Vital Signs

by sporklift

"You—" Light flickers bright and then dim inside Felix's skull. "You took someone's heart for me?" / In which Peter Pan unknowingly uses True Love Magic to resurrect Felix. / Post 3x11, canon compliant AU / cross-posted on AO3

1. The Enchanted Forest

A/N: This was originally inspired way back in April last year after A Curious Thing aired and is basically "What if Peter tried to resurrect Felix in the same way Snow resurrected Charming?" It was meant to be a ~10k oneshot but spiraled out of control and basically turned into my magnum opus. I originally posted on AO3, but I'm beginning re-writes to that file and wanted the original copy available somewhere else.

Please be forewarned this story does get graphic in violence, sex, and gore. I have also taken some liberties with the heart-sharing concept to make it darker because I will never forgive canon for not jumping on that.

And now, without further ado, the heart sharing fic.

---

Peter cannot recall the way he felt when he made the initial agreement with the Witch.

He remembers the mechanics - how he leaned against the wall, tilting his own murder weapon in his hand. The sheath of old worn leather compressed in his fist. He stared at the twisted blade and the meandering name scrawled into the steel. It all sits like acid on his tongue. Eyes glassy, mind numb.

He remembers wondering for a beat whatever happened to Rumple after he fled, Baelfire too. But then he reminded himself he didn't want to know the answer. He remembers smirking when the glowering woman appeared before him in a burst of green smoke.

"Careful," He'd said, still examining the dagger, sliding his lips upwards in a show of confidence. "Don't let your eyes go red - it'll clash with your skin."

The Witch snarled, but, to Peter, it felt more like a whine. "You have my attention."

"Excellent," Peter smiled and made his way 'round the chamber, circling the green woman like a vulture. "Now I could pitch a fit demanding what you're planning to do with this dagger. But I won't. In fact, I'll just hand it over."

The Witch's eyes skittered around, mistrustful but curious.

So curiosity does kill the cat after all.

Peter knew an opportune moment when he saw one. "All I ask are for a few amenities. Protection. A place to stay. And...one more little detail."

"You've got quite the list."

"I'm a boy who knows what he wants."

The Witch stopped, nails turning a lighter shade with all the strain she put on her hips. "What's the little detail?"

"Well, I'll be helping you get your happy ending, won't I?" Peter raised a brow. "Help me get mine."

"How would you expect me to do that?" A green little pout matching an air of frantic put-on self-sufficiency. Peter had to make a conscious effort not to roll his eyes.

"You obviously know how to raise the dead," Peter took lazy step to lounge against an end table. "Teach me."

"Don't think you'll want to," She said, on defensive as though this were anything but a calm business meeting. "That was a life for a life situation with the Dark One."

"No, don't think so. It was one life for two. Don't try to hide back doors from me. It's insulting."

"And why should I? I don't even know who you are."

"It's the only way you're getting this precious dagger. You'll get this," He waved the weapon in front of her face. There's a gleam in his eye as he sends it away in a flippant display of his magic, stowing it someplace safe in the forest. "When I get Felix back."

He didn't know how he'd feel when the time came to raise his friend. Now that he's breaching the chamber, ready to accomplish the deed, he still isn't sure.

He knows he's treading a thin line. But the fact is he doesn't much care for lines - never has - and apparently returning from beyond the grave does not a wiser man make. Pity. But it's a thought for another time. He'd rather not think at all right now if he can help it. And so far so good. Even if it is mad.

The rewards will outweigh the risk. He continues to remind himself as his heels click against the veneer of the floor. A precise and metered clopping echoing loud in his ears. Just footsteps. One right after the other.

He raises his hand and a fire sparks in the hearth. It rolls and rises in an instant, bathing the chamber in orange and red light. Shrivelling dry heat permeates through every corner of the room before he even makes it to the center.

It's now Peter notices the tapestries. Insignias of royal families, old folktales playing out to a happily ever after that never occurs in reality. Showcases and portraits of stallions and knights who are more symbolic than historic.

If he'll be honest with himself, he knows he's only avoiding the real focal point of the room.

It can't last long, lest the stench make him faint, and he draws his eyes down.

The corpse lies flat, cold and still, on the silk and cashmere sheets of a queen who ruined everything.

There are open gashes in his face from the places the insects creep and gorge themselves. Mold and decay pierce deep into the scar over his face, fanning out to reach the line on his jaw and the slopes of his nose. The junction of his lip is desecrated, torn open and eaten away by maggots that clearly don't give a shit he's spoken for.

And they wriggle and squirm embedded in his skin. Tunneling and devouring and making a meal of him. White little worms and six-legged creatures on stark contrast to the leathery skin. Blending into scraps of skull peeking through clumps of rotting flesh. Blood curdled sour in veins without a pump.

He smells like rancid meat. It's an awful, biting scent that attacks and reminds Peter of the sheer length of time he's gone alone. It infects the air, in the stomach, rank and debauched as it burns his eyes.

Vomit erupts in his throat; he shudders as he swallows it down. The disturbia in the images is not the worst of it.

He's seen Felix sleeping, brows furrowed in a nightmare. Seen him blue in the face, frozen solid. A few centuries ago, Peter had even stumbled upon him curled into a ball half his size. Gone white in fever; spending the whole night shuddering in pain. He'd gotten an infection after forgetting to clean a wound. Or because he'd been too busy making sure the other's cleaned theirs (Peter can't remember the specifics).

The point: he's seen it all, from bad to worse.

But this?

He shoos the thoughts, the bile and vomit. Shakes away the burning in his every inch. Instead, he begins to remind himself that, afterit's done, he'll be able to focus on more pressing matters. On challenges and games and wars and meddling witches and curses. But for now, he can't get ahead of himself - he has to prioritize.

And this has apexed on the list without a single question of revision. The past few weeks were full of mind-numbing loneliness. Composed of stalking up and down corridors as monkeys chattered and swooped through the air. It all reminded Peter what it feels like to be starved for company. To be without Felix.

He doesn't need much. But in addition to now requiring food and drink, companionship surpasses those necessities.

And now, staring at the rotting husk that was once pumping and vibrant with a boy he called Friend laid flat on the bed, it's more than he wants to bare.

There's too much swimming in his mind. He needs to relax. Remind himself of what's important.

With a cough and a spell and Peter places his hand on a chunk of flesh that's cold and turgid under his fingers. He mutters the incantation, and first the worms appear. Crawling out from under the skin, poking holes and sores as they attempt to flounder away. They spark into flame. Creatures alight like convulsing miniscule torches. All slowness gone, writhing fruitlessly on the body and the sheets. They disintegrate into ash and then into nothing at all.

As the decomposers flay, rotting flesh stretches to accommodate and cover the skull. Skin pulls taut, and then the tissue appears between the bone and outmost layer. Colors fade and desaturate from the cadaver's gore, first to blue and then to white.

The stench of festering intestines fades as bones fill in to further structure something resembling a body. Felix's long ragged scar looks fresh enough to bleed, as though he'd just acquired it. His lips are whole again, smooth and undisturbed.

In fact, now Felix looks just the same as he had leaning against the rim of the well. He's all but wearing his confidential smile he always reserved for private moments.

There - good as new.

Well, not exactly.

Yes, technically it's Felix. It still doesn't look like him though; there's something missing.

All the romanticism Peter's ever heard says death looks like sleep.

But Felix just looks dead. A hollow husk, chalky and white - empty.

For centuries, no matter what, even brushing elbows with death, Felix was mobile, tangible. Alight.

Now?

It's all vacancy.

There's nothing there - nobody's home.

There's unrest, a disconcerting feeling as Peter wonders if, by cleaning the body up, he made it worse.

Resurrection is a dangerous game. There's a reason no scroll or tome spells out the secret.

And, not just that, but the sorcerers still hoard it. One would think, for their utter lack of ethics, they'd give it away. And yet, on the contrary, they keep the method tucked in their breasts and won't tell a soul.

It isn't a huge jump to imagine the repercussions. Although Peter doesn't know what they are, they must be steep. Otherwise the mages would've capitalized.

Well, if not the price of the deed, it might be the process itself is so stupidly simple most people overlook it.

It's somewhat funny. Or at least Peter thinks. The most desired and coveted magic, the magic people sell their souls for, die for, pay for in blood, is nothing more than surgery.

It's fantastically dim-witted.

Peter doesn't know much about this sort of magic, but enough to make the lacerations. The resurrection, he imagines, will be the easy part.

It's the aftermath that warrants pause.

After all, Felix might be unfortunate enough to remember his time in the Underworld. Peter isn't sure he wants his companion filled with memories of the Styx, Erebus, Tartarus - wherever he ended up. He doesn't know enough about the Land of the Dead to deter Felix's mind, and for a moment wishes he could remember his own penance.

It probably won't take too much time for Felix to jump over that, though. Peter remembers how bright Felix's heart was.

Or, at least, he thinks so. But he knows if he mulls it over for more than a few seconds his temples will start to throb. So, he decides it's better to believe Felix hadn't had a titch of black marking his heart.

The rusted barbs and fanged harpies in Tartarus, therefore, shouldn't have made his Lost One's acquaintance. The winding dankness of the river and the lifeless fields of grey, while unpleasant, couldn't have been damaging.

Peter can imagine what Felix will do upon his return. He'll freeze, a deer on the wrong end of an arrow. Frightened in the change of pace in death to life.

But Felix has to accept this; Peter's life depends on it.

So Peter will talk Felix out of fear, and then he figures more pleasant emotions will come rolling in.

His fingers stim as he brings his hand up, heart pounding and the slightest tremor in his stomach. Magic travels to his nails. Palms hot and muggy with static, he drowns in the swampy air around him, courtesy of this burden that weighs him down.

He may or may not be aware he's not thinking clearly. Better stay optimistic, though, or this could be the death of him.

A jerk of the hand and he's got a fist inside his own body. He pushes past the rubbery tissue of his lungs, until he feels it in his hand. It's pulsing altogether too quickly, a steady vibration against the pads of his fingertips.

He takes a breath and tightens his grip along his vibrating heart. His eyes seal tight, wrinkling his lids as he pulls and, in a blunt crescendo of pain, groans once. The noise sustains in the air for half a second before his mouth clamps shut. Everything is stagnant but the staccato tick-tick-ticking of a clock in the hall.

He'll never admit it, but it's worse than the muffled sifting of dust into the cusp of an hourglass.

A dull ache climaxes to searing flames as he clutches at the heart. He rips through, jolting as the tiny mass pops through the surface and the pain turns into a black hole. He fills: a weighty nothingness floods and pools in the soles of his feet and the pit of his stomach.

Bile burns in his throat, and he twitches.

There's a small half-grin toying at his lips, though, as he reminds himself Felix won't be dead much longer.

He can't force himself to look down at the body as he lifts his heart to eye level. He had dismal expectations to begin with, but he hadn't been thought he'd see this pathetic black knot.

After all, he is endangering his own life to restore a friend to his prime. Risking everything for the thing he loves most. Shouldn't that be worth, if nothing else, a streak of red or the faintest glimmer?

But, no. His heart is small and black as pitch, dull; it barely looks as though it can sustain one life, much less two.

He never considered himself evil before and he has to say he disagrees. Ambition, self centrism and ferocity cannot immediately equate wickedness. He knows he likes to play a villain, but evil? But perhaps that's a subject for another time.

There are more pressing affairs at hand.

He's calculated. Careful as he twists the opposite chambers, muttering a spell that may or may not exist. A razor sharp edge jolts down his body, raking him and stabbing between excitable ribs. He chomps down on his lip to keep silent.

The heart quakes,sobbing and pleading as it's torn apart in his hands. Keep me whole, it says. I want to stay whole.

But, more to the point -

It screams at him. Begging one word on loop.

No no no no NO!

And just like last time, Peter refuses to listen.

His vision sways and doubles, he nearly buckles as the force beats down his core down through his veins and the ends of his hair.

The pain is sharp and intense. It's wrenching his spine into quasimodo curves. It's twisting and curdling like venom thickening in his blood. Pain propelled to the emptiness by magic.

It blunts, ragged and coarse as he stares at the two halves of his heart, one in each hand. On accident, his fingers tighten, and he deflates in his diaphragm. Teeth gnash until he tastes blood. It's as though a reaper's slimy talons had locked tight onto a heart protesting and begging for selfishness.

He stills the knocking in his knees and sets his head up towards the ceiling. He has to get ahold of himself, because he believes in a few moments he won't be alone in the bed chamber.

Punching deep inside Peter returns one half of the heart to himself. As it crashes into his cage, the emptiness disintegrates into slop. It gurgles and bubbles deep in his gut. It's torment.

He has to act before he can think, reevaluate, or do something stupid. Holding his breath, he counts to three and slaps the small black mass through Felix's ribs.

The corpse lies there. Stiff. White. Cold. Peter thought the spell cleaned him of the bugs, but there's something active and buzzing under his skin, something that isn't Felix.

For a moment, Peter falters. He waits, can't think, the pathetic half-heart barely risking a beat. Twitches and balls his fists. He's willing Felix to live, willing to pick up where they left off, willing for the loneliness to abandon him.

There's a gasp, loud and abrasive against the silk sheets and satin curtains.

"No!"

Felix springs up on the mattress, all but twelve feet in the air. A moment later and he's shooting back and blinking away the last vestiges of a misty forest, a land without magic, a tragic twist of fate.

Despite the franticness in his friend's first breaths, Peter can't help but sense the victory. Felix is alive once more. He smells like Neverland's jungle, like smoke from a campfire, like salty sea air, like life.

His face is still pale, but no longer ashen in hue. Peter figures he'll gain ruddiness in moments.

But - wait - no, something's in Felix's face indicates he's still screaming except for the noise. Or, that is, lack thereof. He stares ahead without words, in complete and utter silence.

