Pan pretends to have no heart, but he loved my mother back when I imagine she was much easier to love. Maybe she was even his first kind of love. The kind he gave freely after he emerged from the lagoon, a boy with no name and no story and no mother.
Somehow Tink and Pan got through years and years of love before they realized their love for one another was different.
There was no going back then. And there’s no going back now.
The question is, why the fuck did the lagoon give Tilly what she asked for when it loves Pan so much? When it literally birthed him? It doesn’t make sense.
I thought when he reclaimed his shadow, his relationship with the island was good. I thought the island wanted him back on his throne, the shadow in his possession.
As much as I try to ignore it, there is a seed of doubt that has taken root.
Nana loved Neverland and she was more connected to it than the rest of us. Even though she was the matriarch of the family and the Queen Mother, she still tended to the palace garden, growing and harvesting the food the palace needed to sustain itself, even though a great many fae could just conjure food out of thin air. Nana said food borne of magic never tasted as good as food borne of earth. Her fingernails were always crusted with dirt, her skin a little wrinkly from the salve she made sure to put on to protect her skin from the hours spent beneath the heat.
“Listen to the Neverland soil,” she’d tell Bash and me when we visited the garden with her. “Can you hear it?”
My twin and I would try to hide our laughter behind Nana’s back as she made her way down a row of cabbages.
Did the dirt talk to us? No. It definitely did not.
We were just stupid boys back then.
What did the island tell you, Nana? And what the hell is it trying to say now?
“You still didn’t answer the question, dear sister,” I say. “What did you give it?”
She licks her lips and straightens her spine. “I gave it my throne.”
“What the fuck?” Bash charges at her and fists the collar of her cloak in his hand, yanking her into him. “Why the fuck would you do that??
Her wings turn a deep shade of crimson as they beat at the air. “It was an ugly thing anyway!” she shouts up at him. “It was a symbol of my offering.”
“It’s a symbol of the very seat of our power!”
She wraps her smaller hand around my twin’s wrist and bright light bursts from her grip, zapping Bash. He yanks back, shaking out his hand.
Tilly tries to take to the air, but I’m on her in a second, hand wrapped around her throat.
She gasps out.
I have always been the gentle twin. The nicer one. Until I’m not. Until I see the only path worth taking. I’m the twin that gets the dirty work done.
I squeeze, cutting off my sister’s air supply in tiny increments.
She grips my arm, trying to ease the pressure as her eyes widen.
“Kas,” she says, her voice stilted. “Please.”
Tears well beneath her lids.
“You’re just a stupid little girl,” I tell her, echoing my own thoughts, my own fears. “We protected you all those years ago. We shielded you from the worst of it, bore the brunt of Mother and Father’s expectations so you could just be a spoiled little princess. We gave everything to you so you could continue to be a spoiled princess, and what did we get for it? Our wings torn from our backs. Our birthright ripped away from us. And now you’ve sacrificed the throne that our family has sat on for generations just so you can continue this campaign against Peter Pan? So you can be the most spoiled, powerful bitch on the island?”
Her face turns blue and her wings dull to match as tears soak her face.
“Kas,” she gasps out, slapping at my arms.
“Brother.” Bash comes up beside me.
I lean in, teeth gritted. “You are on a blind pursuit for power, and you’ve sacrificed the one thing any of us had for the resurrection of a dark, twisted, mother who never loved us.”
It isn’t until my own face grows wet that I realize I’m crying too.
“Kas!” Bash says as he yanks me away from our sister. “Take a breath.”
I don’t know if he’s telling me or Tilly, but we both suck in air. She chokes on it, wheezes, and turns away.
“You okay?” Bash pats my shoulder, pulling my attention to him.
When I focus on him, his dark furrowed brow, the flare of concern in his eyes, I finally come back to reality. I’ve always had him. In every dark moment, my twin has been there.
I look over his shoulder at Tilly, her lower lip trembling as she tries to hold her tears at bay.
Tilly never had someone like I had Bash. He goes to her now, but keeps his hands to himself, giving her the space she needs as he whispers consoling words to her. I collapse near Nana’s grave and look down at it, spotting several old wreaths of braided sweetgrass placed where her grave marker meets the earth. I pick one up and blow off the snow.
I didn’t make these mementos and I know Bash didn’t.
Nana loved us all, but I always thought she loved Bash and me the most. Tilly barely spent time with our grandmother, always preferring to follow our mother and father around like a lost little puppy. Mother and Father were the seat of power and Tilly had always been hungry to have a place.
Nana had the wisdom and Tilly never wanted that.
Hoisting myself back up, I cross the graveyard and hold the sweetgrass up. “These yours?” I ask her.
My sister and brother look over at me.
Tilly swipes away a tear with the pad of her thumb. “Yes.”
“Why?”
She frowns. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why were you here today? Why do you visit Nana’s grave? Why leave her mementos?”
Tilly licks her lips. The bruising left by my hands has already faded from around her neck. “I realized too late, that Nana was the only family we had who never wanted something from me.” Fresh tears fill her eyes and as soon as one spills over, she’s wiping it away. “I did what I thought Mom and Dad would have wanted me to do. Duty over family.” She gestures at us both. “Our duty was to the throne and the court. The family lineage. I didn’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to fail! And I—” She cuts herself off, teeth clenched. Her chin wobbles as she bites back the tears. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, does it? What’s done is done.”
She starts off down the hill.
“Tilly, wait,” Bash says.
I catch my twin before he charges after her. “She’s right though.” We watch her make her way across the graveyard, her wings still as her cloak drags through the snow. “What’s done is done.”
“She’s in trouble,” Bash says. “I can feel it.”
“So what are we to do? Save her again? I don’t think she wants saving.”
“I don’t think she knows the language of asking, brother.”
The snow falls thicker, swallowing up our little sister as she makes her way back to the palace without a throne.
8
WINNIE
Vane is brooding. He’s in one of the leather club chairs, elbow propped on the arm, a cigarette captured between his middle and index finger, the end burning, smoke curling into the air in thin ribbons.