A/N — Title from the Peter Pan quote 'think of all the joy you'll find when you leave the world behind' which very loosely inspired this fic.
For Amber! I hope you like it :)
And thank you to Bex for beta'ing
"What is that doing there?" Cho snapped, glaring at what appeared to be a giant bird cage sitting on the middle of her deck. It was very ornate, she'd give it that. But completely out of place on a ship.
"Y-you said you wanted a fairy?" her first mate stuttered. "I thought we should have somewhere to put it."
"Right, yes," Cho said. "Of course." It was a bit bigger than she'd been expecting, a lot bigger, in fact, but she decided against saying as much. It wouldn't do to let her crew know she'd never actually seen a fairy before.
She wasn't from around here, you see, and she'd found herself on these shores quite by accident. But they couldn't know that.
"Do you — Do you not want a fairy anymore, Captain?"
"Of course I do," she snapped. "I said I wanted a fairy, and so I want a fairy." She didn't bother mentioning that she was just clutching at straws now. That she'd been told a fairy might be able to grant her a wish — or was that a Genie? The mermaids had been a complete bust — and really all Cho wanted was to get home.
This had been fun at first, when she'd thought it would be just as easy to get home as coming here had been, but now she just wanted a nice, hot shower. Electricity was the real magic, she'd decided. And food delivery.
Real magic, insofar as this place was concerned, was an awful lot of work. And Cho really was not made for the outdoors, let alone the open sea.
She adjusted her hat — a real pirate had to have the proper attire — to keep the sun from her eyes, and tried to avoid touching her hair. The salt water had not been kind to it.
Cho had learnt pretty early on that this place was like a child's imagination. Everything seemed perfect at first, but there were some considerable plot holes. Nowhere to bathe had been the first she'd discovered. No pubs was the second.
There wasn't much of anything here, really.
Oh, there were plenty of magical creatures, but what good were they when you were hungry and desperate and really didn't want your dinner to be having a friendly conversation with you whilst you figured out the most humane way to kill it. Even the fish could talk, it was ridiculous. Cho had been surviving mostly off of berries.
"Let me know when you catch one!" Cho yelled after the retreating first mate. "I'm going to …" She waved her telescope vaguely in the air, trying to appear as if she actually knew what she were supposed to be doing with it. Looking for … things, probably. Mermaids, she decided, she'd keep an eye out for those.
Pressing the cold metal to her eye socket, she pulled the telescope to its full length … and immediately received a splash of water to the face. Followed by what sounded suspiciously like a giggle.
Cho would be the first to admit that she knew nothing about the politics of this strange land — in fact, she hadn't even realised there were politics — and she'd perhaps been in the wrong with the way she'd first approached the mermaids, but really this was just rude. She was a visitor, a guest to these parts, a —
"We have a fairy!"
"That was fast," Cho said, shaking as much of the water off her telescope as she could, and turning to face the crewmember who had spoken. The first mate again; she couldn't remember his name, but he seemed to be everywhere she was. It was very disconcerting. And, now that she thought about it, the rest of the crew seemed to be more impressions of people. As if she thought they must exist, and so they did, but they weren't really there.
She shook her head, pushing those thoughts from her mind. "How did you catch it?" she asked, ignoring the fact that the pause had gone on for too long, that the first mate was looking at her with a slightly more worried expression than usual.
"It's — it's a fairy, Captain?" he said, wringing his hands nervously in front of him. "You just make it somewhere nice to sit, and it sort of … wanders in."
Cho glanced past her first mate, to where the cage stands in the centre of the deck. On the perch hanging from its roof, a fairy swings gently, looking surprisingly serene for one sitting in a cage. "It is very lovely," the fairy said. And it's only then that Cho realises there isn't actually a door to the cage, just an open gap in the ornate bars for someone to step in and of out with ease. "May I 'ave your name?"
"Are you French?" Cho couldn't help but ask, somehow that being the thing to strike her as the most out of place in this strange land.
"You are smarter zen I thought," the fairy said. "Very clever. But I do not know what a French is. I am a fairy." The fairy cleared her throat, the sound musical like windchimes and incredibly grating. "My name is Gabrielle. And what may I call you?"
"I'm Cho," she said, stepping closer to the cage, reaching out a hand to trace along the filigree.
"Please do not touch zat," Gabrielle said delicately, though on anyone else Cho suspected it might have come across as being more angry. "It is mine."
"A gift to the fairy," the first mate said with an awkward bow, making Cho jump. She'd forgotten he was still here.
"Leave us," she snapped. Normally, she'd feel bad about talking to someone, anyone, like that, but there was something not quite real about the people here. Almost cartoonish. The magical creatures had more life to them, and that only further reinforced Cho's theory that this was all a child's make-believe land.
But that didn't help her understand how she got here, and it certainly didn't get her home.
Gabrielle smiled in that overly peaceful way she had, more like a doll's smile than an actual person. Cho hated it. "You want to leave already?" she asked, tilting her head to the side. She didn't pause in her swinging, her wings fluttering out delicately behind her with every push forward. "But you've only just got 'ere."
There's something so familiar about her, as if they'd met before. But that would be impossible. "I — I have a home," Cho said, though she wasn't so sure she has anything to return to. Life before was all a bit of a blur. Less real than this place. She knew what her life was like, of course, she just couldn't exactly pinpoint any details.
But she knew it had been real.
