Aborigine's sparrow wasn't sure which was better: to admit failure and beg for mercy, or to start flying now and hope he reached the mainland before his wings gave out. Neither were very appealing options. But he knew he couldn't keep nosing about randomly like this, dragging a dangerous egret and a company of carnivorous birds through the underbrush. He'd known the pirates would have moved by now, as would anyone who bothered to think rationally.
Pausing on a twig of an elm tree, the sparrow ruffled himself and wondered absently if he would be dead by the time Aborigine swallowed his eyes. Probably. He couldn't imagine a beak that size getting into his head without breaking it open in the process.
It wasn't that comforting a thought.
"Well?" Aborigine snapped up at him. The egret was scratched from fighting his way through the briars. He looked impatient.
"Well you didn't really expect them to stay put, did you?" The sparrow called back, sounding a little shrill.
Aborigine's beak snapped. "I EXPECT you to be useful! You admit you don't know where they are??"
"I knew where they WERE! I never said I know where they are now!"
"Then get down here!"
The sparrow's tongue went dry, but he didn't move. His feet couldn't let go of the twig.
"N-No! I won't come down!"
"I've ordered you!"
"I won't do it!"
Aborigine's eyes flashed. His beak dropped open as he tongued the metal reinforcements into place.
"You can't make me come down!" the sparrow shouted shrilly. "You can't fly in the woods and you can't get me! I won't come down!"
"YOU ARE DIRECTLY DEFYING MY ORDERS!" Aborigine bellowed. "Do you know what I could do to you for that?"
"I'm not coming down!"
Aborigine fumed silently for a moment. The birds were staring at him.
"Sparrow hawk!" he snapped. From a poplar tree, the one sparrow hawk in the company regarded him bleakly. "I order you to bring me that sparrow!"
The sparrow could feel his heart fluttering against his throat. But the sparrow hawk, who was a contrary fellow on even the best of days, turned a lazy black eye towards the sparrow and blinked. He made no move to obey.
"I said, bring me that sparrow!"
The hawk snorted and turned around on his branch, presenting Aborigine with his tail feathers. The egret sputtered.
"You would DARE!?"
"I'd dare a lot more." The sparrow hawk said over his shoulder. "You're a bad boss, Abbie. We all saw what you did to that little ground sparrow back there. Do you really think Tory is going to give you your pardon after what you've done?"
"YOU'RE one to speak! You LIVE off birds!"
The hawk smirked. "That's right, I LIVE off birds. I don't kill them because I want to. Screw you, Aborigine. You want to catch your pardon, you do it without me."
With that the hawk dropped from the branch and disappeared above the trees.
Except for the egret's stammering, the woods were silent. Two crows looked at each other in the elm tree, turned tail, and disappeared. A redtail followed them. In only a few moments, Aborigine was completely alone.
Faintly, through the woods, he heard Slightly scream.
***
"You know something?" Picadilly said, face pushed down into Popper's feathers by the cap.
"What?"
"I'm getting reeeeally sick of being stuffed into things."
Popper snorted.
"FIRST, I got tied into that ghoul's hanky and dragged across the ocean. THEN I got tied in a sash, hung from a tree, with you, of all people. And now I've been stuffed in a hat. Are we going through all the articles of clothing here? Are all the pirates going to do this? Since when did my goal become to be tied up in every way possible?" He paused for a moment. "…wait. Not including with licorice rope."
"I REALLY don't want to hear any bondage fantasies involving you and licorice rope." Captain Popper shuddered. "Besides, doesn't licorice rope make jackalopes sick?"
Picadilly stiffened "What does that have to do with anything?! Why does everyone think I have a thing with jackalopes??"
"Don't you?"
"No!"
"Then why are you always off sleeping with them instead of in your apartment? Nearly every day at the start of my shift you drag your sorry self back onto the island covered in fur."
Picadilly went silent.
"…why DO you sleep with them instead of your apartment? Why not just get a girl, your own flat, and act normal for once in your life?"
"Normal?!" Picadilly squeaked, frustrated and indignant. "Like YOU'RE normal?? You're fake as the Philosopher's Stone! Your accent's fake, your attitude is fake, I wouldn't be surprised if even your name is fake! Everyone gets sick when they hear your voice! And you're one to tell me to be normal?!"
"At least I'm trying!" Captain Popper flared. "I'm trying to fit in on the bloody island, I might not do a very good job, but I'm trying! I KNOW nobody can stand me! You think I haven't noticed? Even my own squadron flinches when I'm around!"
"You call a fake accent and an ego problem 'trying'?"
"You haven't tried at all!" Popper snapped.
