As the border between forced unconsciousness and sleep quietly slipped past, his mind's labyrinth unraveled itself, and he watched with some interest as it lay stretched before him like a great sleeping serpent. He wondered if it would snap at him if he touched it. One generally does not observe one's own sleep, but on the rare occasions you may just look how everything lays out so neatly on it's side. The most complex knots and puzzles become simple ropes, but when you wake up they will quickly snap back into their frustrating and impenetrable selves. So James watched, as the tunnels and corridors lay straight, the false guide ropes sleeping by the vast body of the labyrinth. As the unraveling reached it's center he watched with some anticipation, wondering what minotaur haunted this place. But as those last walls fell, he saw no minotaur at all. Only a dark, smooth patch of earth.
As he stared, not understanding, the pounding began, the clawing and scritching at the coffin lid. His hands flew to his ears, trying to block the sound. Without the walls of the labyrinth to hide in, there was nothing to protect him, no way to flee from the accursed coffin and it's contents. He could only watch. The soil arched, then caved, and from the dark earth a white hand reached towards the light. Escaping from it's fist flew a handful of that mind which had been hidden from him. He could see them as they flew, shades studded with broken remnants, dark and vanquished agonies that only hinted at the horror buried below. They clustered, and in a singular movement like a swarm of bees rushed at him........
....the labyrinth began to reform......the tunnels and puzzles reworked themselves......
James was waking up.
"--I said to get up, whoreson! Get up! The captain wants to see ya!"
The heel of a boot landed against his chest and knocked the breath out of him. The boot belonged to a great and massive man with skin the color of pen ink, who held in one hand a lantern and the other, a knife.
"You cowardly brit, I said, GET UP!"
The hand with the dagger closed around James's collar and dragged him up to his feet. Then he almost fell, but the knife point pressed under his chest made him quickly regain his balance.
"Come on, filth. Follow me."
He didn't have much of a choice. Glancing about quickly in the lantern light, he saw they were leaving a holding cell somewhere beneath the deck of a ship. _The pirate ship_ he concluded, when he was shoved out into the main hold and saw the unclean mesh of crew. There were islanders, english sailors, black men taken from slave ships, blonde haired germans, cockney rabble, and a scattering of everything else he could think of. But there was one, a glaring man of questionable origin who stood upon a wooden leg. While the others were pushed back nearly to the walls he stood in the center of the hold, watching calmly as James was forced out, and looking over the prisoner as one might examine the flesh in a butcher's window. The black man kicked James's feet out from under him and he sprawled painfully on the boards, on his belly like a worm before the pirate captain.
"What's your name, boy?"
Frightened, and a little confused, he said nothing. After a moment of silence the captain's wooden leg cracked him sharply in the face, spattering blood from his nose on the boards. He pulled back onto his haunches and covered his bleeding nostrils.
"I SAID, what is your name?"
"James." he sputtered, the taste of blood in his mouth. Oh lord, his blood! He thought he was going to be sick.
"Ah. James. Now tell me, you are not a Piccaninny, correct?"
James affirmed that, trying to get the blood out of his senses.
"And yet you were in their village. I WOULD kill you as an ally to the redskins, but I find it odd you did nothing to save them while the others were being slaughtered. Why?"
"I don't know."
In a quick movement the captain grabbed James's hair and pulled his head back as far as it cold go, coppery blood pouring down into his lungs. After a moment of struggle he let go, and James heaved blood and acid onto the floor and lay, coughing horribly.
"If you don't know that, perhaps you can tell us why you were with them in the first place?"
"They took me in.....I was--I was hurt, and they helped me."
"And yet you did not defend them? That sounds to me like an act of cowardice."
"It wasn't!" he insisted. "I wasn't afraid! It...it was....like I wasn't even there.:.."
Those hands reached for him again, and James ducked under, scrabbling backwards and, unfortunately, into the legs of the black pirate. The man scowled and buried just the very tip of the dagger against James's ribs, enough to draw blood but do no real damage. He shouted, and ended up somewhere between the two, frightened and still disoriented.
Barbecue laughed "Squeals like a little pig, he does! Lets hear that again, shall we?"
