Jane’s eyes stream when she’s finally able to blink them open. She is not drowning after all. She’s lying on the sand, staring up at the wrong-colored sky. She pushes herself up, despite her body’s protests, every part of her feeling bruised. The ship is gone. Her heart lurches and she scrambles up, falls, stands again, and breaks into a run.
“Michael! Uncle Michael.”
There’s a crater in the sand where the ship shattered, or rose, or sank. Jane still isn’t sure what happened. All she knows is that it’s gone. But a body lies crumpled where the ship stood and her throat squeezes tight, tears starting in her eyes.
Then a cough. A gasp of breath. Jane rushes forward and falls to her knees at her uncle’s side, touching his shoulder. He sits up, blinking at her with eyes that are pale blue and no longer stained sick-gold.
“Jane? Where are we? What’s—”
She throws her arms around him, squeezing him tight. There’s no missing his thinness, the fragility of his bones, but she can’t make herself let go. She’s crying and laughing all at once, and it’s a long moment before she can make herself pull back, wiping the tears from her cheeks, to look at him.
“You’re never going to believe me when I tell you.”
* * *
The sky is red-black, flickering. If Jane allows her gaze to stray to it for too long, she begins to pick out a shape she doesn’t want to see—a massive thing, that might once upon a time have looked like a boy, maybe never quite human, but human in form, and now no longer anything like it at all. She looks down at the holes dug in the sand instead, one long and rectangular, the other square and small. Her arms ache with the effort. There’s sand under her nails, in her hair, worked into her skin.
They did the best they could with bits of driftwood and stones as tools. Her uncle helped her dig, in silence. Now, he sits beside her on the sand, legs stretched out, his head tilted back, watching the sky.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” His voice is very soft, very small. He sounds like a young boy. “It’s Peter.”
Jane doesn’t want to look where he’s looking, but his question stops her cold. She forces herself to glance, just for a moment, at the sky. It hurts in a way she can’t explain, and she looks down again, looks at her uncle and the awe and terror written on his face under the red-dark sky.
“Yes. I think so. What’s left of him.”
Her uncle doesn’t say anything else then, but keeps watching the sky, the figures, while Jane turns her attention back to the ground. How much does he remember? Something in his voice sounds to her like someone waking from a very long dream. And if that’s the case, she wonders what will happen to him when he does.
Part of her expected it to be different, as if once the shadows were driven from him, her uncle would finally come back to himself. A self she’s never really known, only seen glimpses of. But he brought his own ghosts to Neverland, and those haven’t left. Maybe they never will.
If she goes away to war, will it happen to her too? But her father went to war and returned reasonably whole. She tries to push the thoughts from her mind; there will be time for them later. Perhaps she can still find a way to help people without breaking her uncle’s heart.
Jane shifts her gaze to the bones. Along with Michael, in the crater where the ship had been, she’d found a skeleton, one with only one hand. The bones looked old, as if the man they’d belonged to had died a long time ago. She lifts them now, as carefully as she can. They weigh nothing as she shifts them to the makeshift, shallow grave.
She takes the larger, carved skull from her satchel, nestles it into the crook of the skeleton’s arm. She lets her fingertips rest against the silver patterns for a moment, feeling she should say something, though she didn’t know either man, not really. They were stories, dreams belonging to another world. But for a time, their world crossed her own.
“He loved you very much.” It’s the only thing she can think to say, seeing in her mind’s eye the pirate captain’s expression as he’d held the silver-chased skull. “And he’s sorry he never told you.”
She lets her touch linger a moment before pushing sand into the grave until she can no longer see the bones. Then she turns to the second, smaller grave. Her hand rests on the flap of her satchel. For a moment, she can’t make herself reach inside. She doesn’t want to let go. Timothy deserves so much better than this, an unmarked and shallow grave under an eternally burning sky.
But she can’t bring him back to London either. Whatever else this place was to him, it was also home. Once he was happy here. There were times when the only things were games and stories, no bedtime or rules. And he could fly.
Jane scrubs fiercely at her eyes. The grief inside of her is too big to let go. It sits in her chest, in her throat. Tears stream from her eyes, but instead of bringing relief, the ache just goes on and on. It isn’t fair.
She kneels, setting Timothy’s skull in the hole as gently as she can.
“Once,” she whispers, like the beginning of a fairy tale. But the word breaks, and she can’t get any further.
Everything smears and blurs in her vision, she’s crying so hard. A hand touches her shoulder, and she looks up. Uncle Michael stands beside her, looking down at her. He doesn’t need to know who the bones belong to in order to understand her sorrow. He doesn’t have to know where they are, or what happened to know that Jane hurts, all the way through, and to reach out and offer her comfort in her pain.
She covers the hole as quickly as she can, wordlessly saying she’s sorry, wordlessly saying goodbye. There’s a picture in her mind of Peg and of Timothy and she holds on to them as tightly as she can and then lets them go. When it’s done, she rises, and brushes the sand off her trousers. She takes her uncle’s hand, smiling at him through the tears.
It’s time to go home.