"Pan," one of the Lost Boys called him – he didn't remember his name but he was one of the oldest. "Felix left the camp hours ago to find you but he hasn't returned yet," he informed his leader, somewhat hesitantly, as if he was scared to be punished for Felix's absence even though he had nothing to do with it.
Ah right, Felix, Pan almost had almost forgotten about him. He was still trapped in the tree Pan put him into. With a quick wave of the hand Pan released his hold on the magical tree, leaving it to Felix to get out all by himself.
"He'll come back soon enough," Pan told the Lost Boy and dismissed him. The boy stayed where he was, looking awkward and unsure of what to say what he obvious came to tell him. "Spit it out boy, I don't have all night."
"It's the Shadow, it brought new people," he admitted, shaking slightly when Pan walked up to him, standing too close for the young boy's nerves.
"What people? Do you mean the Shadow brought more than one boy?" Peter asked, growing impatient with the boy and his slowness in providing a clear explanation.
What in heaven could be so out of the ordinary and important that Pan couldn't even take a few hours off and be by himself? What prompted his second in command to seek him out in the forest, knowing that he would be punished for it? He was tired of being surrounded by a bunch of helpless, incompetent boys. Mercy. He couldn't stop thinking about Mercy whenever someone disappointed him, because he knew that he wouldn't have to worry about these kinds of the things if she were still around. Unfortunately for him that was out of the question. He had come to terms with the fact that she would never come back to him after the first six decades of her throwing away his flowers. Which raised the question of why he kept sending them to her. He pushed it to the back of his mind and focused on the task at hand.
"You should come see for yourself," the boy stuttered out, only then realizing he had almost given a direct order to his leader.
To avoid losing anymore time Pan ignored the boy's tongue slip and followed him outside of his shack. He led him to the cages to his surprise.
"Why would you imprison the newcomers? Who's responsible for that?" Pan barked at the boy on his way there, taking great pleasure in seeing fear appear on his juvenile features.
They all shared looks and remained quiet. Pan guessed it must have been Felix, none of them were confident enough to take decisions without consulting Pan first. Peter understood why they were in cages as soon as he saw them though.
Cursing under his breath, Pan ran a hand through his hair and kicked one of the nearby empty cages out of frustration. How long had it been since the Shadow brought those people here? How dumb was Felix for not coming right away and tell him? How dumb was he for not listening to his friend when he told him something was wrong?
"Everybody leave," Peter said calmly but sternly. "Now!" He shouted when he realized his Lost Boys stared at him with googly eyes instead of obeying.
They dashed away, returning to their previous activities as if nothing was going on while Pan walked closer to the cages and knelt down to be at eye level with his visitors.
"Names," Pan snapped at them and they yelped and shivered under his somber gaze. Something dark twinkled in his eyes and they must have seen it because they answered right away.
"John," the first one said.
"Michael," the other one told him, holding onto his brother.
"We're the Darlings, where are we? Where are our parents? Why did you take us?" The third one began to ask question after question, gripping the bars of the cage with her shaking hands. Pan's attention shifted to the furious eyes staring at him with contempt.
"Hello there," he said and everyone shivered in fear. "What are you lovely doing here? Surely the Shadow made a mistake, girls don't belong here."
"I don't know what you mean, I belong with my family!" She replied stubbornly, refusing to look away from Peter's inquisitive eyes. "Release us! Our parents will worry if we don't go back home!"
"I don't see how this is relevant to me," Peter snarled. "The grow ups' concerns are the least of mine."
"What do you want from us?" She asked, her voice beginning to quiver though there was determination in her sparkling eyes.
She was the oldest, that much was obvious to Peter. For a second he thought that she reminded him of Mercy but he saw the fire in her eyes diminish by the second. It wouldn't be long before she completely subdued and stopped resisting Peter's threats and intimidation techniques.
Mercy would never. She never has, in all the years he kept her close and tested her limits. But her flame only grew in intensity the more time she spent with him. He shook the thought away.
"I want nothing to do with you, silly little girl," Peter laughed in disdain, making her flinch and back away a little. "I have no use for you. Your brothers will stay with me, you can go back to your home and your parents you care so much about."