Peter doesn't understand. He never pictured this. And he thought of everything - went through all the options. He saw anything but this. Anything but blank. Anything but the dangerous stoicism that was so Felix.

It renders him into such a similar state that he - Peter Pan - finds himself apprehensive of all things. So, he begins with the one thing he knows he'll always be able to mange: he speaks.

"Well. Welcome back to the land of the living. You look good, all things considered."

But Felix doesn't say anything. He blinks.

"I don't suppose 'sorry' will quite cover it." Peter does his best not to shuffle his feet, to veer towards optimism.

Despite all hope, Felix is bleary. Incohesive. His lips barely move. "You murdered me."

He says it as though it's an alien concept. Something he couldn't have conceived even in the most nightmarish circumstances.

"Now, now, murder is such an ugly word." Peter tries to offer a crooked grin, but finds his face stiff.

Felix frowns, pale and quivering from exhaustion as his legs swing over the side of the bed in trepidation. He's solid ice, though. A miniscule flicker of life hidden inside, diffused under layers and layers of confusion and emptiness.

There's a block in Peter's throat, something catches. He presses his shoulders down, cocking a brow as he sinks into an armchair and crosses his ankles on the mattress beside Felix's hip. "Well? Haven't you got something to say?"

Felix tilts his head to the side, pausing. He's quiet. Still. But just for a moment.

And then another.

And one more.

Peter thinks he'll speak soon. Felix, however, shows no interest in rising to the occasion, folded over, mouth stitched tight into a frown. His mind is racing, but this time Peter isn't privy to the thoughts that swarm around in his greymatter. Something rustles outside the window; a monkey chatters on a tower several meters above.

How long has it been? It feels like hours, days, years. Felix takes in his surroundings with a critic's eye and a tourist's pace. His eyes flash in befuddlement at the crest in the tapestries on the wall.

Something spikes in Peter and he can't take the silence another moment. "I admit I made a mistake. Do I have to say it? You know I hate apologizing.."

The look in Felix's eyes is solid granite, and Peter can feel the world spin.

"I was hoping that'd help," Peter mutters, wanting very much to keel over and vomit right now. Instead he straightens his shoulders. "Before you go holding grudges, try to remember I brought you back."

The muscle in Felix cheek flexes before it falls slack. His brows furrow in a mannerism he'd picked up from Peter somewhere along the line. "Why?"

"It was hardly an ideal situation, but I didn't have many options at that point." Peter purses his lips, popping them for emphasis. He looks down at the ground, the wall, anywhere but at Felix. "Doesn't mean I wanted to lose you, though."

"Lose me?" There's force behind the consonants, a loud snap in his tenor, daggers in the sound. "You ripped my heart out."

Peter's voice is weak, tired, but he's grappling with his composure. "Nuance."

Felix huffs, and it's a dry unamused sound, similar to the noises he used to make in retaliation to the Boys fighting each other over rations or something equally stupid. His lips turn up - it's haphazard and bitter, and tastes more and more like castor oil the longer Peter looks at him.

There's heat welling in the empty crevices within him, he can feel it like lightning cracking in the sky, and his voice raises. "I suppose I was too busy meddling with dark and impossible magic to fantasize about our reunion, but for all my effort I think I deserve-"

Felix's head snaps over to him. His words are sharp, caustic. The hot light radiating in the hearth reflects deep in his eyes, flames igniting and climbing high. "You. Killed. Me."

And Peter cannot bring himself to understand what's going on inside him, but he knows he's never felt like this before.

What's left of the heart inside his chest is shards. Pathetic little strings beating altogether too fast at the same time they want to stop. It feels like dreamshade. It feels like his shadow his hanging limp half out of his body, enough to notice how it burns when it's not there. It's pumping acid through his veins, and he's dizzy, and it hurts him in ways he never thought anything could.

Inside Felix's chest, the heart is angry and trying so hard to hate. It's reaching out with talons, but not quite making it there. The effort and the inability to reach loathing makes his knees buckle.

Peter wants to return to the grave. It couldn't have been worse than this.

Give him harpies, string him on a rack. Flay him alive. Pull his liver half outside his body and let rats gnaw the rest of it. Make him choke on his own blood and die a little every day. Anything. Anything's better than this.

He'll retract everything.

Just make this stop.

Make. This. Stop.

There's an incredible range of hurt and devastation competing for his attention. And out of all of them, frustration, haphazardly put on anger, is the easiest response

And so, he gets angry. "Oh, do stop fixating."

"Fixating?"

Peter's palms have gone sweaty, but he'll never admit he's panicking. "I brought you back!"

"But for what point and purpose? You've got a game or a plan, I'm not sure what - but you've got something," The words spill out, seeping out, slow molasses, articulating punches and stabs. "And I'm not feeling up to it."

Peter snaps in return, tossing his head. "You're all up for nothing, I'll have you know."

"Really? Because this feels like the beginning of a doozy."

"That's insulting." Peter pretends his voice didn't crack, but Felix notices, mouth opens. "Look, I've always said never to get yourself into a cage you can't get out of. I found a way out. So if we could just-"

"Just what?" A scoff. "You want me to be flattered?"

Peter stops. His stomach trembles, his ribs feel like they're bleeding. His eyes burn.

But he gnaws at his cheek and he can feel the soreness inside Felix's chest. He's unsure how to react, and so he clings to the faux anger, curling his lips into a sneer he can't feel. "Don't start in with sonnets now."

"A eulogy would be more appropriate."

And Peter bares his teeth and darkens his tone just because, if he were to acknowledge any of the other attacks and pains, it'd make things worse. "We're going in circles."

Felix sighs. The last thing he remembers is Peter looking up at him, with a round face, and a voice that wasn't his. He'd said the friendship that kept him alive would be the thing to kill him.

The odd thing is that Felix has known for years - decades even - he'd do anything and everything for Peter Pan. He'd maim and murder and, he always figured, even give his own life.

But Peter didn't allow him to give. He took. And for some reason that means everything.

Felix remembers the way Pan had told him, they were to rule Storybrooke as the new Neverland together. Sentiment in his intonation. And, Felix has to wonder, if all those words were an attempt to change his own mind or to premeditate the kill.

Peter hadn't even let him speak or protest.

Not that it mattered; caught in the moment, all Felix had managed to say was "No."

He didn't want to die for Peter, in the end, after all. He wanted to live. Is that so wrong?

Especially when Peter had the gall to smirk and bat his eyes while Felix's whole world came crashing down.

He'd already lost his home twice. His brothers twice. And then, on the spur of a moment and in the curl of a fist, he lost his life and everything that ever mattered.

But Peter can't treat him like a marionette, to be killed and revived on a whim, on a game.

He's never treated him so frivolously before, at least not in Neverland. But here's the thing: they're not in Neverland anymore.

He needs to remember what Peter did to him. He killed him.

After six hundred years, after everything, he killed him.

Felix can't afford to forget. Those six hundred years should've been removed and perverted the second his heart left his body. But they spitfire in color and he can still feel the jungle air. He can still feel Peter's grin against his shoulder that one instance they'd laughed so hard they both fell to the ground.

The wood in Storybrooke, in contrast, is speckled grey. He can't remember the feel of mist nipping his ankles. Can't conjure up how it felt to have a hand in his chest and a metaphorical dagger in his spine.

But he can still feel the dent in his scalp from the time Peter tackled him out of a tree. Still remembers the way his voice croaked out a meaningless "May I help you?"

'Murder' ought to stack up to more than a six letter word. Ought to cancel the six hundred years of memories.

But it doesn't.

Something aches in his chest, and up till now, he's interpreted it as emptiness. But, as he's shrouded in a thought, there's a recognizable thumping. It's soft, muted, somewhere inside the cavity.

Felix stops, images of a candlelit séance and bloodspill dancing across his mind. "How...how did you do it? Bring me back?"

Peter twitches, nods and murmurs on an exhale. "All you needed was a heart."

"You-" Light flickers bright and then dim inside Felix's skull. "You took someone's heart for me?"

"No. That wouldn't work." Peter adjusts himself in the chair, legs leaving the ease of the bed to dig deep, deep into the ground. "It has to..." He fades, implications taunting him from the evening circling on repeat. "It's got to belong to you. In a manner of speaking.

"But mine's gone."

Peter swallows, blanches. He admitting weakness and all but literally on his knees - and Felix has every reason to tell him to go straight back to hell. He's in a cage and he can't get away.

"Lucky for you, mine fits the bill."

Felix coughs. There's something in his eyes indicating confusion. He's unwilling to consider those same implications that have driven Peter to pale. The statement cumulates with a small lilt, a muted sound Peter knows better than to place hope into. "You gave me your heart?"

"And what if I did?" Cocked brow and set mouth, Peter looks more ready for battle than anything else, and he wonders how on earth they got to this point. It occurs to him a moment later that it's his fault. But he drives on to amend himself. "It's only half, don't get too sentimental about it."

Felix doesn't abandon scrutiny, doesn't soften or sympathize. Instead, he gives a shaky breath and then "Why couldn't you have just killed some poor bastard?"

It's the last thing Peter expected and he starts. He traces the conversation over. The comment came out of nowhere with no precedent. He can't make sense of it.

Felix's cold glare speaks enough for him, but he doesn't spare Peter the narration.

"It would've made it so much easier to hate you."

"And that's what you want?" Peter narrows his eyes, rooted to the spot with a dry throat and overwired nervous system. It's as though he's impaled straight through. "To hate me?"

"Honestly? Yes. More than anything." Felix pauses, turning away. "But I don't. I'm trying and I just can't."

"Stop trying then."

It's a stupid, childish request.

Peter doesn't know what he'd been thinking. What he'd been expecting.

Was he naive enough to think anyone - even and especially Felix - would jump up and thank him? Wrap his arms around him and say "I knew you wouldn't let me rot?"

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

"Peter? Are you listening?"

"What?"

"Where are we?"

"Oh. Enchanted Forest. Regina's kingdom-former kingdom, really."

"What happened to the curse?"

Peter crosses his arms at his chest. "Must we get into the details?"

"Yes. I think you owe me that much."

"Fine." Peter flickers for a second, disappearing and then reappearing on the mattress beside his friend. He gestures to the pillows behind them. "Settle in; it's gonna be a long night."

And he tells Felix everything. He skims over the part where Rumplestiltskin killed him. Felix looks intrigued, but he's kind enough not to ask for elaboration.

Peter admits he recalls nothing about his time in the Underworld. Admits the last thing he remembers after the dagger spliced his spine was waking up to a snowy wood. He remembers blinking as thick black slime flowed down his body.

He snapped his head up at the sound of Rumple's voice, an incredulous whisper. It was the first time, in his befuddled stupor he noticed his surroundings. The forest, the clearing, Rumplestiltskin, the beautiful woman (Belle, he remembered) sobbing over a body.

"Bae!"

Rumple sounded gruff as he rushed forward. A moment's more evaluation and Peter realized the Dark One was right. It was Baelfire shivering on the ground.

Peter knows all too well what dying looks like, but as he reaches this point in the story, he lies down to forge an easement.

"If I were more myself at the time, I probably would've snuck off. Don't think they noticed me."

At the time, Peter stood rooted to the spot. Watched Rumplestiltskin cradle a hapless Lost One who was all grown up. Baelfire was pathetic: he looked more like a lost little kid than he had as a Lost Boy.

Peter was the first to notice the cloud of green smoke and believed himself invisible.

A tall woman with a dark green face appeared in the smoke, sauntering around like a cat. Peter curled his lips up, despite having no audience. He set about considering ways to both bring her down if he'd need to, or to forge an alliance.

"Poor Baelfire," She said, "Couldn't learn from his father's mistakes. He wanted so badly to get back to his son."

Rumple growled, and even Peter had to admit he sounded something fierce. "You did this! You tricked him!"

"All I did was pass on some vital information." The green woman was grinning the whole time, but still rather calm. The thing that stuck out to Peter, then, was her lack of glee in the matter.

She was working to a higher motive. If this were her grand plan, she'd certainly be a bit more excited.

And he was stationary. Simply waiting for inclination to act as the woman indicated a rather demonic looking candelabra. And still waited as she continued the idle conversation.

Peter half listened, weighing options to get out of this. He knew he could walk away under the guise of invisibility. But, somehow, that felt tasteless.

Rumplestiltskin held Baelfire in his arms, brandishing his crooked dagger protectively against the dying man. It was pathetic; Peter thought it'd be kinder to just kill him then. But, then again, kindness wasn't his strong suit; and philanthropy wasn't the Dark One's.

Rumple's entire body stammered as the green woman's eyes flared. It looked like there was some force trying to rip either the weapon or the man out of his grasp.

"Sorry Rumple," The woman said. "You can't hold onto both."

There was a tug, a struggle. And then, Peter groaned.

Leave it to Rumple to make the worst decision possible.

The Dark One's grip loosened on the hilt of his dagger, and it went flying through the air.

Without premeditation, Peter disintegrated. He appeared again, in full view, right in the cursed weapon's pathway. He stopped it in midair, just before it hit his gut. An old parlor trick he learned after centuries of boredom.

"You!" Rumple spat, fury and fear all wrapped into one.

The green woman shrieked, full of anger. Belle, a few paces away, looked whiter than the snow.

There was a pulse of magic, pressure building up in Peter's veins. It took less than a second to realize the green woman – a Witch – was intending to harm him into dropping the weapon.

Peter transferred his eyes from Rumple and Baelfire over to the woman.

"You'll have to do better than that," He said, disappearing into thin air.

Coming back to the present, Peter sits up on his elbows. "I didn't see the rest of it. But it didn't end well for Rumple."

"What happened to Baelfire?"

"I don't know." Peter pretends to find the shine in the sheets distracting. "I spent the next few days in the forest, gauging this new magic. And tried to figure it all out."

