The Lost Girl ✨Once Upon A Time✨

Chapter Eight

   "Home" was a word of many emotions. Few times did it offer as much relief as tonight. 

   Wren was the personification of an oxymoron. She was tired. She was terrified and terrifying. More alive than plants and animals, than any sleeping monsters in this house. Because nothing could outweigh her ownership of these memories. No. Nothing more magical. Nothing more mundane. Scratching and itching filled her brain as they returned, sending her into a panic.

   Life- that's what this night felt like. Wren was alive, and it was horrible, great, and everything in between.

   She could have died. 

   Wren was afraid of death and had always admitted so to herself with some shame. She wanted to be one of the people who held conversations over spilled blood so that when her time came she would not dally. Truth was that she would fight. She had come close tonight, closer than her mind could comprehend when it only had threads of the tapestry. The story she had entered was here and now, though. It was bloody and as ready to play out on her phone screen as it had been in front of her. 

   Peter Pan was the villain. 

   Villain. She shivered. Mud flaked from her shoulders and onto her pillowcase.

   He was not the main character, though, as much as he may have wanted to be. His impact was a chip in the story. He knew so little. Wren knew it all.

   Wren knew every single thing right now, as a fifteen-year-old with a blossoming halo of messy hair and trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. Knowledge felt an awful lot like sweat and gore.

   Breaths snagged on her throat. She quivered.

   But her shirt was saturated. Her mom was going to kill her.

   Neverland. Neverland in her palm. Neverland plastered against her skin and hair. 

   What happened? What happened to her?  

    "What? What! Wha-" She whispered hoarsely.  Twitching fingers threw back the duvet. Her head parted from the pillow and collided with the headboard in a sickening crack. Still there, she shook the pain from her mind.

   No. She was not seeing things. Her arms were translucent. Shaking. Like a bad signal, she flickered on and off in the shadows. A technicolor flush tattooed her hands over the gashes. She peeled the covers down further. Her ankles, her feet- all glowing. Magic. 

   MAGIC. 

   She might as well paint the word over her features in the most obnoxious pink color that she could find. It was real, no matter how many times she had to tell herself. She had magic. Whether that was good or bad was yet to be determined.

   A laugh cackled from Wren's jaws before she could stop it. Her palm slapped across her face, silencing it. Hushed laughter quickly turned to something of a scream. She could feel the tears swelling in the ducts of her eyes, but she couldn't cry tonight. Not again. She let sobs muffle into flesh and her breath turn to hiccups before it was considered safe to remove the hand. 

   "Ohmygod-" Wren mumbled. She wiped the sweat running down her forehead away.

   What was happening to her? Who was she? 

   Certainly not Wren. Wren would not do these things. Wren would not say these things. 

    The girl sifted through sheets for her phone- the one she was not supposed to have past 10 p.m. She could hear whispers coming from the one working earbud. She took two breaths, one for each episode into season three that she had rewatched tonight, and ripped out the headphones.