Peter was taken aback by the vehement protesting that came from the cage next to the girl's when the threatened to separate the siblings. The Lost Boys have had the good idea to lock the girl in another cage so she wasn't with her brothers. John and Michael shook the bars of the cage and shouted all kinds of protests upon hearing that Peter projected to keep them prisoner here.
"Why do you want my brothers? What have we done to you?" The girl wailed. Her defined brown curls bounced with every movement of her head, and the ribbon holding her hair back started to loosen up. She liked like a doll. Fragile. Breakable.
"I need little soldiers for my army and you don't make the cut, nothing personal here, you are simply useless to me."
"We will never be your soldiers!" The oldest boy told him, displaying more assertiveness in this one daring sentence than his sister had during their entire exchange.
"You can't separate us! We'll never obey you! Leave us alone!" The other one added, making Peter smirk at how feisty they all were. He had noticed over the years that the children tended to be bolder when they weren't alone. One more reason to separate them – divide to conquer.
Peter opened his palm and made a dagger appear there, causing the younger brother to gasp in amazement while his two siblings trembled in fear. Before any one of them had a chance to say something, Peter opened the girl' cage in a snap of his fingers and dragged her out, only to hold the weapon up to her throat, earning a round of cries from the three children.
"What if I don't leave you a choice?" He asked the two boys. "Maybe I won't send her home, maybe I'd rather slit her throat, less work and more fun for me this way."
"Monster!" She cried out.
"No, no, please! Wendy did nothing wrong!" John started crying silently.
Pan could feel the girl - Wendy, what a lovely name – shake in his arms as he held her tight so she would escape from his grasp.
"Let me go!" She tried to say between two sobs. "Please!"
Mercy never begs.
"We'll do what you say, just please don't hurt her!" Michael promised, still holding his brother close.
Mercy never gives in.
"Quiet!" He barked at them, prompting a collective whimper followed by silence. The arm he placed around Wendy's shoulders to keep her pressed to his chest felt wet and he realized heavy tears fell from her eyes.
Mercy never cries like a helpless little thing when he showed her the rough side of the hand. She took it as a challenge and doubled her efforts to exceed his expectations.
But Mercy hated him and this pathetic, whimpering little thing crying in his arms was the closest thing to his Mercy he would get. His hand fell down his side and Wendy took this opportunity to dive down and return to her cage, trying to reach out to her brothers through the bars.
Pan vanished, leaving the Darlings to their moment. What was worth his immortal life without Mercy? Even worse, knowing that she hated him?
000
Her throat was sore and her eyes dry – Mercy wasn't much of a crier, but this time she felt it was justified. She had undergone quite an amount of physical torture ever since she got here, whether it be from Peter and the Lost Boys, or from their enemies, but it had only served to toughen her up, nothing she couldn't take. What Peter did to her with his ceaseless attempts to draw her back to him was a whole other level of cruelty. He aimed where it hurt, and she hated him for doing this to her, but most of all she hated him for having such power over her.
She knew the girls were doing all right so she didn't return to camp yet. Not taking the risk of her girls seeing the tears in her eyes. Mercy got lost in the forest – figuratively that is, she could not get lost even if she walked through the heavy jungle blindfolded. Hundreds years of exploring Neverland had done this to her.
Luckily for her the Lost Boys' camp was at a three days journey so she could wander about aimlessly without any danger of bumping into anyone – after the last few hours of turmoil, who knew what kind of hectic state the boys were in? Peter's foul mood never allowed any room for leisure, he had everyone work tirelessly until they were too exhausted to even speak.
Sometimes she wondered if she was really that different from him. Their methods weren't quite the same but in the end they were feared by their peers more than they were respected. Mercy wouldn't bat an eyelash if one day her girls decided to rebel – no doubt being led by Sybil who will soon grow fed up with being constantly reprimanded and assigned on night watch.
Peter Pan had broken her in a way that could not be healed by any magic. Over the first hundred years she spent on the island, she thought he tried to break her spirit to make her malleable, easier to control, even at the risk of diminishing her abilities. But she was wrong. Instead, she gave him her trust, she put her life in his hands, wrongly thinking that he cared about her and wouldn't mishandle it.
