***
30
***
Neverland, five years previous
Winter had come early and frozen everything beneath a concealing wall of snow. The fluff iced over, creating a hard crust the animals walked on and had to burrow through to survive. The spring came just as late as the winter had come early, and in that flooded, chilly world of the winter run-off, a fairy caught sight of a tangle of hair in an unlit pyre of pine branches. The hair was flax, like dandelion fluff, and he knew no dead redskin had hair like that.
The fairy skipped his rounce that day and held an excavation. The branches had bowed and compacted under the snow, covering over their treasure stringently like a wooden dragon, but the fairy wheedled and pulled and levered them away until his hands broke through a warning spell, and in the Underground House, a little blue fairy dropped his book and shot up the tree in a panic, the magic alarms still popping in his mind.
A few moments later the branches of the pyre came tumbling apart through a feat of lever engineering, and the fairy, feeling all too pleased with himself, got a good look at what was underneath. There was not one body but two, both small, both white, or at least the skin still over them seemed to be. Their faces had bloated and begun to splotch, and their fingers had gone fat as cold sausages, barely contained in their skin. They had to have been there since the first snow; they had frozen neatly.
The bodies, it seemed, had been ravaged by scavengers before some conscientious soul had covered them up. The furs they wore were torn and stained and the meat under them was worried through, sections of muscle ripped away like tree bark leaving damp hollow ruts in their bodies. But for all the successful damages there were just as many places where the skin hadn't pierced. Swollen with the run off, the arm of the flaxen haired boy proudly displayed the marks of being gnawed, with fat, black crescents where the teeth couldn't pierce. A wolf or a lion wouldn't have such dull teeth. In fact, they seemed a bit too small for a wolf or a lion; they were squared teeth, a little crooked, in a neat semi circle like an ape's. The eyeteeth were short and blunt, and made no puncture.
The fairy frowned, and ran his tongue slowly over his own teeth, counting their places.
He heard the soft click of fairy wings behind him. He turned, startled, and stared at the silent observer. This newcomer was younger fairy than him by a good thirty or forty years (for all the years mattered), blue, with a mess of pale hair cropped carelessly off. He wore a vest and trousers made out of un-dyed plant fibers, and in the vest pocket was a pair of reading glasses with red garnet lenses. His hands were folded behind him and his ankles crossed in the air, and somewhere between the taught twitching of his body language and the careful composure of his face, he knew something wasn't right.
"What have you found?" Tybalt asked him.
The fairy stood up and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I found bodies." He said carefully. "White ones, probably Lost Boys. May I ask who you are?"
Tybalt seemed he didn't hear the question. "What happened to them?"
The fairy sighed, sufficiently muddled with academic conundrums that he didn't notice the slight. "I think they got eaten. Look at all those marks; they must've gotten attacked by something. Look, though."
The fairy paused and bit into the back of his hand, gently, leaving two semicircles of red dents on the skin. He showed them to Tybalt. "Look at that boy's arm, where he got gnawed but the skin didn't break. They're the same marks, aren't they? Bigger, but they're the same marks."
The blue fairy drifted down and looked at his hand carefully, then looked at the boy. The corner of his mouth twitched.
"So what do you think would cause those marks?" Tybalt asked. His voice was too carefully soft, and rasping a little as it forced past his throat.
The fairy rubbed the back of his hand "Well what COULD cause those marks? It isn't a baboon or any member of the simian because the eyeteeth are blunt. This thing had a human mouth, a small one at that. What meat eater on the island has a human mouth?"
"I don't know." Tybalt said faintly.
"There must be one. I can find out." He said eagerly. "If I report this, I'll be able to use the records library at the palace. They know every thing that lives on this island."
Tybalt blanched. "You can't report this."
"Why not?"
"It's not a fairy affair." He scrubbed an eye nervously with the heel of his hand. He was sweating.
"Well if the creature falls under fairy jurisdiction it's a fairy affair. Besides, you obviously must have some knowledge, some scholastic curiosity," he tapped Tybalt's reading glasses. "Don't you want to know the secret of the mysterious corpse?"
