"Wanna go flying?"

I blink, and can't help but laugh a little. "You're kidding, righ--" but I haven't even finished the sentence when I'm shocked into silence. He's... floating.

Above my bed. Crisscross applesauce in the air above my bed like it's nothing, he's floating. I gape, and his grin widens, becomes a little more natural. He leans toward me, a few of the shadows lightening to be replaced with mischief.

"Come fly with me, Gwen," he says, and holds out a hand.

The world is falling apart around my ears. We're at war with creatures from nightmares and have been for weeks, but I only noticed tonight. I've been under stress from school and Stacy and there is a book in my bag that I'm fairly certain is magical.

There is a flying boy--no, he's a man, I realize as I look up into his grass green eyes--who calls himself Peter Pan in my room. He broke into my house.

I'm probably hallucinating. This is all a dream and when I wake up everything will be back to normal.

I should want that. I should want it to be normal.

But I take Peter's hand. "Don't I need fairy dust?" I ask, perplexed as he leads me to my window, his feet not touching the carpet. He shrugs and looks back at me, and his face is so blank that it makes me want to cry. He says, "Some fairytales are lies, Gwen."

He leaps, and I'm yanked through the window; the curtains mix with my hair and get stuck in my mouth. I spit them out and shake my head frantically, trying to see--and then I'm trapped in Peter's arms, held close against his chest and we are floating three stories off the ground just above my window. The air is chilly and my feet dangle in a terrifying fashion and somehow I always pictured flying as being more... elegant, than this.

But still. I'm flying. With Peter Pan. This is definitely a dream, and I do not ever want to wake up.

"Only some?" I ask, hopefully, as I look up into his grass green eyes.

He smiles ever so faintly. "Yes, only some." And then we shoot upward faster than I can imagine; the wind whistles and my hair stings against my face and there is no air in my lungs but I laugh as I cling to him because it feels amazing, like riding a motorcycle but a million times better.

I wrap my arms around Peter's neck and hold onto him, grinning so wide that my cheeks hurt, and we spin and flip and whirl through the clouds until I can't tell up from down anymore. 

Until I can't tell me from him or real from not real; until I don't want to know the difference. It seems so pointless, such a little thing from way up here in the clouds. Why should I want to know things, when I'm living a dream?

"You should always want to know things, Gwen," Peter says seriously, looking down at me. We're floating lazily above the clouds, twirling in soft, slow circles as if dancing to music that neither one of us can hear. I frown at him.

"Did I say that out loud?"

He shakes his head, no.

"...can you read my mind?"

He nods his head, yes. Well, and that's a scary thought--one I don't want to consider too closely.

"Are you ever going to use words?"

He grins, and nods his head yes again. I smack his arm, the familiarity as easy as breathing. Even though I only met him tonight, it still feels like... today is tomorrow and yesterday and last week. Today has been today for a very, very long time. That's what he said to me.

We've done all this before.

Haven't you been paying attention, Gwen? Don't you watch the news?

The world is falling apart and you're what--worried about a history project?

Time is on a constant loop and every time you open that book it just gets worse!

Their words echo through my head, over and under and around until I'm breathless, staring up into Peter's eyes, and I don't know how I couldn't see it before, how I missed it, how... how I let that curtain in my mind blind me.

"Why didn't I--" I stop, unable to go on as the horror hits me, the realization. That everything happening, it's all my fault. My fault.

Peter has stopped spinning; we're just standing here, in midair like it's something casual that everyone does all the time, his hands against my hips, holding me against him so I won't fall. I would notice how amazing it feels--how amazing he feels--if I wasn't so busy falling apart. Tears slip down my face and he just looks at me, shadows and sadness in his beautiful eyes.

"The Book of Unhappy Endings. It shrouded your mind."

"Why can I see clearly now?"

"Because we're away from it." And the way he says it, I know. That he didn't ask me to come flying because it would be fun or because he had something to prove--he only wanted to get me out of my house. Away from the Book. Everything he does is for a reason, I think, looking at him. I can see it like it's written on his face: the calculation.

The Peter Pan of my stories is a boy, childish and selfish and sweet; a boy who always gets what he wants. Who hated the thought of growing up so much that he didn't.

The Peter Pan in front of me is a man, and I can see in his eyes that he hasn't changed all that much. That he will still do anything to get what he wants, regardless of the consequences to anyone else. That he is still selfish and sweet, such a strange mixture of things. But he is darker too, darker and quieter and so much more sad. I wonder what he lost, what touched him so deeply that he could no longer remain a child. I think of all the stories, of Captain Hook and the Lost Boys and Tinkerbell, and I think of the look on his face when he said, 'some fairytales are lies, Gwen.'

