Notes: This pairing officially makes me smile a lot, and was an excellent excuse to watch Peter Pan in the name of research. Best sick day ever.
He first hears about the world that has more pixie dust and pirates than scents and science as Braig is recounting his travels there to Even. He thinks it all sounds silly at first, flying with dust instead of planes, and flowers that are more likely to be turned into dresses for the fairies than put in vases.
But all the same, it makes him look up from his microscope, if only for a minute.
When all is said and done and Radiant Garden is little more than a husk, and he has finished slitting his mentor's throat with the lab report pages he helped to write, he is gone.
They all are.
They try to turn what's left into anagrams. He can't bring himself to care, but it seems that's part of the anagram too.
No one else seems to mind what they have done, and they try to illustrate why.
"The research needed to be completed."
"He was in the way."
And the most convincing of all, from Xehanort (or is it Xemnas now, he can never remember...): "We never needed him."
But he knows they have never needed Ansem more.
The castle is still too quiet. Too scentless. He pleads to return to what is left of the old one, but he is ignored.
Many of them ignored him before, but it is worse now.
Ansem is not there.
Vexen, the hollow they once called Even, can hardly be removed from the labs anymore. He doesn't know what happens in the labs, only that he is no longer welcome there.
He tries to ask to be taken out for ice cream.
"Zexion, we destroyed the garden. There is no ice cream."
It is the missing empathy, rather than the missing ice cream, that makes him run.
He finds a world with too much pixie dust and too many pirates, but whether it is the one he heard about so long ago, he doesn't know.
It doesn't quite matter anyway, but he would like proof that anything is real anymore.
Before long, the pixie dust stops making him sneeze, and the pirates stop making him scared.
Just like Ansem, a page is buried in their spines before he moves on.
Unlike Ansem, these men curse him as they die.
With the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, it is no wonder that he is found.
"Hi there! I'm Peter Pan, and these are my Lost Boys!"
"...Ienzo."
He will not be another anagram. Not yet.
The Lost Boys are more like birds, chattering away as he is brought back to the hideout. He can hardly make out the words amongst all the sounds.
Tinker Bell sits on his shoulder, haughtily surveying them from her perch, and occasionally laughing in that bell-voice of hers.
"Does she usually laugh like that?" he asks Peter, who is floating lazily alongside the procession.
"Of course! It's the fairy language. Just like bells."
Their hideout is a tree. The entrances are like polka-dots, numerous and scattered. He isn't surprised, but he doesn't quite mind either.
He slides down a tree trunk and winds up in a hollow beneath the roots, which unfold like tent supports over their heads.
"Oh, and who's this?"
"Wendy, this is Ienzo! Ienzo, this is Wendy! She's our mother!" Peter declares.
And her hair is the colour of copper and hanging in limp ringlets, but she's smiling and bright, and he hasn't had a mother in such a long time...
The first time he tries to perform an experiment in Neverland, he breaks.
Because the fairy skeleton is there and he can see it but it's not Tinker Bell but that means very little from the way her pinprick fists are shaking at him and it didn't feel like this when he was removing the knives from Ansem's back and he can't stop trembling and why did he ever have to say that he didn't believe and their betrayed stares are so similar...
"I-I didn't... Slightly said, but I... didn't..."
He can't finish. Words are pointless in the face of what he has done.
There is no blood on his hands this time. Only blank fairy eyes gazing at him from a still skull.
Wendy holds him and sings soothingly while he screams himself to sleep.
He won't leave the hideout anymore. He's scared he'll say it again. Scared another dead fairy will plummet to the ground because of his disbelief.
"But why, Ienzo?" the Twins ask in unison.
He wants to tell them that his experiments seem to have an unfortunate habit of bloodying things.
But he doesn't. He trembles until they leave him alone.
Wendy stays with him. "My mother always stayed with me when I was feeling sick," she tells him gently as she presses cool compresses to his forehead.
"Where's your mother now?"
"Back in London."
"London?"
"Yes. I think it's far away from here, but there's every chance it could be very close. Neverland is strange like that," she says thoughtfully.
He doesn't want home to be close. Not anymore.
Peter forgets about the fairy before long. Peter forgets about most everything before long. The others usually forget as their leader does.
He starts to forget too. It's very easy in this place.
The faces he was running away from are distant now.
He knows they are Xemnas and Xigbar and Xaldin and Vexen and Lexaeus, but he doesn't remember their features.
They are as blurry as finger-painted masks, and he wills them to stay that way.
"Ienzo, it's time you learned how to fly."
"How?"
"It's easy! All it takes is faith, trust, and pixie dust."
The child who heard about Neverland with his nose scratched against a microscope would doubt that, but he is not that child anymore.
He doesn't have the heart to tell Peter that he has no faith, and he has no trust.