Peter chews the inside of his cheek. In those days in the wood he was more alone than he'd ever been before. He hates remembering how he'd turn around to share a spell or a victory and would meet the chattering of a squirrel. The horrible silence around his campfires. The emptiness in him, the fact everything became less important when done alone. When done without Felix.

Not that he'll admit it.

"Desperate times, desperate measures."

"And what happened next?"

Peter sighs, he hates long-winded explanations. But the short version's less painful. Although there was nothing short nor painless about those months of scouring over tomes and spellbooks. All the failed potions that exploded in his face, burnt him and left him tossing and turning for weeks.

He'd even marched up to the Queen of the Dead and tried to make a deal. "But it was spring by the time it occurred to me," He explains. "And she was a right bitch about bothering her about the dead at the time. She threatened to me a tail as punishment for it, too."

Felix stares at Peter, dumbfounded. This impossible boy, who was always so far beyond human need or desire, ripped his heart in half to revive a friend - to restore him. He experimented and got himself hurt in the process. He went directly to a goddess - and cursed her name without remorse when she refused to help him.

The fact Peter will do anything to get what he wants isn't anything new. Felix knows that just as well as he knows his own name.

The odd thing, however, is Peter accomplishing those feats to get him, one of at least thirty Lost Ones, to return to life. There had to have been another boy who Peter could've entranced or befriended - so why did he do so much to get this one broken boy back? Especially after a cold-blooded kill.

It doesn't add up.

Once Peter stops his tale, Felix is silent. He's thinking hard, trying to draw his own conclusions. And though Peter Pan is many things, patient under stress isn't one of them.

"I've been meddling enough with ways to bend the rules, I suppose a portal won't be too much of a challenge," Peter says, fiddling his hands. "It can't be too difficult to get you to Camelot, if that's what you want."

"What? No." Felix's head snaps to attention, his tone somewhere between harsh and overwrought. "Why would I want to go there?"

"I'm not stupid enough to think you want to be here." Peter covers with a hoarse cough and knits his arms together. "Or that you want anything to do with me. So I suggest you weigh your options."

"I haven't been there in..." Felix looks at his hands, as though he can count millennia on his fingers. "My family, if you could even call them family, they're bound to be dead by now. Where would I go?"

"You can learn to be resourceful, I suppose. I'm sure there's something sentimental in your skull about home or the like."

Felix scoffs, dry and humorless. "Peter...you understand you're it, don't you?"

"What?"

It's an unnecessary question, and they both know it. Both aware that everything in Felix's life, at this point, hinges upon Peter Pan. He abandoned the life he had, so long ago, in Camelot. Left his brothers without a single good-bye, all for the sound of a pipe. At the time, it seemed like the right decision.

He'd adjusted quick, made a new boy of himself in Neverland. There, he'd been a lieutenant, powerful in his own right, he had friends and brothers of his own making. Happier than he'd ever been. It was a second chance that stacked up to freedom. Amounted to the tantalizing degree of violence and friendship he'd always craved.

But then, in the end, it all crumbled. The Lost Ones betrayed the both of them. They ratted out Peter's location, and left Felix to scream. They left him to kick and hiss at adults who stepped onto the island as though they owned the place. It wasn't fair, Neverland wasn't theirs.

As far as Felix could tell, they shouldn't have had any power or influence over anything. Least of all over his friends. The most valuable thing to Felix, and it turns out there wasn't a damn thing reciprocated in it.

In another situation, Felix might've started seething at the memory. Foaming in how eagerly they slipped into treachery. They were his brothers, who he'd hunted alongside, took care of, and spent centuries building up pillars of fraternity. But they left him without a passing glance. Deserted him and glowered in haughty derision as he foamed in a mad attempt to keep things the way they were. The way they were supposed to be.

They added insult to injury. Wrenched him away from Neverland on the Jolly Roger. Lifted him off the ground as though he were a toddler throwing a fit because he didn't get dessert. He was a boy betrayed, clinging to the last fragments of the life he'd made for himself. Shoved him on the starboard side of the ship. Forgot about him.

Everything was gone.

Now, revived, he faces the same situation. He's in a realm he doesn't know, a complete stranger to all but one. No power, no friends, no familiarity, no clue, nothing but Peter.

That's old news.

But the real thing that gives pause is the striking realization that, in this situation, they're matched. Felix is all Peter has too. Maybe he's all he ever had and he's just been too stupid to notice.

Felix chews on the side of his cheek. As though still in rigor mortis, he is stiff, and despite having a half-heart to pump his blood, is still far too vacant.

"You killed me, and it's going to take a lot more than bombast to get me to forget. I don't know if I can."

Peter can't identify which half of his heart is beating louder, which half is splitting.

Felix pauses, fiddles with his clothes, eager to have something to do with his hands. "We can't go to the way it was - but maybe we can get close."

"The way it was isn't good enough," The words slide out before Peter realizes what he's saying. A very different sort of boy might've clapped his hand over his mouth. As it is, he stops, abrupt, sucking on the aftertaste of his sentiments.

Felix's eyes have abandoned the fire, have turned to Peter. It's sparking, a reflection falling low. His shoulders have hunched, his neck retracts in towards the rest of his body.

"What did you mean when you said the heart had to belong to me in the first place?" Felix is chomping down on his lip, and he shifts in on the bed, whether or not he realizes.

For the first time, perhaps in forever, Peter's jaw drops. He cranes nearer, glaring at Felix as he grabs his chin. Makes a conscious effort not to pay too much attention to his breath, his eyes, his face. "What do you think it meant?"

Felix's voice is low, scratching. "And you couldn't have told me?"

"Haven't the past three centuries sufficed as a hint?"

Three hundred years of sharp kisses behind trees. Three hundred years of dirty wrestling and panting into each other's necks and he couldn't have guessed?

"No, not really."

"I'll be blunt next time."

Something comes over Peter. He doesn't know what it is, maybe it's the proximity or the way his heart thunders. Maybe it's stupidity. Maybe it's the urge to shut Felix up. But the next thing he knows, his grip on Felix's chin moves to his jaw, and he's smashing their lips together.

A strangled gurgle chokes up from Felix's throat, and he bolts away. Peter halts, trying to ignore the way Felix stares at him, wide-eyed and skittish, as though he just asked the kid to die all over again.

"You said-" Felix begins, broken sounds making a humming decrescendo as they slur in the air surrounding them. "In Storybrooke you said-"

"I know what I said," Peter snaps, the words rotating in his skull, stuck on a cyclone, a faux pas that shouldn't have meant so much.

"Love doesn't just mean romance or family."

"It's friendship. Loyalty."

"Only one person's always believed in Pan."

Friendship. Loyalty.

Doesn't just mean family or…

Or.

He shoves the sickeningly sweet thought away; it's damn near lachrymose, and he doesn't want it. Can't want it. Not with the way this is going.

But Felix is still gruff, uncertain and rough around all the edges.

And it's beautiful and frustrating and hurts.

"I know what I said," Peter repeats, raising his gumption. He sighs, swallows the excess liquid soaking heavy on a tongue that feels too big for his mouth.

There's something tugging at him, pulling his heartstrings like a needle and thread, crosshatching Felix's name over and over again. He recognizes the tugging, wants to stomp it into the ground. The crux of the matter is he knows, at this point, it's not possible.

In the silence, the sole indication Felix is breathing seems to be the way he has collapsed, a quick abrupt inhale held forever.

At least until he speaks: "And?"

Straightening his shoulders in determination, Peter tries his damnedest to reach nonchalance.

Back at the well, he didn't lie. Love doesn't just mean family or romance. It can be friendship. But he'd be damned all over again if Felix wasn't all of it at once.

It always went unsaid before. In Neverland, when Peter pressed Felix into a tree, teasing him with his nails and lips - it wasn't necessary to say or even acknowledge. Before, when they were forever young and immortal. When nothing needed to be analyzed because it could stay the way they wanted forever. Keeping one's brain in the push and pull and rotation of skin on skin and as far away from speeches and thinking made it easy. It took away the complications.

But it looks like he's saddled with complicated right now.

"I think I might've... oversimplified. A bit."

Felix's eyes constrict to a normal size. He's more critical than Peter's ever seen and it sets his teeth on edge.

"But you understand what it's like," Peter recovers shakily. "Child's mind and all that. Besides. I didn't even have my own heart. I admit having Henry's mind might've made me a bit callous ."

It's not quite audible, or perhaps it's all in Peter's head. Felix's voice is veering away from anger and frustration, coming to rest at something lamentatious. "You're still oversimplifying."

"Really?" And for once, Peter lacks all edge. "I think I'm making it complicated."

For the first time, he realizes he's tired. How late is it? How early? Even the monkeys have ceased their prattle. He wants to roll over and fall asleep, but he's got to see this to the end.

Felix's eyes look silver in the way they glint. Rare and valuable. Cold and metallic. His fingers shake, and he's making an active effort not to raise them.

"Why couldn't you just have brought me back and expected me to serve you and follow blind? Instead you tell me you've been through hell - all the shit you've done to get me, and then you're willing to walk me to Camelot if I wanted to leave you. You're being good. Why can't you make this easy? You're not being fair."

"Am I ever?"

And, much to Peter's relief, Felix's lips turn up, closed and tight, half real. "Good point."

"What do you want to do, then?"

"To use your phrasing, I don't have many options right now," Felix ignores how Peter flinches at the statement. "I'm not going back to Camelot. I can't make myself hate you. There's one thing left."

"Which is?"

Felix rubs the base of his neck, gnaws on his cheek. "We find a way to make this work."

Peter can't help it; he's relieved.

It took Peter longer than he cares to admit to notice there was something unique in his lieutenant - his best friend - Felix.

By the point the thought even occurred to Peter they'd already spent at least two lifetimes together. Shared countless pranks played on Lost Ones and on pixies. Hundreds of games forgotten in the mist and moors of the island. Dozens of nights lying on their backs in the cliffs, Peter creating vivid constellations and Felix naming them. They'd create legends together, just the two of them.

There were battles then, complex adventures and intense wars.. Bloodied up some mermaids, nymphs, rogue boys. Gotten into more scrapes than anyone else might have dreamt. They didn't mind; they were both made for the trouble.

Felix had wrapped bandages around Peter and all the other boys too often to say. And Peter had been returning the favor - healing him magically in secret - for perhaps a decade or more.

So Peter doesn't know why it took him so long to want him like this. Doesn't know if it took him a while to notice the heat in Felix's eyes, or the way he'd become so eager to please. Doesn't know if Felix just came round to the same revelation around the same time he did.

In the end, those are just technicalities, though. Aren't they?

Perhaps he used to turn away from it on principle before the thoughts could make themselves known. Perhaps it's something that grows once one becomes comfortable with another person. With their perfect company and unrelenting friendship. He wasn't sure, but, thankfully, it's not point.

The point was that he woke up one morning and realized he wanted to know what Felix looked like with his legs up over his head.

And Peter realized this, allowed his thoughts and emotions to stew, and then put them away until the opportune moment.

And then?

Veni, vidi, vici.

It was, really, very simple.

He'd backed Felix against a cliff, trying not to laugh as the boy stirred and tried to figure out if this was for fun or serious.

Peter's grin was all sharp teeth and congeniality. "You've been here about - what - a few hundred years now?"

Felix's eyes narrowed. He could tell there was an air of gravity to the situation but nothing fatal. "Three, I think."

Letting his hands move over the bony planes of Felix's chest, Peter hummed. "If we recognized titles here, how many do you suppose you'd have?"

"I don't understand."

Peter smiled, amusement buzzing all around him. He used the slope of his smallest finger to draw abstract patterns, aware of the effect he had on the poor flushed boy pressed against a cliff. "You've got all sorts of titles by now. Lost Boy," He punctuated each statement, steepling his fingers. "Brother. Friend. Soldier. Confidant. Aide-de-camp. Mine. The list goes on. Let's add another, shall we?"

Felix spent a few moments trying to swallow but managed to say, "Which is?"

"Learn to read between the lines and you'll find out."

"All right."

And then Peter had a hand jerking under Felix's belt and teeth scraping along his lip.

Felix would have drowned in his mouth had Peter not been there keeping him afloat.

It wasn't long before hands shuffled under clothes. And only perhaps a few minutes before a near-timid, "What do you want to do?" and the easy flared response, "Everything. But we've got forever to do it. Might as well take our time."

Veni.

His lungs were failing him and in the most marvelous ways. He gasped and cried out in intense want, panting between words.

Vidi.

Felix's heartbeat chuttered like a hummingbird, pattered so fast it was hard to make out one beat from another. A constant vibrating hum.

And Peter kissed him hard.

Vici.

Peter hasn't yet experienced insomnia. But, he thinks begrudgingly, there's a first time for everything.

Or at least he tells himself as he tosses and turns and rattles off excuse after excuse after excuse for why he can't drift away.

The bed is too big. The sheets are too slippery. The pillows too plush. Someone snuck into the room and smashed his spine with a hammer. It lies in tangential fragments somewhere in the gaping hole inside him.

Something like that.

If he'd ever dabbled in tearing out his own shadow, he imagines this is how it'd feel.

And so he tosses and turns and cannot shut his eyes.

It's been hours and it's only getting worse. Building from mere unpleasantry to something far more unsavory..

Peter's heart is racing, his lungs flood with what feels like mercury, burning and heavy. Every pore in his body sweats, soaked through and weeping. He doesn't know why, but he twists on the sheets, gritting his teeth and tries to figure out why he's so panicked.

The feeling climaxes at the same moment the silence breaks by a scream, high and frantic. His eyes adjust to the darkness just in time to watch Felix collapse off the windowsill and fall to the floor. Peter blinks, watches, a gobsmacked look on his face, panting and terrified. Felix spins and splutters on the ground. He presses against the wall, swatting at nothing.

