Hi everyone! I know I shouldn't be starting another fic, but I'm not. lol. This is a Phoebe fic, something I've never tried before. Just to be sure, it's a stand alone, but it's a decent length. I always thought that Phoebe was a mysterious character, and this tells her story, from her perspective. It does end slightly AU, though I suppose that the entire show could have happened with this being the background for Phoebe. They would have had to leave out details from her, er, shady past, though, so to speak. ;)
I'm just trying something new here, and it's in the first person narrative. So if anyone actually reads this, please let me know if you like it.
It would help if you were familiar with 'Peter Pan' in order to understand it better, but it really doesn't matter. It's about Phoebe, not Peter. ;)
All right, here goes. I'm sort of nervous about this, plusI wrote it in like one hour flat. It came out really quickly. lol.
Disclaimer: I don't own Phoebe, Friends, Peter Pan, Walt Disney, The WB, NBC, the person who invented television...sometimes I don't know when to stop. ;)
----
When I was a little girl, my favorite thing in the world was Peter Pan. I owned every book, movie, and toy dealing with that make-believe world. For hours I would sit, entranced by the promise of Neverland, staring out our bedroom window, trying to see beyond the rows of slender houses. My twin sister, Ursula, would awaken me from my trance by shaking my shoulders.
"Phoebe!" She would shout.
Startled by her piercing screams, I would glare at her, angered that she interrupted my search. "What?" I would sigh.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to see Neverland."
"That stupid make-believe fairy place from the movie about the boy who could fly?" Even at eight, Ursula possessed no imagination.
"It's not make-believe, Ursie. You've seen the movie, read the books. At the end of every single one it has the same message: Follow your heart, and believe in yourself, then you will find your Neverland." I would shut my eyes tightly and wish my world away, hoping to discover a land sprinkled with pirates, lost boys, and alligators ticking from the clock within. My long blond hair would fall around my face, shielding me from Ursula's impatient smirk.
"So, have you found Neverland yet?" She would tap her foot, knowing that I hadn't yet discovered it.
"Almost," I would grunt. "Maybe if you gave me a minute of quiet I could!"
"Fine!" She would stomp off in a huff, a trail of gray smoke clouding after her. If I shut my eyes, I could imagine her sprouting a ragged hook from her left hand, tearing away at the hopes and dreams of all who dared cross her path. In my version of Peter Pan, she was Captain Hook.
My mother, still alive back then, would have been Tinkerbell, dusting the world with her kindness. Yet like Tinkerbell, she would always hold a small ounce of mystery, a green light of enigma that would continuously be marked as her shadow.
We had a dog back then, Yowler, a rusty old beagle that had seen too many years. His snout, dipped in a cement colored rust, twitched whenever he smelled trouble. He was an endearing character, really, and for this I modeled him in my head after the nanny dog that took care of the Darling children.
As for myself, I tried to picture being Wendy, or even Peter Pan. Yet every time I even attempted to imagine this, images of Wendy's grace and Peter's sheer courage flooded my mind, and I realized that I was so unlike them.
And for this reason, in my version of Peter Pan, I was always one of the lost children.
----
One spring morning, when I was thirteen, my life changed forever.
It began like any other morning, what with Ursula stomping across the length of our small bedroom, demanding to know where I had placed her new sweater.
"Phoebe!"
"Hmm?" I awoke, the sun's rays gliding across my eyelids. It was far to early for her to begin her tirade.
"Whathave you done withmy new striped sweater?" Though my eyes were shut, I could see her arms flailing about in question, her hook glinting in the April morning light.
"I don't know, Urs. Check the closet."
"I did! I saw the way you were looking at it last night, I know you wanted it!"
Squinting in question, I tried to recall the longing gaze rising in Ursula's accusation.
The Night Prior
"Don't you love my new sweater, Mom?" Ursula strutted around the room, modeling an oversized striped sweater and legging pants.