Tybalt shook his head. "Not this time."
"Oh, bull." The fairy waved him off. "Of course you want to know. Otherwise, you wouldn't have come to investigate, would you."
The fairy squatted down on the brittle bark of the dead pine branch, knotting his fingers between his knees and frowning at the dead boy's skin. Tybalt lighted carefully behind him. He wasn't breathing, just a shallow, continual opening of the lungs. His eyes were going black.
"You know something." The fairy was saying. "When I was young, there was a big ruckus on the island when it came our turn to pay the Tithe. Do you remember that?"
Tybalt shook his head.
"No. I suppose you weren't around yet. King Oberon paid the tithe with human children instead of fairies. But one of the children wasn't human. Hell wouldn't take him."
"Oh?" Tybalt said, his voice somehow managing to break on that single syllable.
"Yes. It caused all sorts of havoc, caused Oberon to loose his daughter to the Hell Tithe. Oberon nearly killed the scouts who brought him the ghoul."
Tybalt was silent.
"Funny, though. Those teeth marks are about the size of a child's mouth. But that ghoul would have to be full grown by now. Getting old, actually, if not dead; I was only five or six when it happened, and I'm eighty now. Humans are old by eighty." The fairy paused. "Do you think he might've had children with a redskin girl?"
Again, no response. The fairy faintly thought he heard movement behind him.
"Ah well. I'm sure the records will tell me." The fairy stood and brushed his knees off. He was excited at the prospect. He never got much chance to really apply all his learning. "Do you want to come wi—"
He didn't get a chance to finish that. A stone smashed against the back of his skull, pitching him forward off the branch to land with a sick smack against the water bloated belly of a boy. Tybalt dropped the pebble and went after him.
"I'm sorry!" He whispered, digging his fingers into the dazed fairy's neck, his knees slippery on the stinking skin as he straddled him. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."
He was too hysterical to feel the tears on his face as the windpipe crushed beneath his fingers, bringing a new wave of panicked scrabbling from the fairy beneath him. Tracks of skin came up from his face, neck, and wrists under gouging fingernails, but he held on, even as the man's motions became shaky and his joints locked, his eyes wide and polished.
Tybalt lowered his face to the man's ear, the slick, putrid, bloated skin of the Lost Boy nearly touching his cheek. His fingernails were still in the veins of the suffocating man. "I'm sorry…but I can't let you hurt Peter… Try to understand…"
He jerked himself away, letting the collapsed cartilage smother away the last of life. The other fairy jerked as the weight left his chest. Tybalt stood himself on watery legs and stared, not quite able to breathe, as the fairy's limbs began to move himself in the frail, hopeless writhing of a doomed man. Lost to intelligence, his eyes enormous and disbelieving, he tried to push himself away from Tybalt, his heels and palms sliding in the necrid film. It took a long time for his light to gutter out. Tybalt was alone in the pyre.
He was going to be missed. This fairy had not been a loner, or a drifter. He had been an educated man. Someone would have to come looking for him,
If they scoured the island for him, they were going to find the bodies.
If they found the bodies, they would see the marks.
If they saw the marks…..
"Peter, you idiot, you IDIOT!" Tybalt shrieked, taking to the air with a panic. Leaving the fairy in the branches, he set about lighting the wet wood of Peter's sorry, makeshift pyre, determined to burn the flesh from his boys, and with them, the marks.
***
Slightly awoke to a sky just beginning to pinken, the stars still strewn above him like bright jacks. His legs were entirely asleep. Billy Jukes, however, was still awake, the predawn light touching his face with a diffused glow that softened the bruises and made him seem warm and healthy. He was staring down at him, silently. Slightly couldn't judge the expression.
"I fell asleep." Slightly admitted dumbly, his face turning red as he realized the possible ramifications of his actions. "Did…?"
"No." Billy said softly. "I would have woken you up if I'd got too tired."
"Why did you let me fall asleep at all?"
