When Wendy was in England, she was especially good at balancing the politics of all the social groups she was a part of: her family on both sides, the social group from church, her father's work associates and friends, her school friend group and the other socialites. It wasn't a skillset she was particularly proud of, but it pleased her mother and father immensely. It also largely kept her out of trouble when tensions flared and friendships splintered. She could always tell when rifts would happen, whose side it would be most advantageous to take.
It was a skillset that she had expected not to use at all when she got to Neverland, but to her dismay, she used it far more than she had ever wanted to.
Pan's Lost Boys were always unhappy, grumbling under him. He didn't share his power with anyone and that made his underlings testy. They wanted more than just tenuous immortality and the freedom to wreak havoc. They wanted to recruit. They wanted their own followings. They wanted their own swathes of land. They wanted power. They wanted him.
Sometimes, she mused that, perhaps, if Pan were even slightly gullible or if she was willing to give up on her humanity, she might have been very good at picking out recruits when Pan flew off to other worlds. When Pan brought them back, haggard and starved, in awe of all the plenty that Neverland and Pan had to offer, she could pick out the ones that would obey silently and the ones who would cause problems. The ones who caused problems were often the ones who were totally captivated by Pan. They loved the Boy King, dashing and daring, without a single care in the world. They loved him, desperately wanting to be like him and bask in his glow alongside him as an equal. Jealousy was often what caused strife back in England and it was just the same in Neverland.
But she didn't want to dip her hands into the slime of Neverland politics.
Neverland politics had gotten Gavin killed after all.
So bitterly, she tried her very best to stay as far away from it as possible. But the island was small and there was no one for company who wasn't at least marginally involved in the backstabbing and double-crossing and spying. She heard about it from the Lost Boys who followed her around, the ones who were small and kind-hearted and used as pawns. She heard about it from her patients who got into scraps over power and respect. She heard about it from Pan, though mainly just because he liked the sound of his voice.
She would often snap at him when he talked about it. She didn't want to hear about the petty bloodshed or the destruction of lives over a perceived slight. Sometimes, she wanted to scream at him, "How can you talk about this so casually, so flippantly, when this is what killed our child?" She imagined that one day she might.
Instead, she would tell him sharply how to effectively fix the solution. Discipline this one, give some respect to the other, give another one a better room. All in an effort to avoid lives lost and patients maimed. He would look at her skeptically and would inevitably ignore her sound advice.
Typical.
She enjoyed it when she was able to point out all he had done wrong, for Pan wasn't perfect and all-powerful. His grip slipped on Neverland sometimes; she had seen it happen firsthand. The island would erupt in violence and he would inevitably come to her to have his wounds tended. She would scold him, berate him over the lost lives and the senseless violences. He would half-listen to her, drowsy from the pain medication she had shoved down his mouth. She wondered it if ever actually got through that thick skull of his.
One particular eruption she had kept her eye on for nearly two decades. A band of Lost Boys had arrived twenty years ago, four of them hungry-eyed and following Pan around as if he were their saviour. Pan had loved the attention initially, as he always did. He loved to be worshipped and praised, but he bored easily. He tired of them after a few years and had slowly pushed them out of his inner circle, away from the extra benefits and power it conferred.
She had told him at the time that that was the wrong move. He needed to placate them if he didn't want this to be a problem in the future. He had simply told her to mind her business and gone off on his merry way. She kept an eye on it though and watched them seethe silently. She watched as he did this to other Lost Boys, one or two at a time, and then they were then promptly recruited by the group.
Fifteen years in, Pan noticed and worked diligently to unravel them, but they had been stewing in their anger for far too long. They were too far gone by then, too strong and too furious.
So when an attempted coup erupted she was unsurprised. It meant simply more patients if Pan won and potentially escape if Pan lost. She listened in for hours to the chaos, sipping a cup of tea and mindlessly doing an embroidery. It was strange to remember that she had one been a high society lady, poised to become a nurse. Never in a million years would she have dreamed that she would have been able to tolerate the sounds of screaming and clashing of swords.
Sometime in the early morning, she went to bed, shutting her windows against the sound. She slept fitfully knowing that the next few days would be filled with wounds and dying Lost Boys.
She woke up late to Lost Boys lined out the door and she spent the entire day in a swarm of bandages and blood and sweat, the heat of Neverland clinging to her. She finally fell back into bed late that night only to hear violence erupt again. She groaned and slammed the windows shut this time. She needed far more sleep if this was going to continue on like this.