"You look like a runway model, Urs." My mother smiled, her brown eyes shining in the golden light of our cramped room.
"I bought it with my own money, too, from babysitting the Corwins," Ursula beamed. She turned her icy blue eyes towards me. "What do you think, Phoebe?"
I rolled over towards her in the length of my twin bed, tucking my sketch pad underneath my pillow. "It might be a little warm to wear it tomorrow, don't you think?"
"Well, I don't care," she stuck out her chin defiantly. "Nobody listens to their little sisters, anyway."
"Only by two minutes!" I protested.
"Yeah, well at least I don't spend all day staring out into space, dreaming about stupid places that don't exist."
My eyes stung with tears. It wasn't stupid. It gave me something to hope for, to dream about. And even at thirteen, I still had faith that some unknown entity would come to sweep me off my feet.
"Girls, girls!" My mother intervened. "Stop fighting. Now Ursula, hang up your sweater by the closet door, and Phoebe, please get ready for bed." I could see the pain masked in her eyes by the love she had for me and my sister. But still, it was there, and it would appear in the unlikeliest of places:
In the grocery store, as we passed by the frozen food aisle. I would be pushing the cart, urging the rickety basket on wheels down the narrow linoleum walkways, and she would stop. Bathed in fluorescent lighting, she would halt dead in her tracks and stare up at the ceiling. Back when I was a child, I believed she was trying to find her Neverland; now I know she was merely trying to escape.
Once we were at parent-teacher conferences, and my mother finished talking to Ursula's teacher (because, at Ursula's special request, we were placed in different classes), and was getting ready to talk to mine. One minute she was there, alive and jittery, ready to discuss my well-being with Mrs. Halinowski. And the next-gone, in a world of her own, eyes glazing over with threatening tears. In a rush of embarrassment, I led her by the arm out of my fourth-grade classroom as my peers whispered in excitement, "Did you see that? It looks like Phoebe is a mother to her mother!"
And the pain would subside, only flickering like a light of fairy dust on certain occasions. And that night was no exception.
After putting on my pajamas, I crawled under my thin sheet that I called my bed. My mother, silent, stared off into the room, trapping herself within depths of air and time that I couldn't relate to. Her eyes rested on a nondescript spot above Ursula's sweater.
Ursula, as usual, was oblivious, but I watched her. In a semi dream-like state, my mother reached above Ursula's sweater and gently caressed the thin wall. To this day, I swear I saw a twinkle of light gingerly dance across the wall, much like Tinkerbell would in Peter Pan.
"Mom," I began in a shaky voice, wondering if she, too, saw what I did.
And then she was back, eyes righting themselves upon us. "Good, you guys are ready." Going over to kiss Ursula, I noticed my sister's eyes glaring at me as I stared above her sweater, not at it, as she seemed to believe.
"Good night, Mom," Ursula flopped over on her side, and with that she was asleep.
Making her way over to my bed, I saw a twinkle in my mother's eye. "Good night, sweet girl."
"Good night," I sleepily mumbled. At thirteen, I knew we were too old to be getting such bedtime kisses, but secretly I loved them.
"Now you be good, okay?" She mussed my long hair as I sat up, in question.
"What are you talking about? I'm an angel." I smiled and my mother rolled her eyes.
"You know what I mean." Her eyes took on a new seriousness. "Don't listen to Urs when she teases you, Pheebs. I never want you to stop dreaming, all right? Dream until your heart is full, and never stop."
"You sound like Peter Pan, Mom," I laughed.
"You still like them?"
"Yeah," I blushed.
"Don't be embarrassed. I used to, too."
"Really?"
"Yes. I loved the idea of Neverland, a place where you would never grow old and always have a wonderful life."
"I like that, too."
She leaned over and kissed my head. "Well, my little dreamer, I want you to promise me something."
"Okay."
"Never stop searching for Neverland, okay?"
