VOLATILE (I) : peter pan ouat

When a Return Happened

When a Return Happened

"Where is Johnny?" I ask Harry, walking up to him.

Harry's ears go red. Never a good sign with him. "He's in lock up."

I roll my eyes. Harry is great and all, but he doesn't like to be the barer of bad news. "Alex?"

"Johnny is in our version of jail. He's going to be there for the next week or so. He got lucky, he could be dead right now. News like you need to learn to control your tempers. Don't bite the hand that feeds you."

I can always count on Alex to be honest, no matter how brutal his words are.

"So I should just whine about the hand behind its back and not try to change anything?" I ask. "I'll take a page from your book and be a coward next time."

"You are a plunter," Alex sighs, "and you are going to get yourself killed."

With that he turns around and walks away. That kid is the biggest ass on this island, even more so than Keaton. One day, he'll learn.

"He's not stupid you know." Harry tells me.

"There's a difference in knowing how to pick your battles and avoiding them all like he does." I respond.

Harry rolls his eyes. "What's up with you?"

I shake my head. "I'm deciding where to go from here."

"What do you mean?" He asks.

I'm about to explain myself when I hear shouting over towards an edge of the clearing, behind where Harry stands. Someone is shouting for help over there, and boys begin to rush over, shoving by me and Harry to get through.

Harry grabs my wrists and disappears, darting through the crowd with me in tow. The boy is small and sneaky; he slithers through until we are finally through the crowd. Before us are three boys. They are caked and coated in dirt from moving around the forest.

More Earth than human.

One of the boys, the Asian one, holds another in his arms, trying to keep his body off the ground. The third boy has short blonde hair, and is collapsed on the ground, blood almost pooling around him.

The Asian boy begins to sway until Harry and a few other boys rush forward, helping hold him up. The boy begins to cry, shouting something I can't understand. Maybe it's because the language is foreign to me, or maybe his shrieks are simply blurring together.

The boy in his hands slips down out of his grip and I reach forward to catch him. I miss. He rolls on to the ground, landing on his face. I kneel over and roll the boy over, he is cold to the touch. Colder than ice, colder than Pan's soul. Colder than the living.

I immediately yank him into my arms. Which is not something I thought I would do when faced with a dying boy. I expected to go into shock, but all I want to do is save him.

He's very heavy. Robert grabs him and helps me to remove him from the circle of boys. I head towards the med tent but Robert shakes his head and pulls us towards the other direction.

I follow Robert out into the forest. We twist and turn, walking in silence for nearly thirty minutes, until we find a ladder leading up inside a rock. Pan's house. Pan suddenly is in front of us, trying to help the boy.

Still don't like how he moves about without using his feet.

"It's Nick." Robert says. "We had to get his body out of the way, was bothering Wilbur quite a bit. Didn't want Jared to see him."

He's dead. I'm carrying a dead boy. I can't figure out if it's more unsettling that there is a dead boy in my arms, or that it barely bothers me that he's dead.