He had given her space – more than he would have liked, and more than she could have hoped for. He had given her time, too, although each second was torture. He gave her everything she needed from the moment she left him to live on the opposite side of the island, where they wouldn't run into each other by accident.

Peter Pan thought himself quite generous in these aspects, even if Mercy liked to think him incapable of such sentiment. He was surprised too at first, but he had realized that he lost all sense of reason when it came to Mercy. She could have asked him for the moon, and Peter would have snatched it out of the night sky to give her on a silver plate. But Mercy didn't know that, she didn't know how much power she had over him because she was blinded with rage.

It was alright: better she hated him but lived with hope in her heart than the other way around. Or so Peter thought, until recently. It weighed on his heart to know she was so close, so near and yet completely out of his reach. Besides, it had become quite evident that she wasn't happy at all, far from it. Had Peter's self-sacrifice meant nothing? He had begun to feel the effects of such constant suffering, it began to show on the island itself. If Peter hurt, so did Neverland, and the same went the other way around too.

When Mercy had burned the clearing, it had scorched him. And when Peter ached, nature withered, heavy clouds hovered in the sky, and everything went silent. After years and years of self-imposed torture, Peter noticed his magic dwindling in a way that should have scared him.

Except he couldn't find it in himself to be alarmed, because he knew exactly why it happened and how to revert it. He just couldn't do it.

For years upon years, Peter had made sure she didn't lack anything. He tasked the Shadow with bringing her food, supplies, everything she could have use of. At first, she sent it all back, too stubborn to accept charity from the one responsible for her misery. She didn't know it had nothing to do with charity. She just rejected it – she rejected him – over and over again. After a white, reason must have overcome her stubbornness because she stopped returning whatever he sent.

Then, one day, Peter had the Shadow bring her a girl. A companion that would fill her lonely days: Dorothy. She had been so broken at this time, so utterly broken. Peter half expected Mercy to burst into his shack and yell at him for bringing yet another girl, for robbing yet another person of their future by kidnapping them and trapping them in this timeless place. But she didn't.

He tried – and failed – not to read into that. Was she simply too desperate and lonely to give up this chance at having company and possibly a friend? Was she more alike him than she liked to pretend and selfishly decided to accept this new gift? Hadn't she expected more to come after the first one? Or had she, and did she merely decide not to tell him she didn't want more girls?

These questions haunted him, and to this day, he still wondered, sometimes. Mercy was intelligent and knew the consequences of her actions. It was natural for Peter to deduce that she acted on purpose. Maybe she didn't hate him entirely. Was there hope yet?

He was going to find out today.

Setting fire to his peace offering was a step too far, and Peter had reached the limits of both his patience, and his sanity. If he kept what happened – what really happened – to himself any longer, he was going to implode, and Neverland with him. Therefore he had to tell her – tell her everything he put so much effort into hiding from her.

How would Mercy react to the news?

Surely, she would lash out at him and call him a liar and a cheat. He smirked at the sheer thought. He hadn't seen her in so long that he would take anything, anything at all. She would scream and curse him all she wanted for what he cared, as long as he got to see her again.

Would she be different? She had to be, decades of separation must have changed them both in ways they couldn't even understand. But he knew, deep down, that Mercy would always remain true to herself and stay the Mercy he knew and loved.

Destiny proved to be cruel to him, but hadn't he deserved it? You reap what you sew, and Peter spent a lifetime making a lot of people miserable, therefore it was only right that he got a taste of his own medicine. He hadn't measured the full extent of what separation from a loved one did to a person until Mercy walked away from him and he could no longer pretend that she didn't mean anything to him.

For long he had fooled himself into believing she was but a distraction, a way to entertain himself in a land where hardly anything happened unless Peter grew bored and allowed bad things to happen on purpose.

There was no one like his Mercy, and he stood by that. He wanted her, needed her, and he hoped, despite everything, that she might want him back.

That is, if he came clean to her and managed to convince her he was telling the truth. That would be the most difficult part: making her trust him enough to believe what he said to be the truth. She was wary of him – rightfully and annoyingly so.

Once his mind was made, Peter stood up from the rock he had been sitting on for what felt like the last four hours, and he set into motion. He had wasted enough time already, there was no need to wait any longer to cast light on the truth.

He had convinced himself he was doing the right thing, the magnanimous thing, by hiding the harsh truth, but it hadn't turned out for the better like he had hoped. Mercy lived in delusion now, and she didn't even know it. She was set on an unachievable goal, a mirage he never bothered to tell her was just that. It was high time to fix his mistake.

Without further ado, Peter disappeared from his side of the island, and reappeared on her side, not caring what traps he might walk into or what alarms he would raise. He was the king of Neverland, and as such was allowed to go anywhere he wanted, whether or not it pleased its other inhabitants.

000

"Mercy! Mercy!" Nancy screamed and ran through the woods, whipping her face against small branches in her mad dash.

She could feel blood trickle down her cheeks but did not care, she ran like the devil was after her to find Mercy, wherever she had holed herself up. She wasn't in the best of shape these days, much like Winnie who looked like the entire world weighted on her small shoulders, always lost in her thoughts and exhausted.

Mercy had once against retreated inside herself, shutting everybody out and claiming it was for their own good. The young girl knew better than directly go against Mercy's wishes but she hoped whatever was bothering her would soon go away.

In any case, she would have to push it aside for the time being, because there was a more urgent matter to tend to.

