First OUAT post! Please review!

When Peter Pan played his pipes, and you heard, then you would be taken to Neverland.

But only if you believed.

He was just a Lost Boy now, and he knew it.

Once upon a time, he was Telly, a little boy who lived in a rather average suburb in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming.

Of course, in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Wyoming, everyone knew each other in the town. Your mother went to school with your best friend's mother. That's why you were best friends. Your Father owned the hardware store off the road. There was only ever one road. Everyone else owned houses and property. Not nearly quite so much of the town was farms, like it used to be, but a good enough amount of it still was. Trees towered over everything, and the only thing that rose higher than those were the mountains looming like Colossus in the distance.

In the Middle-of-Nowhere, everyone knew that you would be a good for nothing drunk if your father was a good for nothing drunk.

He also knew he would have friends if you had a mother. You would be friends with the kids of your mothers friends. Women were the ones who got together and gossiped in the teahouse. Girls did the same in the playhouse the men had built years ago in the field behind the teahouse.

Men hung out in the bar out in the woods. Telly knew he wasn't old enough yet, not at that age, to be going in their where the men smoked tobacco and cursed.

Telly was usually there every morning, with more money to get his father his first glass of whiskey in the morning.

"That you, m'boy?" his father would mumble. Sometimes, Telly thought his father wasn't even speaking the same language, but he had long since learned the language that his father called 'hangover. It wasn't a new experience.

"Yes, Daddy."

"You came all the way over here, m'boy?"

"Just for you, Daddy."

"You are a good son, you know that?"

"I know. I love you."

"Go get me something to drink, son."

And Telly would pass over the bottle and his father would drink enough that other, normal fathers would be tipsy and it would almost be like he was sober.

No girl would talk to Telly because he was rude and kind of smelly, but then, girls were stupid. Sure, he ogled their breasts and tried to tease them to lift their skirts like the girls on the single television in town did, but only because all the other boys did too.

Plus, sex looked really fun. He'd nicked one of the little magazines that the other boys would hole up in the woods after school to gawk at while they snuck their father's cigarettes and would taste the alcohol (only ever a little) and the girls looked like beauties. Not that there were any girls that pretty where he used to live, but then, you didn't need a face to be able to enjoy a pussy.

Every day was mostly the same. He hated going to school; he'd dropped out at the first opportunity. Pencils and books and numbers made him want to cry, especially when math turned to 'algebra' and essays were required to be ten pages long and typed up. He was not joining the lines of nerds that slaved away at the few typewriters at the school library. (Except all papers were required to be typed.)

No one in the town would hire him. The town drunks' son was bound to be a drunk as well. Everyone in Middle-of-Nowhere knew that a drinker had a terrible work ethic.

Bull. He'd seen some of those, 'good, hardworking' men slip their sons a drink or two. Most of the boys in town drank more than he did, if only because the liquor store and bar refused to sell him anything because his father owed too much credit.

People ignored him a lot. At least his father reminded him to be a good son every morning.

So he made people look at him, even if this peers got older and moved, he'd terrorize their little siblings. Push them over and punch them until they forfeited their money. Their mothers and brothers and sisters even, with their hair all done up in the latest fashions wearing poodle skirts or coveralls would come after him and make him apologize. If he didn't, they'd beat him up behind the parking lot of the Deanna's Diner. The new owner's name wasn't Deanna, it was Rachel, but she never did anything about the name of the restaurant. DEanna was this little old lady that used to be friends with Telly's slutty mother, but then she'd gone and died years ago. Deanna used to give him lunch, breakfast, and dinner, and he'd sweep up the store and do all the harsh scrubbing her old bones couldn't do anymore. Rachel wasn't as nice as Deanna, but she would sell him alcohol, even if she knew that he'd had to beat up little boys and girls to get. Her apathy was a two sided blade.

One little boy, with bloodied teeth and his pants pulled up too high and neatly coifed hair, had said the most ridiculous thing Telly had ever heard while the older boy had perused the pockets of his school satchel.

"You're a lost boy! My momma told me so!"

"Yeah? Well, yer momma's a whore."

"She is not! She said you done been raised wrong. Like a rat, with your daddy drinking all the time. She said so to my Auntie Florence."

"Yer Auntie Florence is a dumber whore than yer momma."

The little boy's—his name was Ian, Telly remembered that little fact quite vividly—face reddened. It was likely that no one had ever cursed at him the way that Telly did.

