,” I call out. I’ve grown soft. He’s grown soft. What is this world coming to? “I like it!” I yell at him. “Fuck off.”
The hair along my forearms rises and I sense the shadow at the center of me. We were meant to be, it says.
I catch the faintest scent of earth and wet moss, maybe a little bit of something sweet, like lemongrass. The scent stirs something old in me, a long-forgotten memory with the barest hint of a fingerprint.