No use in saying that she was proven wrong in the harshest manner. The memory stung like a dart to her heart. As she stumbled around, barely looking where she was going, Mercy swallowed back a new set of tears, feeling the gigantic knot in her throat swell even more. Betrayal tasted like copper and rusted iron.
If it weren't for the muffled noised she heard right then, Mercy might have continued to walk farther and farther. Now that she thought of it, she might not be as far as she thought from the Lost Boys' camp since she used magic get away from the field of flowers.
"Who is there?" She asked, her voice sounding exhausted, the weight of her five hundred years of existence heavy on her shoulders this particular day. "I'm not here to play cat and mouse, show yourself or get away from me!"
The noise ceased for a minute before resuming even louder than the first time. She could not see anything around her yet the noise, as stifled as it sounded, came from somewhere close, very close. Finally, Mercy walked past one peculiar looking tree and that was when she figured it out. The noise came from inside the tree, as if something was trying to come out of it.
With a single sharp movement of her hand Mercy destroyed the tree's bark to reveal whatever was inside and trying to escape. She had to take a few steps back when a tall blond boy in poor condition fell out of the tree, collapsing on the ground, breathing heavily.
"Felix."
Mercy heard her voice say his name without fully realizing she was the one articulating it. How long had it been since she last saw his scarred face? She remembered the first time her girls meddled with the Lost Boys and she saw Felix's disfigured face, swollen and red from the fresh wound that barred his face. He never told her where it came from but Mercy had her own theory.
He was coughing and struggling to catch his breath. Still on all fours on the ground, he looked like he came straight out of a nightmare.
"I don't need to ask who put you in that tree, or why," she snickered, sounding a lot more bitter than she would have liked.
She herself must look quite different from the last time they met. She knew she was thinner in the face, paler, not like someone who hadn't had a sunbath in a long time , but like someone who lived in the shadows and whose life has been deserted by light and happiness. Mercy was the ghost of herself and she blamed Pan for this. As much as she wanted to take her life into her own hands and move on from what Peter did to her, she could not. It was too hard.
"Mercy, what a pleasure," Felix commented ironically as soon as he recovered his voice. She had almost forgotten how disdainful he sounded. "As a matter of a fact Pan put me in a tree because of you."
She didn't see that coming, however Felix saw her fist coming towards his face and he did nothing to stop her from hitting him. He knew better. If Mercy didn't get her way, she would try another. If he didn't let her vent with her fists, she would use magic against him – Pan rubbed off on her more than she would like to admit, there was nothing new here, Felix came to this conclusion in the early days when Mercy and Pan were still on the same side.
"He still cannot bear the mention of your name," Felix taunted her, deliberately pushing Mercy's buttons. "I wonder if it's the same for you..."
He reached out to touch her but she swatted his hand away. He was trying to make her mad, make her lose her cool. He was very good at being an annoying bastard, always had.
"Peter's name has no place being mentioned in my camp, unless I feel the need to remind the Lost Girls how much of a menace he is. Yours on the other hand comes up quite often, when Sybil and her friends tell the others how they kicked your ass again and again – it makes a good campfire story."
"Don't-"
Mercy's hand flew up and silenced Felix.
"I will not suffer to listen to your whining any longer. If you want to use my name as an excuse to infuriate Pan, do as you please, I don't care." By now she had dropped the act and merely glared his way with her dead, shallow eyes. "But I am no longer the same as when we met, Felix. If you defy me, I will not hesitate as I did in the old times. And remember... I can put you back in a tree just as easily as I freed you."
Before he could process what she just told him and utter another provocative sentence, Mercy turned around and grabbed a branch, ripping it off a tree. The piece of wood transformed in her hand, taking a slightly pointier shape, the tip forming an arrow.
"My greetings to Pan. Tell him I got his message and that there's a forest fire in the meadow."
Using all of her strength, Mercy threw it at Felix whose hands flew up to protect his face. He closed his eyes and felt himself hitting the tree behind him. The arrow hit his collar and pinned him to the tree.