"That's not true! My momma said that you don't know a thing! Maybe you should just wish yourself away like the boys in the stories do. I don't think anyone would miss you. I certainly wouldn't!"

And that planted a seed in forlorn, cruel little Telly's head.

"What stories?" he asked, and when the annoying little know-it-all seemed hesitant to answer, he grasped his arm and shook him harshly. "I done said, what stories!"

"The Neverland ones! The ones about Peter Pan! I been there, in dreams, but it was really scary, I, I left right away! Pan ain't taking me tonight, nossir!"

Telly liked the sound of that. It was better than rascal or whoreson. Sir. He spent far too much of his time feigning respect and calling others sir, but having been called 'sir', he could almost understand the appeal.

The next afternoon, after cleaning up his Daddy and the house, Telly headed out to Mrs Trebold's dingy little place. The house was so full of books and dusty old classics it doubled as Middle-of-Nowhere's library. Her porch door was open wide, only the screen shut. Telly hesitated only for a second before swaggering up to the door and pulling it open.

Mrs Trebold looked like a shriveled old prune, and was fully of the opinion that Telly was a useless ruffian whose only contribution to the world would be to die.

"What business do you have here, boy?"

"A book. I'm lookin for a book. Ian told me about it."

At the mention of the good for nothing annoying little brat, her face softened, but her eyes were still heavy with suspicion. "What book?"

"Peter Pan."

She hrmphed, and still glaring, she went digging through her overburdened bookshelves and pulled out a dusty old folder. with tiny, typecast print— nothing like the dime novels and books he had seen the boys reading to their girlfriends in the glades while they avoided the 'delinquent'. 'Peter and Wendy', the title read, and he grabbed the book quickly, betraying his eagerness. Mrs. Trebold smirked.

"I wouldn't have taken you for a reader. But then, a book can cure even the the most unrepentant delinquent. They can take you to worlds, they can."

She hushed him when he tried to talk back, and his face reddened in anger at her wistful expression. "You know, to travel, all you have to do is take the words to heart and believe in what you read. " She shook her head. "But then, I doubt you'd understand a word of what I'm trying to say to you. Hard-hearted little boys like yourself don't listen to anybody but your own kind, and not the advice of an old biddy like myself."

Telley ignored her, ruffled. He didn't even say goodbye, or thank you— that was a rule that had never taken root.

It took him a long while, almost eight whole months, to finish the entire novel, and found himself more than disappointed. Here, he thought he had found a world for children like him, and instead, he had found a fairytale. A beautiful fairytale, he secretly admitted to himself, but a fairy tale nonetheless. If someone like Telly ever found himself in a fairytale, it'd be as a villain. Villains always died a horrible death, and Telly would rather be as he was than die in some fairy tale, and he hated the Middle-of-Nowhere, where it was inevitable that he'd just grow up to be a drunkard like his father and grandfather before him.

It would be nice to stay as he was forever. Lost, but young, fighting and brusque with the meanest reputation in town. Not yet ruined and pathetic like his Daddy.

Ian said that he'd been to Neverland, and that it was the scariest thing he'd ever done. Well, whatever scared Ian sounded good enough to Telly.

He just hoped that his belief was not unfounded, because Telly didn't believe easily.

Just as soon as Telly fell asleep, he woke up.

But the air was not the dry thin air of the Middle-of-Nowhere, nor did it reek of alcohol and tobacco and body odor. It was humid and sat in his lung like water. Sand scratched at his palms and face, and he rolled over to be faced with a dim blue dawn. Clear, crystal blue water of the kind he'd only ever seen in travel ads on the television glittered like a sea of diamonds stretched as far as he could see, an even in the early morning, fat, droplet like stars glimmered in the sky. They loomed so close in the darkness he thought he might almost touch them.

It was quiet, but noisy with the oppressive sounds of nature. Scratching claws, squawking caws, and rushing waves filled his ears for several minutes before the sound of footsteps on sand jostled him out of catatonia.

To his shock, another boy lay sprawled as ungracefully on the ground as he was, and he scrambled up and backed away. He was dressed in a way that Telly had never seen anyone dressed before, in leather pants and a loose, low cut shirt, torn beyond any use. His lip was bloodied, and his eyes were huge. He was only a little older than Telly was.

Older boys tended to think they could boss Telly around like they were his mother.

