This is a disclaimer.
AN: References to Shakespeare and inexcusable liberties taken with JM Barrie.
Second to the Right
"I thought you'd like it," the boy says triumphantly. He's perched on Mary's chest of drawers, the really tall one, bare feet swinging three feet off the ground and leaves scattered in a loose circle around him.
Mary has her face so close to the jar that her breath is misting the glass. The fairy is glaring at her, sulkily, arms crossed over its chest.
"You shouldn't keep her trapped like that," Mary says reprovingly.
"It was the only way I could get her to come," the boy shrugs.
"Why are you even here?"
"I like you."
"We've never met before," Mary points out with great dignity. "I should probably tell my Daddy about you. I'm not sure you're even human."
"Human!" the boy yells. "Of course I'm not human. I'm Peter Pan, silly."
Mary's not sure what he means by that, and she's not convinced he does, either.
"So you're going to teach me to fly and show me the Neverland?"
Peter pushes off the chest of drawers and floats over to her, hanging in the air in front of her. He's framed by her bedroom window, curtains blowing, stars out. "Don't you want to see Neverland?" he asks, wheedling. "Don't you want to live in a tree-house with the fairies and meet Indians and pirates and mermaids? Don't you want to stay a little girl forever and ever and ever?"
Mary bites her lip and considers. Being eight isn't a particulary exciting age, in her opinion - it's too old for most of the fun things she used to do but still too young for the fun things the older kids do. Six would have been a nice age for Neverland. She was better at pirate-speak when she was six.
But on the other hand, growing up... that means more school, and harder lessons, and hunting with Daddy, and Mary would rather die than have to admit to her Daddy that the idea of hunting scares her a little, and she'd really like to stop being 'that freaky Campbell kid' at some point, thank you very much.
Peter holds out a hand to her. "I don't know what a freak is," he says in his funny, grown-up accent, "but there aren't any in Neverland." And he smiles at her, a blinding white smile.
Mary puts the glass with the fairy in down on her mattress and stands up, her hand sliding into Peter's. It's warm, and firm, and very, very steady.
"Can I have a cutlass?"
"Girls don't fight!" Peter declares in outrage, and Mary's eyes narrow.
"This one does," she says firmly. "Or she stays."
Peter sighs. "You can be an honourary Lost Boy, I suppose. I'd have to consult with the others, but I think that's all right. You'd still have to tell stories, though," he adds, threateningly.
Mary grins. "That's OK. I know lots of stories."
"So you'll come?" He bobs backwards a bit in the air, tugging on her hand, drawing her forwards, looking delighted.
"Second to the right, and straight on till morning," Mary says.
*********
Neverland days go by in blurs of colours, always loud and bright and shining. Mary and Peter battle pirates and walk planks and smoke pipes of peace with Indian braves who teach them the best way to throw a tomahawk, and in return Mary tells them stories. She learns to cook on an open fire, which is more exciting than it sounds, and Peter shows her buried treasure and ruined cities by the dozen.
"Surely the Island isn't big enough for all these places?" Mary says one day. "I mean. They're everywhere. And they're huge."
They're sitting on the wall of a well in an overgrown public square as she says this, swinging their feet the way Peter did on top of her chest of drawers so long ago. The sun is out, and the stone underneath Mary is warm and comfy. Peter is frowing rather curiously at the building opposite them; there's a tree growing out of one of the windows, and Mary feels sure he was about to make some comment about how the tree got inside the house in the first place. But at her question, he looks up.
"What do you mean? This is Neverland."
Mary rolls her eyes. Of course this is Neverland; she'd be an idiot not to know that.
"I know that. But it's an Island. And this is the fourth ruined city we've seen this week. And they're all huge. And when I went down to the beach yesterday morning it looked a lot bigger than it did the day before."
Peter carries right on staring. "You think too much," he declares. "This is Neverland, silly."
It's the first time Mary starts to feel a little... uneasy. As if something's not quite right, somewhere.
