Disclaimer: I don't own Peter Pan.
Um. This piece actually freaks me out, to be perfectly honest. Especially the bit about the Indian prisoners. There was actually a tribe that did that who lived in my state.
This was inspired by Björk's song Pagan Poetry.
They come to her at night, little boys lost from their parents, dressed in animal skins. They are not as she remembers. The skins are stained with blood, blood stains that spread across their cheeks and foreheads and hands. They smile terrible smiles, with blackened teeth and splatters of their last meal. A terrible stench comes from them, the stench of rot.
Come back to us, they wail, swaying. Come back, Mother!
She tosses and turns, but she can never leave. She sees mermaids, necks decorated with the bones of men's fingers, blood-specked razor sharp teeth, and a horribly beautiful song. She sees them beckon men to them, sees them lay their heads against their bare breasts, and sees them die, all with those enamored smiles and infatuated eyes.
She sees the pirates, ever so much crueler than before. Drinking and cursing and fighting-- there was more then one bloodstained body tossed into the depths of the cove beneath the caves she and Peter had hidden in. A kidnapped Tiger Lily screams and screams and screams and attacks with her nails, desperately. Her body falls into the cove that night, followed by a pirate with a gaping hole in his throat.
She sees war-- real war, between Indians and pirates. She sees prisoners, taken by the Indians in one of their bloody battles, and the women walking up and slicing bits and pieces of their bodies, tossing them into their mouths like candy as the pirates shriek.
She sees pixies, like the one who had been so nasty before. As beautiful as ever, and oh so much crueler. Leading children who can't swim to pools a bit too deep, tossing the wrong kind of mushrooms into the cooking pots, little pranks gone horribly (right) wrong.
The Lost Boys wail, Come back!, ignoring her tears and screams and horror and terror. Come back! they wail. Neverland was never supposed to be this way, they claim. Not anymore. And she screams.
And then comes the part she can't stand, the most terrible, unbearable part. He stands before her, Peter, looking just as he did before, or close enough, with maybe a bit of a plant's green staining the tips of his fingers. Come back, Wendy-bird, he says, more softly than she's ever heard him. We need you. We (I) need you.
Then she wakes up, cheeks stained by (blood) tears. And when she hears a tap at her window the nest night, and the night after, and the night after, she trembles, and her heart pounds, and she doesn't move until the tapping stops and there are no more sounds and there's nothing to do except to try and stay awake.
Until the next night.