When he opened his eyes, he was not in the forest anymore. Instead he found himself pinning against the tree holding Pan's shack, in the middle of the camp, surrounded by wide-eyed Lost Boys staring in shock.
000
"Try this," Peter instructed, showing her the gesture again and before Mercy's eyes he changed the wooden stick he held in his hand in a real steel sword, sharp enough to cut a man in half. He changed in back so Mercy could try.
"I have been trying to change little pieces of wood in all kinds of objects for weeks, and all I managed to do is set fire to one of them. What makes you think I have a chance with an entire sword?"
"This is different," he told her, walking around her like he always did when he was in a philosophizing mood. "It's not just any object, it's a weapon. It's one of the first and only things the Lost Boys can turn, do you know why?"
Mercy shook her head – obviously she did not know, Peter only asked for rhetorical effect.
"Because it requires very basic emotions – fear, anger, a strong desire to survive. It's easy, you'll see," he promised, wrapping an arm around Mercy and holding onto the stick, guiding her movements. "No one here feels things as profoundly as you do. You're angry, I can feel it. Use that, canalize it, let it flow out of you in form of magic."
"The whole point of anger is to be out of one's control, it just comes out, I can't make it happen," Mercy argued, shaking off Pan's touch. "How do you do it?"
"Me?" He asked, a bit stunned that she would even ask him that question. They didn't play in the same league, they couldn't compare methods. "I do it like I breathe, my dear. It comes naturally."
"Quit being arrogant and cocky, I'm asking for advice here so don't make me regret it," Mercy scoffed, all the while focusing on her bloody stick. It wavered, as if the light played tricks on her minds, distorting reality. But it stayed the same.
"I just wish for it to happen and it does. I don't need to think about it, it just happens. Almost as if it knew what I wanted before me," Pan eventually admitted, reluctantly giving her this personal piece of information.
"This doesn't help!" Mercy complained, lowering her stick. "It's stupid, just admit that you were wrong!"
"Peter Pan does not mak-"
"Don't give me another of your dumb sayings that begin with 'Peter Pan does not', or else you'll have to worry about how much damage I can do with just a wood stick, trust me I don't need a sword to beat your sorry ass!" She threatened.
"My, my, little tiger has claws!" Peter laughed. "What has gotten into you? Are you giving up already? Poor, helpless Mercy can't do a simple magic trick so she throws a fit?" He took a step towards her, expected her to cower away from him but she stood firm on her ground.
"I see what you're trying to do," she said with a triumphant grin. "You want to make me mad, you think I'm not angry enough to turn this into a damn sword."
"You see right through me, dear."
"The anger is not the issue, I have plenty. The problem is that I don't see the point. I don't need the sword right now," she explained. "When the Lost Boys morph a stick into a blade it's because they are fighting, they wouldn't be able to do it if you asked them to do it out of the blue."
"Perhaps," Peter conceded. "But you are not a Lost Boy, you are my precious Mercy. I don't make mistakes, you do have the gift of magic." He smirked, once again displaying the twisted, sick smile that was his signature, the very smile that had made Mercy shiver in her blouse the night they first met in the Enchanted Forest. The devious Pied Piper smile that betrayed his ill intentions towards the transfixed children. He leaned in towards her, his mouth so close her Mercy's ear that she could feel his warm breath brush her cheek – triggering shivers again, but of another nature. "You're just too scared to use it."
And with that, Pan vanished, leaving Mercy in a part of the island she did not know. He did that sometimes when she did not do good enough during their training sessions,he left her someplace she didn't know and she had to navigate her way back to camp, no matter how long it took her. This time her felt fury curse through her veins, rising up inside her like steam.
She could still see Peter's green eyes, his crooked smile teasing her, provoking her. Mercy, as aware as she was of the fact that he toyed with her, couldn't repress the feeling in her stomach, a distinctly different feeling from the one she had when the other boys teased her. She hated it. She despised it. She was frustrated with herself and needed to bash something in to vent before heading back to camp – wherever the hell it was.