Billy was quiet for a moment. "You needed it." He said lamely, and disentangled himself from Slightly. Billy stood up and stretched himself, and Slightly blinked. He hadn't realized he'd had hold of Billy's hand when he woke up. Had Billy done that while he was sleeping? Had he done that himself? He ducked his head at the thought. Mason and Mullins were still sound asleep, and Slightly pulled himself up to sit on the stone, blinking away the night and watching Billy's back as the other boy fingered tangles out of his hair.
"Hey Billy?"
"Hm?" Billy didn't look back at him.
"When we talked to Great Big Little Panther yesterday, he said we'd be slightly hard pressed to find anyone who could help."
Billy frowned over his shoulder "What of it?"
"We slightly need to start looking, then. Today."
"Do we?" Billy said blandly
"Yes!" Slightly stood, his legs filling with pins and needles as the blood went into them. "You can't last that long without sleep, and now that Hook isn't looking for us anymore, we only have the fairies to avoid. The fairies won't stop looking until they get bored, but this is still our only time to search."
Billy laughed, humorlessly. He was exhausted. "Cully, I think the old redskin's gone mad. You heard the story he told us. A city without suffering. Slaves that feed off the dead. Do you really think any of that's true?"
"I don't see why not!"
"Because it isn't. Man can't create man, not like man can create a ship or a sail. He couldn't have made a new race just by will alone. The old man is crazy. The only true thing he told us was that there isn't any help."
Slightly grit his teeth. "So that's it? You're just going to say the Chief is slightly crazy and not even look? What else is there to do, Billy!?"
"There's nothing TO be done! Don't you get it, cully?"
"No, I don't!" Slightly grabbed Billy by the neckerchief, jerking him face to face and startling him badly. "You don't get to give up! We've come slightly too far to go back and you can't just quit, Billy, I won't let you! You're my friend!" The fury on his face split open, and melted into that panicked, pleading look. "You're my friend, Billy." He said, softer. "You're the only friend I got left. I know things are bad and I know you're tired, but the Billy I know wouldn't give up. Not now."
The boy's hands had softened with his voice, and rested against Billy's collar, warm with his outburst. He hadn't backed away. He was too close; Billy could feel his breath on his chin, and his blurry mind ordered his ears to turn red.
_He doesn't understand…he doesn't understand…_ Billy's mind recited adamantly, his ribs feeling a little too small now.
"…Billy?" Slightly asked, hesitant. Something moved in the corner of his vision, and the cabin boy's stomach dropped out as he realized Mullins and Mason were both sitting up, watching them, probably woken by the shouting. Slightly hadn't seen them.
Jukes jerked away, guilt and self-revulsion exploding in his throat, but Slightly's hands tightened on his kerchief and his face turned to hurt confusion. Slightly opened his mouth to protest Billy's retreat, but his crewmates were right there, and in a panic Billy did the only thing he could think of.
He punched Slightly in the face.
The boy reeled back, taken completely by surprise. His mouth flopped like a fish. "B-billy!"
Billy's heart was stuttering against his ribs. Slightly looked too betrayed, too innocent, and that look mauled at the misdirected rage that was bubbling in his stomach. A hot, irrational thought burst against the back of Billy's eyes before he realized he was lunging again, ready to crack Slightly's teeth into his head. –Slightly KNEW what he was doing, he knew it!- In his panic at being found out, Billy didn't realize he'd been caught from behind, two wide arms crushing his ribcage and hauling him back from Slightly. The blonde boy stumbled away, frightened and confused.
Mullins pressed his weight down on Billy's back, forcing the boy to brace his legs to stay upright and giving Mullins the moment to capture his arms. Billy was pinned, fighting, in an undignified, crippled stoop.
"What the hell's all this?!" Mullins snarled into Billy's ear, his breath hot and sour. Billy shoved back against him in a futile attempt to throw him off, but he didn't have the strength or the leverage against Mullins' weight. Mullins only clamped down tighter.
"It's too god damned early to be fighting." He growled. "Calm down, and I'll let go."