She repeated the same schedule for the next five days: waking up to injured Lost Boys lining up for her and her attendants' help. She would spend the day in a blur, her back and hands aching from her work. She would scarf down bits of food when she had the chance and then at the end of the day would wash herself thoroughly before falling into a heavy sleep only to be woke up in the early hours of the morning by the din of fighting.
She didn't see or hear from Pan the entire time. She didn't really care where he was or what he was doing. He would have been a distraction from her work and she didn't have the time for him. She hardly even thought of him until the seventh night, when she awoke in the early hours of the morning, her body trained to wake up then, only to find the island silent.
She blinked into the darkness of her treehouse and sighed. At last, the violence had finished and in the morning, she would find out what the aftermath of it was like. She turned back over, pulling the blanket with her and was about to fall back asleep when she heard a faint knock at her door. She paused and waited. Perhaps, it was a branch. But then it came again. Then a third time. Then a fourth time.
Cursing, she got up and threw on her robe, promising hell to whoever was disturbing her at this hour of the night. She flung back the door to find Pan crumpled on her steps, covered in dirt and blood. Grime was streaked across his face as if someone had smeared it on him. There were leaves and twigs in his hair and clothes as if he had been dragged through the forest. All over her was covered in large gashes that were weeping blood. He clutched at this side and when he breathed, there was a faint wheeze to it.
"My God," she breathed.
He looked up at her and coughed, the movement spurting blood on his chin and chest. "That must not be good," he quipped, his voice breathy and thin.
She heaved him up the last few steps and into the treehouse. She had to practically drag him across the floor to his cot on the far side of the room. She toppled him onto the bed and then ran for her doctor's bag. When she returned, she knelt at his side, ripping off his shirt to find a deep stab would at the side of his chest, gushing blood. She knew just looking at it that it had punctured his lung.
Upon further examination, she found several broken ribs, gashes on his arms and legs and it looked like someone had hit him over the head with a rock. The ribs were her biggest issue. The gash on his chest had punctured his lung and it seemed the ribs had done the same thing, too. And there was nothing she could do. She most certainly heal punctured lungs. She could hear the gurgle of the blood filling his lungs with each breath, shallow and strangled.
"I think… I think you're going to die," she said after a long moment. It was strange to realize that this would be the end. After he died in a few hours, she would be free. It didn't seem real.
He waved away her words and motioned for her to get moving, to do something.
She shook her head. "There's nothing I can do to fix this," she told him. "You're going to die." She tried to say it with finality but the words felt strange coming out.
"I'm no—It's the pain," he breathed. "It's excruciating."
She furrowed her eyebrows and stared down at him. She did have pain medicine. She could ease his suffering. But did he deserve that? No. He didn't. He had ruined her life and countless others. He was cruel and unfeeling. She could just leave him to languish in his pain and die a slow death.
She stood up, hands on her hips.
She could just leave him there.
He deserved it.
He was evil.
But she wasn't.
She had never let someone suffer needlessly. She had decided long ago that Neverland would not break her. She would always do what was right, what was decent. She wasn't about to let Pan ruin her record.
So she turned and got the pain medication from her doctor's bag. She poured him a glass of water and helped him sit up enough to swallow the pills. She told him that they would kick in within half an hour, but to be quite honest, she wasn't sure if he would live that long. Blood was pooling underneath his cot, already soaking through the sheets and mattress. His skin had grown pale and grey, like crumbling ashes in a dying fire. His eyes were barely open, eyelashes fluttering across his cheekbones.
She pulled up a kitchen chair and looked at him.
She had always imagined that if Pan died it would be some dramatic, cataclysmic event. Instead, he had been taken down by a bunch of thirty year olds in the bodies of teenagers. It seemed fitting though that the Lost Boys had finally turned on him. He had sowed the seeds for this and now, it was harvest time. He had poisoned them, poisoned Neverland… poisoned himself.
It would have been best if she packed and was ready to go as soon as he drew his last breath, but Wendy always stayed with her dying patients. She kept them company so they wouldn't be alone when they left. Pan complained to her about it; it wasn't efficient and it didn't do anything for anyone. She liked that she was able to spite him in her own way.
Time began to drag on. Fifteen minutes turned into half an hour and then half an hour into an hour. The hours began to drag on into the night and her eyes grew heavy and soon she could barely keep her head up. She looked out the window, away from the gurgling of Pan and watched the stays dance in the sky. When she blinked, the sky would begin to lighten. Before she knew it, the sky had turned into a warm blue, full of promise. There was a crick in her neck and her back was sore from staying in her chair all night.
Blinking in the light, she knew that once she turned from the window, she would find Pan's dead body. She had seen many dead bodies before and after a couple years, they didn't instil the terror and despair that they originally did. But Pan was different. His death had always seemed like an impossibility. But now, it was right in front of her.