Barbecue slid his own knife out from the leg of his boot, and slowly advanced on James, grinning at the prospect of new game. Trapped between the captain and the pirates along the wall, he stared upward, and the coffin began to skritch.....the hand rose again and released it's shades, and just as the knife lowered towards the apparently vacant James he grasped something of the shadows, just a glimpse. A face. Burned over the scowl of the captain was a visage dark and familiar, which he didn't quite know, but a face his subconscious mind leaped at. The knife blade glinted in his eye, and in a sudden surge the confused fear was replaced by a desperate and seething hatred. He issued a screech of rage and launched himself at the captain, all logic gone from him into that crypt. Barbecue was taken enough by surprise that James slammed him to the ground, knocking the knife away. Before the other pirates could react to save their captain James had ripped off the wooden leg of the shocked man and slammed it into his skull. Barbecue was stronger, though, and in a moment had James flat on his back, still squirming and screeching in a manner hardly human. Both the men were bleeding now, Barbecue from a split in his scalp and James from his likely broken nose.
And Barbecue began to laugh.
"The little pig has fight in him after all!" he shouted, head split in two by a grin. The dark stuff of James's mind retreated as the captain let him go. The man jumped up, still poised and wary for a fight, but the captain merely stood there grinning.
"I think you may be a madman, boy," Barbecue said cheerfully "But if
you are, your a bloody fantastic one. I think I may have a proposition
for you..."
In the meantime, back at the Piccaninny village, three cold bodies had been lain side by side not far from their places of death. Deer's Sister, Yellow Bird, and Blue Hawk had been found only minutes after they had been slain, for no battle can occur on Neverland without the full knowledge of the ever wary indians. What few could understand was how it had occurred in the first place. Usually, the pirates were so loud and clumsy in their ways that even untrained ears could hear them half way across the forest. But here they had snuck right to the heart of the Piccaninny land, and not a one had heard them until battle cries sounded. Immediately the scattered indians had nearly flown back to the village. But they came too late, either to stop the deaths or intercept the pirates on their flight back to the ship.
As a matter of pride, grown redskins never showed their tears or their sorrows. Watching the scene of their arrival one might think they had no feelings in their whole being. But one would be wrong to think that. After all, they were human, and no human, no matter how strong, is immune to misery.
The redskins burst into the village first as a flood, then a trickle, as those further away caught up. The first to arrive were Great Big Little Panther and Black Fish, propelled by near panic ahead of the others. Those few seconds between their arrival and the next running in could well have been eternity to them. The chief looked about quickly, searching for the thing he hoped he would not find, his daughter, Tiger Lilly. Black Fish did not need to search. Emerging from the tree line he froze, each muscle tight, even breath suspended, such that he might have been a statue. He, too, had come to find what he hoped he would not, but unlike Great Big Little Panther, his hope was false. He had been drawn ahead of the others by the simple fact that he loved a woman, a woman who had married him, and a woman who was to have a child. She lay sprawled in the same hideous pose James had last seen, displayed cruelly in the path that he might not miss it. His eyes widened in an unspeakable pain, though his face betrayed nothing, and as those orbs drew in the information he loathed, time slowed for him. He had an eternity to take in every detail. The wetly glistening innards, the red slowly pooling around her, the way the sun reflected from the enamel of her teeth as she still screamed silently.
Worlds and centuries away, more redskins poured into the clearing. His ears barely received the stifled cry of a woman who kneeled over Blue Hawk's body, suffering the same pain as himself.
But time must pass. Tiger Lilly and Hard To Hit clung to each other while trying to stop their tears, and many of the redskins had taken on a sort of vacant expression, turning their sight inward while they struggled to control their emotions. At the risk of cruelty, one might say the village had become deathly quiet. Not a bird sang, not a mouse rustled the grass.
Finally, the chief said softly "They must be buried. Lets take advantage of the sun while we have it."
But to some of them, the sun was already gone.
To contemplate Neverland is consuming and terrible, yet the fairy Tybalt found himself more and more often drawn to the topic. As he sat on the corner of a shelf in the underground house, watching two Lost Boys pretend to hunt each other, his endlessly turbulent mind saw not children but theory. And theory is something his mind could never let be.
The boys themselves were nothing interesting. The older of the two was called Marsh, who stood tall and thin and was regrettably growing up quite swiftly. In no less than a year he would have obtained a man's stature. Already his voice was beginning to crack. The other boy was rather new, having been sent to Neverland not long after Tybalt himself had found Peter. He was small and round, as young children are, and bore the name of Nibs, though from what that sprung Tybalt knew little. Unlike the other boys, Nibs was too young for any real adventures, and Marsh was too old to want to find them anymore. As such, they had become unlikely friends. Marsh's paternal behaviors were a sad sign of his age. Tybalt was rather fond of the boy, though, and hoped Marsh would survive him, though that only granted him a few more years of life at best.