Billy did not calm down, but he did lock his muscles, freezing him in place. He wasn't going to stay still long if Mullins didn't get off his back (he KNEW better than to pin him, especially like this!) Mullins waited a moment, then carefully and slowly released Billy Jukes.
Swearing through his teeth and feeling as frustrated and humiliated as he had in a long time, Billy stomped some distance away from the others and leaned his back against a tree. His hands wouldn't unclench, and his palms were sweaty. But how dare Slightly act so sincere and kind, just how dare he! Even if he was a Lost Boy, even if he didn't know anything about real society, that was no damned excuse for getting that close, for having held his hand, for having acted like…like himself, dammit!
Billy's excursion into anger misdirection was beginning to peter out as his pulse evened. Slightly didn't even know what could happen between men, or even between men and women, he was sure of it. Slightly may be only a year or so younger than Billy but their lives had created vastly different maturities. The fact it was such a raging innocent that had resurrected this problem for him wasn't a very comforting thought.
He could hear the voices of Slightly, Mullins, and Mason through the trees. He didn't care to make out what they were saying. Though he did wonder what he was going to tell Slightly if the boy ever asked what he did to get himself hit.
Billy slid down the rough flank of the tree, the bark pushing his vest up and cutting nicks in the raised marks on his back. He rested the side of his face against his knees and stared off into the horizontal woods. When he hard Mullins' footsteps, he did not turn around.
"We're going to see the Old Witch." Mullins said gruffly, his distaste for the idea apparent even in those words. "Slightly says she's the only one left on the island who could help."
Billy didn't say anything. He wanted to fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the world.
"Get up." Mullins ordered. He prodded Jukes with a boot toe, but the boy just rocked and didn't stand up.
"I don't think I want to see the Old Witch." Billy said finally, faintly.
Mullins snorted. "Too bad. You're going."
"Don't I get a choice in this matter?"
"No." he said bluntly. "I agree with the boy this time. And if that means you want to bludge me too, I'll just drag your sorry ass there in chains."
Billy chuckled into his arms, a little darkly, and put his hand out. Mullins dragged him to his feet and escorted him back to the group.
30
***
Neverland, five years previous
Winter had come early and frozen everything beneath a concealing wall of snow. The fluff iced over, creating a hard crust the animals walked on and had to burrow through to survive. The spring came just as late as the winter had come early, and in that flooded, chilly world of the winter run-off, a fairy caught sight of a tangle of hair in an unlit pyre of pine branches. The hair was flax, like dandelion fluff, and he knew no dead redskin had hair like that.
The fairy skipped his rounce that day and held an excavation. The branches had bowed and compacted under the snow, covering over their treasure stringently like a wooden dragon, but the fairy wheedled and pulled and levered them away until his hands broke through a warning spell, and in the Underground House, a little blue fairy dropped his book and shot up the tree in a panic, the magic alarms still popping in his mind.
A few moments later the branches of the pyre came tumbling apart through a feat of lever engineering, and the fairy, feeling all too pleased with himself, got a good look at what was underneath. There was not one body but two, both small, both white, or at least the skin still over them seemed to be. Their faces had bloated and begun to splotch, and their fingers had gone fat as cold sausages, barely contained in their skin. They had to have been there since the first snow; they had frozen neatly.
The bodies, it seemed, had been ravaged by scavengers before some conscientious soul had covered them up. The furs they wore were torn and stained and the meat under them was worried through, sections of muscle ripped away like tree bark leaving damp hollow ruts in their bodies. But for all the successful damages there were just as many places where the skin hadn't pierced. Swollen with the run off, the arm of the flaxen haired boy proudly displayed the marks of being gnawed, with fat, black crescents where the teeth couldn't pierce. A wolf or a lion wouldn't have such dull teeth. In fact, they seemed a bit too small for a wolf or a lion; they were squared teeth, a little crooked, in a neat semi circle like an ape's. The eyeteeth were short and blunt, and made no puncture.
The fairy frowned, and ran his tongue slowly over his own teeth, counting their places.