And Peter doesn't know what to do. Maybe in another life he would've, but the truth in the matter is that comfort is something he's never learned.

Felix writhes and curls in on himself and mutters frightened things under his breath.

Peter slinks off the mattress, but his knees fail him. He smacks on the ground, forehead throbbing from where he hits. Cornered, the world is black; can't breathe. He's stuck in a hole deep, deep, deep in the ground and he can't claw his way out.

And he cries and yells and gasps. And Felix, just across the way, shivers and yelps.

It's the longest night of their lives. It's as though years have waxed and waned by the time they finally grab ahold of their lungs and regulate their heartbeat.

"Peter?" Felix's voice strains and his chest billows. "What the...hell..just...happened?"

"You had a nightmare." It isn't an answer, but nothing else jumps to mind.

Felix chews on his cheek, his tongue darts out to saturate his lips. He doesn't speak, just glares.

"What was it?" Peter manages to rise up to his knees, lean against a wall and pretend not to shiver as freezing sweat evaporates off his skin.

"You were killing me," Felix says, slow and wounded, recollecting the nightmare. "And laughing. You said I didn't matter."

"Why would I say something like that?" Peter extends his hand for a beat but then retreats when Felix fliches. "So despicably out of character."

"It happened once before."

"Con-text, Felix," Peter snaps, running his hand along the cracks in the slabs on the floor. "Look, don't be an idiot. If you didn't matter, do you honestly think I would've spent all that time finding you?"

Felix brings his lips together with so much pressure they turn white. "This isn't working."

"It was just a nightmare." Peter says too quickly. He blinks and recovers with a rotation in his shoulders, looking out the window at the way the dawn's breaking in a repeat of every morning. As though everything doesn't depend on this boy splayed on the floor. "I don't want you to go."

"And if I do?"

"That'll be your decision." It would also destroy everything. But still Felix's decision.

"If it isn't?"

A funny little breath, and Peter can find the words, but swallows them for the thousand ways they're unwelcome. Felix's eyes are narrow, though, and so he allows them to flow. "I suppose I'll just have to find you all over again, won't I?"

Felix meets the Witch early in his second week. He's surprised when he and Peter walk into the dining hall to see the table stacked high. Gold-inlaid plates of meats dripping in sauces. Overfilled baskets of bread still steaming. Sweating porcelain bowls of broths and stews.

The Witch is a tall woman, perhaps she might've been beautiful if not for the affronting verdigris in her skin. There's something in the way she walks prompts Felix to veer on the side of caution.

Peter walks with his familiar ease, reclining in the chair, heels on the table, legs to the left of a plate of stuffed duck. He waves a hand and a chair skids out for the Witch. Felix pulls the chair beside Peter, sitting down just as he's muddling through introductions.

"So what's this, then?" Peter gestures out to the table in front of them, sending a small flare in his fingers over the plates of food.

"Thought it'd get your attention," The Witch tuts. "You do owe me something after all:"

Felix thinks he can feel a small palpitation beside him. It's hard to tell as Peter tossing his head so easily and spooning himself a generous helping of stew. "Let's not talk business over breakfast."

There's nothing Felix can say throughout the meal. He doesn't know the witch, after all, doesn't know the politics of this strange new scenario.

He knows he ought to have more monumental worries, but there's something grating in the fact Felix has no clue what's going on. Peter told him everything; in Neverland, there wasn't a thing happening on the island and surrounding islands the both of them didn't know.

So imagine his surprise when Zelena and Peter begin to exchange words. Clipped, uneasy conversation for certain, but it's an exchange. Worry about the monkeys, about those who might stand in her way, and such things.

Felix has to admit he thinks the Witch needs to get a grip. When the conversation dipped into adversaries, she drew tight and started to stammer. While Felix watched with a small air of righteous indignation, Peter rolled his eyes but reminded her to breathe.

To say Felix doesn't like it would be an understatement. But he hardly feels warm enough to Peter to say anything suggesting possessiveness. Besides, Peter never much liked it when he behaved like that anyway.

So he counts the stones in the floor. He counts how many monkeys fly by out the window. Creates a parallel narrative in his mind of what might've happened had Pan cast the-

Felix aches in his belly. Peter spins to face him, a hand pressed to his own abdomen. Felix ducks behind a baguette and resumes his train of thought.

Cast the...

He can't even make himself think it, but there's no point in dwelling. Peter won't hurt him again, he has to remind himself. Not now, so soon after resurrection.

Breakfast comes and goes, and the food is rich and warm. Felix can't remember the last time he felt full.

He's nursing a glass of white wine when Peter stands, draws his hand as if pulling on an invisible string. A crooked dagger appears in his hand. It's pulsing with such dangerous magic even Felix can feel it, hazily, through Peter's palm.

The Witch looks hungry. Greedy. Jealous.

Peter, though, still holds right to the hilt of Rumplestiltskin's dagger. He extends his hand a beat later. "Play nice."

The Witch goes to snatch it, though Peter still manages to keep the weapon away from her fingertips. "What do you care?"

"I don't," Peter cracks his neck to try on nonchalance. "But good girls don't break their toys."

Felix doesn't know whether it stems from him or from some sort of extraterrestrial force. But he can't help it as he glowers and stalks away, making quick distance in his strides.

Peter's pivoted on the ball of his foot. He tosses the irreplaceable artifact into the witch's hand, and he's at Felix's heels in moments.

"What is it?" He groans. "What could I possibly have done now?"

But Felix just shakes his head, and no matter how long he wracks his brain, can't find the words.

Peter can't ignore the scathing look in Felix's eyes much longer though. He ducks into the windowsill, arms poised across his chest, looking just as debonair as a seven-year-old. "You're staring."

"She has your son," Felix leans against the cool stone wall of the corridor. He figures if Peter doesn't have to be standing at attention, neither does he. "Shouldn't you feel something about that?"

"Of course I do," Peter snaps. "I might not be cut out to be a father, but I don't hate him."

Felix blinks. "You bartered off control of him."

"To get you back. I have my priorities."

"But you do tend to," Felix pauses, takes a deep breath. "Veer towards dramatics."

Peter wrings a hand through his hair and sighs. "It's complicated. I want him to be safe, or at least out of the line of fire. I just don't want anything to do with it."

"You've got a lot to do with it now."

"Not for much longer."

Felix pauses, leans away and adjusts his balance on his feet. "I don't understand."

And Peter sighs and explains what he knows of Zelena's plans. How she plans to infest the past for some convoluted revenge plot against the Evil Queen. Peter suspects she's legitimate in her intensions. Time travel is against the laws of magic; but laws always crumble under the right amount of prodding.

He explains he figures it's best to wait it out. Once the Witch succeeds, Rumple will go to his own life, and won't end up here in the first place. They'll be in Neverland with the Boys and won't worry about any of the betrayal or defeat, since Regina won't be around to play rescue-mission. He's mid-sentence when he finally makes eye contact.

Felix is wearing his Look of utter skepticism that's always grating.

"What?" Peter snaps for what feels like the umpteenth time.

"We have to stop her," Felix speaks under such an air of severity, Peter forgets to ask why. But he clarifies on his own: "For your sake."

Peter shakes his head in a way indicating confusion so he won't have to admit it.

"You still need Henry."

"I'm not living off Neverland's magic anymore I thought I-"

"Not now. In the past. You'll still need him in the past, won't you?"

Peter cocks a brow and settles into the windowsill. He braces himself for the logic Felix carries around like an enormous sacked burden on an ass.

"The Queen, she's his mother."

Peter waves it away. "John and Michael will adopt him then."

"It's not because I doubt their parenting skills."

And he continues his exposition, outlines the upsetting ripple effect that Peter, apparently, had been too dense to notice.

Not that he used that wordage.

Perhaps it's just because Peter doesn't know the story and all its implications. Felix doesn't blame him. He wouldn't know himself if Henry hadn't recited it around the fire one of the nights he felt like less of a brat and more like a Lost One. (The kid was quite good company on those nights; he excelled at keeping the more squirrelly boys entertained. To Felix, that was nothing short of a miracle.) Peter must've been elsewhere and didn't hear the tale.

It didn't take much thought for Felix to remember the details from one night of storytelling.

If the Witch succeeds in erasing the Evil Queen from history, Snow White will never have a stepmother who hates her so much. Therefore, she'll never turn to banditry.

"So?" Peter interrupts this point in the story, but Felix shoots him down in a glare.

He explains how without Snow White becoming a bandit, she'll never meet her True Love. And so, the Savior would never be born in the first place.

"Which, in turn," Felix concludes. "Means neither will Henry."

Well, shit.

Peter pauses, grits his teeth, and lets out a small noise. "And I suppose it'd be stupidly optimistic to assume another boy might work?"

Felix nods. "And, besides, you liked this one."

"That I did," Peter's still musing for a moment. "Well then, nothing more to it. I suppose we're sleeping with the enemy now."

"The enemy being?"

Peter rolls his eyes, disappointed his eloquence flew over Felix's head. "Snow White. The Evil Queen. Whatever the prince's name is. Do try to keep up."

"And you'll think they'll just let us in?" Felix blinks in disbelief.

"Oh, not right away." Peter adjusts his shirt and bounces to his feet. "But give it some time. Bat our eyes. Smile real pretty. Suck a few cocks. They'll come around."

And Felix exhales long and exasperated. Peter's confidence was soothing, the fact he listened was elating. But, the problem swarming in Felix's mind? Peter Pan really doesn't have the first clue in getting people to trust him again.

Does he?

Spring melts and blossoms to summer, the wind is hot and wet, giving no respite from the way the sun scorches everything in its breadth. For Peter and Felix, they've fallen into familiarity that's routine by the end of summer.

It's a quiet acceptance. Conversations are infrequent, but they've both noticed the emptiness whenever they're apart. The way their stomachs are empty, their chests hollow out. It's easier to stand together.

And, per Felix's suggestion, they make it work.

It's not good enough, not yet. It's an unresolved rigid stalemate, but it's a start.

And sometimes, it's almost back to the way it was all those centuries ago. Almost comfortable. Almost forgiven.

But then something happens. Some sort of relapse, and they're standing in square one.

It's a mockery of the past and if Peter wasn't so reliant on Felix's proximity, he might've told him to piss off by now. But as it is, Felix stands near. Always stoic and always lost in the realms of his own mind.

He walks as he had in Neverland, a pace beside Peter, but not offering the same support he had then. He's a body, a hollow presence.

Peter still wants him, nonetheless. He wants to come full circle, return to the way it was.

Felix still wakes up screaming most nights. No matter how Peter tries to calm him, they both press against the headboard unable to breathe.

When they recover, Felix repeats the nightmare aloud. How Peter tore him apart again, over and over. The memory on loop, and it doesn't fade after his heart is dust; it gets worse.

At least 'till they're awake and Peter's half-heart aches and burns. He can relieve it by reaching out for his Lost One, but he knows Felix will swat him if he tries.

And once he gets his breath, Felix will go off through a corridor on his own. He'll ignore how the world spins and his stomach threatens to erupt vomit with every step. He works through anger as he relapses and wants to spit and foam and demand Peter set him free.

He doesn't. He's been too in love for too long and even though it hurts him, the last thing he wants is to leave.

It'd be impossible for anyone else, but Peter has ways of accomplishing the impossible.

Peter thinks he's being amazingly unfair.

Because Felix decides to twist the knife and pour salt into the wound; insisting to stay beside him regardless. He stands close enough to touch but flinches when the attempt is made. Still loving, but not enough to make it right. Taunting that Peter might be able to fill in the gaping holes inside him, but without the permission to do so.

Whenever Felix runs off or disappears, Peter feels it as an ache and rolling pang of seasickness. If he tries, he can pinpoint Felix's location, but it does little to relieve the way the pain ricochets off his ribs and spine. And so he rolls into a ball on the bed. He presses a kerchief of heated smelling salts against his nose. He waits it out until Felix feels friendly again.

But right now, Felix is taking his time in returning to friendliness. He's walking, and not only through the corridors, but past the doors. Out into the world. And he keeps going. This is the farthest he's ever gotten, and Peter's legs quake and bowl under every shuffled step. Felix can't be running. Can he? No, that's absurd.

It's ridiculous to think he's testing to see how far he can get until he falls over dead.

He just got back, he can't be eager to play with fire again.

Can he?

Everything inside Peter tells him it'd be groveling to go to him. But it's hard to think straight when your head's split open.

And so he evaporates into thin air and reappears about a mile away, on the beach surrounding the castle.

As it turns out, Felix isn't running. Or, if he is, he's stopped for a breather.

He's seated on a boulder facing the large expanse of water surrounding the castle. As the lake is still, so is Felix. Nothing ripples or churns. Nothing flows. Just calm.

Except for the drawl interrupting the stillness. "I always wonder if you'll come."

Peter can't tell if he's excited or upset over the matter. Thus, he places his attention to the way the pebbles sift in miniscule avalanches under his soles as he walks closer.

Felix looks awful. His face is seasick green but blanches to his normal color every time he pads forward. Behind the layer of stringy blond fringe, there's beading sweat and pimpling gooseflesh. The closer Peter gets, the better he looks. And the better Peter himself feels. He feels, at least for the moment, as though he's in a win-win situation.

"What're you up to?" Peter asks, and it feels like white noise against a gull's unappealing squawk from some unknown location.

Felix gives a vague gesture to the vicinity and flicks his gaze between Peter and the petrified shoreline.

"It's like glass," He says after a beat of silence. It's a rather uncreative thing to say, he knows, but he's not feeling particularly imaginative. Weakly, he adds, "'s perfect."

And to this Peter releases a bemused sigh. He shifts his stance and, feeling some greater foundation than sand under the balls of his feet, crouches down to uncover it. A smooth slab of sandstone, rounded about the edges and thin.