"Sure," I shrugged nonchalantly.
"Promise?" She held out her small hand, pinky outstretched.
I locked my pinky with hers, my hand almost larger now. "Promise."
Outside, the rain roared.
"Wow, it's really coming down out there."
"I hate the rain," I frowned, closing my eyes to sleep.
Bed creaking, my mother got up and headed towards the door. If I had known it would be the last time I'd see her alive, I would have opened my eyes, soaked in the image and bottled it up inside my brain. I would have paid special attention to her outfit, her smell- coconut and honey butter-, and the last gleam of feeling in her eyes. I would lock it inside myself and open it from within my secret treasure chest for rainy days.
But now all I have are her last words: "It's okay, Phoebe," I could hear the then-unexplainable sadness in her voice. "I hear the sun is supposed to shine tomorrow."
That Morning, Resumed
"So, Phoebe?" Ursula prodded. "Do you remember where you put my sweater now?"
Swinging my legs out of bed, I groaned. "Urs, I didn't take your sweater!"
"Fine. We'll just have to bring Mom into this, then."
Bounding down the stairs, Ursula and I raced towards our mother to tattle on each other. On the way down the slim staircase that led to the kitchen, our dog Yowler began barking frantically.
"Shut up, Yowler!" Ursula pushed the poor canine out of the way as I proceeded to pat him on the head in the reassurance that he did no wrong.
Yet he didn't accept my affections, and running ahead of the two of us, raced into the kitchen, barking like mad.
At the bottom of the stairs, I curled my nose, sniffing the blackened air. "Urs, do you smell that?"
"Maybe Mom burned breakfast?"
A horrible feeling began to rain in the pit of my stomach. "I don't know..."
Pushing open the swinging doors to the kitchen, I cried out, "Mom?"
No answer.
"Mom?" Ursula chimed in.
Still nothing.
"Mom?" Our twin voices rang in harmony, one lower and one higher, yet still the same voice all at once.
"Urs, where is she?" I rounded the table towards the oven and it was then that I saw her.
In the oven. That awful burning smell. My mother. Dead.
Screaming, I called out to Ursula as my world came tumbling down. The pirates, the fairies, the flying children all crashed down to the weather-worn floor with my body. I grasped wildly through the air, for comfort, for help, for my mother.
And all I found were the arms of my sister. "Oh my God!" Sobbed Ursula. "What have we done? What have we done?"
----
I don't remember much more of that day, except the smoke. The smoke filled the air, my lungs, the kitchen, my heart. All I could taste was the raw burning scent of my mother's tarnished dreams.
The entire day passed like a nightmare, Ursula and I clinging to each other as if we were all we had.
And we were.
----
That night, before Social Services came to shoo all the mourning neighbors and friends away to place us in the care of our grandmother, I remember watching Ursula brave the kitchen one last time.
Though her body was gone, I could still feel my mother in the house. Ursula said I was crazy, but I felt her.
When Ursula had said her final goodbye to the place where my mother had said hers, I noticed a small slip of paper sticking out of Ursula's pocket.
"What's that?" I had tearfully questioned.
"Nothing," she pushed my questions away. "Nothing."
As we went to bed at my grandmother's house that night, I peered in her pocket, not knowing if I truly wanted to see the note. In the darkened room, I could make out two words amid my mother's hasty scrabble of a suicide note:
Never land.
----
And now I am eighteen. All love of the make-believe has vanished from my system, believe me. Yet there are times like this, when I sit on a vacant park bench on cool Aprilevenings and think of how different my life used to be.
I used to be warm, for starters, not shivering in a barely one-room apartment in East Brooklyn.
I used to be happy, too.
Well, we can't go on living in the past, can we?
So I've moved on. But my mother's suicide note haunts me. How I wish I would've seen more than those two words, how I wish I would have seized the moment and read the entire note. Now I pretend it doesn't exist. If Ursula were to mention it to me- a doubtful occurrence because we no longer speak- I would act oblivious. But I saw it. Two words.