I don't know him very well, don't know anything about what's going on. There's no way this is real, it can't be--even though when I pinch myself, it hurts. But if it is just a dream, or even if--somehow--it's reality... it's mine.

It's my dream. And it's my life.

And it's my fault.

So I say, "Tell me what to do to fix this."

"You can't fix it now. No one can."

"Then why are you still here?"

He just looks at me, eyes narrowed with something that I think is surprise--or maybe it's caution. I can't quite read him, can't quite see him; it's almost as if his form is flickering in front of me, and he's only really there in the single moment right before I blink.

"You don't want to know," he says.

"Yes, I do."

He barks out a harsh laugh, and we're no longer floating--no longer in the sky. We're standing on a rooftop, a small, flat one, and when I look out over the edge I don't recognize the area. Miles and miles from my home--maybe even from my city, I have no way of knowing.

"You don't, Gwen."

"Just tell me, Peter." I look at him, vaguely registering a faint sense of loss as he pulls away from me to stand on the edge, arms crossed, face and expression closed. "Tell me why you bothered to get me away from the Book if there's nothing I can do to change things. Tell me why you didn't just do this from the start. Tell me why you're still here."

He looks over his shoulder, eyes fathomless and dark--but not from the darkness of the night around us. No, they're shadowed from within, from something harsh and unforgiving and empty inside him that makes my heart flinch back in pain, makes me want to hide under my bed like I did when I was little.

Some fairytales are lies. In this moment, he is the lie I see; the face of a boy from a book superimposed over his face--the two images don't coincide. There is nothing mischievous or playful about this man. There is nothing light or childlike at all.

Only shadows, only the face of a man who has lost too much and seen too much and done too much in his life to ever truly feel alive again.

I step toward him, reach for his hand. "Please, Peter. I want to help."

"You can't."

It's my turn to stare at him, my grasp tight around his motionless fingers. Moments pass like years and seconds between us and I think I'm holding my breath but I can't be sure, because I can't feel anything anymore--I'm drifting in a sea of white noise that fills my head and drowns out all rational thought.

He's changed. Everything about him has changed--the boyish, sad young man from my bedroom has disappeared. In his place is... someone else. A man, but not young--though his face says otherwise. His perfect, flawless face.

Like it's been carved from marble, or the most perfect gemstones, like one of those pictures you see online and know it had to be photo-shopped, because no one in the world is truly that beautiful. His perfectly sculpted cheekbones, his full lips, the way his fire red hair brushes over his small, pointed ears. His eyes, almond shaped and turned up at the outside corners, not just green but black and gold too, writhing and dancing with the shades in his eyes like someone has dumped a bucket of color into his body and all the liquid is whirling and dancing there, looking out at me...

"Gwen." He says my name and it's like a bubble popping, like waking up from the edges of a dream, like suddenly realizing that you're hungry when you didn't know it a moment before--but you're so, so hungry.

I gape at him, and he stares back at me with surprise in his inhuman eyes. "You can see me?"

"I... think so?" I whisper, the words forced past a river in my throat that won't stop rushing, rushing rushing...

He stares at me for longer than I can stand it, for so long that I think my knees will buckle under the force of his gaze. Then he says, "There is a way."

"Tell me," and the words are still a whisper from my lips, but I try to put all the meaning I can into them. His fire red eyebrows lower and he frowns. "You need to stop looking at me. Your human head can't stand it."

"I don't know how to stop." The words are dragged from within me, from a place and a girl that I don't know or recognize. Peter sighs and reaches out, taking my shoulders in his palms.

His touch is like a brand, hot as lava through my jacket, making me gasp. And then suddenly I'm moving, turned around and all that's in front of me is nothing.

An expanse of nothing. Slowly, images begin to flit into my awareness--cars on the street below, trees in a park not too far away, lights from the building across the road and the lamps that I can barely make out from this distance. It's light--dawn has come and gone, and I didn't even notice.

"There is a way," Peter says again from behind me, and I almost turn to face him--almost, but I don't.

"Tell me," I say again, and I feel him close to me, so very, very warm, a solid presence by my shoulder. "You'd have to give everything up, Gwen."

"Give what up?"

"Everything. Your life. Your family--friends, all of it. You'd have to come with me to Neverland."

"To Neverland?" I gasp, and can't help it--I whirl to face him, more excited than I should be. He's changed again, is nothing more than a human man in his early twenties. I shake my head to clear it as he looks at me with a serious, dark sort of sadness.

"Some fairytales are lies, Gwen," he tells me, for the second time. "Neverland is one of them."