To use Felix's vernacular: 's perfect.

Mouth skewed half up, Peter returns to standing. His arm swings in a breezy underhanded fling. The stone skips three times before diving below the tense surface. The ripples are bigger than they ought to be, an extra slapping of magic guiding the water to slosh and churn. Small waves rock and lap up on the sand, coaxing something resembling a tide out of its slumber.

Felix's head sinks to the side, a small easing motion more than a quirk or tick. A slow and patient, albeit unvoiced, request for an explanation.

"You know me," Peter shrugs, flicking his wrist to summon another stone to graze against his palm. "Can't let anything get too perfect."

Felix's shoulders straighten, and his movements are liquid and easy despite their delay. He's trying to run through mud. "I get the feeling there's an elephant in the room."

"Not at all." The words spill out brisk, and perhaps a titch too quick, but Peter doesn't make those mistakes. The stone skips twice and then plummets out of sight, and Peter replaces it as he circles his wrist.

He moves to toss the stone, but reassess himself and instead moves his hand to Felix.

"No thanks."

"Why not?" Peter can't help but challenge him. The fresh air gives him an air of vitality, there's something innocent and lighthearted in the activity and in the air around him. "Scared you won't be able to beat me?"

Felix laughs on a breath and lifts himself to his feet. He only needs to take two steps to accept the offer, but he takes four. And when the stone slips between their hands, their palms meet for a quarter of an instant. It's the first time they've touched since Felix's return. Peter curls his fist the second it's free just to hoard the scrap of body heat and the temporary bolted fullness in his chest.

Felix's throw is forceful and artless, but it bounces thrice. His fragile grin fades when Peter retaliates with a stone flying its way across the water no less than seventeen times.

"You used magic."

"Observant, aren't you?" Peter flares his eyes and inflates his chest. "Not that you'll do anything about it."

"On the contrary, I'll simply assume you know you'll never beat me without help."

Peter's shoulders sift with his grin, it's small and toys at his lips, but his whole body lifts in response. Sauntering around his ankles, he walks backwards. He presses his palms out to prompt Felix to follow. "Let's take a walk."

They circle the beach at least twice, skipping rocks when the idea occurs to them, commenting on the banal. The weather, the sunshine, dragonflies whirring over the banks. Comparing and contrasting Neverland to this.

Peter's never been a good timekeeper, and Felix has lost the skill over the years. If either of them had to guess, they'd say it was somewhere around suppertime. As it happens, they were nowhere near keen to return to the shitstained corridors of the monkey-infested castle. And so, they came to rest on the same boulder they'd started.

Summer days are long, and so the sun is still high in the sky when Peter conjures up a plate of roast capon and a flask of whiskey diluted in rosewater.

Felix nibbles on the meat with his front teeth, tentative to bring in his canines. He grabs the flask and takes a few long gulps the second he's swallowed.

Peter raises a brow. "I thought you liked the taste."

"It's easier to swallow after a few drinks." Felix mutters, keeping his voice bland as possible.

"So I've heard before. But I have to say in a very different context." Peter elects to not press the glaring double entendre any further. Judging by the way Felix snorts and looks at him in something resembling joviality, he just caught up.

Felix shakes his head, "You couldn't let that one go, could you?"

"When have you known me to shirk an opportunity?"

Lifting a scrap of meat to his teeth a second time, Felix finally offers his secret smile. Peter doesn't hear the response. "Next to never."

For a moment, they're laughing; a shred of happiness broke through the fog of their reality.

But the next thing they know, they hear voices.

"Hang on, I think I saw somethin'."

Peter releases a cloaking spell between them just in time to see the figures emerge from the ferns and bushes framing the beach.

There's a boy, Peter notices, shuffling behind an immense furry bauble of a man. The boy's got deep tanned skin, black hair, traces of dimples, and a slight flicker of familiarity to him.

Reading his mind, Felix jumps to his feet, "Aaron."

Peter has to squint to get a better look. Oh, so it is. He hasn't seen the former Lost Boy without a hood in years; he was a titch paler, too, in the eternal nighttime on the island.

…and Felix steps towards him, invisible to all but Peter, hands curled into fists.

"What're you doing?" Peter hisses and swings forward.

It takes Felix a moment to realize he's pulled backwards. It takes another to register the way his shoulder slams against the boulder. And one more to notice Pan's magnet-hot hands stilling his shoulders and holding him still.

He glares. Says, "They betrayed us," as though it's obvious.

"They blabbed. Not quite the same thing."

"No," Felix tugs but Peter doesn't budge. "They deliberately destroyed everything."

And Peter shakes his head, rooted in firmness. "I don't want you doing something stupid because you're projecting-"

"You think I'm projecting?" Felix's head hits the boulder behind him in surprise, and he hasn't even had the chance to wince when he speaks again. "I should be able to strike him-he hurt me."

"And yet you sit by and 'make it work' with me." Peter grits. "So, tell me, what is that if not projection?"

"Don't psychoanalyze me."

Peter might've had some sort of clever retort resting on his tongue, but Aaron and the furry rotund man have meandered close. The spell might've made them inaudible, but there's something daunting in carrying on a private conversation in such close proximity to others.

Aaron grabs the flask and kicks the plate under the sand. "Well someone was here, John. One of ours, maybe?"

"Whoever it was, they're not here anymore."

"But I heard somebody," Aaron insists, pulling the cork of the flask and sniffing its contents. "Transportation potion?"

Felix's mind hums in too much anger to hear. Peter finds the suggestion clever and makes a note to remember it sometime in the future.

The man - John - takes the flask and inhales the fumes. He shakes his head.. "Smells like whiskey to me. Must be nothing. Let's head back. We must've heard birds or something."

They pocket the flask, leave the half eaten plate of rooster full of sand, and have just dipped to the shade when Peter turns to Felix.

"Tell you what, you can give any and all the Boys their deserved comeuppance. But you can't be an idiot about it. And you can't be projecting."

Felix squirms on the sand and Peter releases him, lifts the spell concealing them. It's now they're aware of the red sunlight scathing against their faces.

"You went and found me." Felix's voice is gravelly, soft. Peter notices he's locked his knees. "Even after what you did, you wanted me. You came here today - you still want me. Hell if I know why, but you make an effort."

He clicks his tongue for a moment and then gestures to the scrap of forest where the former Lost Boy disappeared. "He squealed. Hid behind a Savior, and wouldn't even look at me on Hook's ship. None of them would."

Peter's having a hard time swallowing and turns his head a beat to hide the sun's glare. He's pretending the sun is the reason his chest feels peppery.

"So don't compete for the worst betrayal." Felix's eyes flick down to the ground and then up to meet Peter's and bore straight through. "You won't win that one."

Peter's face contorts into an odd half-smirk half-smile. If it were a concept known to the likes of Peter Pan, Felix might've thought his tone bewildered. "How sickeningly romantic of you."

"Don't push it."

On Neverland, it never snowed. Or, if a fairy decided they wanted it, it was localized and extremely easy to avoid.

But, here, autumn moved by at breakneck speed, and before they knew it, leaving the castle entailed wading through ice and snow, up to their knees or higher.

With the inability to walk freely without fear of frostbite, the nightmares return, every night, sometimes twice. They shiver and dive under blankets. For the season, they share the bed for warmth, though it does little to soothe the tortuous images behind Felix's mind or the way the sweat crystallizes while still on Peter's forehead.

Once their heartbeat takes up a rhythm once again, Peter turns to Felix on the pillows. "We need to find a way to control that."

"I'm doing the best I can."

"It was getting better for a while," Peter shakes his head, adjusting the blanket.

They're interrupted by a clanging, sudden and abrupt, and the doors swing open. Peter mutters something unheard before sliding off the mattress. He's slipping on slap-dashed neutrality and turning to the Witch as she enters the chamber.

"Well," She says, voice high,, "Am I interrupting something?"

Felix glowers and sits up. .

Peter stands, feet apart, brow arched. "What do you want, Zelena?"

And the Witch laughs, raising her nose to the sky. "Oh, you're more uppity than normal. Don't get so defensive. I'll leave you to…" She flits her hand in the air, "Whatever. But first I've come bearing gifts."

A small cluster of black smoke appears as she waves her hands. Peter finds himself turning a miniscule cordial in his palm.

Zelena saunters around the room, checking the fireplace for dust, running her nails along the threading of the draperies. "We have a predicament on our hands. There's going to be another curse."

Peter can feel Felix stiffen at the word, and bites his tongue to keep from taking in the residual effects.

"Same one as always, of course. Quite unimaginative, but what do you expect?" Zelena saunters about happily. "So I had to make things interesting."

Felix steps in closer. "How do you mean?"

"They'll all lose their memories if they cast it - and they will." She sighs. "And you would too, but I am feeling generous today."

"Why?" Peter's hands flex on his hip.

"I'd rather not burn bridges with you."

Felix's voice breaks through the tete-a-tete, uninterested and deadpan in tone. "Our memories?"

"You'll keep them. But after that I'm afraid I can't be any help to you."

"Were you ever?" Peter mumbles, careful to add playfulness to his tone so as not to stomp on her fragile esteem and wind up even worse off.

She glares. "They'll recognize you. They won't know who I am, be best for both of us if we aren't affiliated with one another."

Peter cocks his brow, slipping the vial into his hand and stroking it with his thumb. "So you'll just throw us to the dogs?"

"Unless you want a cloaking charm added to it-"

"If we don't drink this," Felix's gaze fastens on the floor, busy, locked in his own thoughts. "We won't remember anything?"

"Nothing from this year."

"Will it take away my year, though? Or the calendar?" Felix's eyes dart around the room in thought. "I've been dead for most of this. If it's my year...I'll forget Storybrooke too."

The Witch's lips drop ajar as she considers.

"Maybe I should risk it." Felix mutters, more to himself than to anyone else.

Peter overhears, clear as day, spinning around to face his friend. Every muscle in his body tenses. "What the fuck do you mean by that?"

"Don't you think this," He offers a tiny gesture between them. "Is more trouble than it's worth? We're stuck together, so won't it be easier if I just forget?"

"No." Peter brings his feet a little farther apart for confidence. "Hellish as our current situation is, I'd rather have you come around to forgive me - or not - with full capacity of your mind than have you forget and start to trail after me again like everything's fine. That's not going to cut it, Felix."

Felix looks down into his hands as he gathers his words before flicking upwards to meet Peter's. "I don't know if I agree."

The clock strikes three one winter morning as Peter awakens with a groggy shiver. He groans to the familiar wave of nausea accompanying Felix's absence. He sits up, startled by the trace of underscored warmth sweeping through his gut. There's a thrumming down, somewhere in the core of his…

Jolting up in bed, the moonlight leaking in the gap in the curtains shows Felix is neither sleeping in the windowsill nor sobbing on the floor. It can be expected, judging by the sickness, but he feels feverish in a way that doesn't come with separation between walls.

He seeks out a ray of magic to locate Felix in the next bedchamber over. Felix would be using if it were at all comfortable to be apart. Why on earth is he in the next room over, at three in the morning, with such a high pulse and-

Oh.

Now Peter's pictured it, he's having a difficult time stopping the visual.

It's one he's seen before, on muggy summer nights, when he'd push Felix into a pile of vines or torn hammocks and whisper, "Show me." When he'd make sharp grins at the unique rhythms Felix took. When he'd take the taste of the sweat gathering on his neck. And remembering all the chirrups and moans he'd try to hide.

And it's happening, right now, on the other side of the wall.

Fuck.

Peter hitches when there's the same not-quite-there pressure. Alight, a silhouette's touch. It's building up under his skin, deep in his core.

He can't feel the movements, but the effects are clear and pulse through his body. Intense pressure, bottled up in the centuries, under his stomach, between his legs.

"Shit," He mutters and tries to focus elsewhere, to close the accidental voyeurism. Telling himself not to allow his imagination get the best of him.

But his blood rushes to his face and down through his stomach - both focal points staking claim on him.

And he's trying to push it away and turn it off. Not right now. Not while everything is still so fragile.

It feels really fucking good.

Peter's worked up, without reason, and trying not to shiver or groan.

He bites his tongue and clenches his fist, seals his eyes tight. Which proves to be a bad decision, because now there's nothing to stop the imagery firing in his mind.

It respires and it's vibrant. He's got a fever, and it's getting hotter after every shockwave rippling up his spine.

No one can know about this. Ever.

But, the thought occurs to Peter, if he's feeling the results of what Felix is doing, the effect should be transitive.

Transitive, so Felix knows what's happening. And he isn't stopping.

If Peter wasn't already beside himself, that final thought would have sent him toppling over. If he can't ignore the sensation, he figures he can ignore his thoughts.

So he tells himself to think of nothing. Go through the motions and refuse to think, refuse to believe this is happening.

There's no control. Peter can't remember the last time he didn't have any control and before he knows what he's doing, he warbles. He bites hard into his cheek and flings a pillow between his legs and rides out the feeling. One fist balled up on the downy material and the other pumping underneath.

He tastes blood. He's boiling and burning from the inside out, aching and sore and unused to the erratic clouds looming over him.

He arcs, folds over on himself, and it feels like he's falling.

Falling and spinning and turning around him. Building up and unraveling and shooting a brisk "Ahhhh," he falls limp on the sheets. All he can focus on is the ragged pricks of adrenaline and rubbery limbs. Caught up in the frenzy of his own lungs until the door creaks open and slams instantaneously.

Scrambling up onto his elbows, Peter shakes his to shoo bleariness and hopes he's imagining the look on Felix's face: two parts furious, one part confused.

"What the hell did you do?"

Peter's panting, doesn't mean to snap. "Can't you fill in that blank yourself?"

"Peter." Felix cuts through the air. "Don't play around."