Never land.
I'll never know if the space was intentional, or if that's how my mother spelled the make-believe area where Peter Pan got his kicks.
Maybe she thought I was flying, and never wanted me to land.
I'm willing to bet that it was the latter, though it frightens me to think that my mother even knew about that place, my mother who killed herself.
Maybe that's why Neverland has the word 'never' in it.
Never.
Never.
You will never understand.
----
It's getting dark now, so I head back to my apartment. On the street, my friend Benny whistles to me. I hope he's got what I want.
Tugging my thin coat around my body, I hurry into a darkened alley.
"Hey, Pheebs," he chokes out.
"Benny!" I throw my arms around the ragged old man living in the alley. I'm not here to judge; I used to live out here, too, when I had a falling-out with both Ursula and my grandmother.
"Did ya bring the cash?"
"You bet!" I smile, almost too brightly for the dark alley. "Did you bring what I came for?"
"You bet," he winks, a gesture almost too sincere for my liking. I get enough of that already.
"Great." I snatch the bag, and inside my body hums for the contents. "I'll catch you later, Benny!"
"Why ya gotta leave so soon?" His face falls as he understands. "You got one of them fellas waitin' for ya?"
"Not yet, I have to go on the prowl." 'On the prowl.' My nice way of saying prostitution.
"Bye, Pheebs! Ya come back ta see me soon, ya hear?"
"Will do!" My stilettos clatter against the sewers I dash out into the street lights, covering my face with my hood. Both Benny and I know I'll be back. I can't live without his pills. He can't live without my money. We both, therefore, cannot live without the men.
I strip off my jacket and hold it in my hand, pills in tow. Revealing myself to the residents of East Brooklyn, I scout out my prospects.
Man. About 45. Alone. Dark. Silent. He walks past me, and I smile knowingly, winking at him from underneath my weight of mascara. He nods, but continues walking.
He is not the one.
Next up, short man. Dwarfish-looking. Pale skin, covered in blemishes. He saunters past, and I try not to wink, but I cannot help it. The pills rumble inside my coat and I think of where I would be without them. Without the men. He flashes a wad of cash in my face as he passes, and I know it.
He is the one.
Unfortunately.
I force myself to smile seductively, and lead him up to my apartment.
I ask him his name and he grunts. Okay, he is now Grunty-man.
I tell Grunty-man that I need a minute to prepare and that he can sit on the bed. Glad that I have a spare change of sheets in my meager linen closet, Grunty-man sits on the bed, trembling in raw excitement.
In my shadow of a bathroom, I close the door and open the contents of the bag. Small green pills clatter all across the dirty floor. I don't care. I pick them up and pop two in my mouth.
Before the pills hit me fully, I glance in the mirror at my reflection. Each day, I look less and less like my mother. Each day, I look less and less like my twin.
Each day, I look less and less like myself.
I can see my mother in this broken mirror, her broken truth, her broken pain. She whispers to me, "Phoebe, never land. Fly, my darling. Fly. Never land. Neverland. Never land. Neverland."
Her words blur in my head as I stumble out into a forest of green trees and fairies. A pirate grunts on my bed of flowers, awaiting my presence.
He smiles at me, teeth ragged and yellow. His face blurs into my surroundings as I feel him strip me of my tarnished clothing.
I am Wendy, I am Peter Pan, I am a flying fairy, I am a lost child. But most of all, I am flying. Flying high above the mermaids, high above the pirate deep inside me, high above my mother's pain.
A green light twinkles in the distance.
Looks like it's off to Neverland, after all.
----
Well, it was different. lol. Please let me know if you liked it or if it was just plain weird. And not in a good way. lol. Thanks, and updates on my R/R stories ASAP. Beautiful will be updated soon, also, even though I updated yesterday. lol.
Have a great day!
Mel