Chapter Text
“What about all the old lost boys?” The Storyteller asks, her head cocked to the side as she considers her own question.
The fierce warriors stop, each of them frozen in their tracks. Slightly opens his mouth as if to answer before promptly closing it, the Twins look at their toes, Nibs looks at the Wendy-bird in horror at her question, Curly avoids the gaze of everyone else and Tootles turns to their leader to save them.
Peter wastes not a second on her question, flouncing past her as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. She spends another moment on the lost boys, before moving her gaze to follow Peter, who has begun to test his weight on a low hanging branch of a nearby tree. For a while she simply waits, having sussed by now that the master of the woods needs patience to be dealt with. However, when a full minute passes she can no longer maintain her silence; her fast dwindling patience coming to an end. Maternal or not, she is but a child herself, after all.
“Well, Peter?” She prompts, and behind her one of the Twins sneezes and another wipes his brother’s snot from his nose. John frowns at the interaction- the standards of the English gentry instilled into his young mind.
“Well what?” Their fickle king retorts, and the mother scoffs.
“You speak of so many lost boys, Peter, but I see only six here,”
“Eight,” Michael corrects, adding himself and his brother and ignoring his sister’s (Mother’s?) frown of disapproval.
Peter pulls the branch suddenly and it snaps, it’s crack resounding across the forest and causing a ruckus from the explorers behind Wendy.
“There are no others,” He snaps petulantly, kicking off the ground and moving on to a higher branch.
Nothing more is said on the matter, but Wendy cannot let it go in her head. Despite Peter’s short and unsatisfactory reply, there is something in the reaction of the lost boys that sets her mind whirring in a way that disturbs her everyday routine; not that there is very much routine here. Swept away but the sudden decision to conduct an ancient spirit-summoning ceremony Wendy attempts to momentarily forget her quandaries, but to no avail.
She decides that Peter is not the right boy to ask.
Curly is.
Being as he is such a terrible chatterbox, and a gossip at that, the mother has noticed. Nibs and Slightly won’t speak a word that Pan hasn’t said himself first, the Twins would keep each other quiet and Tootles hasn’t uttered a word since his arrival in Neverland. Curly would be her ticket to gaining this knowledge that she had begun to crave. She thinks of how best to approach the matter once more and with strained effort she forces herself to wait the longest amount of time she can manage, so that the boy has forgotten her previous enquiry.
As it is, Peter hands her the opportunity when all go fishing. Curly is dreadfully ill, and as the mother Wendy is ordered- rather shortly- to stay behind and care for him. Had this not been such a perfect opportunity she would have objected the unfair treatment, but to her brother’s surprise she accepted her apparent imprisonment with good grace. She copies Nanna from her memories as she improvises a bed pan for the sick boy, before fixing him a cup of hot cocoa from a tin she finds set in the Wendy-house. She briefly wonders how it got there before dismissing her curiosity; such odd things happen in this strange land, she would truly go mad if she attempted to suss it all out.
She fixes Curly his drink, and one for herself, and sits next to him on the large armchair constructed of leaves and the like. She watches Curly drink, leaving her own untouched in her pale hands.
“Feeling better?” She asks him and he nods happily, looking and feeling cosy; wrapped in blankets and coverlets.
“Curly,” She braces him, watching him intently while he pays her little heed. “What happens to the lost boys that leave?”
He drops his –thankfully empty- mug onto the floor with a resounding smash, eyes fixed on the opposite wall wide with horror. Luckily for Wendy, the lost boy is not smart enough to blow her off with a lie or avoid the question smoothly. Instead he coughs and splutters out “W-we’re not s’posed to talk ‘bout it,”
Wendy moves hastily to clear away the mess on the floor, acting casual despite her burning curiosity which threatens to overcome her.
“Why not?” She asks in her crisp Oxfordian accent, desperately trying to mask her enthusiasm on the topic.
“P-peter doesn’t like it. It makes him angry,”
“He doesn’t like Grown-ups, does he?”
“N-no,”
“He thinks growing up is a trap, doesn’t he?”
“Y-yeah,”
“But what if a lost boy decides he wants to grow up?”
Poor Curly couldn’t see the trap she was leading him into, with her calm soothing voice and gossiping nature. She began to potter around the Wendy-house, absentmindedly humming and dusting.
“Peter gets mad. Very mad,”
“Does he send them away from Neverland?” Her fingers tremble as she reaches for a cloth; she was so close to uncovering everything. She polishes a silver kettle, watching Curly acutely in the reflection as he considers the wall and her question alike.
“He banishes them,”
“Banishes them back to England?”
“Oh no,” Curly says, now as engrossed in the conversation as she was, all worries seemingly ebbed away as he snuggles down further in the sheets and steals a biscuit from a nearby tin. “From the camp,”
“But only Peter can travel in and out of Neverland, right?”
“That’s right,”
“Then how do they get home?”
“They-” Curly freezes once more, his eyes lifting from his cookie to his mother, who has halted her diaphanous movements and is now staring straight at him, hanging on his every word. With a sudden steely resolve he clamps his mouth shut on a mouthful of cookie and suddenly finds himself absorbed in the pattern on the blanket. He doesn’t deign to finish his sentence, but he doesn’t need to. The words hang clear in the air, as if they have already left his lips.
They don’t