"I'm not." Peter sighs, adjusting so he can't feel the sweat cooling on the base of his neck. "Seems we've got some extra connection I hadn't anticipated. But I don't know anything about it."

"You know everything."

"Not this." Peter sits up, abrupt and brilliant. "I think we'd better make an effort to find out and avoid awkward situations. I might not, but I think I know someone who might have an idea or two."

He raises his hand, and on the name of a spell, a sparking magic fog surrounds them.

As the haze dissipates, Peter blinks to find himself in a narrow room with high ceilings and stone walls. It's quite drearier than he expected, but then again, she never met expectations.

After a quick look behind himself to be certain Felix was there, he turns to the center of the room. "I know it's rude to drop by at someone's home unannounced." He speaks more to the pair of wings in front of him than to the incredulous face staring at him through the mirror on the vanity table. "But you were never one for manners anyhow."

The Blue Fairy's jaw falls slack for a moment before she knits her prim lips together, she pivots on her stool. "You were killed."

"I could say the same about you," Peter - at this moment composed of nothing else but Pan - shrugs. "But I'm not here to share secrets from beyond the grave. I need you to explain something for us."

The fairy sits straighter, putting on an arc to her brows. "I could never help someone with such dark-"

"Are you joking, Blue? You and I both know you've got more black fairy dust in here than you know what to do with."

The fairy's wings quiver, thinly covering her anger disguised to look like hurt or concern, and she reaches up to tuck a curl into her tresses. "And why should I help you?"

"My shadow may be gone, love, but the things he told me about you aren't." Peter takes a few steps forward to assert himself. "And I'm nowhere above blackmail."

"Just information?"

"Of course. Wouldn't want to compromise your..." Peter fades, gesturing circles in the air as he pretends to search for words. "Reputation. Or whatever it is you've got."

She stands up, nose pointed at the ceiling. "What do you wish?"

"We're," Peter turns to face Felix, who's standing off his shoulder, fallen into a place he'd grown so accustomed to he used to take it for granted. "Having some difficulties."

"I should say so, you ripped his heart out to start a curse."

Peter's stomach clenches at the word, he can feel Felix's breath stop and all he can do is turn around and watch his Boy stitch himself together. Peter doesn't speak again until Felix is peering out once again under his hood. When he shifts to the fairy, her lips are pursed in something that looks a hell of a lot like curiosity.

"That's not it," Peter redirects the conversation. He explains as briefly as possible, how the ache sets in if they're on the opposite end of the same room, how they're in pain if they're between separate walls, how physical contact seems to be the sole thing capable of filling in the negative space. "And, if there's any sort of intense...feeling...we share it."

The fairy pauses. "I'd rather not know the specifics of your evil methods, but I'm afraid I must. How did you raise him?"

"I know what you're thinking, but it's actually rather stupidly simple." To the fairy's dry expression, he scoffs but finishes, "I ripped my heart in two and gave him half."

Felix thinks he hears the fairy gasp.

"My, this is a surprise," The fairy's mouth quirks into some unintelligible shape. "I haven't heard of such feral magic in a long time."

"Can you tell me anything about it or not?"

"What you did," The fairy begins, "is incredibly complex and ancient magic."

"It was surgery!" Peter snaps. "Drop the theatrics."

The Blue Fairy steps around herself, brown curls bouncing in the momentum. "Sharing a heart is the most concrete, binding, and profound form of True Love magic that exists. To love someone enough that you can sustain them - raise them from the dead...it takes an incredible bond. And it came from you."

Peter doesn't know if its himself or Felix who's overcome by the urge to vomit. He doesn't know which one of them is nearing cardiac arrest. Can't identify a single thing in the eye of the storm raging in his ribcage.

He knew there had to be love for the exchange of hearts to work. Perhaps he was even aware, underneath it all, it had to be the person he loves most, just like the curse. All the information ever told him was that the heart still had to belong to the person. Love was supposed to be a component, not the driving force.

Or, perhaps, all the resources had been explicit in the matter and he was too distraught to realize.

Love, on its own, isn't an intimidating force. Peter's known for centuries he loves Felix. And, on the rare occasion the distinction is necessary, he'll even admit he's in love with Felix without hesitation.

No harm in it. Love is impossible to avoid, even in a place like Neverland. There's no reason to allow it to work against you when it's just as easy to embrace it and use it as motivation.

True Love, however, is a much more malevolent and untamed beast. He'd always rejected the concept on sight due to a distaste for masochism.

And so, he lifts his brow. "True Love? Don't you think that's a little sweet?"

"Yet he's alive."

Peter opens his mouth to retort, but Felix speaks quicker. "Is there a way to stop it?"

Jaw dropping, Peter snaps his towards his Lost One. This time, he knows whose lungs are ripped apart, whose stomach is rejecting any food he'd eaten in the past millennium, whose half heart is breaking all over again. When he speaks, it sounds far too quiet. "Felix?"

"I meant the connection."

The fairy's wings flutter. "Short of him reclaiming the half he gave to you, no. Once you settle whatever qualm you're having - once the heart you're sharing feels at peace, you'll be able to function well enough apart. Perhaps even in different worlds, though I doubt you'd want to."

Peter hasn't ripped away from Felix, who refuses to look over to him. There's magic, staticy on his palm, but he doesn't know what he wants to do with it.

"I'm bound to him?" Felix is frowning, and Peter can feel all the anger and resentment burning white-hot, taking precedent over everything else. He's drowning in it.

"An odd way to phrase it," The fairy says. "True Love magic works both ways. You wouldn't be alive if you don't love him as much as he loves you."

"Answer my question."

The fairy sighs. "Yes. As long as you possess the same heart, you belong to each other."

Peter can feel the fury inside Felix, and the way it's making sparks erupt from his fingertips. He isn't sure if he casts the spell, or if it was the fairy herself sensing things were about to explode. The next thing he knows, they're in the Witch's castle once more.

Felix speaks before their chamber materializes, "You knew. Didn't you?"

"Knew what?" Peter doesn't intend to snap, but the secondhand anger is seeping into his chest and he can't help himself.

"That I don't have a choice!" Felix becomes a different person when he yells. Peter's never had it directed at him before. "I'm stuck here."

"I told you you could go to Camelot!" The fog has gone and they're all but circling each other. "You didn't want to. I didn't know anything about this."

"There is not a single thing you could say to make me believe you." His words are broken glass, sharp and dangerous, but still fragmented and broken, too ready to shatter again.

"And that's my fault?" He's never been blamed for anything before, at least not like this, and his voice absolutely does not crack.

"Yes." Felix responded far too quick for Peter's tastes, and he still isn't finished. "Everything. Even after you threw me out like trash, I'm supposed to toe the fucking line? I'm supposed to believe this is some capital-letters, turn the world on its head True Love? "

"You're over analyzing." Peter's teeth press together. "And you're being too cautious. As always."

"No. Not always. I'm still here, aren't I?"

"I said you could go!"

Felix's mouth snaps shut. There's an odd quirk to his mouth and a lilt in his brow. It reminds Peter so much of looking into a mirror that he's already bracing himself for impact. "Don't lie to me, Peter."

"You know how much I hate it when you assume the worst of me."

"Your ego will survive." His voice is low, the shadows cast across his face make him appear so much older and so much more intimidating. It's like he's a stranger. "From the second you killed me, to the day you revived me, to the decision to stay, I haven't had a choice in anything. Have I? I've just been playing your game."

"I can find a way around it. There's got to be some loophole, something between the lines. A spell, a potion, something. Give me a little time and I'll find a way and you can walk away and never return."

"That isn't what I want."

Peter's seething as he pauses, fury forks his tongue when he goes to wet his lips. "Then what do you want? You're sending me mixed signals. You want to stay; you want to leave. But when I say I'll figure something out you look at me like I just asked you to rip your head off."

"When I'm with you, I want to be here because it's my decision. Not because of some magical tether. Not because your shadow dropped me off on your island. I want to be here because I hate the idea of living without you-"

"Sonnets, Felix."

"Be quiet and let me finish."

Felix continues to rave in how he doesn't want to stay to pay the debt for Peter lifting him from the dead. In the same respect, he doesn't want to leave because Peter put him there in the first place. He rants and he raves and he paces. Ultimately, it finishes: "And definitely not because some fairy says this is True Love and therefore obligated to ride into the fucking sunset or something."

"Take it, then." It's a dare without pretense, a challenge without sport.

Felix steps away. "What?"

"Reach into my chest," Peter's grinding his teeth, needs his jaw to ache, something needs to hurt more than this. He shades his tone in red, if nothing else, he gets to be angrier. "Take out what's left, and make yourself whole. I won't stop you."

Felix allows a growl to seep up inside his throat. "Fuck off."

And, in all the centuries, it's the first time Felix has denounced him to his face. Peter doesn't know how to take it, has never had to take this before, not from Felix's tongue.

Peter won't argue. He knows he isn't the type to experience something as Good as True Love. It's the sort of thing reserved for the likes of Snow White and others with something resembling a clear conscience. He doesn't like to think in terms like this.

Because True Love is something in black and white and Peter Pan lives in a world of color. Felix lives in shades of grey. They should be free to be what they are away from rules and standards and the far too lovely implications of True Love. It shouldn't apply to them.

But, if the fact they're both alive is any indication, no matter what they say, it does. It might just be a lot more complex than storybooks and fairytales make it seem.

Truth be told, Peter doesn't like the way the label stripped his autonomy from the matter either.

No more words can help. No more actions. Nothing will work.

For the first time, they're out of options.

They sense their pulse quivering like a rabbit, Felix's temperature breaking into sweat, blood pressure condensed and rocketing up, up, up. When his eyes open, they're shaking. "What the hell kind of True Love is this anyway?"

Peter cannot - will not - refuses to match his gaze. His voice is quiet, and he doesn't close his mouth once. "Whatever it is, we're fucked."

Peter's holding everything back, surviving off the residual push and pull inside Felix's chest. It's all he needs; his own lungs don't suffice, but Felix's work best.

But Felix is reviewing his speech he's rehearsed in his mind a thousand times over. The last thing he needs before he knows he'll be willing to forgive him. And he needs to learn to trust Peter again. End of story.

It's impossible to love someone if you don't trust them. Nevermind whatever True Love magic bullshit affects him. He knows that with or without the tether, he doesn't want to stop loving Peter.

He's had a lot of time to think in the past months. He'd thought about how Peter's tried and strived to get him back - and the shock that he matters to him at all still resonates in Felix. The centuries of infatuation have returned, and Peter's reluctant willingness to grant Felix permission to flee for Camelot….nevermind it wasn't an option...

Pan cares, he always has, but Felix never realized he degree to which he cares for him.

It's not all better, and Felix reminds himself over and over again. He ought to hold a grudge. He ought to hate Peter.

But he wants to hold him close and taste his skin, act on impulses he's had longer than he can remember. He's loved him for too long to stop now. And it's just occurring to him Peter loves him in the same way.

He should hate the fact Peter Pan is all he has. He ought to hate how without any of the other Lost Ones, without Neverland, the identity he made for himself there has dissipated. The identity inflicted upon him in Camelot has been shunned too long to revert.

Right now all he cares about is convincing himself he can forgive Peter.

And so, he speaks: "If you ever walk into something with the intention of hurting me, ever again, tell me. And then let me choose if I wanna run in the opposite direction."

Peter's in shock. The second he heard the beginning of the statement, he assumed there would be a vow of perseverance, of avoiding all grief or pain that he might spur in the future. But it seems as though his friend has dropped idealism in favor of realism. There's something tragic in it.

He doubts he'll walk into something that would cause him to strike Felix ever again. Loneliness is hellish all on its own, and now that they share a heart, the idea sounds like suicide. It was close enough the first time.

Felix frowns. "I want your word."

"You have it."

He isn't expecting it, but the next sound he hears is identical to "Good," and starting now, he's gone.

Or, well, he has to be. Because all of a sudden, Felix has stepped forward and they collide.

Felix feels bigger than he actually is, larger than life, grasping Peter through his bones as though he isn't quite alive anymore. Maybe he's still dead and all this is doing is luring him in past the point of no return so the harpies can rip it away.

But, right now, Felix is warm and has a hand threaded through Peter's hair. The other curves down his spine, trailing from the jut of his hip up to the slope of his shoulders. The kisses are short, loud, hungry. Six hundred years in the making, and they're still parched. They bounce off one another to spring right down into the next, not taking enough time to separate.

He bites on Felix's bottom lip with his canines, shaping the contour with the edge of his tongue. He scutters further into the room, dragging the boy behind him. One hand still rotating as Felix mutters, "You're impossible."

Peter nods, ringing ears deafening him to the statement, and then opens the action. Biting, perhaps to serve a point, or perhaps to feel the way it thrums in Felix's chest, a bolt of electricity he can sense. He grabs at Felix's collar, haphazard meandering into the center of the room. They collapse onto the mattress, sliding on the silk sheets.

For a few brief moments, they're made of teeth, biting and tearing at one another, leaving marks and scrapes behind. Peter's swung his leg up and over and isn't sure how he ended up with both knees on either side of Felix's hips. How he's here with two arms coiled around him like a constrictor, holding him close. His head tips down as Felix's points to the ceiling.

Peter smirks, changes the theme as he licks up Felix's tongue in one long charged swipe. Electricity pumping down his spine as he rocks in. Nerve endings overwired, he shivers at the messy contact. He pumps forward again in an aftershock at the chirruping noise Felix makes, just for the thrill of it.

"Peter?" It comes out as more of a gasp, the second syllable swallowed down into the other's throat.
The noise muffles between two mouths, vibrating on the hot puff of air they're sharing. "Hmm?"

"What's happening?"

Peter steps off, scoots as far away on his knees as possible as Felix's hands are keeping him close. He raises his brow. "I'll let you decide."

Felix is slow, deliberate. Over-enunciating. "We're. Not. Okay."

