Monster // Peter Pan (Robbie Kay) (OUAT)

Chapter Nine

A/N:

Thank you to everyone who has been patient for an update, I really appreciate the kindness. (:

Song Recommendation:
Try by The xx
Bad Machine by Nostalgia

Chapter Nine

Days In Neverland: 7

I'm terrorized by all the things I feel but cannot see.

I was cowering against the corner wall where my bed was, where the quilt folded under the mattress and pinned itself beneath the frame, where the woodwork met up with the wall and the walls met each other. I had a pillow smashed between my knees for cushion, and had enfolded and re-enfolded my wrist with the wrap, swathing the highways and city lines with gauze clouds.

I wonder why I don't call them what they are anymore. They're scars. They're scars and cuts and lacerations and incisions. But, somehow, I call them naturalistic things nowadays. And I highly believe it's the influence of Pan.

Maybe he's right. I don't have to brutalize it. I can pretend they truly are highways and ditches and canyons, or I can hallucinate jet streams and wispy clouds, even though they were carved in anxiety and not the breath of a higher power.

Or even, I can pretend my arm is a chipped fence with cracked pickets and holes under the stakes, but the gauze is the mending wire that secures the boards back together. True, it is something that's found in nature, but not beautiful like the things Pan says about them. He says they are back roads and river systems, not barbed metal twisting alongside the prison lines. No, that'd be if I had gone as far enough to get stitches. And yet, I can never go deep enough.

Here, I can't risk a disease. If I caused my own wounds to fester, if I exposed myself to fever and sickness and all things infectious, I highly doubt Pan would be kindly enough to use some of his lovely medications or antitoxins to save my weeping sores due to my own self-inflicted slashes.

It's been a day since I severed my skin into more fault lines, and now they were starting to itch through the gauze. It was so uncomfortable I put an aching amount of pressure on my arm to put my mind-set on a different distress. I found myself nonchalantly rubbing my arm against the bed posts and dresser edges and wall corners when I walked through the hut all just to ease the scratching, but I never removed its dressing.

I was too scared.

I hadn't left my hut all day; I had just sprawled myself out on the bed or the floor or the bathroom floor even, letting my mind soak into the hardwood and soak into the quilts and drift out the window and over the hills and into the sea, drift under the waves and getting lost in the deep...
To a place where I wasn't separated from a potential lover, where it wasn't a modern day castaway version of Romeo and Juliet, where instead of the story of the Montagues versus the Capulets it was Kian and I versus the island, versus the people and the odds, against the time that didn't exist and against the mapping of this island. I hate everything here.

It took me awhile to notice that Pan hasn't called me out for training, but even if he did, I don't think I would have acknowledged him. He's the last boy I ever want to look at.

Late afternoon was when I finally started crying, when morning and evening clashed together and so did I, collapsing further into the blankets and wrapping the sheets round myself until I was suffocating, but it was fresher air than the one that circulated Pan. And as quickly as it came on, I stopped and pulled myself together and sat curled up on the bed once more.

It was sunset when Kian came knocking on my door.

I slid off my bed hastily and wiggled my toes against the wood as I hurried to him, my steps sticking to the floor as I sprinted for it.