Work Text:
i watch the work of my kin bold and boyful
toying somewhere between love and abuse
colors were always smeared across the boy's body. a father, a friend, a stranger. who would pass up the opportunity to paint, with fists instead of brushes, over the boy's plain face? the reds fade into purples, greens, blacks, and blues. the naive, innocent child fades into a hardened, lost teenager. predictions come easily: the boy will become a lonely, wretched man. however, predictions are not always correct.
what has so ruined him?
simply, growing up. that is the answer he would have given you. i see it as a bit more complicated than that. but i’ll let you decide what to think.
he was drawn to havoc. some might call him adventurous (others might call him foolish).
calling to join them the wretched and joyful
shaking the wings of their terrible youth
i follow peter pan closely; bodies seem to pile where he goes, and i am the one who is left to pick up the souls. i picked up many that day. that’s when i noticed the boy king and his newest addition. i wasn’t interested. i had learned, by then, that pan brings tragedy and death, something i see far too much of to be interested in more. but maybe pan seemed like a second chance, to the boys.
freshly disowned in some frozen devotion
no more alone or myself could i be
i tend to wonder at the lost ones that peter manages to rope in. how they can fall for his tricks. but the prospect of a home must be a most inviting one. after all, i’ve realized that is what brings these boys to neverland- the possibility of belonging.
looks like i strayed to the arms that were open
no shortage of sordid, no protest from me
felix. the name means “lucky one.” felix always thought it was a cruel joke of a name, but in his time on neverland, he grew to feel that maybe the name was true. because he thought he was lucky to be taken away. lucky to escape to neverland. maybe he was right; maybe he was truly better off for some time. but the time would come when he would lose that luck once again.
feeling more human and hooked on his flesh
i lay my heart down with the rest at his feet
i visit neverland more often than i would like, and i noticed the change of pace when i visited after the lucky one arrived.
the boys were, dare i say it, organized. less like a gangly group of teens trying to get by, with me inevitably waiting around every corner, and more like a united front. they were ready to go down fighting for their right to live. i suppose they had always been that way, but after felix, they were more likely to win.
pan seemed to have a change in disposition too. i won’t speculate; i’m not much of a gossip. felix had become pan’s right-hand man. their reign had begun. neverland, like all places, has changes and shifts in power. this was one of them.
if i were teaching how the boys (not just pan, but all of them) rose to power over the other island groups, the first finger i would point would be towards felix’s grave, if he has one; i never got the chance to see for myself.
fresh from the fields, all fetor and fertile
it's bloody and raw, but i swear it is sweet
i don’t mean to imply that felix was the hero of this story. quite the opposite, in fact. the two boys, pan and felix, thrived off of the worst parts of one another, i think. it made them strong, until the end, when every awful thing caught up to them.
leash-less confusion i wander the concrete
wonder if better now having survived
all of the boys loved to fill themselves with hate. hate for those that abandoned them, love for pan, who saved them. hate for the adults who would only try to take their paradise away. it brought them further from the outside world and closer to one another. and to pan.
jarring of judgement and reasons defeat
the sweet heat of his breath in my mouth i'm alive
as time went on, as time tends to do, not much changed; it never seems to in neverland. but pan grew desperate, and i saw it in how many more boys died, as time forced me closer and closer to felix. i knew it was coming; pan was losing everything, and felix was possibly the thing he valued most. it was only natural that he should be the last to leave pan. what i didn’t know was that pan would be the one to give him to me. later, when the time came (not too long after all of this unpleasantness), i asked pan if he knew how it would all end. if he knew that he would have to (finally) lose.
with his sweetened breath, and his tongue so mean
he's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
as i carried felix, the most loved, away, i could feel his soul. it was filled with neverland and peter pan and times when he wondered if he was loved. if he were here now, i wonder if he would laugh bitterly, because, as it turns out, he was loved (in some twisted way), or i wonder if he'd have grown tired of the callous over his heart. i wonder if he would finally break down, cry for the first time in centuries.
with his straw-blonde hair, his arms hard and lean
he's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
i remember how felix, "the lucky one", gasped his last breath as he realized he had no good memories left to flash before his eyes as he left. (they were all left bittersweet; ruined, blemished by none other than the root of every single one.) i can only wonder if a lost boy can ever really be found.