Picadilly tugged a feather. "I tried! Fat lot of good it did me to try to fit in! I'm ugly, Popper! Have you ever seen an ugly fairy besides me? No! Of course not! All the fairies can cast glamours on themselves so their pointy noses and warts don't show up, but I can't! I'm stuck with these stupid ears and these stupid teeth and these stupid, stupid freckles!"
Captain Popper snorted. "So what? You're ugly. Deal with it."
"DEAL WITH IT??" He pulled the feather again, ripping it out of Popper. The bird yelped. "You don't KNOW what it means to be an ugly fairy! Especially an ugly fairy who can't do magic! Nobody on Small Monday Island would hire me for anything except Spoonthistle, and that only because his apprentice felt sorry for me! I hate being ugly! Girls all LAUGH when I try to talk to them. Even Nittlewhit, the apothecary's daughter, and she's the nicest one of the lot!"
"So then hire a prostitute, just stop pulling out my feathers!" Popper shouted, squirming.
Picadilly hit him. It wasn't very hard, because Picadilly couldn't hit anything very hard, but it was enough to make their uncomfortable situation even worse. Picadilly curled around his aching ribs and pouted.
It had been quiet for nigh on ten minutes before Picadilly suddenly jerked, his glow flickering in the cap.
"Did you feel that?" He whispered.
"Feel what?"
"That ward! Did you feel it?"
"No. What ward?" Popper asked, a little snubbish still.
Picadilly knotted his feathers. "That was a fairy ward. A big one. We just went through it. You really didn't feel it?"
"I'm not a fairy, genius."
Picadilly poked him. "Shut up. That ward can't be a good thing. I've only known of three in all of Neverland. One is around Crooked Mountain, one is around the sulfur swamp, and one is around the Heart."
"So?"
"So we were too far away from Crooked Mountain, and I don't smell sulfur. We must be in the Heart!"
Popper paused. "You know, I've never actually seen anything in the Heart. What's the big deal?"
"That's where the magic is the strongest." He said, and shivered. "Did you have a happy childhood, Popper?"
"Yes. What does that matter?"
"It wasn't really that happy, was it. You forgot things as you got older." Picadilly pressed his face into the feathers and mumbled. "Everyone forgets things as they get older. Some people forget the bloody noses and the nightmares. Other people forget the days they laughed."
"So?"
Picadilly chuckled. "So Neverland never forgets. It remembers everything." He paused. "Especially the things you don't want it to."
***
"….You alright?"
Starkey squinted at the hollow of a tree, glaring at the shadows where infestations and gaping wounds had twisted the trunks to unhappy shapes. Constellations of white mushrooms clung in the dark hollows and stared at him, their skin covered with soft blisters like the membranes of an eye. Mason prodded him.
"Hey! I said, you alright?"
"I'm fine!" Starkey snapped. He yanked his mostly clean handkerchief from his sash and scrubbed the back of his neck with it. His skin was fading to the same hot, sunless color as the back of his knees.
Mason kept him warily in the corner of his vision as they walked. Every now and then, Starkey's head would snap to the side and he'd quickly search the trees for something that Mason hadn't seen. He glared at the carpenter, daring his to speak. He didn't.
They were fording a mess of thorny brambles, the white mushrooms popping underfoot like roaches, when Starkey felt something hot, like a living flank, push up against his leg. He yelped and jumped back from it, catching himself in the briar and falling in a painful tangle onto his rump. If the itching pain of thorns and the indignity of their location was not enough, Starkey's fall had ripped down the concealing branches, baring to the filtered sun the warm, wet insides of the thing he had discovered.
To say he had screamed was an insult, because he didn't scream, it strangled in his chest behind his collarbone and came out the explosive bleat of a messily executed sheep. Despite the warmth of the day, the thing before him was steaming like a fresh kill on a snowy hillside, an anonymous pile of meat and viscera, with a wide, pink mouth fading blue in the cold. Smooth, white fingers curled placidly towards the sky, as though the only slept in the field.
Her hair had tangled into the thornbush. It was the color of starlings in summer.
Starkey could not move an inch.
When the man refused to accept a hand up or even acknowledge it had been offered, Mason caught him underneath the arms and hauled him up, expecting Starkey to put his own two feet under him. When he didn't, Mason pushed him against a tree, where he collapsed to his knees and stayed there, his eyes hot and glassy, his teeth showing. Confused, he followed Starkey's eyes. He was staring at an empty nest of thorns and fungi.
"What in the name of Queen Anne's Revenge are you lollygagging about for?!" Hook snapped back at them, his iron namesake glistening in the filtered sun. Mason shrugged.
