Wendy cocked her head to one side, studying him carefully.
“What does he mean – different?” John whispered from beside her.
“I don’t see anything,” Michael mumbled, still attempting to peer through the telescope.
“I’m not sure,” Wendy replied. She motioned for John to stay where he was. Then she squared her shoulders, which she always did when she was summoning up a certain amount of courage, and she slowly approached Hook.
The captain must have sensed her coming near, because he turned to smile gently down at her.
John’s brows raised inquisitively at the cordial expression.
Wendy bit her lip. “Hook,” she began. “What do you mean when you say that Neverland is different?”
Hook’s smile turned grim. He raised his left arm and pointed to the place that he had been staring at moments before. “The sun should have risen over that horizon more than a thousand years ago,” he said, softly. “It has yet to do so.” He lowered his arm. “Neverland sleeps below us in that perpetual night.” He sighed. “I have, however, at last come to comprehend what has made it so.”
Wendy, eyes wide, face troubled, asked, “What? What’s made it so?”
“Haven’t you noticed, Wendy?” he asked softly. “Neverland is straight out of a story book.” He gestured to the world beyond his ship. “It possesses a back drop of fantastical proportions. And, most especially,” he smiled a sad smile, “it has a hero.” Hook shrugged then. It was a hopeless gesture. “Neverland cannot exist without Peter Pan.”
Wendy truly did not know what to say to that. It seemed that Hook’s words begged a following of silence; of digestion and contemplation. And, so, as her voice remained quiet, her mind became a chatterbox: Neverland is a story world. . . .Its hero is Peter Pan. . . . Her storyteller’s brain ran circles around the implications. Every good adventure tale had a hero. But a hero was worthless without an anti-hero. That was where the bad guy came in. The antagonist. The villain. He was the single most important aspect of every adventure story. A good bad guy made a good story into a great story.
If Neverland is a story and Peter is its hero, then its antagonist must be. . . . Wendy looked up at the captain of the Jolly Roger, who had once more turned to peer out over the vastness of space, toward that one place where he claimed that the sun was supposed to have risen so long ago. Her mind finished its damning thought. The bad guy is
Hook.
“What the bloody. . . .” Hook suddenly muttered under his breath, his blue eyes growing wide.
Wendy turned to look. A faint glow was beginning to outline the farthest horizon. Below it was an endless sea. Above it was a slowly brightening sky.
It was sunrise.
“The sun is rising,” Wendy whispered. “That must mean – ”
“Pan,” Hook hissed. “Neverland’s indolent son has come home at last.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Holy fruitcakes…” Tootles looked over Peter’s unconscious form, taking in the cuts and scrapes and forming bruises over his face and what was visible of his arms. “He doesn’t look so good.” He wisely chose not to comment, at the moment, on his general surprise that Peter Pan had grown up, and focused, instead, on the damage the boy had taken.
“He fell,” Tinkerbell said, simply. “Peter?” She knelt beside the teenage boy, gently brushing a lock of blonde hair from his closed eyes. “Peter, wake up.”
Peter stirred and rolled over onto his back. The empty bottle of pixie soda rolled out of his open hand.
Tinkerbell picked it up. “Well, at least he finished this off. It’ll help.” She stood up. “Come on, we need to get him home and warm him up.”
“Okay. . . .” Tootles considered Peter and his relative weight. “I’ll get his upper half if you can carry his legs.”
“Fine,” Tinkerbell nodded and switched places with Tootles. Luckily for them both, Tootles, or Jason Carmichael, as he was called these days, was a big boy. He always had been. He’d been, by far, the largest of the Lost Boys in Neverland and he’d grown accordingly. So, it wasn’t too difficult for him to lift Peter up off of the ground – especially with Tinkerbell’s help.
“Lead the way, Tink.”
It took the two of them several hours to navigate all of the alleys and darkened city streets that they had to walk through in order to get home without being seen by other people or, worst of all, the police. When Tinkerbell finally led Tootles behind the green brush and overhanging branches that hid the opening of their forest trail from view, Tootles could have cried with relief.