He tensed up immediately, preparing to raise his fists for a fight when other rustling noises caught his ears. Other boys, bedraggled and in their nightclothes (if they had them) walked around, stumbling out of the water, the forest. Some were young, very young, other, slightly older but a vast majority of them were Telly's age. Everyone looked at each other cagily, uncertain, before one person cursed, backed away, and fell over.

"It's bloody hot, man! The hell are we?" oe squawked, voice thick and his words nearly unintelligible.

"Looks like we've got quite a lot of dreamers tonight, boys!"

And then, the strangest thing happened, and in the early dawn came boys-young and older, but all youthful and pleasant. At the head of them, swinging upside-down from a lone tree branch that loomed over the edge of the enclosed beach was a blonde, ruddy faced boy who smirked knowingly at the gobsmacked expression that the lot of the dawn arrivals wore.

There were boys coming from the trees like shadows, dirty and barely dressed and baring their teeth— some of them surprisingly well kept, other's crooked and brown as the dirt that covered Telly's grimy sneakers. Some wore cloaks, but most looked like they'd just crawled out of bed, or like they had never rested to start with.

"Where are we?" Another boy asked, frightened voice shaky and thin. His voice was higher than Telly had expected, for one of his bulk.

"Lost, obviously," a dark hooded one said, chest bare, voice husky, and skin dark like the niggers that Telly had heard his father cursing about in the city. Two thick scars ran down his chest, perfectly straight like street lines on the road.

"Let's not be mean!" The blonde one with the eyebrows said. "You're in the land of your dreams!"

"Neverland! I knew it existed! I knew it!" one particularly annoying little boy shrieked at the top of his lungs, scrambling through the sand and running towards the woods ecstatically. His eyes were wide, and to his chest he clutched a ragged looking doll, woven of coarse corn husk and twine. A pitiful looking thing, it was. "Afore's they got my brother, he'd tell me about Neverland and Pan, but that I was too young." His big, brown eyes were shining with glee. "He's dead now. I'm the oldest, so I thought I wasn't too young anymore."

This was why Telly always hated talking to little kids. They would spit the truth without refrain. That, or deny everything and everyone and go hide in their mother's skirts. Telly never had any skirts to hide behind, not from the bottle, and certainly not from his father's fists. The first time his father had called him a good son had been the first time he fought back. He never took shit lying down, not since he was very young. Other boys had a skirt to hide behind. Not Telly. He didn't hide from anyone.

The blonde's eyebrows rose in sympathy, and he swung gracefully to the ground; so quiet, that if Telly had not been watching him quite so intently, he would have missed the motion completely. "That's a shame. But not a surprise," he shrugged. "Most people come here because they're sad. That, or they really hate their life. It happens. Adults and their like bring you down so often that you lose your way, and then you're just as sad as they are. Just as pathetic."

The boy nodded eagerly, squeaking with hope. His eyes were wide and he looked up at the boy like he had hung the moon. But there was a terrible sadness in his eyes as well.

"This is stupid," another boy called out. He had hung away from the group of boys in their nightclothes; the dreamers. "This is just an awful dream!"

"How can you say it's awful? The sun's only just gone down!"

Honestly, Telly couldn't really see a difference. The sky seemed permanently stuck in the evening, and a lot of the sunrise (sunset?) was ominously obscured by the enormous mountains and sheer cliffs that he could see, even from his point so far on the shores of the beach.

"I've heard awful things about this place," the nervous boy said, "They go and then they wake up with cuts and scratches and then they're meaner than ever. And then...the next night, they go missing."

Telly snorted, but the older boy whose eyes he had met earlier snorted louder. "I think you're the only one that really misses them, baggage."

The outlier bristled. "Don't you dare call me that! At least I know I'm unwanted! I don't have to pretend, not like you budgers!"

"I'm not a burden to the whole!"

"You're just cheap labour!"

Telly had no idea what either was talking about, and from the startled or confused expressions of the other boys, neither did they. The blonde only looked amused, and none of his scary looking lackeys commented— only watched, silently and eerily. Telly was beginning to feel a little creeped out by the intensity of their stares.

The outlier and the older boy went to blows immediately, increasingly violent and cursing, louder and louder. Telly had never seen two people who truly hated each other quite so intensely go at it without any interference from an adult before. But then, he remembered from the book, the book that had taken him so long to read, that there were no adults on Neverland.

Sweet.