*********
"It's like nothing has rules here," Mary tells Tiger Lily a few days later. "Everything is just... everything just is. Higgeldy-piggeldy."
Tiger Lily looks wise and brave and solemn, but that's just because her father's the Chief and she thinks it's a good look for a Chief's daughter. Mary knows all about that sort of thing.
"Every place has rules," Tiger Lily tells her.
"Not this one. Peter says that ten times a day," Mary says, a little testily. "He's so arrogant. Acts like he knows everything about Neverland."
Tiger Lily looks at her. "Peter is Neverland," she says.
No wonder Mary can't keep track of the place from one day to the next.
*********
Peter is arrogant. Peter is selfish. Peter is annoying and adventuresome and exasperating and he won't ever take his medicine, although not even he remembers why, and he sleeps in the most cocky way imaginable, with one leg drawn up and his hand hanging off the edge of his bunk. Peter is unforgiving and intolerant and everyone in the world has to obey him, or else. Peter is kind and gentle when he wants to be, and he always rescues Mary first. Peter laughs himself silly when he takes her to meet the mermaids, and Mary faces them all down, hands on hips and green eyes flashing.
"I like her better than the last one," the blue-haired mermaid says to Peter, who, notoriously forgetful child that he is, frowns. "Which last one?" he asks.
*********
Nevertheless, Mary stays until her nineth birthday. Then she really has to go home. Mommy promised her chocolate cake and a party for her nineth birthday, and Mary, who is an OK cook but a woefully inadequate baker, hasn't had chocolate cake in centuries.
"You can come to the party, too," she says to Peter. There's a hard set to his mouth and a darkness in his eyes she recognises; he doesn't want her to go.
But Mary Campbell is the only person in all of Neverland who can say 'No' to Peter Pan and have him listen to her.
"We'll see," Peter says. "Your mother might not like me. Besides, I don't like mothers."
Mary sniffs. "That's because you've never had proper chocolate cake," she says.
*********
They fly back at night, when all the stars are out. Mary turns in mid-air to look back at Neverland below her, and chuckles. "It's the same size as it was when I came," she says.
Peter snorts. "Of course," he says. "You wouldn't want to remember it different, would you?"
Mary looks over at him. Peter is Neverland, she thinks. "No," she says, and smiles.
*********
"Mary Campbell! Out of bed. Time for school!"
Mary struggles upright in a tangle of blankets. Her bedroom window is wide open, and Mom is picking her way across the floor to go close it.
"But what about my presents?"
Mom stops and stares at her. "What presents, sweetie?"
"It's my birthday!" Mary exclaims. "I'm nine. Remember?"
Mom laughs. "Nice try, sweetie. But I was very much there on your first birthday, and I can tell you now that it was in December, so you're not going to turn nine for another couple months yet. Up and at 'em."
And she leaves the room.
Mary jumps up as soon as she's gone, and runs to the window. It's true; the trees are still green, the air is warm, there's no sign of Mr. Pattenson's Christmas decoration that goes up on the first of December, every year regular as clockwork.
Everything looks the way it does on that night when she first met Peter, when she climbed into bed and read Alice in Wonderland before falling asleep, waking up later on because there was a fairy shining its light into her eyes.
Mary struggles with the stiff catch of the window, but she gets it open and hangs out, leaning so far over the sill she nearly falls. She's not afraid. She's been higher than this, and Peter always catches her.
"Peter!" she calls, hoping against hope. Maybe he's on the roof. "Peter!"
"Mary!" her father bellows from the garden below her. "Get away from the goddammed window! You're too young to be acting like Juliet on drugs anyway."
Mary has no idea who Juliet is, or why she'd be on drugs, but she slides back into her bedroom with a sick weight of disappointment in the pit of her stomach, and closes the window.
*********
It's ten years before she sees Peter again. She's in her bedroom once more, window open, door firmly shut against Mom and Dad arguing downstairs - arguing over her.
