“I can’t,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her body was so bruised and so sore and her arm felt as if it were being dipped to the shoulder in acid. She barely noticed the disarrayed, blurry pandemonium of Peter and Hook where they continued to fight off the determined, desperate advances of the skeletal monster who wanted Wendy dead.
“Yes you can,” John told her. “Nothing can keep a storyteller from telling a story, Wendy.” He gently cupped her face and peered into her stormy eyes. “I know that now, sis. And I’m so sorry for ever asking you to stop.” His expression was so pained that it drew Wendy out of her own agony and into his.
“I forgive you,” she told him.
John smiled a sad smile and nodded. “Then finish the story,” he whispered.
Wendy closed her eyes once more. “At the center of Neverland, where the giant tree that once housed the Lost Boys still stood, a single green leaf on a lone branch began to turn from green to gold.”
*****
The leaf curled on its stem, its emerald hue fading to one of yellow and then gold. Then red. Then brown. It fell from the tree on a new, cold wind, and in the emptiness that memory leaves behind when it stops being remembered, the other leaves followed suit.
*****
The mermaids were next, and though Wendy’s head throbbed where she had struck it against a boulder while dodging yet another of the Never Bird’s attacking appendages, one by one, she sent the inhabitants of Neverland’s island home – back to where they had been taken from so long ago.
In the end, all that remained of the pixies, the pirates, the Natives and the others were Wendy and her brothers, Tinkerbell, Captain James Hook, and Peter Pan.
The ending had to be done right. It was the most important part. She wanted to send Hook back to his time and place, but she also needed to give back to him everything that he’d lost when he’d been drawn into Neverland’s eternal fairy story.
She wanted Peter to return to his home and live the life he’d discovered in their world. But she wanted him to remain young at heart. For that was a man’s greatest defense against the adult world. And because he’d been forced to grow so quickly in Neverland, it was something he hadn’t possessed his first time around.
Wendy braced herself against the sheltering boulder she’d finally come to rest beside. John and Michael stood beside her, partially blocking her from the sight of the strangely wounded Never Bird, which had been hacked and chipped at by both Hook and Peter, alike.
Wendy closed her eyes and prepared to tell the final part of her story.
Her lips moved and her words whispered out across space and time as if they echoed off of the stars and the sea and were sung by the wind. And then the rock beside her gave way –
– and Wendy fell.
It was unexpected, to say the least. Everyone had been so focused on the Never Bird and the storm, a simple fall from a great height hadn’t taken precedence. They’d forgotten that the rocks had been knocked loose when the Never Bird had drawn itself, in a bedlam of unruliness, from the depths of its briny tomb.
She didn’t scream as she went over. Instead, she gazed up at the gray sky over Neverland and never stopped telling her story.
By the time she hit the sharp, craggy rocks far below and the first of the tidal waves washed some of her blood out to sea, Wendy had a mere few, short sentences remaining in the finishing of her tale.
As the world faded around her and her body grew cold, she whispered the final words to bring about the perfect ending.
And then she took one last breath and closed her eyes.