They tired, and quickly, the outliers looking around nervously, far more out of sorts than the older boy, but better off. His hair was only a wreck. The older boy had a bloody lip and the beginning of a shiner that made Telly want to wince, and he'd had too many to really count, and no one to treat them. When the older boy bared his teeth, a gaping red hole stood where his tooth had once been; not knocked out, but up. It would be lodged painfully and crooked for the rest of his life.

The outlier met Telly's eyes fiercely before switching his gaze to the blonde's. "M'not apologizing."

The blonde rolled his eyes. "You just said so yourself, boy, 'cuts and scratches and meaner than ever'," he mocked, his mimicry perfect. "This is Neverland! No one apologizes!"

His face twisted in an evil smirk. "I'm Peter Pan, and these—" he gestured dramatically at the boys around him, "are my Lost Boys, and you're our humble guests!"

The shore echoed with their whoops and cheers. When the blonde— Pan spoke, they quieted without signal.

"Since you're so eager already, we'll just start right off!" To the little shrill boy who still stood close to Pan, he smiled and crouched, sitting just above his heels. "Normally, I have to weed the wimps and cowards out, scare them off the island, but it looks like everyone knows exactly what they're in for already."

Telly sure as hell didn't know, but also knew he wasn't about to leave. He was not a wimp, and he certainly wasn't a coward. This seemed way more interesting than chasing around annoying know it all little shits who had the nerve to throw around insults they didn't even understand.

Pan pulled out a pipe, and his blood sang when from nowhere and everywhere came a song.

Excitement and euphoria of a like that Telly, in all his dull sixteen years had never felt, rushed trough his blood and with the flood of mania, he ran into the darkened forest.

He went back in his dreams, every night, after he brought his father home and taken a deep gulp from the bottle to dull his wonderings.

In Neverland, he could beat up anyone who pissed him off and no one would say anything. In fact, he even felt approval from some of the boys, but especially from Pan.

He could dance and run and sing— and for a boy who'd never sung a day in his life, it was the most freeing thing he'd ever done, and it was nice to know that most of the boys he'd see that night he'd never see again. It was easier to just go with the crowd, to not have to stick out, to belong. Even if what he was doing was what the old ladies at the market would call wrong, it never felt that way when everyone else was doing it. It was like going to school. Telly was wrong cause he was the only one not doing it, but because all the other children were doing it, did that make it right? He never learned anything, and the teachers could be crueler than the kids sometimes. No adult had ever bothered to really answer his question. They'd dismissed him as a chain smoking little punk too quickly to think that he'd actually sat down and thought about. And well, his father was in no position to be telling him anything except how not to throw up a pint.

Occasionally, other boys would come in their dreams, and Telly had never seen such a variety of kids, especially not in Middle-of-Nowhere. They were of all sizes, and a surprisingly wide variety of ages, but overall, most of them ended up being about Telly's age. If he didn't want to get beat down, he'd have to act crazy. People were always challenging the tough ones, but no one messed with the crazy kid.

It was why Peter made such a good ringleader, besides the fact that he was a charismatic and funny little shit of a boy.

His 'games' were wild, and he enjoyed messing with people's heads like it was nobody's business. He was arrogant enough to make Telly want to pull out his own hair and punch a kid in the throat, but then, he backed up his talk with violence and force and fear. Any new kid-dreamers-the island kids called them, who dared to challenge Pan ended up being the butt of their games. Telly was smarter than that, so he kept his resentment and his fear close to his chest. But Telly wasn't afraid all the time; the adrenaline and the freedom and the calm nights balanced into a perfect existence where he was never bored, never wronged, and never treated differently from any other kid on the island.

The jungle was heavy and oppressively hot; he'd taken to forgoing his shirt in the dusky daytime. Sometimes it was hard to tell when it was day, and when it was night, but he woke up whenever he felt like it, or whenever they were holding a particularly interesting game.

His favorite ones were the ones with nothing but fists and aggression, though some boys preferred the arrows, or the clubs or exploring. He'd never admit that he also loved playing pretend, but it wasn't something as embarrassing as playing pretend when you were a little kid because something about the island made the stakes real.

It was real enough if you believed it was so. It took a little while for Telly to figure it out, but he never claimed that he was some genius kid.

His skin got dark from the sun, and he picked up some interesting turns of phrase. The nigger with the scars on his chest (the freak who was actually a girl but who hit hard enough to knock out three of his teeth out and was actually so crazy Telly kind of feared for his life) was apparently used to the jungle. To Telly, it seemed to be the only thing he feared on the entire island. The world he'd come from was at war with its own jungle. He spoke slowly and huskily and his hair grew long in thick vines he called 'dadalocks'.

