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“Mermaids are vicious creatures,” Pan has warned one time, his tone guarantees dustfall on her clothes, tiny particles kissing her head. The idea of merfolks doesn’t terrify her—until he insists it must.
He only speaks these truths when his head is swirling with a fever.
Tapping against the dampened towel on his forehead, the boy continues, blowing his nose into leaves. “They devour when your guard falls and consume until your bones meet this earth,” Peter hums, his breath hitched. “They will leave you, Wendy. They will leave you tattered and worn.”
Full of sorrow, she wipes down his face. The ruckus is only shared past the first brush of night between Wendy’s careful hands and his blabbering aliment, but John still blinks up with one sleepy eye, influenced.
“Then what should we do when we find one, Peter?”
The answer is spoken like the end of his attacks, precise, uprooted and someone will cry.
“We mock and let them dissolve into bubbles,” he concludes, victorious.
Nobody speaks after.
Morning comes and he’s fine again, tells the boys that they’re hitting the Mermaid Lagoon without his previously burning animosity for it. She doesn’t ask him what that means. She doesn’t ask how he knows of such things with quite an exactitude.
Unlike the group of cheery children, Wendy keeps his words to her heart, wary and careful around bodies of water and stars that reflect. She still recalls one of the girls’ previous attempts at drowning her. She still recalls his half-defence, Wendy, they’re only playing with you.
At thirteen, she hasn’t realised his seething comments from last night might have come from a past experience.
She hasn’t realised Peter meant his words and ate them too.
“You’re not the first Lost Girl,” Cubby has told her once, innocently enough. They happen to be sitting near a puddle, which trickles a tinge of memory back into his mind. All of the Lost Boys are like that, faint stories triggered from a pair of shoes, a piece of fabric. She thinks about her brothers losing their names one day. She knows Cubby used to be called Theodore, once.
Wendy smiles, shaking her head. “I don’t mind that.”
These days, she tends to wave these sentences with ease, having gone through her fits of odd jealousy before and naming it by its throat. Envy is only as powerful as a foe until noticed. Then it shrinks, it goes quiet under her dirt-stuck fingernails.
“I like being your first mom though,” she says, her shoulders balanced and facing down at the flowers, nature seemingly colours itself after a long night in Neverland, refreshed. She likes being family. That is the utmost honourable title to herself.
“But—” one of the twins begins from behind her, sticks dropping from their small hands, a responsibility alerted. The other finishes his brother’s reply with ease, picking up the fallen treasure “—you’re not the first mom we have, miss Wendy.”
She giggles, “of course not, we all have mothers before Pan.”
“No,” one of the children speaks. “We had another mother, with father Pan.”
She faces away.
“Oh,” Wendy murmurs and a blush flushes through her ears. It’s not the same effect that Peter would have on her, more so of embarrassment when her spine feels much colder in the sunlight.
Another mother! she thinks.
The thought intrigues her deeply.
It’s not like Peter to accept someone into the group without a number of reasons, hers has been out of gratitude, but he carries the same sentiment for Tiger Lily—and she’s not even close to being regarded as an equal to his hips. Wendy feels the wetness on her toes when a frog jumps by, alongside its amphibian leap is a splatter of tiny dots on her hemlines, a small interplanetary bridge connecting solely through pendant-like water drops.
It looks like a tail.
She is silently pleading at envy to turn its head away.
What did the other mother do? she prompts the boys. It hasn’t been wise of her to probe, but she can’t sit and wait for the world to spell it out again, on another random day. She grapples with the things they said. They said the other person had kissed Pan.
Wendy places plates on their dining table. She puts down the same dish twice, even when she has recalled it differently. It’s an appalling reveal, nonetheless. She can’t picture the image, the weight of a kiss on The Boy Who Will Never Grow Up. She thinks it’s blasphemy. She places two forks down for one boy.
And, you’re positive? she asked then, her heart hamming up in her throat.
They said yes.
They said that was what they remembered the most about their time with the other mother.
As Peter Pan comes home, knocked a variety of trinkets down with his back against the door and Wendy flies over to his place—he smiles at her like always, and asks if she’s hungry enough to eat.
The girl passes him a piece of apple, all sliced up. She tries to give him a peck on the cheek that evening, just cause, too. They’re father and mother to the boys, hence this shouldn’t be unavoidable; not to mention his previous closeness. But when she leans in after taking off his coat, a situation from her old days of watching her parents in London, Peter sends her direction away, dodging and flying.
“This is not to be rushed,” he tells her, arms folded. Some seconds pass by as she realises he has seen through her sudden antics.
They don’t talk about it afterwards but,
Girls who kiss first—grow up first, too.
She asks John if he has known of anything on long trips to the ponds with Peter, presuming he can blow her frustration away with logical sentences and compose his sister with practical words. Speak to me freely, she has enquired him to. Her brother sits and then, from a mixture of confusion, he tells her about the pauses in between.
“Whenever I accompany him past the Mermaid Lagoon, the girls seem to claw at Peter alone, in the mood to possess a piece of his attention to themselves, all too ready to hear about his worldly experience.”
“And?” she asks.
“And,” John lowers his gaze, “well, today they told us that an Ariel had gotten engaged.”
Wendy nods. She can’t possibly imagine why that would be bad news in any regard. Nobody in the Darling household has ever heard of Ariel, but to be regarded by the merfolks in their limited, cherished timespan with Peter, then that name must not be called out in vain.
She thinks about the time aunt Matilda rushed home with a ring, face blooming with the sunset. She thinks about weddings as joyous occasions, something the Lost Boys would find worth celebrating.
But the silence stretches on and her burdens are coming back slowly, the pieces of a previously mentioned puzzle coming into picture.
“Was Peter happy?” she asks softly, her tone nonexistent in his heartbreak.
John thinks for a second, then bites against his lips.
He points her to the mountains, where their companion sits and broods.
She comes to him pliantly, hands opened on her mauve sleepwear as he gazes out the ocean, and the ocean does not stare back. Twilight paints Peter as if sieving him through a mesh of periwinkle notes. He doesn’t acknowledge her sitting down, doesn’t care enough to point out.
Here, he doesn’t look her age. Doesn’t look like he can be fifteen or fourteen or whatever freezing degree this universe has blessed him be. She thinks about the information absorbed and what she can do with it. Seemingly defeated by her curiosity, Wendy lets out a sigh and asks.
“Do you miss her then?”
Peter blinks, doesn’t turn to her but she still watches him regardless. Her heart rises like waves, all seafoam and she thinks about how he might have wished for the other to turn into bubbles, to reside on the second star to the right.
(Ariel had red hair, she heard. Peter keeps the rouge feather on his hat more preciously than anything in this world.)
Wendy feels like she’s walking down uncharted lands, her hands are shaking, but she wants to hold onto his nevertheless. Attaining adulthood means someone will be left behind in memories. They watch something akin to fireworks kissing the horizon.
Ruby-eyed, he treads before turning over, before coming home to her and the kids.
The wind breaks his words into clouds. A bitter laugh.
“Does it matter what I want?”