"I want to go home," she said with more conviction.
"Are you sure you do not want zis to be your 'ome?" Gabrielle asked. She put her feet to the floor gently, stopping the swing with a resounding thud. All other sound seemed to disappear in the wake of such a noise, time freezing, and Cho is left shivering on the deck of her now motionless ship.
She hadn't realised until it was gone, but the rocking motion of the waves had been a comfort. Sweat pooled under her arms and at the small of her back, now that the sea breeze was no longer there to ease the heat. The sun shone too brightly in the cloudless sky.
"Why would I want this —" Cho spread her arms to encompass the unnatural stillness of this place, the way it looked almost exactly like a drawing in a picture book "— to be my home?"
"Zere are worse places zan zis," Gabrielle said. She rose to her feet, though Cho missed the motion of her standing. Just, one moment she had been sitting on the swing, the next she was on her feet, her light skirts caught in a breeze Cho would have given almost anything to be able to feel. She swallowed thickly.
"Please, I just want to —"
"What if you 'ad a look?" Gabrielle asked. "If you could see what you 'ave left?"
"I wouldn't choose to stay here."
"You do not know zat," Gabrielle said, her voice dripping with so much reasonable understanding that Cho wanted desperately to start an argument but couldn't find any grounds to.
"How would I —"
.oOo.
Cho's eyes opened slowly, painfully, her lashes crusted together with a horrible mix of blood and tears. There was a sharp pain in her chest — there was pain everywhere, really, but this one hurt the most — and she didn't dare look down to see what state she was in.
Around her, there was screaming, flashes of light, and the occasional dull thud that Cho pretended to not know was the sound of a body hitting the floor.
"I'm not afraid," she whispered, though it didn't really work to reassure her. The metallic taste of blood coating the inside of her mouth and sticking to her teeth did nothing to help, either.
A sound like a child's scream, a flash of green, a thud, lighter than the rest. Bile crept up her throat; she was going to be sick and she couldn't even turn her head. She would die choking on her own vomit, tears falling into her hair, people running over her broken body as if she were already gone.
She didn't want this, she didn't —
.oOo.
"— do that?"
No time had passed, she hadn't gone anywhere, but she knew. She knew that she had nowhere to return to — nowhere she wanted to return to, at any rate. And she could remember what her life had been, full of sorrow and heartache, and so much death. Did she really want to return to that?
"Is this giving up?" she asked the fairy.
"Not at all."
"Then what is it?"
"Moving on," Gabrielle said.
"How, I — I know you," she said; she'd been about to say something else, but she couldn't quite remember what that was. "I've seen you before."
"Zis is … your memory," Gabrielle said, a sympathetic lilt to her voice. Cho would have expected her to reach out and rest a reassuring hand on her arm, but no one ever touched her in this place. "In a way, at least. It is like … 'olding. Until we decide where to put you." She paused for a moment. "I could be someone else, if you'd like?"
"No, that's — that's okay," Cho stuttered. She didn't think she could handle it if the face staring at her so calmly were someone she'd known particularly well. As it is, she has vague recollections of a girl, painfully young, stood dripping wet in the midst of a tournament she didn't belong in. She looked much older now, and for that Cho was immensely grateful — if she'd been confronted with a child there was no telling what she'd have done, but still. This was about the level of familiarity she could take.
"Why are there so many pirates?" she asked, desperately clutching onto the first topic change she could think of.
"You can change that, if you like," the fairy said. "You can change anything 'ere." There was a pause, as if she were weighing up just how much it would be okay to tell Cho. Unfortunately, now that she's remembered what the girl had looked like when Cho had known her, the fairy seems to be getting younger. Her dress stays the same length, but she's getting shorter, looking like a child playing dress up in an adult's clothing. "Zis is just your mind," Gabrielle continued, evidently having come to some sort of decision. "You control everything 'ere. We take things from your memories, and zey appear as you think zey should."
Which is a bit unfortunate, because now a child who can't be much older than eight is staring up at her, wings she hadn't yet fully grown into trailing on the ground behind her. She tried to picture the child being older again, but Cho wasn't entirely sure she'd seen the girl much older than she appeared now.
Her wings fluttered out behind her, and she raised herself into the air until she could look Cho directly in the eyes, leaving her now too large slippers where she had been standing.
"Someone will come for you," she said, staring at Cho with far too much seriousness for such a young child, "when a decision 'as been made."
"Can I think about it?" Cho asked. Gabrielle landed heavily on the deck, her small feet slotting easily back into her slippers.
"Of course not."
"Oh." Cho hadn't been expecting that. She'd thought this place existed outside of time, but maybe that wasn't quite true. Had things shifted ever so slightly while they'd been talking? Was that wave just a fraction of a millimeter closer to crashing against the side of the ship?
It would be so easy to stay here, Cho was sure of that. But she'd never really been one for the easy way out.
"I want to go home."
.oOo.
— want this, she didn't want to die.
Her lungs burning with the effort, Cho slowly managed to get her feet underneath her and, using the nearby rubble of a fallen wall to help her, stood on shaking legs.
There was a wand poking out of the debris — not her own, but it would have to do — which she grabbed with numb fingers and clutched the unfamiliar wood in her hand. She swallowed thickly, tasting blood and vomit and ash, her vision swaying. But she stayed on her feet.
"I'm not afraid," she whispered to herself again, her words holding more conviction than before.
This would not be her ending.