But these boys, as they played good natured games on the dirt floor of the home, represented not boys but idea, as I have said before. Resting his chin on a delicate hand, Tybalt stared down at them with furrowed brow. And what puzzled him is this: what is a Lost Boy? Of course, simple answers presented themselves. One could easily say they are children who fell out of their prams and were not claimed for a week. And of course, they were. But they could not simply be orphans, could they? Tybalt knew from his own excursions into the world beyond Neverland that many such lost boys existed, but these children were sent to orphanages, not here. Perhaps these children were made of different stuff than regular children. Perhaps these children had originated as dreams, so their abandonment in a land of dream was a perfectly logical step. And yet, like normal children, they aged (excluding Pan, of course, but he was a different matter). So they could not be dreams entirely. What would be the purpose of that constant cycling of arrival and death if the boys were dreams and nothing more? Would it not be easier to simply change the boys instead of killing them to make room for a different one?
But when have dreams been logical?
With that simplest of thoughts Tybalt's entire chain of pondering was cut, and he leaned back against a jug set behind him. There was no point to puzzling over Neverland, because no logical solution could be expected! So must he think illogically? That was difficult. Maybe he would just ask Peter, who was fantastic at matters of the illogical.
Looking down again, Tybalt saw that the game had stopped. Marsh had instead sat Nibs down by the fireplace, and was entertaining him good naturedly with string games. Oh! See that rarest form of patience that glimmered behind his eyes, that proud and content way he viewed the tiny child! Tybalt knew quite suddenly Marsh would not survive the year. He was growing up too fast. He was no longer as heartless and innocent as the other boys, seen not only in his affections but in his mannerisms. In fact, last time they had battled the pirates, Marsh had hesitated to run his sword thru the ribs of a man. Conscience only comes when innocence is disrupted. As did affection.....as did loyalty......
Tybalt felt quite suddenly that he would cry. His dear, heartless Peter would kill this boy for the crime of growing up. He knew that. And he knew it would mean nothing, for in a week he would be forgotten. Peter would forget he had ever been within hours, the other lost boys would follow suite, though a tad slower. Nibs might remember, at least until the others convinced him Marsh was simply a creation of the imaginary. That left Tybalt to remember, and fairies don't live long enough to perpetuate a memory like that.
Sighing heavily, Tybalt set his wings into motion and drifted slowly
downward from the shelf. His light cast shadows that conflicted with
the fire over the boys' faces. Marsh gave the slightest guesture
for Tybalt to settle on his lap, and the fairy happily complied, basking
in the warmth of this serene and quiet moment, if only for a little while.
As the flickering firelight put Tybalt under it's spell he heard as if
at a distance Marsh's warm and grown up laugh.......and in only moments
he had fallen asleep.
In Neverland days and nights flow swiftly by (so that Peter might not be bored with one or the other) and soon James had spent nearly a week on the pirate ship. He still wasn't quite sure what had happened. Barbecue had snatched him away to the captain's quarters and read from a lengthy law code using terms James's hardly understood. What he did catch were the strangest things, outlining behaviors on and off ship, though wherever they would find a port city to practice them in he had no idea. Most of them sounded like good sensible rules, though punishments seemed to have been exaggerated with the intent of causing obedience by fear (or at least, he HOPED they'd been exaggerated). Then the captain had held out something like an ax, probably used in ship repairs, and made James swear on it to abide these rules or suffer said consequences. He thought this was a strange way to ensure a prisoner behaved, since it relied on his honor instead of chains and whips. But he swore it anyway. He assumed, if he did so, he would not be kept in the brig anymore, since half those rules were useless in the context of imprisonment. It was not until he was given assignments and put to work alongside the rest of the crew that he began to question the true meaning of that oath.
He asked the boat swain, that genial irishman named Smee, about it. Or he did eventually, since anyone else he asked fell into a fit of laughter at the question. Smee did not. A little puzzled, Smee explained that oath had been an oath of loyalty to the Jolly Roger and it's crew. Whether or not he knew that at the time of swearing it didn't matter now, for he had already done it, and to go back now would be to go back on his word. Whatever else he might do, James had the oddest feeling he could never do that. But he thought miserably of the redskins, of those dead women, of Blue Hawk, and especially Tiger Lilly.
"You best put those memories behind you now." Smee said, with a smile that would have been mocking on any other face, but was simply kind on his. "You won't see those redskins again except behind drawn bowstrings."
And of course, Smee was right.
