He sighs and puts his hands over his eyes, not to hide his tears, but to breathe through the annoyance of me.
“Do not pretend like a man has no right to his tears,” he says around his hand.
I sit down beside him, one knee up so I can prop my arm on it as I continue with my nuts. “I suppose that’s fair. I’ve shed a tear or two in my day.”
Taking his hand away, he looks over at me, then drags himself into a sitting position. “What were the reasons?”
“Are we sharing vulnerabilities, Peter Pan?”
He fishes out a cigarette and lights it, then brings up his knees, arms draped over them. His exhale is a jet stream of smoke. He looks tired. Defeated. I don’t blame him. He just sacrificed his shadow for fae shits and his Darling pussy.
Not sure I’d make the same decision.
“Very well,” I tell him. “Tears shed. I will tell you of three times. First, I broke my arm when I was a boy. Fell out of a dragon’s claw willow. Broke it in two places. Hurt like hell. Second time, it was when I ate a girl I shouldn’t have.”
Pan’s gaze cuts to mine.
“And not in the enjoyable way,” I clarify.
“And the third?”
“When I heard my sister’s last breath.”
He nods, as if he expected this one. “Vane will never forgive himself for the loss of Lainey. She must have been a special girl.”
I blow out a breath. “She was an asshole who liked to push us, her older brothers, because she knew we would jump at anything to protect her. We were a bit controlling, I’ll admit.”
Cigarette pinched between his fingertips, he takes another long drag, his gaze on the sand.
“And what reason does the Never King have to shed a tear or two?”
I know already, of course, but I like to poke a wound just to watch it bleed.
“I’ve lost everything I am,” he admits.
“And what will the Never King do now that he has nothing?”
He takes a deep breath. “Right now I’m just trying to figure out why.” He nods at the dark water. There are no swimming spirits. No swirls of glittering light.
“Why would the lagoon bring back Tinker Bell unless it was to teach me a lesson?”
I doubt the lagoon resurrected the dead fairy just to punish him. He clearly doesn’t know the fae throne was crafted by the Myth Makers, threaded through with dark magic. Makes me wonder if the faes’ reign, since their possession of the throne, has been clouded with darkness and bad luck. We’ll never know because I’m the only one who knows to ask the question, and I’m also the only one who doesn’t really give a fuck.
“I think the lagoon tried to warn me,” Pan says. “I guess I did not heed it.”
“Hindsight is a zero-sum game where time is the winner and you’re the loser. Always.”
He finishes the cigarette and flicks off the burning ember, burying it in the cool sand.
“I thought once I reclaimed my shadow, everything would be right once again.”
“No,” I tell him. “You thought it would be easy. You thought you would arrive at some point in your future where your troubles melted away. It’s a trap, Peter Pan. I have lived a long time and I’ve seen a great many things, and I can assure you, there is no point in the future where problems do not exist. Where your doubts are no more. Your hardships gone. Where things are easy.
“There is no point in the future where it doesn’t hurt right here”—I tap at my chest—“when something you love breaks or abandons you. There is only now and what you do with that now.”
He glances at me over his shoulder. “The Devourer of Men is philosophical?” He laughs to himself. I crack open another peanut and dump the nut into my mouth.
We’re silent for a moment. The boughs of the trees creak as the wind shifts.
“Out of curiosity, what was it the lagoon told you? The lesson you did not heed?”
He waggles his fingers at me and I hand him a nut. “Potters?” he asks.
“The one and only.”
“Famous nuts,” he jokes.
“Infamous even.”
He eats the peanut’s roasted innards. “Remember when you tossed me into the lagoon? When you and Hook were trying to kill me?”
“Yes, how could I forget?”
He laughs. “The spirits dragged me down and they said, ‘Never King, Never King…drenched in darkness, terrified of light. You cannot have light without darkness.’”
It’s an interesting choice of words.
I look over at him. The wind dishevels his hair. I think deep down, one of the reasons I have resisted liking him is because he is so very godlike. Indestructible. Indomitable. Distant and unreadable. A fucking fine specimen.
In all of my years, all of the people I’ve met, the mystical men and the powerful women, the rich, the famous, the royal, the secretive, none of them, not a single one, could ever shed light on where Peter Pan came from.
And perhaps this is the second reason why I resisted liking him. Of all the myths in the Seven Isles, he is the only one that has persisted.
You cannot have light without darkness. That I know for certain. But very few are willing to go so fully into the dark. To destroy themselves on the descent, so that they may climb out transformed.
I stand. “Follow me.” I walk down the beach, kicking off my boots, then my pants. Pan hesitates, but then joins in, and we wade into the water together, until it’s up to our hips.
“Do you trust me?” I ask him.
Pan’s expression is blank as he says, “Absolutely not.”
“Let me rephrase that. Do you trust that I know things most men don’t?”
“I suppose.”
“I have a theory about the lagoon’s message. Would you like to hear it?”
His tongue drags over his teeth as he considers.
“A man who has nothing has nothing to lose,” I remind him.
He grumbles to himself. “All right. Let’s hear it then.”
It’s no longer snowing, but the air is still brisk, the sky still cloud covered. The sandy bottom of the lagoon is cold beneath my feet.
“So it goes something like this,” I say to Pan and then lunge at him.
A man who has lost everything cannot fight a beast who has at least half more than nothing.
My grip on Pan is sure as I force him underwater. He is not stronger than me. Not when he is without his shadow, and defeat has already seeped into his veins, spreading like an infection.
He flails. Water splashes around us. His nails dig into my flesh as he scrabbles for purchase.
I catch the last moment he is alive, when his eyes search for me through the lace of water, when his mouth pops open and the water floods in, and his body gives one final jerk.
I give him a 3 out of 10 for effort.
For good measure, I hold him under for another minute. I can practically hear the seconds ticking by in my head.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
And when I let him go, he does not float to the surface.
Instead, he sinks.
Down.
Down.
Down he goes.
Until the darkness swallows him up.
Still a theory. But as the seconds turn into minutes, it becomes a much shakier theory.
I return to the shore, get dressed, shake out my jacket and slip it back on. I snack as I wait.