Taking a deep breath, she turned and—
"Can you change the sheets? They're really wet and uncomfortable."
Her mouth dropped open as she stared. "You—you're alive." Disappointment crashed down on her. She hadn't realized how excited she had been do leave this place.
"Try to contain your excitement, bird," he said dryly, shifting in the cot. As he moved, blood oozed out of the mattress.
"Those injuries should have killed you," she continued on.
He rolled his eyes. "Your observation skills are unparalleled,"
"How?" she breathed.
He looked at her puzzled. "I'm immortal." He said it as if she were an idiot.
"Everyone is immortal here. I'm immortal here," she said, her voice rising.
"Immortal, but not immune to death, except for me," he said. "You didn't know this?"
She threw up her hands. "No! No, I didn't know! I thought you were the same as everyone else!"
He scoffed and propped himself up into a sitting position. The gashes over his body were turning into angry scratches, the bruises were fading. His skin seemed to glow from the inside out. "Why would I be the same as everyone else? Who would want that?"
"So what?" she demanded. "You're just never going to die?"
"That's the plan," he swung his legs over the edge of his cot and stood. He took a few halting steps to reach the kitchen before he poured himself a glass of water and drank deeply.
She glared at his blood-soaked back for a few moments before saying, "This is why the uprising happened."
He turned and quirked an eyebrow up at her.
"You don't share," she ground out. "You don't share the land. You don't share your power. You don't share your immortality."
"I'm king here. I don't need to share," he said like the petulant child he was.
"You don't share yourself," she continued, ignoring him.
"As if I would give part of myself to the Lost Boys," he scoffed.
"They give all of themselves to you. They give up their lives and their homes and their families for you," she told him. She thought of the countless Lost Boys who had come here looking for something more, hopeful and excited, who had found this hell instead. "They give themselves to you and you give nothing back. That's why these rebellions happen."
"Oh please," he said. He poured himself another glass of water and then leaned against the kitchen table.
"It's true," she said. "You go to these other worlds and charm them so thoroughly."
"They come for the freedom and the fun and the luxuries," he bit back.
"That's part of it, but what draws them is always you. You're charming and fun and exciting. All they want is to be near you, to be your friend," she went on. She had spent decades thinking about this and finally it was all coming out. "And they give you their praises and their adoration and you give nothing back."
He stared at her for a long moment. "I give them this island and immortality and no responsibilities or cares in the world," he said calmly, distantly. His eyes were so light, so cold it was hard to look at him. "I don't need to give them anything else. They shouldn't want anything else."
Wendy stared at him for a long moment.
"It's human to want connection," she told him. "It's stupid to expect them not to want it." She paused, considering how he might react to her next words. "You want connection, too."
Another scoff. "Please, bird." He turned and began opening her cupboards, rifling through them looking for a snack like he normally did after she patched him up.
She stared at his back for a long moment before saying, "You could have lived in paradise forever by yourself. You never would have had to take on the responsibility of being king if you didn't want to. But you sought them out, too. You want connection still."
He didn't turn back to look at her when he said, "I want praise and adoration. I don't want or need connection." He almost spat the last word.
"You can't have them praise and adore you without them wanting to be close to you. You can't have one without the other," she said, pointing an accusatory finger at him.
"I can and I do," he bit out, turning his icy gaze back on her.
"The last few days prove otherwise," she ground out. "I have spent a week elbow deep in blood because you can't let anyone close to you. I—"
"—This little sermon of yours is just because you still think I'm human—"
"—Don't try and change the subject," she snapped, her voice rising to a shrill pitch. She stood from the chair and closed the distance between them, with only the kitchen table separating them now. She pointed a finger at him. "If you had listened to my advice about Daniel fifteen years ago—"
"Would you drop this?" he demanded, exasperated. "You always have to be right, don't you?"
"I'm right about this," she said vehemently. "I saw it the day he came here. He just wanted to be close to you and after you got bored with him, you shunned him." She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself when she said, "Why do you think they like me so much?"
"I'm glad to hear you think so highly of yourself, bird," he quipped.
She ignored him. "It's because I form relationships with them. I allow them to get close." She shook her head. "Have you ever thought about why Gregory was so angered that Gavin got to live with me?"
"You know he viewed it as a reward for killing Christopher," he said, his voice tight. She knew from the tightness in his jaw, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand gripped his water glass that she was close to making him break. Pan was so controlled in all things, especially in his anger. It took a lot to make him implode and she knew she was close to making him do it.