It is odd how those memories clung to him, perhaps because they were all he had. After the experience where he had fought with the captain no other flashes of insight had been given by the buried coffin, and frankly, James was glad for it. He did not miss that scritching on the lid, or the terror that that lid might open and he would be consumed by the blackness that dwell within. For the first time since Neverland he held no fear for his own mind. He could wander the empty chambers as he pleased, though there was little to interest him, and the curls of the labyrinth did not all lead to an inevitable horror he must flee from. But there were nights. Fallen asleep in a rough hammock, Starkey's body suspended above him, rough boards and endless sea below, he saw things in his dreams.
He saw that face that had been imposed over the captain's visage, but he saw others, too. He saw a lovely woman with the blackest hair and eyes he'd ever seen against so pale skin. She laughed and twirled her skirts along the edges of his vision, while before him, strange faceless dramas played out. A formless little boy sat on the lap of an old woman, listening to tales of times long ago and places far distant. Two men, drunk mindlessly, sang slurred songs and laughed at each other's clumsiness. But from the old woman's hair a pin was drawn....a decorated stiletto. The black haired woman began to scream, and from nowhere came blood.
He often woke up then. Bolting in his hammock he knocked Starkey's backside and tumbled from the net cradle, waking not only Starkey but anyone who could hear the thud. He would draw his knees to his chest and concentrate on breathing, trying to calm his oddly terrified heart. It rarely succeeded.
One night the dream had ended in a particularly nasty fashion, and an angry and likely bruised Starkey had sent him above deck to sleep. Shaking not with cold but with a fear that would not leave him, he quickly scuttled up the stairs and slipped thru the door, closing it as quietly as possible behind him. The deck sprawled before him, lit brightly by a moon that shone like a silver coin set up among the stars. The sails and rigging were relaxed and calm in the windless dark, providing no movement or distraction for his eyes. The sea had calmed greatly since that day. It now lay as a glossy black mirror beneath the boat. The moon and stars swirled on it's surface, disrupted by the slightest tremors in the water from some distant breeze.
Creeping along the boards, he came to the base of the first mast, and carefully pushed away tangles of rope to clear a place for himself. Strange...he felt that odd sensation one gets when one is watched, the thing that makes your breathing go shallow and your motions pause. But it made no sense. The pirates were all asleep now, and they were too far from land for it to be anything else. He turned his face to search anyway. No one. Wait! At the ship's railings, standing so still he had not seen them, was a man whose outline was swiftly identified by a missing leg.
"Captain!" he sputtered, pulling back a bit. "What are you doing here, I thought....I...."
"Don't ask stupid questions, boy. It is I who should be asking why YOU are above deck."
"Nightmares, sir. They kicked me out..."
Barbecue snorted, and turned back towards the water. For long moments James watched the man's back. He did not seem hostile. James had learned soon after the oath that in some rare moods Barbecue was approachable, and in others, it is best to stay clear of him. He seemed to be the former at the moment. Stepping quietly in case he was mistaken, James crept beside him and followed the man's eyes. Only water.
"...sir?"
Barbecue sighed, and for a moment James thought he had made a mistake interrupting him. But the man did not give any hostile or reprimanding words, simply waved a hand vaguely at the sea. "Look out there, boy. Just look. What do you see?"
"The ocean, sir." he said cautiously, wondering what the captain was heading towards.
"It would seem so, wouldn't it. But this is no ocean any living man has seen. We could sail out forever this way, and Neverland would always be just back beyond the horizon."
James shook his head. "That's impossible. Eventually we'd hit other land."
"No. No, we wouldn't. Whether we sail a day or a decade, here we would always be. Trapped in place, a dream world for all time."
Now James, who had never had any idea of where he was or what was going on in the first place, decided to say nothing. For all he knew the captain was right.
"Peter Pan, that wretched boy, this all centers around him. Did you know that? Peter Pan and Neverland are nearly the same thing. Just neither of them know it."
"Peter Pan?" James's memory lurched. "Oh, I've met him. Back with the redskins. He had a little fairy he called Tybalt."
"He's had a million fairies. They love that boy, for some reason. Perhaps they're part of him, too. Maybe all magic is. What an idea! A simple boy the center of all that is magic." Barbecue noticed James's confused face, and laughed. "Oh, you don't understand. I can't expect you to. Who ever heard of such nonsense? No man sane, that is certain. And yet we've heard it. Maybe we're both mad. Ha! We could both be strapped to walls in a London sanitarium, hallucinating all of this. What a fantastic idea." In the last part the amusement left his voice, and James had the impression it was not merely a random thought that made him say this.