But he has the heart to pretend (like Peter is always telling them to), as he hurls himself off the cliff.
In a blissful moment, he thinks he will hit the bottom. Thinks he will finally know what they were looking for in that darkness.
Thinks he will see what Ansem died for them to be blind to.
But Wendy is there, and mothers do not let their children fall off cliffs.
Another failed experiment, he supposes, as the others crowd around him and say he'll "Fly better next time!"
He is unsure if he wants to.
They all get sick after a visit to the Indian Encampment, after trying to mimic the smoke rings made by the braves. Peter isn't, of course, and Wendy had the good sense (as mothers tend to) not to smoke at all. The rest are confined to bed until she deems them well again.
She gives them water, and like good children they pretend it is medicine.
In between waves of gradually decreasing nausea he wishes water could cure everything so easily.
The mermaids of the Lagoon like him more than they like the other boys. Peter is still their favourite, but they like to comb his hair and hear his stories.
"It's such a lovely colour Ienzo," they coo while he tells of his world filled with more scents and science than pixie dust and pirates.
Like him, once blinded by microscope panes, he suspects that the world he speaks of is little more than a story to them.
It is a story where he is a noble prince who lives in a castle, not a bloodstained invader who took over a fortress, so he persists in the telling of it.
He hears them once, long after everyone else has fallen asleep.
"I worry about Ienzo."
"Why?"
"I'm his mother. Mothers worry."
Wendy is doing the mending. He can almost hear the needle stabbing through the cloth of their worn socks and animal skins.
Peter is playing the pipes, rarely pausing to respond.
"Wendy, it's only pretend."
"Hurt is never pretend."
He doesn't want to worry Wendy. So he smiles so wide his cheeks nearly splinter and crack from the effort, claps so loudly his palms go numb.
But he does not hear her again. He does not know if the new pretend is working.
After some time, he stops listening.
There is rarely real food on the table. The dishes are real, gold and silver and pearl-embedded, straight from pirate treasure, but most often they imagine the tastes and smells rising from the finery.
He imagines the sky-blue ice creams he destroyed.
Wendy tells him she can see them.
"They're the same colour as your eyes!"
"...They're the same colour as your dress."
And she laughs and it is more like bells than any sound Tink has ever made.
Less like bells are her criticisms of his criticisms of the Neverland flora.
"They don't smell like anything," he points out with a frown.
"Well, flowers hardly have to smell like anything to be lovely."
"Flowers smelled where I came from. This one girl would always come by the castle to sell them." He is relatively sure her name was Aerith, but less sure what happened to her.
"Oh, yes, your castle."
"It wasn't mine. It was Ansem's. He was the king."
"Oh, my! You knew the king? I daresay I never met ours." She is rather miffed at this denial, it seems.
"I was one of his apprentices," he says a little proudly.
"My, that must have been very exciting!"
He thinks of the wrecked lab and the cracks in the sidewalk spreading up into the sky and the little monsters blooming from the frog-green lawns like horrible charcoal flowers.
"Not really."
He gets into a lively bout with his shadow one night (of course it's always tricky to fight with your shadow on the best of days, but the dark makes it all the more difficult to see), and Wendy makes him take extra medicine. She also insists on wrapping his arm in a sling (despite his arm being uninjured).
John and Michael find this quite funny.
His shadow pushes theirs over with its sling-ensnared arm, and Wendy gives him a scolding.
He can't say he minds.
Tiger Lily gives him a kiss the next time they visit the Indian Encampment. It's uncomfortable.
He doesn't like how he can't talk while their mouths are attached.
He doesn't like that she smells like the pipes that make him sick.
He doesn't like the venomous looks Wendy is shooting them out of the corner of her eye.
And he especially doesn't like Peter taking Wendy's hand and dragging her away to dance around the stabbing fire.
"I don't believe in Peter. I don't believe in Peter."
Because last time, lack of belief was enough to kill someone, and he wants nothing more than the death of this boy who shines more brightly than he ever has.
The blood is back on his hands that night. It seems there is nothing he can solve without a grisly murder (even the idea of one), and it chases him throughout his restless sleep.
Through it all he feels Wendy's hands stroking his hair soothingly, and singing that same song over and over to him.
She does not know, and he will never tell her.
There may be many things a mother will forgive her children for, but attempted murder is not among them.
Peter becomes attached to playing prince, inspired by Wendy weaving tales of a castle surrounded by flowers. The Lost Boys are sent scurrying through the forest to search for blossoms to adorn the hideout, while their haughty prince sits on a bearskin throne and crows.
The thorns scratch his fingertips, and Wendy gives him bandages.
By the time he removes them, the adhesive barely clinging to his skin is grey as Xemnas's hair, but he tucks them away for safekeeping all the same.