"He ain't moving!"
"I can see that much! Starkey! If you don't get your sorry hide off the ground this instant I'll use your skull for a rum glass!"
Starkey did not move. In his eyes the shadows had begun to hiccough and shift, stretching dark branches out to form a faultless, crystal blue sky, and smearing the winking mushrooms until they glittered in white hills and drifts that faded into forest. The crystallized landscape of his long-past home shivered and settled. It was February, still in the grips of the winter frost, in that wide, white meadow where his mother sent him to collect firewood with his sister, Imogene. This day Mother had gone with them, and been met halfway by her gentleman friend from the village. Mother had carried the hatchet.
The cold numbness of the ice seeped into his legs, his hands, and his rump. The snow was interrupted by running tracks of footprints. They scurried and converged into a melting point, where the snow turned red and sank towards the earth. Gutted there with hatchet blows, Imogene's face was wide and white, the warmth of her life drifting away into the cold clear air in wisps of steam.
"Get up!" the man bellowed, frightened and shrill and not his father. Ignatious stood. He was no higher than the man's hips. The man's arm was split from elbow to palm, leaking steam and blood steadily, but the blood on his shirt was not his. Iggy turned his glassy eyes behind him, where he saw his mother, and his mother's white apron turned red in the snow; he saw the hatchet in her hands, and her hair torn down into her face, though she never let it down, even sleeping.
"Do it." He said to her. Iggy noticed the man had wet himself while Imogene was screaming, a dark patch showing on the front of his trousers.
The hatchet stayed where it was, caking into his mother's hands as Imogene's blood froze in the cold. The man stepped towards her.
"Madeline! For God's Sake, do it, you can't stop now! DO IT!"
Iggy didn't notice his face was wet, but his throat hitched sharply and his mother's face shattered, the quiet terror and strange looks that had sat inside her eyes for weeks exploding through her skin. She turned and ran, plowing a bloody rift through the snow, throwing the hatchet aside as she reached the trees, where it disappeared beneath the white blanket. The man shrieked "MADELINE!" and disappeared after her.
Iggy stood there blankly for a moment, his vision wavering, though from his sister's heat or his tears he couldn't tell. He shrugged off his second hand coat and tucked it over his sister's cooling belly, trying to trap the heat inside her. His breath came out as steam. Imogene's didn't.
Iggy sniffled and began the walk back to town. It was four miles, over cold snow, and some ways yet to the road. He was six years old.
And he was very, very cold.
Pausing on a twig of an elm tree, the sparrow ruffled himself and wondered absently if he would be dead by the time Aborigine swallowed his eyes. Probably. He couldn't imagine a beak that size getting into his head without breaking it open in the process.
It wasn't that comforting a thought.
"Well?" Aborigine snapped up at him. The egret was scratched from fighting his way through the briars. He looked impatient.
"Well you didn't really expect them to stay put, did you?" The sparrow called back, sounding a little shrill.
Aborigine's beak snapped. "I EXPECT you to be useful! You admit you don't know where they are??"
"I knew where they WERE! I never said I know where they are now!"
"Then get down here!"
The sparrow's tongue went dry, but he didn't move. His feet couldn't let go of the twig.
"N-No! I won't come down!"
"I've ordered you!"
"I won't do it!"
Aborigine's eyes flashed. His beak dropped open as he tongued the metal reinforcements into place.
"You can't make me come down!" the sparrow shouted shrilly. "You can't fly in the woods and you can't get me! I won't come down!"
"YOU ARE DIRECTLY DEFYING MY ORDERS!" Aborigine bellowed. "Do you know what I could do to you for that?"
"I'm not coming down!"
Aborigine fumed silently for a moment. The birds were staring at him.
"Sparrow hawk!" he snapped. From a poplar tree, the one sparrow hawk in the company regarded him bleakly. "I order you to bring me that sparrow!"
The sparrow could feel his heart fluttering against his throat. But the sparrow hawk, who was a contrary fellow on even the best of days, turned a lazy black eye towards the sparrow and blinked. He made no move to obey.
"I said, bring me that sparrow!"
The hawk snorted and turned around on his branch, presenting Aborigine with his tail feathers. The egret sputtered.
"You would DARE!?"
"I'd dare a lot more." The sparrow hawk said over his shoulder. "You're a bad boss, Abbie. We all saw what you did to that little ground sparrow back there. Do you really think Tory is going to give you your pardon after what you've done?"
"YOU'RE one to speak! You LIVE off birds!"
The hawk smirked. "That's right, I LIVE off birds. I don't kill them because I want to. Screw you, Aborigine. You want to catch your pardon, you do it without me."