He heard the soft click of fairy wings behind him. He turned, startled, and stared at the silent observer. This newcomer was younger fairy than him by a good thirty or forty years (for all the years mattered), blue, with a mess of pale hair cropped carelessly off. He wore a vest and trousers made out of un-dyed plant fibers, and in the vest pocket was a pair of reading glasses with red garnet lenses. His hands were folded behind him and his ankles crossed in the air, and somewhere between the taught twitching of his body language and the careful composure of his face, he knew something wasn't right.
"What have you found?" Tybalt asked him.
The fairy stood up and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I found bodies." He said carefully. "White ones, probably Lost Boys. May I ask who you are?"
Tybalt seemed he didn't hear the question. "What happened to them?"
The fairy sighed, sufficiently muddled with academic conundrums that he didn't notice the slight. "I think they got eaten. Look at all those marks; they must've gotten attacked by something. Look, though."
The fairy paused and bit into the back of his hand, gently, leaving two semicircles of red dents on the skin. He showed them to Tybalt. "Look at that boy's arm, where he got gnawed but the skin didn't break. They're the same marks, aren't they? Bigger, but they're the same marks."
The blue fairy drifted down and looked at his hand carefully, then looked at the boy. The corner of his mouth twitched.
"So what do you think would cause those marks?" Tybalt asked. His voice was too carefully soft, and rasping a little as it forced past his throat.
The fairy rubbed the back of his hand "Well what COULD cause those marks? It isn't a baboon or any member of the simian because the eyeteeth are blunt. This thing had a human mouth, a small one at that. What meat eater on the island has a human mouth?"
"I don't know." Tybalt said faintly.
"There must be one. I can find out." He said eagerly. "If I report this, I'll be able to use the records library at the palace. They know every thing that lives on this island."
Tybalt blanched. "You can't report this."
"Why not?"
"It's not a fairy affair." He scrubbed an eye nervously with the heel of his hand. He was sweating.
"Well if the creature falls under fairy jurisdiction it's a fairy affair. Besides, you obviously must have some knowledge, some scholastic curiosity," he tapped Tybalt's reading glasses. "Don't you want to know the secret of the mysterious corpse?"
Tybalt shook his head. "Not this time."
"Oh, bull." The fairy waved him off. "Of course you want to know. Otherwise, you wouldn't have come to investigate, would you."
The fairy squatted down on the brittle bark of the dead pine branch, knotting his fingers between his knees and frowning at the dead boy's skin. Tybalt lighted carefully behind him. He wasn't breathing, just a shallow, continual opening of the lungs. His eyes were going black.
"You know something." The fairy was saying. "When I was young, there was a big ruckus on the island when it came our turn to pay the Tithe. Do you remember that?"
Tybalt shook his head.
"No. I suppose you weren't around yet. King Oberon paid the tithe with human children instead of fairies. But one of the children wasn't human. Hell wouldn't take him."
"Oh?" Tybalt said, his voice somehow managing to break on that single syllable.
"Yes. It caused all sorts of havoc, caused Oberon to loose his daughter to the Hell Tithe. Oberon nearly killed the scouts who brought him the ghoul."
Tybalt was silent.
"Funny, though. Those teeth marks are about the size of a child's mouth. But that ghoul would have to be full grown by now. Getting old, actually, if not dead; I was only five or six when it happened, and I'm eighty now. Humans are old by eighty." The fairy paused. "Do you think he might've had children with a redskin girl?"
Again, no response. The fairy faintly thought he heard movement behind him.
"Ah well. I'm sure the records will tell me." The fairy stood and brushed his knees off. He was excited at the prospect. He never got much chance to really apply all his learning. "Do you want to come wi—"
He didn't get a chance to finish that. A stone smashed against the back of his skull, pitching him forward off the branch to land with a sick smack against the water bloated belly of a boy. Tybalt dropped the pebble and went after him.
"I'm sorry!" He whispered, digging his fingers into the dazed fairy's neck, his knees slippery on the stinking skin as he straddled him. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."