Peter moves to climb off Felix's hips and call it a night. He's ignoring the way the blood gushes from what's left of his heart, but finds Felix hasn't loosened the grip on his waist.

And now there are lips on his neck. Peter's just as perplexed as anything even as he arcs into it. Felix nips at the column, sucking his neck as though he needs to swallow it, and Peter shuts up on a primeval reflex.

Felix tosses, suppresses a mewl as he nips at Peter's throat.

He's right on top of him and vibrant and pulsing and hissing away moans and starting to fray at the edges just for him.

Unsure what to think of it, he can figure it out later. Right now he hurts deep under his ribs, far worse than when a hand flew and ripped his heart out. It's a slow ache and one he wants to be rid of. Somehow, the closer he holds Peter, the more the pain evaporates.

He'll think of the consequences later.

They part. Felix doesn't remember abandoning Peter's neck in favor of tongue. But their mouths are swollen and numb, heat building in between Felix's legs, and the way Peter relaxes there.

"So," Peter says - mumbles - carding through Felix's hair, a lisp in his words from the way his lips have swelled. "Your decision?"

Felix thinks he made his centuries ago, and if death changed his answer, Peter's changed it again. He swallows, giving an immeasurable little nod. "Are you sure?"

"Are you?" Peter hates having to wait for an answer, wishes he could learn how to read minds and take asking out of the equation. He feels as though he's starving to death, growing thinner and thinner every moment he waits.

"I asked you first."

Peter smiles, wrinkles his nose. And, for now, it feels light and airy, like all those countless nights around the fire, playing keep-away with a worthless trinket. "Technically I did."

"So, is that a yes?" Felix twitches all over, hands meandering to more purposeful destinations.

"Don't be obvious." Peter presses in, mouth open, hovers close until he can feel the heat and the all but taste his air. His grin snaps, turning impish.

Hands on Felix's chest, he shoves. Palms white hot and rough in their need. Felix falls against the pillows, grinding a small sigh, blackness in his eyes growing as he stretches flat.

Peter's sitting up to his full height, and it's odd for Felix to have to look up to make eye contact. But Peter's built up enough nerve, remembered his trademark confidence. At least enough to start up a slow grind. He's jerking down and pushing Felix further into the mattress with his hips.

"Can you forget about being a soldier, Felix, hm? Can you be loud for me? Remind me you're living. Scream." Peter's stringy sentences sound more weak than they have in previous nights, but it's not the time to compare and contrast. "Groan and whine and hum and scream. Be loud."

Felix freezes, everything inside of him seizing rapid and overtaking his every blood vessel and vein. There's something needy in the way Peter rolls. Felix is too far gone to do anything but oblige, accenting every motion with an unbridled noise.

His hands wind under Peter's arm, capping on his shoulders, and he tugs him down to his level. Peter laughs, but catches himself with a fistful of satin and skin. Felix rubs his lower lip in the synapse between Peter's and breathes out, starts to articulate words unheard by all and lost to time.

The next time they kiss, Felix is smiling. There's a strange air of familiarity. Peter's flush against Felix's stomach, knees folded under, clenching around his sides. Felix paws at his face, open-mouthed and pressing forward and inward, movements hungry and greedy.

Peter returns the motion, withdrawing just to test the hypothesis that Felix will follow. He does. It seems silly to doubt it now.

Releasing the sheets, Peter pins Felix down into the mattress. One last lingering kiss before he departs. He takes a moment to watch the lag in Felix. Another to examine the bruising on his lips. Now he's flashing up a brow and a twist to his lips when he notes how they've begun to purple.

He's surprised in how much he misses the warmth of bodies pressed together.

Peter lifts up his hand, snapping his thumb and middle finger together. The cracking sound echoes in the empty room, loud and resonate.

Felix hums, rubs unsure little circles into Peter's thighs. Then he notices the clasps of his vest have cracked, fallen off and are now taking up space beside Peter's knee. He opens his mouth to ask, but finds distraction on his chest. The leather of his vest liquefies a second later, hot and thick batter, drips down the slopes of his body and pools on the sheets beneath.

A second snap and it evaporates. It's nothing more than a warm impression soaked through his clothes. Memories stuck in the strong scent of leather and body heat.

Three layers of Felix's tunics rip apart at the seams. The bay of tearing fabric yowls. Peter shakes it off in the same motion, throwing the scraps of material over his shoulders without care.

Peter's always enjoyed looking at the expanse of jagged scars mapping his Lost One. Canyons dug into the flesh by mermaid's nails, full mouth bitemarks left over from nymphs hundreds of years ago. There are black and blue splotches all over from unremembered and unimportant brawls and scrimmages. Trails of knives and swords, barren and curled remainders from antlers and talons and thorns.

Felix has been touched and roughed by Neverland. There's a story in the markings, upwards of a thousand stories. It's intriguing and magnetic, something about the life in the scarring and the way they twist and move and breathe. It's enamoring.

Peter's wry grin slopes across his face. He fumbles at his own belt, lifting the clasp to slide the strip of leather out of the way. Sparking in his delayed, languid movement, he shirks his belt off. He smirks, waiting until he hears the clang of the buckle against the floorboards before he slips the suede down his arms. It's teasing the rest of the way off to toss it on the footboard behind him.

A slow, long drag.

Peter can't help but contain a laugh at Felix's huffy sigh. He's emitting a tiny snarl without anything worse than irritation. No real anger. But he sits up with snappish precision. He throws the mesh scrappings of a shirt out of the way. Peter's rid of his last layer in a scanty few seconds before Felix stretches his palms to cover his ass, clasping Peter in flush against his own chest.

They can both feel their heart beating, as though it's whole. It's a heavy simultaneous thumping, racing forward, faster for a moment, and faster still in the next.

A sense of realism settles in as Peter murmurs the final spell, as the rest of their clothes turn to mist and then to nothing at all. Felix's prick grinds against Peter's hip, smearing a sticky line over the flat of his abdomen. He catches, pausing, seeing Felix all in flesh and covered in bruises and scars, lit up in life and heartbeats and fluid. There's something gorgeous in it, in him.

It occurs to Peter it isn't a question of want anymore, judging by the way everything inside him spins towards Felix, it's a question of need.

He, Peter Pan, really fucking needs Felix.

And that's frightening as hell. It's one thing to want somebody, but to need them?

Put it in words, dot the I's and cross the T's. Maybe then it will be less dangerous.

Felix noticed Peter's brevity, and he retreats, rests on his elbows. "Not good?"

It's almost funny that Felix is the one asking. Almost.

"Good." And Peter swallows down Felix's throat, twitching in time to their shared pulse, pushing into skin.

Felix beats and pulses, and they're sloppy and loud and heavy but neither one cares, because the other is warm and alive.

Nevermind anger or hurt or facts or logic. There's something physiological in the air. Perhaps from this moment on they're cursed to forever be on the same page. They can think about it in the morning.

Right now, it's okay.

Peter lifts up higher onto his knees, pressing Felix into his chest. He hovers, presses down blunt atop Felix, not yet falling through.

When the magic sets in, Felix coughs. He feels the spell drip down him, turning his skin and toying with the nerve endings, turning ticklish and warm as it works him slick. "Impatient?"

Peter shuts him up by licking a long line across his lips. "What do you think?"

Felix prefers to work from the ground up, to touch and kiss and make something of foreplay. Prefers to use real oil and get messy.

But then again, sometimes there's a necessity to get fucked and get fucked now.

Peter thinks this is one of those times.

As though to drive the idea home, Peter releases a new burst of magic. Fluttering in his lashes and twitching, giving off very obvious expressions. Once they were quite familiar. It's an odd thought, but Felix does feel the slightest pang of irritation in not getting to do himself. But Peter's face, as he mutters a spell to stretch himself open, elated, delighted, compensates.

Humming in his chest, Felix grabs either side of Peter's hips, guides him down. He doesn't realize he's holding his breath until he's forced to draw another, quick and sharp. Peter sinks on him with a throaty whine and an arch in his spine, curving in and collapsing over and over again.

They share the same berated puffs of air. As they condense against one another. As Peter moves and Felix retaliates.

They're not kissing, and it takes Felix a moment to realize it, and Peter might be so rapt he might not notice at all. Their mouths rest against the other, open and needy, but there's no pressure, no tongue, no seduction.

Just breath. Just a matching pulse. Just the feeling of a boiling fever building up within their veins. Just base vital signs to remind them both that they're alive.

He's blown up and away, presses up to Felix, who's hard and flushed and makes noises. It's strangled in a mix of moaning and whining.

And Peter wants this, and he needs this, and he rakes his hands on Felix's chest. Skin scrapes up under his nails as another form of intimacy.

It's been so fucking long since the've done this. But he's got magic on his side, so anything that might need compensation fell down below the limbic system. Which might be for the best, because Peter doesn't want to take the time to reach the higher areas of his brain, not right now.

He shudders when Felix wraps his hand around his cock. Starts to slide and steeple his fingers. Brushing underneath loose skin, making Peter arch and sigh, vocalizing a small warbling moan.

Felix adjusts, a small shift. Peter's face scrunches in, his jaw drops as he's taken in further. There's a pause, but then Peter's clawing at his hair, scraping up his spine, reinventing the countless scars mapping Felix's skin. Scrawling his name all over Felix's long body in feral runes.

Felix shakes and revels in the feeling of Peter riding him. He's tightening and carrying on long strings of sound. One hand presses marks into his hip, the other runs up and down hot twitching skin leaking and spilling down his knuckles.

And they're trying to drown the flood, to scorch the fire, to asphyxiate the noose.

Felix folds in on himself. He sinks lower into the mattress and drivies Peter down to meet his hipbones. Peter arcs and stims as the action builds up faster and faster and harder and more, more, more moremore.

They both cry out, finding the other's mouth and taking each other in, buried and full and condensed.

Thanks to another spell, it's an hour before it ends.

Felix is first, mouthing onto Peter's tongue. His hand jerks as his body roils, pressure relieving deep inside him, shooting out and pulsing through his stomach. He's so overcome in the intensity and ferocity. No articulate syllables come out, he only shouts.

Peter laughs, but just for a moment. It's a faster build up, a warm prickling through every inch of his body. And he's warm and complete. He says the name and he's exposed in the midst of the euphoria.

Once it fades, they come to realize the ragged way they're panting, loud and abrupt. The weight of the world teases just above them. It's threatening to settle in as Peter's drawing shapes in the sticky mess he leaves on Felix's chest. Felix lies down, runs a hand through his hair and stares at the ceiling.

Peter pulls off with a grunt, acute awareness in the hot fluid dripping down his thigh. He takes a surviving scrap of Felix's tunic and wipes it all away before taking a spot beside his boy on the pillow. It's indelicate, but it suffices.

They don't speak, just curl up into the covers. Peter on the right side and Felix on the left.

It's late, the night is at its blackest and will get brighter from here. And they both hope it's transitive.

It's funny how lack of physical contact can change things. How his heartbeat is weaker, everything feels slower, caught in a groggy surrealism. It's a woozy feeling, as though he's had one too many glasses of wine after forgoing supper.

There's one way to correct it, to bring everything to real time. He has no reason for trepidation, no reason to hoard pride, but finds himself tentative as he slides over on the sateen sheets. Felix lifts onto his side, and Peter presses close enough to feel their heartbeat.

The tipsiness fades, but his stomach still feels empty. A moment later memories of the whole night pops and spitfires in his brain. There's a brief moment, a short lapse to draw conclusions. He won't admit it's guilt that he even had to resurrect Felix in the first place.

But he revived him, inverted the fabric of reality on itself. And all because he fucked up and did something he regrets; the one thing he's regretted in hundreds of years.

"What is it?" Felix asks, leaning up onto his elbow, tone edged with panic. Wondering if, perhaps, he'd done something wrong.

Odd thought.

Peter frowns, refuses to think, and sifts his hand through Felix's wiry snarls. He grabs at his hair when he kisses him next, open and careless, and he moves him like a puppeteer. As far as this is concerned, Felix doesn't mind, moves his arms in reaction to Peter's touches, slides on his hands and knees and clings to him.

They part, and Felix gives a tight introspective chortle. His mind's still fuzzy and warm, too caught up in the residual pinpricks under his abdomen to want to kill them by remembering the circumstances.

Peter clicks his tongue, takes Felix's head in again, and sweeps him up and away.

The next thing Peter realizes, he's springing up on an empty mattress.

The curtains are splayed wide open, bringing icy air into the chamber, and the orange and red smears of dawn leak into the room, bathing everything in gold. It gives the illusion it should be warm, but as it is, Peter shivers.

Or, perhaps, that's because the duvet is gone.

Swinging his legs down to the floor, Peter yawns and surveys the chamber. He snaps to his senses when he sees a bundle of the red silk leaning against the rail of the balcony. He pushes himself off the mattress, and tries to ignore the strain in his muscles. A moment more and he finds himself in the doorway and immediately after, standing up against the railing beside Felix. Snow melts against the soles of his bare feet, but he won't allow himself to turn blue.

Felix is wrapped up in the warm blanket, it bunches around his shoulders as he clutches at it. For a moment he doesn't remove his gaze from the black line on the horizon. Everything's surrounded by mountains and white fields, until it brightens and saturates into red, streaking the snow in blood.

Then, he tilts towards Peter. "Don't you want to cover up?'

Peter finds it easy, for what feels like the first time in the past month, to leave his words uncalculated. "Oh whatever will I do if the monkeys see me naked?"

"I'd be more concerned with frostbite."

"Nothing a little magic can't fix."

Felix's smile is tight-lipped and shut, but it's familiar and unintimidating.

Or, at least until it fades.

"What?" Peter turns to face him, one hand bracing himself for something he can't be sure is coming.

