The Lost Girl ✨Once Upon A Time✨

Chapter Seven

   The good sense in the girl nagged at her to stand her ground, but her feet had other ideas. Stubbornness could only keep her from floating away into dreamland for so long, and with the location that close to her grasp and Peter Pan gone, its hold expired. Her boots were apparently betrayal-prone to truer thoughts and traits.

   Wren silenced the voice in her head with lies. She wasn't following Pan's orders. He told her to go to camp to feast. She wasn't returning to eat. No matter how good the golden platters of food smelled or looked, that was not why she was walking. That wasn't why she let Pan get away and her anger vaporize with him. She was quenching her curiosities. 

  'Where did those hoards of Lost Boys with their prying gazes and far-too-large weapons disappear off to when Pan raised his hand? '

   There. It was a mystery. Not much of one in all honesty- the boys likely only sulked after Wren for a bit before growing tiresome of her lacking knife skills. If Chilton was any indicator, then immortality did not equate to patience- but it was enough of an excuse for why she was drawn into this certain trap. This false paradise.

   Having goals wouldn't protect Wren from the mirage's draw for certain. She could feel its temptation, asking her, begging her: Come closer. Eat. Drink. It was like a shiny thing, and she was a crow. A rather stupid crow she must be to walk into its glimmering jaws.

   Maybe this was the version of Neverland that all the Lost Boys saw. Maybe the nirvana sunk teeth into the childhood innocence of these watered-down adults and preyed upon their weakness. Maybe it strung them along like an addict, searching for another hit of this Neverland to where they'd do anything to appease Pan.

   Or maybe this food was as good as a contract. One bite into these faerie treats, and you'd be in debt to the island forever.

   It was more likely that it was just poisonous.

   Peter Pan wasn't the type to be so anticlimactic, though. If he wanted her dead, he would've disposed of the girl much earlier. He was weaving a story by disorienting her, and he had no reason to kill off the main character so soon.

   It didn't matter. It shouldn't matter. Wren needed to stop getting tripped up over the little details. She couldn't worm her way into their minds. These boys kidnapped her; they were psychotic. They could manipulate the little things. She needed to start playing by the big picture if she wanted to escape or even live. Old habits died hard.

   The girl's legs still carried her forwards, no matter how willing or unwilling her mind was to follow. She had to begrudgingly admit that the scene did not invite dread to fill her. Distrust and unease, yes, but not dread.

   Could she really blame herself for seeking this tea party in Wonderland? For wanting to explore a personal Narnia? It felt like a betrayal to the words she'd used to fight Pan since she got here, but it was what she'd always wanted.

   A table with real golden platters. A table with delicacies plated and shoved and sliced into creations like something you'd expect to be served to a princess, the few and far between empty gaps furnished by blooms and their fronds. A table lined with a seemingly endless number of empty wooden plates and shining goblets, sided by long benches curling upwards from the dirt, headed by a boy king's throne. A table canopied and providing protection from Pan's night, slow raindrops starting to fall. Any child would be enamored with the thing.

   She was finally in Neverland- or at least the place they had always made it out to be.

   Wren wished the drone in her head would go away. She wanted to be able to sit down in all well-meaning ignorance and eat and drink until she was so tired that she passed out, sin worries of poison or imprisonment. She wanted to be a girl again. She wanted to believe anything she heard, every story, every lie. That's why she was here in the first place. She still wanted child-like wonder to blanket her world. She wanted to imagine that fiction was real life even when conspirators could corrupt her mind.