He was too hysterical to feel the tears on his face as the windpipe crushed beneath his fingers, bringing a new wave of panicked scrabbling from the fairy beneath him. Tracks of skin came up from his face, neck, and wrists under gouging fingernails, but he held on, even as the man's motions became shaky and his joints locked, his eyes wide and polished.
Tybalt lowered his face to the man's ear, the slick, putrid, bloated skin of the Lost Boy nearly touching his cheek. His fingernails were still in the veins of the suffocating man. "I'm sorry…but I can't let you hurt Peter… Try to understand…"
He jerked himself away, letting the collapsed cartilage smother away the last of life. The other fairy jerked as the weight left his chest. Tybalt stood himself on watery legs and stared, not quite able to breathe, as the fairy's limbs began to move himself in the frail, hopeless writhing of a doomed man. Lost to intelligence, his eyes enormous and disbelieving, he tried to push himself away from Tybalt, his heels and palms sliding in the necrid film. It took a long time for his light to gutter out. Tybalt was alone in the pyre.
He was going to be missed. This fairy had not been a loner, or a drifter. He had been an educated man. Someone would have to come looking for him,
If they scoured the island for him, they were going to find the bodies.
If they found the bodies, they would see the marks.
If they saw the marks…..
"Peter, you idiot, you IDIOT!" Tybalt shrieked, taking to the air with a panic. Leaving the fairy in the branches, he set about lighting the wet wood of Peter's sorry, makeshift pyre, determined to burn the flesh from his boys, and with them, the marks.
***
Slightly awoke to a sky just beginning to pinken, the stars still strewn above him like bright jacks. His legs were entirely asleep. Billy Jukes, however, was still awake, the predawn light touching his face with a diffused glow that softened the bruises and made him seem warm and healthy. He was staring down at him, silently. Slightly couldn't judge the expression.
"I fell asleep." Slightly admitted dumbly, his face turning red as he realized the possible ramifications of his actions. "Did…?"
"No." Billy said softly. "I would have woken you up if I'd got too tired."
"Why did you let me fall asleep at all?"
Billy was quiet for a moment. "You needed it." He said lamely, and disentangled himself from Slightly. Billy stood up and stretched himself, and Slightly blinked. He hadn't realized he'd had hold of Billy's hand when he woke up. Had Billy done that while he was sleeping? Had he done that himself? He ducked his head at the thought. Mason and Mullins were still sound asleep, and Slightly pulled himself up to sit on the stone, blinking away the night and watching Billy's back as the other boy fingered tangles out of his hair.
"Hey Billy?"
"Hm?" Billy didn't look back at him.
"When we talked to Great Big Little Panther yesterday, he said we'd be slightly hard pressed to find anyone who could help."
Billy frowned over his shoulder "What of it?"
"We slightly need to start looking, then. Today."
"Do we?" Billy said blandly
"Yes!" Slightly stood, his legs filling with pins and needles as the blood went into them. "You can't last that long without sleep, and now that Hook isn't looking for us anymore, we only have the fairies to avoid. The fairies won't stop looking until they get bored, but this is still our only time to search."
Billy laughed, humorlessly. He was exhausted. "Cully, I think the old redskin's gone mad. You heard the story he told us. A city without suffering. Slaves that feed off the dead. Do you really think any of that's true?"
"I don't see why not!"
"Because it isn't. Man can't create man, not like man can create a ship or a sail. He couldn't have made a new race just by will alone. The old man is crazy. The only true thing he told us was that there isn't any help."
Slightly grit his teeth. "So that's it? You're just going to say the Chief is slightly crazy and not even look? What else is there to do, Billy!?"
"There's nothing TO be done! Don't you get it, cully?"
"No, I don't!" Slightly grabbed Billy by the neckerchief, jerking him face to face and startling him badly. "You don't get to give up! We've come slightly too far to go back and you can't just quit, Billy, I won't let you! You're my friend!" The fury on his face split open, and melted into that panicked, pleading look. "You're my friend, Billy." He said, softer. "You're the only friend I got left. I know things are bad and I know you're tired, but the Billy I know wouldn't give up. Not now."
