Travail (Peter Pan/OUAT)

Chapter 1: The Pied Piper

I groaned in annoyance when I woke up. Someone was shaking me, and rather frantically.

"Jay, Mara, wake up!"

I didn't need to light a candle to see who it was. His voice was unmistakable.

"What is it, Oscar?" I complained, still not fully conscious.

"What's going on?" Mara whispered sleepily from her bed on the other side of the room. Fighting off the waiting embrace of sleep, I was tempted to ignore Oscar and hope he would leave us alone. The sun wasn't even out yet and he shouldn't have been awake.

"I hear strange music coming from outside and I want to go see what it is. Come with me," Oscar pleaded. I searched for him in the darkness and could barely see the outline of his body.

It's too early for this.

"You both hear it too, don't you? The music?" he asked. I concentrated, straining my ears. I didn't hear anything out of the ordinary.

"No, I don't," Mara said, sounding concerned.

"Jay?"

I shook my head before realizing they couldn't see me. "Oscar you're not allowed to be in here," I muttered sleepily. Our headmaster was strict about the rules. No boys in the girls' dormitories, and vice versa.

"I don't want to go alone."

"Go back to sleep, you're just dreaming."

"I am not!" Oscar exclaimed. "If you won't come with me then I'll just go by myself." Neither Mara nor I responded. He continued, trying to sound desperate. "I'll be all alone in the forest. If something happens to be, you'll never know."

"Don't go then," Mara suggested. Her voice was quiet across the room.

"I... I have to," Oscar whispered as if talking to himself.

So dramatic, I thought. Before he could say anything else, my mind slipped back into comfortable unconsciousness.

˚˚˚

Oscar was nowhere to be found the next morning. At first, Mara and I thought it was a trick he was playing on us, but the gossip that reached our ears during breakfast suggested otherwise. According to one of our teachers, other boys from our school were missing from their dormitories as well. At the news, neither Mara or I could finish our meal.

"Can it really be true?" she asked, tears threatening to spill out of her amber-red eyes.

We had been best friends, Mara Ferril, Oscar Mallory, and I, since year one of boarding school. Mara was one of the boldest and brightest students, always drawing attention unknowingly. Oscar pretended he was struggling with his studies in order to seek her help, but she wasn't the tutoring type. She would miss classes, even in our first year, and he would follow her around, completely enraptured. It was only when our schoolmaster tasked me to herd them both back to class when I came into the fold. Being the teachers-pet, I couldn't say no.

We got along quite well, with Mara practically doing our schoolwork for us, Oscar making sure we still had warranted adventures, and me, who made certain that we never missed class. None of us had biological siblings and were there for each other like siblings should be. The thought of losing either one of them was unbearable.

Before we could wonder what to do next, someone mentioned an announcement was soon to be held in the main courtyard. Mara and I headed down to join the rest of the students and faculty.

The whole school was gathered, except for the missing students. Our headmaster started speaking, explaining the situation. A total of five boys, all in different years, had gone missing the previous night. The headmaster got word a few hours earlier that several youths from the north part of Venth were reported missing yesterday morning. All of them were boys. The town authorities were searching for a correlation, until then, classes were to be canceled for the day. Teachers were ordered by the headmaster to patrol our campus all day and night to make sure no one else went missing. A campus lockdown was to be in effect at sundown, the gates would be locked to allow no one in or out.