The older boy Telly had hated at first had soon become his friend. Though he didn't think too highly of him the first time, the older boy returned night after night, so obviously he was made of tougher stuff than he appeared. He never told anyone his actual name, it was something ridiculous (Shemislaf or something or the other). Everyone just called him Shemul, courtesy of Felix's apt naming skills. The tall, intimidating first mate of Pan gave nicknames to any boy with a name that was too respectful. Telly's name was ridiculous enough that he didn't have to be renamed to fit in Neverland. It sounded like something out of a fairytale. Like a dragon, Telly had once thought wistfully. Shemul was quiet and hesitant, but quick, clever, and insightful. When Squeaks wasn't clinging to Peter like moss to a tree root, then he was on Shemul and following Telly around like a great annoyance.

During the day, Telly and Shemul stuck together— they cleaned, reluctantly, and then sewed or washed themselves if they were of that persuasion, and then they played the nights away, running Pan's games and dancing to the tunes he played.

Occasionally, Telly knew that he had to go back. The real world awaited him, where his father would call him a good son and he would have to buy alcohol and magazines and beat up the annoying know it alls of the neighborhood. But that kind of life had lost its appeal to him. Where once he had relished in the look of fear of little boys eyes, it was so much more unimpressive because he had real fear, in the eyes of the new recruits, in the hearts of the Lost Ones when they felt the rush and exhilaration of near death for the first time in their dreams. When he lost to other boys on the island, he knew it was because he was weak and not because someone was fortunate enough to have numbers higher than the sheer strength of his fists.

Shemul wasn't one for fighting, not the way Telly was, but he came to the jungle every night without fail. He was a sarcastic shit who got himself beat often, he was so irritating to the other boys. Telly got a fight every night when he hung around the dragon, and Shemul got to do whatever Shemul did. Explore, most likely, or dance or swim. Telly couldn't do any of those things.

One day, before he fell asleep, he looked out his foggy window, where the sky was clear and the moon partially obscured by clouds. It had been a long, long day. He had been thrown out from the school, and his father had been missing for three days, and no one in the town had bothered to go looking for him.

"He'll turn up," they reassured him, their smiles shallow. The smiles were the worst part, he felt. They had never bothered to give a damn before then, but they were pleased to act the part of the 'good guy'. Poor boy, they would whisper, looking at him with pity in their eyes, 'having a drunk for a daddy. He's on his own now.' Before, they had always been quick to call him a good for nothing punk; now, he was alone, and he was a poor boy. He had been a victim long before their notice. Telly had never accepted pity from nobody. He wouldn't start then.

Telly could tell that something was different, right on the first day. His father vanished often, but never when he was sober, and he could point out the signs of being smashed easy as pie.

He wasn't then.

That night, Telly couldn't sleep; for the first time in months, he didn't fall asleep, only to wake up on those steamy shores. Instead, he stayed up all night with only the stars as his company.

The next morning, the horizon still orange over the crest of the treetops, they found his Daddy's body.

And then his house was full of well wishers who had never bothered to give a crap, and old women giving food when before then would have been more likely to swat him with their brooms. Old ladies were feeding and giving him things and pretending they cared, and that infuriated him more than their scorn ever had. At night, he couldn't sleep, and he could feel Neverland slipping through his fingers, from his imagination, and from his soul.

On the week of his final, excruciating night, he looked out the lace, clean curtains over the expansive window, so unlike the one of his childhood, and he closed his eyes and whispered under his breath.

"I know you exist. I believe. I ain't a hero, not like Wendy was in those stories, but I want to be one. I can be one."

A soft breeze ruffled his messy hair, the hair he had refused so adamantly to have cut, and a dark, opaque shadow flitted in through the window, wholly visible in the bright moonlight. He grasped what he thought was its hand; it was cold and cool, like stream water, moving through its black, shimmery body.

He was lifted into the night sky, never to return.

Um. Yeah.

So. That language though. I never call people nigger. But I got inspired for this a while ago...I might write more Lost Boys oneshots; I already started writing one for Felix. ^_^ Shamelessly posting this during class. :/ Please review, tell me what you think!

YellowWomanontheBrink,

8:50 am.

Feb 19, 2015