"Surface level," she said, waving away his explanation. "He was so angry—they were all so angry because Gavin was getting the connection and attention from us that they all desperately wanted from you."
"You're reading too much into this," he said, words clipped and icy. His eyes were almost the colour of ice, only a hint of blue with only cold underneath them, a torrent of icy fury flowing underneath. His dark hair and his pale skin and his frigid, distant expression seemed so out of place on the island, cloying, boiling. He was far too ethereal for her mundane kitchen.
"You bring these children here who are starved for love, giving them the illusion that you'll give it to them and then you lock them out. They give you all the love and adoration and praise they have and you toss it aside," she explained. "Of course they'll take it by any means necessary."
"Are you saying I'm responsible for Gavin?" he asked. His voice cracked like ice chipping apart at the end of winter.
She straightened and said as calmly as possible, "Your way of life, what you created, that's what killed Gavin." She gripped the kitchen table so hard her knuckles turned white. She felt as if she was shaking all over. She had felt the words within herself for so long, the fury she felt that Pan had allowed this island to be more important than their child.
Pan took a deep breath, straightening to his full height. He towered before her, a blizzard building within him. "I think perhaps the first cruel thing you've ever said." His voice was so even, so calm, she had trouble believing she was really even hearing it. "I'm almost tempted to offer my congratulations."
"It's the truth, Pan." She stared up at him. She wondered when that blizzard would explode out of him.
"Why would you say this?" he asked through his teeth.
She tilted her head, considering. It wasn't just because she was furious with what he had created and what he had turned himself into. It wasn't just because she wanted to throttle him all because he couldn't let people in and so she had to watch Lost Boys died. It wasn't just because it was the truth.
"You told me yourself. You're immortal. You'll watch everyone you know die and one day, you'll be all alone," she said, her voice gaining strength as she spoke. "I want you to know why you'll be alone."
"I've become like this on purpose." He was so still, frozen in place.
"Yes. And you should know the consequences."
"I already know what it's like to let people close," he told her, his voice cutting through her like a sharp wind. "I don't wan to repeat it. It's not worth it."
She stared at him for a long moment, thinking of Gavin and how much it had hurt Pan to get close to him, wondering if his human life had been similar. "Then you've created a very lonely life for yourself."
"Why don't you keep your nose of out my business?" he asked. Attempting to change the subject, she knew. "Do you always have to be so meddlesome?" He knew the answer was yes.
She turned and looked at the bed. "You can clean that up now that I stayed up all night waiting for you to die." In the blink of an eye, the sheets were clean and the pools of blood were whisked away. She nodded in approval. "Thank you." She turned her gaze back to him. "And just so you know, now that I know you're completely immortal, you'll always be at the end of triage and I will be much more stringent with your treatments."
Pan glared for a long moment before he disappeared right before her eyes.
XXX
He had to get out of there. He couldn't stand her golden gaze burning through him. He couldn't stand how she seemed to know everything about him without ever having being told. He couldn't stand the truth of her words.
Your way of life, what you created, that's what killed Gavin.
He hated that they had clanged through him, bringing truth and guilt.
Soaring over Neverland, the island was quiet for the first time in days. A tense peace had fallen over the Lost Boys as they lay asleep in their beds. It would be a long time before anyone dared demand anything from him.
The air was warm and comforting, laced with the smell of tropical flowers and the tang of the ocean. Wind ruffled his hair, a kind touch that he didn't know. The sky overhead was an inky navy blue, dotted with sparkling silver stars. It would have been a peaceful fly if not for his encounter with Wendy.
He had gone to her because the pain was excruciating and all he could think about were her soft hands. Instead, she ripped him into shreds as soon as he was healed. Those familiar controls were slippery tonight. Grief and guilt were clawing at their chains, desperate to get out.
He landed with practiced feet into soft grass on a high cliff overlooking the ocean. Flowers of all kinds bloomed over the small patch of grass with a white cross standing in the middle of it. He sat down heavily on the earth, eyes carefully trained on the grass he ran his fingers through.
"Is she right?" he asked. He waited for a long time, and nothing came. The inky night was silent around him. The wind didn't pick up, no bird cried out in rage. A breeze ruffled through the flowers and his hair, gentle and kind.
He closed his eyes and called up the imagine of tiny hands holding a large, embossed picture book. The scene cast in a golden light, filled with the tinkling of laughter. He was no longer sitting on a grass, but a small bed with sheets decorated with monkeys and trees and bananas. He was at peace for once, a golden thread tying him to the two souls at the head of the bed, giggling over a particularly silly poem.
That connection had been worth it.