Tiger Lily straightens. The fire-colored light surrounding the creature outlines her. She faces Wendy, and even in shadows, her eyes are bright. Wendy sees the woman Tiger Lily might have become, should have become, if she’d been allowed to grow up properly and not into this wasted thing. All at once, her guilt and fear are irrelevant. It isn’t her choice to make. It’s Tiger Lily’s.
“Peter is my fight as much as yours. Maybe more.” Tiger Lily’s voice is no longer a wounded thing, wind soughing through trees. It is flint, striking sparks. “You left. I stayed.”
A different kind of guilt knifes through Wendy. She left; Tiger Lily stayed. But back then, what else could either of them have done? What choice did they have?
“All right, then.” Wendy takes a deep breath. “It’s far past time.”
She loosens her grip, but not enough to let Peter escape, guiding him down the slope ahead of her. Tiger Lily follows, and Wendy tries to ignore the way her legs tremble. The creature turns its head to track their progress, looking at them in its eyeless way. It makes no other move, and Wendy thinks perhaps it can’t, rooted in the very stone.
As they near the bottom of the slope, Peter stumbles. Instinct makes Wendy reach to catch him before she can think whether it’s deliberate or accidental. The movement puts her off balance, and Peter uses it, rolling forward and letting his weight pull them both down. Wendy loses her grip as she tumbles. When she stops, she finds herself resting up against Peter’s shadow. It is solid and insubstantial at once. Hot and cold. The absence of light and unbearably bright; she can scarcely look at it.
“Catch him!” she shouts to Tiger Lily, scrambling to right herself.
As Peter tries to crawl away from her, Wendy grabs his foot, hauling him backward. He screams, lashing at her with his other leg. Wendy dodges, barely avoiding getting kicked in the jaw. Peter’s eyes shine wild, sweat streaking his face.
Time surges backwards as Wendy tightens her grip. Peter hasn’t aged a day; he hasn’t changed. She thinks of their positions reversed, Peter looming over her and bellowing in her face, demanding she look at him and look at his shadow. Demanding she love all of him, or not at all. Her fear then turns to anger now.
Keeping one hand on Peter’s ankle, Wendy gets her other hand on the back of his neck. She lets go of his foot, hauling him up like a mother cat would a kitten. Her nails dig into his skin, and she ignores the noise Peter makes as they do. He squirms, but she turns him toward his shadow and thrusts him forward at arm’s length.
“Look at it, Peter. Look at yourself. All of it. You can’t hide from what you are anymore.”
He tries to back away, but Wendy keeps her elbow locked, her fingers at the base of his skull to keep him from turning his head.
“It’s your shadow, Peter. Look at him.”
“You’re lying.” Peter’s voice is small. He tries to pull away, and the piteousness of him almost breaks her, but Wendy keeps her grip firm. “You sewed my shadow back on. Remember, Wendy?”
His voice is a little boy’s. She can almost believe it. For a moment, it is all she believes. She is the monster, not Peter.
“No.” Wendy’s voice quavers, doubting what she knows to be true. Tiger Lily’s stories. The bones in this very cave. Peter himself had called the creature his secret. “He’s yours, Peter. He’s you.”
Her palm slicks with Peter’s sweat, and the sound he makes now is altogether more broken, a panicked hitching of breath, like he can’t catch enough air. Petty triumph fills her. Wendy imagines her own head scraping the cavern ceiling, as obscenely tall and monstrous as Peter seemed to her all those years ago. Instead of snatching memory from him as he did to her, she wants to cram the truth down his throat, fill him with it until he’s bursting.
Wendy yanks him backward, so roughly Peter falls, and she leans over him again, glaring into his face.
“You see?” Her lips pull back from her teeth; it is not a smile. “Do you see now what you are?”
She has no need to hold him anymore. Peter curls in on himself, so much smaller than her, transfixed and still. He is a wounded animal, but even so, Wendy’s anger remains. She pulls it around herself like a cloak, allows herself to feel all of it. Despite the fear in Peter’s eyes, or perhaps because of it, she wants to hurt him.
She is bigger than him, stronger, and she pins him with ease. By the cave’s light, Wendy sees the silhouette of her hand fall across Peter’s face before she even realizes her arm is raised to strike. Peter blanches, freckles standing out like spots of rust, spots of blood. He looks so young. He looks afraid.
Before he ever stole her daughter, he stole her. He stole years of her life. All that time she spent locked away, believing in him, refusing to give up, he never came for her. He ordered her to love him, but did he ever even think of her once when she was out of his sight? He’d wanted not a mother in truth, but the idea of a mother, like his idea of pirates and Indians, soldiers and war. Someone to tell stories and keep the monsters away. Someone to save him from himself.
He’d demanded love like a shield, without understanding that love can be a blade as well, cutting far sharper than any pirate’s sword. Loving something means having something to lose, something that Wendy understands all too well and Peter never will.
All at once, the rage drains from her. Wendy lowers her hand. Peter breathes hard. What has he made of her? What has she become?
“Help me hold him.” Wendy’s voice shakes