In a fit of sheer rage, Mercy threw the stick to the tree in front of her with a scream of fury. To her utter bewilderment an ax, and not a stick, was buried in the bark of the tree. And somewhere in the distance she heard a faint laughter.
000
The air just above Mercy's open palm sizzled faintly, producing a brief spark, gone so quickly she couldn't tell if it was real or if her mind made it up after hours of intense concentration. Her hand was cold, her hair wet, her entire body trembled – she had been standing alone by the cliff for hours now, trying to use magic like Pan taught her.
She had to give him credit for not telling her 'I told you so' when she finally managed to turn her stick into a weapon. It was probably wise of him, she would have put this new skill to use by doing to him what she did to the tree.
"You'll pop a vein," Peter commented, his voice coming from behind her. "It's not something you can force."
"That's not what you were saying when you wanted me to change wood into a sword," she replied, still not breaking eye contact with her hand.
"Looking at it won't do any good either," he continued, ignoring her last statement. "Do you ever see me looking at my hand when I make something appear?"
"You said it yourself, Pan!" Mercy yelled back, lowering her hand. "You play with the big boys, I'm just a beginner, there's no comparing us."
"You twist around everything I say to fit your own purpose," Peter observed. He gave her a once-over, taking in her pitiful appearance. A wave of the hand later Mercy was as good as new, warm and dry. "Admirable. But I'd rather you don't use this skill against me."
"Are you going to help me or did you come all the way here to tell me how much of a failure I am?"
"Here," Pan sighed and walked closer to Mercy. When he was right behind her, he reached for her hand, placing his opened one right under hers and holding it open. "Don't force it, relax and let it flow. Magic is already there, in you." Her capacity to focus was greatly altered by Pan's proximity. He was practically whispering in her ear at this point and Mercy could only focus on his voice, not on what he said. "I can sense it, feel in curse through your body. Right now it's diffuse, like an aura around you. You need to find a way to canalize it, direct it to serve one specific purpose."
Mercy gasped when a blue flame materialized in her palm; her first instinct was to close it, shake off the fire that could potentially hurt her, but Peter held it open.
"You fear it," he said. "Don't. Your own magic cannot hurt you."
"This is... me?" She asked in a hushed tone. She was mesmerized, unable to take her eyes off the dancing flame. It was like a living thing.
"I'm the one creating the flame but I'm using your magic to do it," Peter explained.
He was simply too close. Mercy's back was pressed to his chest, she could feel it rise with every breath he drew. The amount of effort it took her not to lean back into him was tremendous.
"Feel it. Like a river inside you. Redirect its course."
His voice was calm and soothing, miles away from the usual bossy tone and his devious smirk was gone, Mercy sensed it. His directions helped her as much as the hypnotic sound of his voice uttering in her ear. His hand slowly let go of hers and the flame died down, not entirely, but it was barely visible.
"You're staring at it again," Peter said. "Close your eyes."
Mercy did as instructed, surprising herself for obeying. It must have been years since her first encounter with Pan, years of tough physical training during which she stood her ground and resisted him in every possible way.
For a while she didn't feel a thing, simply standing there with her eyes closed, Pan holding her shoulders and whispering encouragement in her ear, her palm turned towards the sky. Mercy focused on feeling rather than forcing, like Pan said. She waited until she could feel the magic run through her veins before attempting to direct it. Her palm remained open and cold, she thought she wasn't doing anything when suddenly-
"Open your eyes Mercy," Peter told her.
But what really woke her up from her trance was Pan detaching his body from her back. Her eyes snapped open and what she saw took her breath away.
"I knew you had it in you," Peter told her, standing next to her now.
Mercy had to forcefully remove her eyes from the beauty floating above her palm. There, right in her hand, was a magnificent, glowing, blue flower, and yet all her attention was directed at Peter's proud, glimmering, green eyes. Without flinching, Peter grabbed the flower from her and tucked it in her hair. Meanwhile Mercy's heart tried to hammer its way out of her chest as she realized just how much she had wanted this – Peter, smiling genuinely for her; Peter being proud of her; Peter showing he was human after all, and all because of one, little flower.