He does not grow up.
He does not expect to.
"Wendy?"
"Yes Ienzo?"
"I can't sleep."
"Then you'd best take your medicine, hadn't you?"
He does not want to take his medicine.
Or at least, quite literally lacks the heart to tell her she is curative in her own right.
He doesn't call Wendy his mother anymore, however hard she tries to be one.
She is only his age. She wears a nightgown, and her hair, once so splendid in curls, hangs limp. Her cheeks are always red with childish excitement, and it is all lovely.
But she is not his mother. He no longer wants her to be.
"Wendy, if I flew away, would you come with me?"
The question is out of the blue. Out of one of those silent moments that feel sacrilegious when they are interrupted for anything.
She is solemn. "You want to leave Neverland?"
"No. I just wondered if you would come with me."
The question dies in the air between them like a firefly flickering its way to the ground, and then they are silent.
The other Lost Boys notice nothing, though they are far from acute at the best of times.
He distracts them for a while with a new game: Scientist.
They have a great deal of fun imagining vials and liquids and pouring colours between beakers, with Peter all the while marching around and pretending to have any idea of what they're going on about.
Slightly is the one who decides to craft Hook's deadliest poison. There is genuine fascination to see how this is done—apparently, by mixing liquids of the most sinister colours with an air of very serious grievance. Occasionally he will shake a curved finger menacingly, and they take a step back accordingly.
When he is finished, it is quite easy to believe that the resulting liquid is actually poison, until Wendy's orders to wash up for dinner break into the game.
The Lost Boys scurry off, but he stays behind to stare at the tiny little vial.
Of course it's all make-believe, but he knows it all makes no difference to Peter.
Make-believe and meals of belladonna are quite the same to him in the proper dosage.
His fingers shake over the medicine bottle. He can't quite manage the stopper of the vial.
Whatever feelings the dreams induced in him before are worse now, chasing each other round and round like the maze of corridors in Ansem's castle.
But he cannot stop hearing the crow. Cannot stop seeing Peter's smug face floating through the air, or leading Wendy to dance.
Just as he cannot stop hearing the friendly voice of the boy who found him.
"Hi there!"
Hi there indeed.
When the Lost Boys wake up in the morning, he is gone.
The only clues are the fragments of glass on the floor and the muggy liquid seeping into the rug.
Wendy does not seem to notice.
"It's okay Wendy, we'll find him."
"He can't have gone too far!"
"We'll bring 'im back in no time!"
It is only Peter, sitting on the throne with pan pipes and a solemn face, who points out what each of them is thinking.
"Once he's grown up, he can never come back."
There is no fanfare upon his return. The castle is empty, and his footsteps echo around the hollow space.
No pixie dust glitters at odd intervals from raindrop prisons as they slide off leaves. No mermaids giggle over the water as they tear combs through their dripping hair. No Lost Boys debating the adventures of the day and regaling tales of their bravery to Wendy. No Peter crowing like a gangly bird overhead.
Nothing, really.
Nothing at all.
He does not go back.
The castle is lonely and silent and denying, and it is fine. He has already forgotten so much. This place does nothing to make him remember.
As time passes, he grows up. Grows into the sleeves of a black coat that were once too long for him and had to be rolled up over his hands. Grows into the anagram he once refused to be.
His hand does not shake over a poisoned bottle again. Over the years he will press the rims of many deadly glasses to the unwilling mouths of their consumers.
The vacuous gazes of Ansem and that little nameless fairy who fell from the treetops do not alarm him now. They are dulled by the faces of others.
Occasionally he thinks Peter would be ashamed. But then he thinks he cares very little for what Peter would be ashamed of anymore.
After all, Peter would be dead if he had wanted it.
As much as he will not listen to Peter, he does not forget.
As Ienzo fades farther and farther into the memories that now control his actions, he remembers the boy who could fly.
And he remembers the girl who believed water was medicine, who used bandages like they were tourniquets, who saw ice cream in his eyes instead of ice cubes, who sang when he screamed and who never met her king.
"Hurt is never pretend."
No, it is not.
But even without the medicine water or the cliffsides or the bandages gathering dust in his bedroom drawers, Zexion has managed, through use (like a knife) to dull everything in the end.
Ending Notes: Thank you for reading to the end! I'm actually rather fond of this, dark though it may be.
For anyone wondering why Wendy would still be a young girl while Ienzo ages normally into Zexion by the time of the first Kingdom Hearts, I imagine it as being because time passes differently in Neverland. Peter never grows up, so neither does Wendy while she is there.
If anything else didn't make sense, please feel free to ask about it!
Particular thanks go out to Vertikalen, who has finally achieved the impossible and gotten me to post something despite my obsessive perfectionism.
Reviews would be lovely, but are hardly necessary!