The captain pointed up to the stars. "Look. Do you remember the stars before you came here? No, of course you don't. You don't remember anything. Those aren't the same stars, though. Not nearly the same stars."
At a private thought the captain's lips quirked, but he said nothing else. They stood in silence for a long while.
"Sir, if I may," James began, not sure if he was behaving properly or not. "I should like to go to sleep now...?"
"Ah. Yes. You may go."
Barbecue waved him off with a guesture of the hand, and he quickly made his way back to the mast.
"Wait."
James looked up, wary.
"The boards of the deck are no place for a free man to sleep. There's a couch in my quarters."
An uncertain moment passed as James's mind turned the statement over and pulled it all to pieces. Barbecue rolled his eyes. "Don't overanalyze everything, boy. Get in there before I change my mind and CHAIN you to the mast."
He had no doubt the captain would do so. "Y-yes sir." he stuttered,
and bowed his head with some confusion as he slunk into the captain's quarters.
Dawn came earlier than usual that day (Peter had woken up and become bored with the night long before it was rightly over), and without the clamor of waking pirates there was nothing to bring James to. At approximately mid day his mind slowly crawled from a lazy, dreamless sleep, and he stretched happily on the overstuffed red velvet couch. The feel of the velvet made him open his eyes and a momentary panic overtook him before he remembered where he was. Across the room the elaborate bed of the captain had obviously been slept in, but now all that rested on the rumpled coverlets was a patch of yellow sunlight, fallen from a small window on the side wall. It did not yet occur to him the time, so he took a few moments to enjoy the privacy of the cabin, quite different from the usual noisy crowd of ship life.
Something scraped against the outside wall, and he crept to the window to look out. With a dim horror he saw that the crew was already working (though on what he couldn't be sure) and by the shadows beneath them it was well past morning. Surely the captain would have woken him up in rising and dressing, but somehow he had not, and now James would surely be in trouble. He quickly tied on his boots, which the pirates had given him to replace the moccasins he'd gotten from the redskins, and crept quietly towards the door.
He had barely more than put his head out than someone in the crow's nest called down. "So the pretty boy finally woke up! Capt'n tired you out good last night, huh?"
There was laughter from the crew, and James felt the blood rushing to his face, even though he had no idea what they were talking about.
"You can't assume that." replied a german boy that was missing the back quarter of his scalp. "Maybe he just finally got himself untied!"
More laughter. Utterly confused, he became indignant "Now see here, I--"
He paused, and put a hand over his mouth as he understood what they were laughing about. His face became an even deeper shade of claret.
"Nothing of that sort happened, you pigeon brained fools!" he shouted angrily, hands turning to fists. "You're all a bunch of despicable, gutter minded, flea ridden imbeciles!"
They laughed harder at his rage, then suddenly fell silent, as if some horrible shadow had fallen on deck. In a way, it had. He heard the uneven step of the captain coming up the stairs, and every man scuttled back to their duties. James was unsure of what to do, and as such did nothing, until the notable form of the captain, trailed by the somewhat shorter Smee, appeared on deck. James immediately looked at the ground, uncomfortable.
"I see your finally awake, boy." Barbecue said dryly, and James did not miss the warning tone behind it. "We're careening the ship while the weather holds out. Follow Smee. He'll show you what to do."
That was all. Only when he let his breath out in relief did he discover he had been holding it. The prospect of having the captain angry at you was terrible in itself, but that was not what had made him so wary. Though the crew was entirely mistaken in it's assumption about the night before, the very idea of it made James nervous and uncomfortable, especially when he was around the man and realized it was not so far a stretch of the imagination. By this time on ship, James had been a crewman long enough to see some of the darker bits of Barbecue. That horrible creature that had slain a pregnant woman was not so much a fluke as he had hoped, and in all truth, it seemed almost more natural on the man than the calm with which he had regarded James as they looked out over the false sea of Neverland. He had heard two british pirates jokingly refer to him as Captain DeSade, and though he had absolutely no idea what that meant, his mind gave the general impression, and he did not like it one bit.
Quite before his mind stumbled towards the inevitable and far more humiliating
ponderings along that line, Smee had dragged him down under the deck where
a few other men were lashing crates of supplies to the walls. When
James questioned the productiveness of this excersize Smee explained that
to careen the ship it would have to be physically turned on it's side in
the sand, and if everything wasn't tied down it went sprawling all over
the place. Good logic, really, and he sat to it. Fortunately,
the men he worked beside here had not heard the shouting and laughter above
deck, and said nothing about the incident that had brought it.
