Peter Pan Fan Fiction ❯ Repetition ❯ Repetition ( Chapter 1 )

Disclaimer: I do not own Peter Pan.

 

Summary: For the last time, Peter comes. For the first time, Wendy follows. WendyPeter.

 

Thanks To: Lotos-Eater, for betaing this for me! You did an amazing job!

 

Challenge: “Winds of Change,” posed by MediaMiner. 300-500 word drabble.

 

Repetition

 

She's older, now. Too old to believe in daydreams and fairy tales and wishes, too old to want him to come back - because she waited for far too long, and she has begun to doubt herself, has begun to doubt that he ever existed, that he ever promised.

 

He won't return, she tells herself. It's been too long - everything has been blown apart, blown away, by the winds of change.

 

The clock tower is gone, for one. She is old enough to know that it is possible to return to Neverland without the aid of a simple tower - which was nothing wonderful in and of itself, only a catalyst. But where else could she find the second star to the right?

 

Peter, she tells herself, could have showed her. But he is gone, or never existed, and she props her chin on her hand and leans out the window and watches the stars and wishes she could forget.

 

Change, it seems, has swept across the world and left her behind. She has not changed, not at all. The years have been kind to her, as her friends say. She finds no joy in being perpetually twenty-one.

 

Twenty-one, the age of wildness and insanity and living with a foot in each world, and that, too, reminds her of people, names, faces that she would rather forget.

 

A shadow dances, stretches toward her across the floor, and she frowns. “Peter,” she calls, softly. “Peter, did you have a nightmare?” When he doesn't reply, she turns to face… nothing, only the shadow, still playing along the floor.

 

No, she thinks.

 

Frowns.

 

This cannot happen to her now, not again.

 

But she is irreparably drawn to it, just as she has always been drawn to bodiless shadows without causes, and she reaches out for it.

 

This time, unlike all times before, it comes to her hand. She gathers it up, black silkiness that is wild and free and so unlike herself.

 

A breath, soft, as though just the act of breathing could break the illusion, could make this shadow disappear.

 

It doesn't fight her, this time, but this time she hasn't screamed, hasn't gasped, only accepted. Even though perpetually twenty-one, she has known far too much of life for her to be so easily shocked.

 

And this, of course, has happened before.

 

Just not this way.

 

Soft footsteps echo in her hallway, against her wooden floors, and this time she's prepared.

 

“Peter,” she says. Looks up.

 

He smilesfrownsgrinssmirks at her, and asks for his shadow back.

 

The shadow isn't as obstinate this time, either.

 

“Hello, Peter,” she says.

 

He smiles to her, “Could you help me fix my shadow?”

 

She almost tells him to try the soap.

 

Her son comes in the room, then; eyes wide and curious, so innocent, and she changes her mind.

 

“His name is Peter,” she says, ignoring the question he asked, and the other question, the unspoken one in his eyes.

 

“I named him for his father.”