"This is complicated as hell." Felix adjusts the finery on his shoulders, slouches to meet Peter on a more even level. He takes his time resting his elbows inches away from Peter's hand.

"As a rule, I don't apologize or feel sorry or any of it," Peter begins, forced easiness in his cadence. "But you know how I feel about rules."

With the morning comes clarity, Felix thinks. And despite the betrayals, and the knowledge of some sort of insane True Love magic keeping him put, he can't be bothered to feel upset about it anymore.

What does it matter he's bound to Peter? He wouldn't have left in the first place.

What does it matter there's a spell declaring that they love each other? They did before the label weighed them down.

So what does any of it matter? It's all white noise. Just complications.

There's a moment of silence, the warm sunlight turns the sky pink and red, all alight. The freezing night air still nippy but sucumbing to radiation. Peter stifles a shiver.

"Fuck it."

Felix reaches out, hooking Peter behind the neck, and presses their lips together, a quick, clean motion. A mutual thought neither one of them have the audacity to articulate. The apology and acceptance thereof would have been far too sweet to put into words for either of their comfort.

But it works.

Even so, they'd have to be stupid not to notice the shift. The way Peter's starved for touch in a way he hasn't felt in years. And the feeling inside of him is intense, curling against his insides, and in the moment he looks Felix in the eye, he can tell it's shared.

Peter steps forward and gestures to the cocoon of red satin Felix has wrapped about him. "I'm cold. Let me in."

There's an air of I told you so to Felix's expression. Nevertheless, he wraps his arms around Peter's shoulders and closes the duvet around them. It's an entr'acte in the snow-birdsong and dancing snowflakes as the sky lightens, switching from red to blue.

Never one for sentimentality, Peter smirks, tightens his fist around the material before yanking it away. He's all grins as Felix stumbles and tries to grapple with the material as Peter wears the duvet as though it were some sort of bizarre cape.

A sincerity that's a little frightening glides over Peter's face before he turns impish. He's turning around to give no indication he had any interest in sharing the duvet. Felix has kept his fist on the border and grabs at it.

They're adversaries for a moment, tugging on opposite ends of the cover. Felix has his strength, and after a short amount of time, gets the upper hand. On the third attempt, the duvet gives and Peter lurches forward.

He trips over his feet, though it is intentional. Now he's swinging the material over Felix's shoulders in a manner choreographed to look accidental.

It's impossible to say who moves first, perhaps they're moving together. Peter won't ascend onto his toes, however, and he pulls Felix down, nosing into the hollow by his collarbone.

Felix maneuvers Peter's face up, bites his lips until they're dotted in pins and needles. He decides damn the duvet in order to put his hands on him in more places.

Peter laughs and nestles away. Words pass, nothing more than the bombast Felix claimed wouldn't fix anything. But soon enough he's biting down on swollen lips. Peter jumps up, hitching his legs around Felix's hips to cross them by his thighs, and they stumble into the threshold, curtains billowing shut behind them.

When Felix drops Peter onto the mattress, he rebounds off and into the bedpost. He uses the rebound to turn the spread of his limbs into a coincidence. An easier method to splay his thighs and try to find traction on the satin for his feet.

Felix stands, fists balled up on the leftover sheets, hair mussed in hundreds of different directions. Every bit of him races in a never ending loop up and around Peter's body. If it were possible with someone like Peter Pan, it might look like he wants to take him apart.

And the thought, Peter realizes, is somehow alluring.

He darts to his knees and presses an open kiss to the pulsing vein in Felix's neck. His fingers steeple and press in some sort of cypher up his arms, spine, shoulders. A hand wrapped in the feathers hanging by Felix's ear, and Peter tugs in a sort of painful command to join him. Peter reclines, ankle twitching in the air as though it's beckoning him closer.

Despite his height, Felix hoists himself up onto the high bed and scrapes his nails up the side of Peter's leg. Peter slides on the slippery surface of fitted sheets, coming to rest with the soft skin on the tops of his thighs bracketing Felix's hips. The heat and dampness inside his cock radiating to the bottom of his thighs.

And Peter laughs, hot and mad; Felix is teetering on the timbre of the sound.

Ignoring the heaviness in both of their chests, Felix steals that secret smile and skims the flat of his palm down his calf. Peter's got one leg in the air and the other twitching amongst the bedclothes over the flatness of Felix's hip. His shoulders feel heavy in the pillows. It isn't a comfortable position, but he snatches Felix's vacant wrist and prompts him to peel down his foreskin with his thumb.

Peter sighs and arcs into Felix's touches. He reciprocates with fleeting fingertips on his arms, with slow rutting against him. With a noise sounding like gratitude in the mewls and gruff moans.

Felix's tongue scrapes against the bottom of his heel. He laughs when the action repeated on the softer skin in the arch of Peter's foot makes his toes curl and his leg bend in on itself. Felix's hand worms in between the compression of Peter's thigh and calf. It's hot and growing sticky with sweat.

"I don't think you're cold anymore."

"Not yet," Peter's voice always sounds matter-of-fact. "But getting warmer."

"Is it my job," Felix all but hums, large battle-roughed hands hiking up Peter's ribs and circling low on his belly but not low enough. "To be your blanket?"

"I was thinking something more…" He pauses, waits a second for emphasis. The words are white noise next to the screaming way his body is straining against Felix, but he continues. "Intimate. But if you'd rather lie idle."

"When have you known me to lie idle?"

"Well, right now for-"

There's a jolt and, despite the interruption, Peter slides up on the bed as Felix pushes his way in.

Felix's hands are straining and flexed. He's bent on friction and marking. He's culling Peter in, quick, rough, touch-and-go movements. And Felix keens to the feeling, to the imagery, to the sounds. Peter's pent up energy, tight and hot and encompassing and the axis of the whole world.

They're shaking, the world is doubling, and there's nothing on Peter's mind but, That, just that. There you go. You know how I like it. Harder now. More, more, more, more. Words, however, aren't feasible, and strings of unintelligible sounds have to suffice.

Felix is somewhere between rock and water. The oxymoron is defined by the way he melts and pushes. In the way he refuses to look at anything but open gasping mouth below him. The way Peter arches against the sheets with his shoulders.

Peter is steepling in his spine, darting up like tower. His heartbeat suffices as a bells' tremendous clanging inside. And Felix is lauding worship and ritualistic adoration.

When Peter starts to stim and pulse, chewing a chunk from his own tongue, Felix gives a pause, but then scoops the boy up. Peter feels as though all his bones have melted into something viscous and he's surprised Felix has the strength to jostle him up.

"Shit!" Peter's blinded, though, after the jolt. The sun has risen in the sky, and found the perfect place to slip into his line of sight. Rays overpowering and swarming his vision. He curses and ducks into the hollow of Felix's shoulder, blinking away the pricks of light dotting his vision.

Peter can hear the smirk on Felix's face. "That made you scream louder than I could."

There's nothing else to do: they laugh. Both of them.

It's been three hundred years, and because Peter's magic prevents mishaps, it's the first time they've laughed like this. Because of the fault in something out of their control, an awkward halt in the passion that does nothing but destroy the mood.

Or, if not destroy it, shifts the mood.

Because now Felix is pressing against his mouth, drinking him in with a closed mouth and pulling without force. A dozen kisses without dual intention. It's nothing more than the well-known urge to keep his mouth busy.

His hands slide up and down his ribs, his legs, and before Peter knows what he's doing he deflates into a pile of pillows. The dawn's turned blue in his peripheral. It darkens and twists into black shadows when Felix ghosts his mouth up the trails of beading sweat by his ribcage and collarbone.

"Takes a lot to get you out of the mood, doesn't it?" Peter teases at the same time his tongue draws a small circle just over his bottom lip.

"Actually it's nice to see you like this in sunlight again." Felix's voice is downplayed, flatlined by his own natural temperament. Although the statement reeks of sentiment, it isn't as grating as it might be otherwise.

And so Peter hooks his ankles around Felix's ribcage and latches onto his neck. He's biting and sucking so hard it feels like it's coming from his spine.

Felix sighs, draws out the noise as long as he can. He feels Peter's breath shift into a laugh on his neck, until he can feel his tongue dampening the bruise.

He pushes on his hands, casting a shadow over Peter in the chilled morning light. There's a tickle under his skin and he uses both hands to push on the softer skin inside Peter's thighs to spread him wider.

"What do you want, then?" Peter's voice riding a faultline between impatience and seduction.

Felix allows his eyes to speak for him, darkening and growing, his thumb between his lips. He takes his time in laving his tongue over the skin. Soon it's made soft and leaves a small string of saliva behind as he moves his hand down over Peter.

The magical boy shudders as Felix's thumb skims and presses down. The hand's articulating and circling around and bring him to full hardness. Peter arcs and tries not to let his toes curl when Felix starts to draw his palm in harsh patterns. He dips underneath the foreskin, sighing down the noises Peter's kettling out in obscene strings.

It feels like forever to Peter. It's forever of Felix drawing along, sending shivers as he treads the pads of his fingertip. Of the delicious pains of nails pulling excess skin down his blood-swollen cock. Forever of reaching out snatching Felix's hair, eliciting sharp hisses and twitches into his hand.

Peter looks as though he'll throw a fit in two seconds. Rocketing his hips up towards Felix as he moves in such drunken slow motion they both have to take a moment to recall if this is quite real.

They quiver. The ache from unsuspecting stimulation to intimate muscles. The rough fantastic sequence of Felix pumping into Peter, and they're hissing.

Felix moves with a languid delayed presence. It's as commanding and impressive as his gait, specific and thought-out as his cadence. Raw and thorough as two bodies dripping in sweat and thick spurts of precome, driven heavy in magic. In pure intoxication from the knowledge. Neither of them can express in anything restrained.

Peter presses his thighs against Felix's ribs. He's grinding in an effort to conduct Felix's endeavor to consume him whole. They continue even as the sky warms and grows muggy and hot. Peter's skates into a series of peaks. Head bent up, chest pointing to the sky as his hips spasm and drive.

And he- Peter Pan - is letting himself get completely fucked.

Fucked into the bed. A note sustaining for ages - in, in, in - until he's dizzy. Felix catches, purrs, and he holds. He withdraws each time, slow, developing a bitter jealousy over the part of him still inside. The desire to barrel and rock and bruise apparent, but whenever Peter urges for a quicker pace, he slows down more.

It's infuriating for the moment it lasts.

But it's all eclipsed by the next movement. Lazy and slow, as though they have all the time in the world.

It's all sedated kisses and delayed twists of tongue. It's latent sliding hands might be perceived as delicate if not for the obvious intention behind it.

They're both exhausted. Slipping into an unimaginitive pattern of slow thrusts and low muted responses. Of profanities slurred so the intended explicative muddles beyond recognition.

Peter's swept up then, deviating the slow and the lazy, and white-hot shivers blanketing everything. His vision's dotted and swayed under the intensity flooding every inch of him. He's finding release in the jerking mess he's spilling against Felix's stomach. He stops and teeters on the edge of consciousness, bright sunlight on the verge of blacking out.

He can feel the open kiss Felix slavs onto his neck until the feeling fades. All sloppy tongue and greedy lips. It's as though he's trying to hoard Peter's orgasm for himself, as though that's the part he vies for.

Watching Peter come undone is what Felix looks forward to. This is both the most rewarding and most jarring part in having sex with him.

But until he's drained, Peter can't bring himself to care.

And afterwards, it's all Felix. Peter worms his way into his Boy's mouth. He's slopping their tongues together for the pattering shiver it sends through their spinal cords. An extra spell for flexibility and Peter can crook a finger inside him. The pace increases and Felix sinks into Peter's exhausted heat.

Felix's spent now, just before in the soreness inside Peter would have turned to pain. He comes on a breath of Peter's name, a final push driving itself buried and snug, the bone of Felix's hip meeting the muscle on Peter's ass.

He pulls out for longer than he needs to, and Peter's sleepy groan drawls through the room.

"Do that again." Felix's strained voice can make the request. But it's fogged between the slew of slow kisses he places across Peter's lips, chin, the vein in his neck.

"Don't get entitled," Peter smirks through a heaving chest. He has to pause when Felix's tongue traces the flat of his chest. As he licks the contours of his abdomen. Lips close over the aching tip of his exhausted cock. "Fe-You know you've got to-oh, fu-work for it."

"I intend to."

Felix snickers into the jut of Peter's hip before nosing further. He tongues the slope of Peter's thigh and he grins at the gasp. A short vocalization away from a moan as he feels the salty tang of his own come slide down his throat.

There's teeth, benign nibbling. Felix maneuvers Peter's thighs over his shoulders and planes down.

Peter goes rigid when Felix's tongue slides inside him. It's soft, hoping to relieve the ache in his wrought and battered muscles. Dabbing them with wetness and soothing swipes. Clearing and devouring physical evidence from the night.

He melts thereafter. He's basking in the flickers and wet compression of muscles coaxed into submission and repair after such amazing overuse.

By the time Felix's kisses return to his thighs, Peter is wrecked.

Felix relaxes between Peter's knees. Despite lack of traction from sweat, Peter hauls him up beside him on the bed by the forearms. Claiming his mouth open and needy, overexcited heartbeat, trickling sweat, and familiarity.

Peter releases a spell, cleaning bedclothes and cooling their skin as they lie beside one another. Their lungs regulate as the magic controls their sweat, but perhaps they miss the lag as their heartbeats descend.

Felix gives him a lazy smile. "Good to be back."

Peter considers sitting up, but decides he'd rather savor the ache before magic rips it all away. Instead, he lolls onto his side. "You've been back."

"Not like this," Felix leans in and nibbles on Peter's ear for a moment before he's swatted away. "It's been too long."

"It's been, at most, a year."

"Too long, like I said."

And Peter laughs, propping himself up onto his elbows. "Well let's not go so long without it again, shall we?"