"Mercy!"

Nancy stopped running to take a moment to breathe and pay attention to her surroundings. She listened intently to the sounds of the forest to try and see if anything stood out. There was a rustle of leaves and a crash of a branch, but when she looked up it was nothing more than a squirrel.

"What is it?" Mercy's voice suddenly broke Nancy out of her contemplation, startling her.

It was simply impossible to follow Mercy if she didn't want to, she was invisible and made no sound at all.

"You have to come back to camp!" Nancy immediately urged her, grabbing Mercy's wrist and pulling her along, much to her dismay.

Had it been anyone else, Mercy would have yanked her back and given her a good ear-thrashing for the unceremonious way she grabbed her and dragged her away, but it was small, innocent Nancy. Reluctantly, Mercy followed the little girl.

"What's happening, now?" she sighed.

Nancy stopped again, and glanced in horror over her shoulder, looking as though she was about to freak out completely. Mercy was beginning to think she wasn't alarmed enough, and the situation might call for a little more alertness than she first thought.

"It's Pan. He's here."

These words stabbed at Mercy's chest like a knife, and she stared in shock at the little girl, who, try as she might, could not pull Mercy along now that she was frozen in place.

What?

Peter was here? What was he doing in her camp? What did he want from her? Mercy nearly shook free of Nancy's grip and ran in the opposite direction, but she pulled herself together before she gave in to her cowardly instinct.

It was beneath her to run away from him. He was trespassing on her territory, and he should be the one shaking, not her. Did he think there would be no reprisals? She had to make an example of him now, or her girls would lose faith. He should know that, he was the one who taught her that.

Willing her hands to stay still, Mercy gently removed Nancy's fingers from her arm one by one.

"Meet me there," she ordered right before disappearing.

Nancy stared in surprise, looking at the exact spot where Mercy had stood a second before, blinking slowly. She rarely used magic. What was she to deduce from that?

Back at camp, Mercy strutted out of her hut, where she had reappeared, looking as murderous as any leader would be if an enemy invested their camp. She hadn't been ready to see him; Mercy hadn't expected to have to face him today, not even tomorrow, not this decade.

Yet there he stood, arms crossed, looking abnormally smug and relaxed for someone who was surrounded by a circle angry girls holding various weapons which they pointed at him. Dorothy was clearly behind this formation; she stood among them, holding Pan at blade point with her curved sword. Far from worried, Pan let her tilt his chin back and grinned like he had never seen anything quite so amusing.

"You have no business here. Leave," Mercy growled as soon as she stood behind Dorothy.

The girl would not move a muscle until Mercy told her what to do. If she wanted her to slit Pan's throat she would comply, although it was unlikely to kill him, or even spill a drop of his blood, it would be damn satisfying to watch. But Mercy wasn't petty.

"I don't think so," Peter answer, not dropping his smirk and not detaching his gaze from Dorothy's hateful glare. He had to give Mercy that: she did instill a deep rooted hatred towards him in her girls' hearts. They were all ready to attack with a single word from their Queen Bee. However, he uncrossed his arms and raised both hands up in surrender. "I didn't come all this way just to go back. So let's talk now, alright? We've postponed this conversation long enough."

The air was thick with tension, it was hard to breathe in such an oppressing atmosphere, and Mercy felt her head spin. Summoning a great deal of self-control to stay calm, she reminded herself that they had an audience. Her girls stood there, ready to execute her orders on demand, she had to keep up the appearance that she had things under control. She couldn't look weak, even if she wanted nothing more than to drop her mask of mighty leader and act like the girl she was.

She was hurting. Her eyes pricked her but she couldn't cry. A knot formed in her throat but her voice wasn't allowed to crack. Her legs threatened to fail her but she wasn't allowed to collapse.

Pan knew it. That's why he came. That's why he chose to make their reunion public.

"Stand down," Mercy eventually told her girls.

Dorothy looked unsure for a split second, but she obeyed nonetheless, and so did all the other girls. Peter, now free to move around, stretched his neck and finally looked at Mercy.

Her knees nearly buckled.

"I have nothing to say to you," she spat at him – a blatant lie that she told very poorly and earned her a smirk from Pan. He could see right through it, but not her girls who were so used to Mercy's rash honesty.

Shockingly, he didn't denounce her lie in front of her girls, and simply sighed.

"I do. Will you listen?"

No.

She wanted to say no! To scream it in his face! She wanted to claw at him shirt and rip it to shreds, just like he did to her entire being. A throbbing pain awoke at the back of her head as she battled her inner self, deciding whether or not it was a trap, an excuse to lure her out of camp.

Then again, Pan didn't need to resort to such schemes to get what he wanted. She told her girls otherwise but Mercy was no fool and knew that what they had, they owed to him. He consented to let them have half of Neverland, he consented that they live there. No amount of fighting, even from strong, determined girls, could make Peter Pan do something he didn't want to.

So she relented. Mercy's shoulders slumped ever so slightly; Peter was the only one to notice as all attention was on him rather than her. Whatever he had to tell her, whether she would listen to him or not, Mercy couldn't afford to wash her dirty laundry before witnesses.

She wanted to take this somewhere else, somewhere she could be weak and emotional and not disappoint anyone for it. Peter knew the way she thought and didn't need her to say anything in this moment. He simply extended his hand for her to take, and under the wide eyes of every Lost Girl present, Mercy stepped forward and took it.

They vanished.