"Tybalt? Are you in there? Come out now, we're going to leave."
Tybalt looked up from his tiny book, and what he saw might have frightened him had he not been accustomed to it by now. A few days previous, one of the lost boys had knocked over the jug that sat on the shelf, and with some string and paste Tybalt had stuck the pieces together into a sort of odd igloo. The broken mouth of the jug formed the entrance. Tybalt had set up a sort of home (though oddly without a bed, since he preferred to sleep curled on Peter's collar) and whenever the Lost Boys wanted him, they had a habit of looking in the jug mouth to see if he was really there. From the inside of the jug this created a most singular effect; a massive eye shadowed by fairy glow, staring down at him.
The fairy sighed and set the book carefully on his table, which was comprised of an overturned walnut shell and a flat fragment of jug with relatively smooth edges.
"Where are we going?" he asked, somewhat reluctant to leave his story.
"One of the redskins spotted the pirates beaching their ship. They're planning an attack, and we're going to help!"
"A fight? What good am I, then!?" he shouted up at the eye, somewhat irritated. "I can't fight anything, and when they see my glow, they'll know we're coming!"
The eye vanished, and Tybalt heard "Peter! He won't come! He says he won't do any good."
"He'll come." Peter said. Now Peter had much more skill dealing with fairies than the other boys, and instead of peeking thru the entrance he whisked the jug house off of the shelf, leaving Tybalt and his furnishings sitting there dumbly and vulnerable.
"Tybalt, I want you to come and you'll come! None of this nonsense! Now up and follow me, will you?"
Of course, this was exactly the right way to deal with Tybalt, who had found himself hard pressed to deny anything of Peter, especially when asked directly. Clicking his wings sharply to show he was irritated, he lifted up from the shelf. Peter nicely returned the jug house to it's proper place.
"Lets go!"
All the Lost Boys, who had until now been standing restlessly at their trees, hurried up them with speed and emerged at the top, rolling to their feet easily in their bearskins. Nibs, of course, stayed behind, for he was far to small to fight, and spent the rest of the day grumbling about it until he fell asleep on the floor.
The boys met the redskins not far from the lagoon. The warriors were all painted and bearing their marks of honor. This was not a simple battle, fought because that was the way it had always been. No, this was a battle of revenge. Black Fish would lead, since his heart burned the hottest with hatred for those who had killed Yellow Bird. Even Peter stepped back and let him be.
Tiger Lilly and Hard To Hit, as well as a few women and old men, stayed back in the village, though Tiger Lilly argued hard to go. She had revenge to extract too, revenge over James, who had just become her friend and was now (to her knowledge) as dead as the others.
"But Father, I have to go with you! They killed James, I should--"
"Tiger Lilly, I said no. You're simply to small."
Great Big Little Panther took her bow from her and set it back in the hut, and gestured for her to follow it.
"Just wait here with your brother. There is going to be a battle, and some of us are going to die. And I don't want you to be among them."
No child could argue with that tone, so she simply hung her head and nodded. Her father kissed her and told her that she was to wait until nightfall. If, by that amount of time, the warriors were yet to return, she was to take her brother and leave the village as swift as she could. If they were not back by that time that meant they were dead. She nodded again, and Great Big Little Panther moved to leave.
Peter, who had been nearby listening to all this, cocked his head and drifted to them. "Chief, if you all die, she can come live with the Lost Boys. We could use a girl to be our mother."
Great Big Little Panther did not reply, but Tiger Lilly sneered at Peter Pan. She did not want to be their mother, the very idea was absurd. She wanted to be a warrior like her father. Confused by the reaction, Peter flitted off to rejoin with the rest of the Lost Boys, who waited patiently for the order to move. Tybalt was there, and stood on his shoulder, and with the distraction of his glow and the promise of battle Peter forgot about Tiger Lilly.
The girl waited. She sat on the floor of the hut with her little brother, staring out the entrance with pure venom in her gaze. She saw the boys take flight, and the redskins begin their silent trek to the shore. They were barely out of sight before she was up, collecting her bow and arrows.
Hard To Hit stood too "Wait, Father said to stay here! Where are you going?"
"After them. If there's a battle to be fought, I want to be part of it."
"But Tiger Lilly--"
She shoved past him and out of the hut. Hard To Hit groaned and snatched up his own bow, running after her as fast as his short legs would carry him.
It was a decision they would both regret.