The boy's hands had softened with his voice, and rested against Billy's collar, warm with his outburst. He hadn't backed away. He was too close; Billy could feel his breath on his chin, and his blurry mind ordered his ears to turn red.
_He doesn't understand…he doesn't understand…_ Billy's mind recited adamantly, his ribs feeling a little too small now.
"…Billy?" Slightly asked, hesitant. Something moved in the corner of his vision, and the cabin boy's stomach dropped out as he realized Mullins and Mason were both sitting up, watching them, probably woken by the shouting. Slightly hadn't seen them.
Jukes jerked away, guilt and self-revulsion exploding in his throat, but Slightly's hands tightened on his kerchief and his face turned to hurt confusion. Slightly opened his mouth to protest Billy's retreat, but his crewmates were right there, and in a panic Billy did the only thing he could think of.
He punched Slightly in the face.
The boy reeled back, taken completely by surprise. His mouth flopped like a fish. "B-billy!"
Billy's heart was stuttering against his ribs. Slightly looked too betrayed, too innocent, and that look mauled at the misdirected rage that was bubbling in his stomach. A hot, irrational thought burst against the back of Billy's eyes before he realized he was lunging again, ready to crack Slightly's teeth into his head. –Slightly KNEW what he was doing, he knew it!- In his panic at being found out, Billy didn't realize he'd been caught from behind, two wide arms crushing his ribcage and hauling him back from Slightly. The blonde boy stumbled away, frightened and confused.
Mullins pressed his weight down on Billy's back, forcing the boy to brace his legs to stay upright and giving Mullins the moment to capture his arms. Billy was pinned, fighting, in an undignified, crippled stoop.
"What the hell's all this?!" Mullins snarled into Billy's ear, his breath hot and sour. Billy shoved back against him in a futile attempt to throw him off, but he didn't have the strength or the leverage against Mullins' weight. Mullins only clamped down tighter.
"It's too god damned early to be fighting." He growled. "Calm down, and I'll let go."
Billy did not calm down, but he did lock his muscles, freezing him in place. He wasn't going to stay still long if Mullins didn't get off his back (he KNEW better than to pin him, especially like this!) Mullins waited a moment, then carefully and slowly released Billy Jukes.
Swearing through his teeth and feeling as frustrated and humiliated as he had in a long time, Billy stomped some distance away from the others and leaned his back against a tree. His hands wouldn't unclench, and his palms were sweaty. But how dare Slightly act so sincere and kind, just how dare he! Even if he was a Lost Boy, even if he didn't know anything about real society, that was no damned excuse for getting that close, for having held his hand, for having acted like…like himself, dammit!
Billy's excursion into anger misdirection was beginning to peter out as his pulse evened. Slightly didn't even know what could happen between men, or even between men and women, he was sure of it. Slightly may be only a year or so younger than Billy but their lives had created vastly different maturities. The fact it was such a raging innocent that had resurrected this problem for him wasn't a very comforting thought.
He could hear the voices of Slightly, Mullins, and Mason through the trees. He didn't care to make out what they were saying. Though he did wonder what he was going to tell Slightly if the boy ever asked what he did to get himself hit.
Billy slid down the rough flank of the tree, the bark pushing his vest up and cutting nicks in the raised marks on his back. He rested the side of his face against his knees and stared off into the horizontal woods. When he hard Mullins' footsteps, he did not turn around.
"We're going to see the Old Witch." Mullins said gruffly, his distaste for the idea apparent even in those words. "Slightly says she's the only one left on the island who could help."
Billy didn't say anything. He wanted to fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the world.
"Get up." Mullins ordered. He prodded Jukes with a boot toe, but the boy just rocked and didn't stand up.
"I don't think I want to see the Old Witch." Billy said finally, faintly.
Mullins snorted. "Too bad. You're going."
"Don't I get a choice in this matter?"
"No." he said bluntly. "I agree with the boy this time. And if that means you want to bludge me too, I'll just drag your sorry ass there in chains."
Billy chuckled into his arms, a little darkly, and put his hand out. Mullins dragged him to his feet and escorted him back to the group.