She'd yelled at Dad that she'd rather get her homework done and avoid detention than come on a hunt. Dad had not been impressed. Mom thinks he shouldn't force her into things; Dad says she's not old enough yet to be making those choices. She has no idea what she's talking about.
Everything spiralled out of control from there, and now there's a rustle at the window.
"Hello, Mary."
She jumps up, gun in one hand, and freezes. Peter's standing on the window-sill, still barefoot, still with a cutlass, still with leaves in his hair and milk-white baby teeth.
"Peter," she says dully.
"Well?" he asks. "Where's the cake?"
"Cake?"
Peter rolls his eyes. "Your birthday cake," he says. "For turning nine? Today? Hurry up, we haven't got all day. There's pirates to fight."
Mary swallows, hard. "Peter," she says. "I turned nine ten years ago."
"Rubbish," Peter snaps. "It's today. Why, you don't look - you don't look any different."
But there's a tremour in his voice, and Mary knows that he knows he's lying. She looks different, all right. Her hair's longer and her face is thinner, childhood puppy-fat gone. There's more muscle in her arms and legs than in most of the school athletes, her hips are a little on the round side, and she has breasts, for God's sake. They're quite obvious at the moment, too, as she's wearing a thin T-shirt and no bra.
But then, Peter doesn't understand that sort of thing anway.
Mary stands up. She's taller too.
"What's that in your hand?" Peter demands. He jerked back a bit when she rose to her feet, but he's still in the window, still putting on a brave face.
"It's a gun," Mary says. "A Winchester. Peter. Peter, I -"
Peter jerks backwards as if she hit him, crosses his arms and scrunches up his face to keep from crying. Some hysterical part of Mary's brain is screaming at her that she's talking to an eight-year-old who's hanging in mid-air, but the rest of her doesn't find it at all strange.
"You promised me you'd never grow up," he says, miserably.
Mary sighs. "Everybody grows up," she says.
Peter hisses at her, utterly furious, and gnashes those perfect white teeth, and Mary has to jump back from the window because a huge gust of wind sweeps through her room and bangs it shut, and when she gets the damn thing open again, Peter's gone.
*********
She doesn't get detention. In English Lit, a new guy turns up, scruffy jeans and tousled dark hair. His boot laces are trailing, and he's got a nice voice.
He's an arrogant bastard, too. By the end of the first ten minutes, they're in a passionate argument about Romeo and Juliet.
"What, so it's wrong to love someone so much you can't live without them?" he mocks.
"That's not the point!" Mary exclaims. "The point is that the whole so-called tragedy of the play is based on the ridiculous idea that two people who are not otherwise depicted as overly stupid would go along with an idea like Father Lawrence's! It doesn't make sense."
"You think too much," he declares.
And after class, in the corridor, he holds out a hand to shake. "John Winchester."
"Mary Campbell. You're a jerk."
"Yeah, but I'm a jerk who's about to buy you coffee."
Mary's mouth twitches. A little.
"Why?"
"I like you," he says easily.
"We've never met before," Mary points out with great dignity. "You've just moved here."
"Why should that stop me liking you?" he asks, sounding honestly puzzled. "I mean."
Mary shrugs a bit. They've fallen into step easily, her quick stride matching his long one, and she really, really wants to brush his hair off his forehead and hand him a comb. "Things don't work like that."
John Winchester laughs, a loud and happy sort of laugh that makes everyone look round at him. Mary goes red. She hates being noticed, especially at school. John doesn't seem to care in the least.
"Maybe they do," he says. "Not everything has to have rules, you know. Sometimes it's allowed for things to just be."
Mary sighs. "I'm really not gettign rid of you, am I."
"I can't see why you'd want to," he says.
Mary sniffs. "The arrogance of you!"
John holds the door to the caf open for her, and Mary thinks that maybe there's material there she can work with after all. Raw material, of course, but still.