With that the hawk dropped from the branch and disappeared above the trees.
Except for the egret's stammering, the woods were silent. Two crows looked at each other in the elm tree, turned tail, and disappeared. A redtail followed them. In only a few moments, Aborigine was completely alone.
Faintly, through the woods, he heard Slightly scream.
***
"You know something?" Picadilly said, face pushed down into Popper's feathers by the cap.
"What?"
"I'm getting reeeeally sick of being stuffed into things."
Popper snorted.
"FIRST, I got tied into that ghoul's hanky and dragged across the ocean. THEN I got tied in a sash, hung from a tree, with you, of all people. And now I've been stuffed in a hat. Are we going through all the articles of clothing here? Are all the pirates going to do this? Since when did my goal become to be tied up in every way possible?" He paused for a moment. "…wait. Not including with licorice rope."
"I REALLY don't want to hear any bondage fantasies involving you and licorice rope." Captain Popper shuddered. "Besides, doesn't licorice rope make jackalopes sick?"
Picadilly stiffened "What does that have to do with anything?! Why does everyone think I have a thing with jackalopes??"
"Don't you?"
"No!"
"Then why are you always off sleeping with them instead of in your apartment? Nearly every day at the start of my shift you drag your sorry self back onto the island covered in fur."
Picadilly went silent.
"…why DO you sleep with them instead of your apartment? Why not just get a girl, your own flat, and act normal for once in your life?"
"Normal?!" Picadilly squeaked, frustrated and indignant. "Like YOU'RE normal?? You're fake as the Philosopher's Stone! Your accent's fake, your attitude is fake, I wouldn't be surprised if even your name is fake! Everyone gets sick when they hear your voice! And you're one to tell me to be normal?!"
"At least I'm trying!" Captain Popper flared. "I'm trying to fit in on the bloody island, I might not do a very good job, but I'm trying! I KNOW nobody can stand me! You think I haven't noticed? Even my own squadron flinches when I'm around!"
"You call a fake accent and an ego problem 'trying'?"
"You haven't tried at all!" Popper snapped.
Picadilly tugged a feather. "I tried! Fat lot of good it did me to try to fit in! I'm ugly, Popper! Have you ever seen an ugly fairy besides me? No! Of course not! All the fairies can cast glamours on themselves so their pointy noses and warts don't show up, but I can't! I'm stuck with these stupid ears and these stupid teeth and these stupid, stupid freckles!"
Captain Popper snorted. "So what? You're ugly. Deal with it."
"DEAL WITH IT??" He pulled the feather again, ripping it out of Popper. The bird yelped. "You don't KNOW what it means to be an ugly fairy! Especially an ugly fairy who can't do magic! Nobody on Small Monday Island would hire me for anything except Spoonthistle, and that only because his apprentice felt sorry for me! I hate being ugly! Girls all LAUGH when I try to talk to them. Even Nittlewhit, the apothecary's daughter, and she's the nicest one of the lot!"
"So then hire a prostitute, just stop pulling out my feathers!" Popper shouted, squirming.
Picadilly hit him. It wasn't very hard, because Picadilly couldn't hit anything very hard, but it was enough to make their uncomfortable situation even worse. Picadilly curled around his aching ribs and pouted.
It had been quiet for nigh on ten minutes before Picadilly suddenly jerked, his glow flickering in the cap.
"Did you feel that?" He whispered.
"Feel what?"
"That ward! Did you feel it?"
"No. What ward?" Popper asked, a little snubbish still.
Picadilly knotted his feathers. "That was a fairy ward. A big one. We just went through it. You really didn't feel it?"
"I'm not a fairy, genius."
Picadilly poked him. "Shut up. That ward can't be a good thing. I've only known of three in all of Neverland. One is around Crooked Mountain, one is around the sulfur swamp, and one is around the Heart."
"So?"
"So we were too far away from Crooked Mountain, and I don't smell sulfur. We must be in the Heart!"
Popper paused. "You know, I've never actually seen anything in the Heart. What's the big deal?"
"That's where the magic is the strongest." He said, and shivered. "Did you have a happy childhood, Popper?"
"Yes. What does that matter?"
"It wasn't really that happy, was it. You forgot things as you got older." Picadilly pressed his face into the feathers and mumbled. "Everyone forgets things as they get older. Some people forget the bloody noses and the nightmares. Other people forget the days they laughed."
"So?"
Picadilly chuckled. "So Neverland never forgets. It remembers everything." He paused. "Especially the things you don't want it to."
***
"….You alright?"
Starkey squinted at the hollow of a tree, glaring at the shadows where infestations and gaping wounds had twisted the trunks to unhappy shapes. Constellations of white mushrooms clung in the dark hollows and stared at him, their skin covered with soft blisters like the membranes of an eye. Mason prodded him.
"Hey! I said, you alright?"
"I'm fine!" Starkey snapped. He yanked his mostly clean handkerchief from his sash and scrubbed the back of his neck with it. His skin was fading to the same hot, sunless color as the back of his knees.
Mason kept him warily in the corner of his vision as they walked. Every now and then, Starkey's head would snap to the side and he'd quickly search the trees for something that Mason hadn't seen. He glared at the carpenter, daring his to speak. He didn't.
They were fording a mess of thorny brambles, the white mushrooms popping underfoot like roaches, when Starkey felt something hot, like a living flank, push up against his leg. He yelped and jumped back from it, catching himself in the briar and falling in a painful tangle onto his rump. If the itching pain of thorns and the indignity of their location was not enough, Starkey's fall had ripped down the concealing branches, baring to the filtered sun the warm, wet insides of the thing he had discovered.
To say he had screamed was an insult, because he didn't scream, it strangled in his chest behind his collarbone and came out the explosive bleat of a messily executed sheep. Despite the warmth of the day, the thing before him was steaming like a fresh kill on a snowy hillside, an anonymous pile of meat and viscera, with a wide, pink mouth fading blue in the cold. Smooth, white fingers curled placidly towards the sky, as though the only slept in the field.
Her hair had tangled into the thornbush. It was the color of starlings in summer.
Starkey could not move an inch.
When the man refused to accept a hand up or even acknowledge it had been offered, Mason caught him underneath the arms and hauled him up, expecting Starkey to put his own two feet under him. When he didn't, Mason pushed him against a tree, where he collapsed to his knees and stayed there, his eyes hot and glassy, his teeth showing. Confused, he followed Starkey's eyes. He was staring at an empty nest of thorns and fungi.
"What in the name of Queen Anne's Revenge are you lollygagging about for?!" Hook snapped back at them, his iron namesake glistening in the filtered sun. Mason shrugged.
"He ain't moving!"
"I can see that much! Starkey! If you don't get your sorry hide off the ground this instant I'll use your skull for a rum glass!"
Starkey did not move. In his eyes the shadows had begun to hiccough and shift, stretching dark branches out to form a faultless, crystal blue sky, and smearing the winking mushrooms until they glittered in white hills and drifts that faded into forest. The crystallized landscape of his long-past home shivered and settled. It was February, still in the grips of the winter frost, in that wide, white meadow where his mother sent him to collect firewood with his sister, Imogene. This day Mother had gone with them, and been met halfway by her gentleman friend from the village. Mother had carried the hatchet.
The cold numbness of the ice seeped into his legs, his hands, and his rump. The snow was interrupted by running tracks of footprints. They scurried and converged into a melting point, where the snow turned red and sank towards the earth. Gutted there with hatchet blows, Imogene's face was wide and white, the warmth of her life drifting away into the cold clear air in wisps of steam.
"Get up!" the man bellowed, frightened and shrill and not his father. Ignatious stood. He was no higher than the man's hips. The man's arm was split from elbow to palm, leaking steam and blood steadily, but the blood on his shirt was not his. Iggy turned his glassy eyes behind him, where he saw his mother, and his mother's white apron turned red in the snow; he saw the hatchet in her hands, and her hair torn down into her face, though she never let it down, even sleeping.
"Do it." He said to her. Iggy noticed the man had wet himself while Imogene was screaming, a dark patch showing on the front of his trousers.
The hatchet stayed where it was, caking into his mother's hands as Imogene's blood froze in the cold. The man stepped towards her.
"Madeline! For God's Sake, do it, you can't stop now! DO IT!"
Iggy didn't notice his face was wet, but his throat hitched sharply and his mother's face shattered, the quiet terror and strange looks that had sat inside her eyes for weeks exploding through her skin. She turned and ran, plowing a bloody rift through the snow, throwing the hatchet aside as she reached the trees, where it disappeared beneath the white blanket. The man shrieked "MADELINE!" and disappeared after her.
Iggy stood there blankly for a moment, his vision wavering, though from his sister's heat or his tears he couldn't tell. He shrugged off his second hand coat and tucked it over his sister's cooling belly, trying to trap the heat inside her. His breath came out as steam. Imogene's didn't.
Iggy sniffled and began the walk back to town. It was four miles, over cold snow, and some ways yet to the road. He was six years old.
And he was very, very cold.