A shiver rippled through Wendy, but the sensation felt distant, muffled—like a sound heard through thick walls, dulled beyond recognition. You were never going back. Pan’s words should have crashed into her like a hammer, should have lodged deep and broken something vital inside her. But they didn’t. The weight of them barely touched her, glancing off like a wave that should have drowned her but instead receded too soon.

  The grief, the anger, the terror that had devoured her moments ago should have still been there, clawing at her ribs, curling in her gut like something alive. But it wasn’t. It had thinned, bled out into something weak and distant, like a memory drained of color. Like something was leeching the feeling from her, leaving only an empty echo behind.

  Her breath came slow. Too slow.

  Her limbs felt heavy.

  The warmth of Pan’s hand on her shoulder lingered, but it felt far away, disconnected from her skin, like it belonged to someone else entirely.

  Something was wrong.

  Pan’s expression flickered.

  His grin didn’t vanish, but it changed—stilled at the edges, sharpening into something that wasn’t quite amusement. His golden eyes, always so light, so carelessly bright, darkened with something unreadable. He was watching her, not like a boy who had just won a game, but like a cat watching a wounded bird—curious, assessing, considering whether it was worth the trouble of catching.

  His fingers flexed, pressing just slightly into her shoulder, testing.

  Wendy twitched, trying to shrug him off, but the movement felt sluggish, like wading through water. Her body wasn’t listening. It took effort just to move, just to breathe. And worse—it didn’t feel urgent anymore.

  Pan’s grip didn’t loosen. If anything, it tightened, his fingertips pressing deeper, just a fraction.

  His head tilted, watching her closely. “Still in you,” he murmured.

  Wendy flinched, trying again to pull back, but Pan caught her easily, tilting her face with one hand, examining her. His touch was warm. Too warm. Like a living thing pressing against her skin, searching.

  “W-What?” Her voice came out thinner than she meant, uncertain. She twisted in his grip, weakly, but he held her effortlessly, like she weighed nothing.

  Pan didn’t answer. Not at first.

  Instead, he angled his head, his golden eyes flicking past her—listening. But not to her. Not to the house.

  To something else.

  “The mist,” he finally murmured, voice quiet, distant. Thoughtful. Listening.

  “It’s not done with you yet.”

  A slow, sickening dread curled into Wendy’s ribs. Thick as oil. Heavy as stone.

  She tried to hold onto it.

  Tried to hold onto anything.

  But it was slipping, fading, like she was being pulled under.

  “What?” she whispered.

  Pan’s gaze snapped back to her, sharp, searching.

  His grip turned unyielding.

  “Let me go.” Her voice trembled now.

  Pan didn’t.

  His fingers only tightened.

  Wendy barely had time to register the shift in Pan’s expression before his grip changed.

  Tightened.

  Then, without warning, he shoved her.

  The world tilted violently as Wendy’s back slammed against the floor, her breath ripping from her lungs in a choked gasp. The impact barely had time to register before Pan was on her, moving with that impossible, inhuman speed, one knee pressing down against her chest, pinning her to the wooden planks.

  She sucked in a breath to scream, but Pan’s hands found her wrists, slamming them down beside her head.

  The weight of him crushed the air from her lungs. His strength wasn’t just overwhelming, it was absolute.

  “No—” Wendy gasped, twisting, bucking, struggling to throw him off, but it was like trying to move a mountain.

  Panic cracked through the sluggish haze in her mind, sending an electric jolt through her nerves. The unnatural dullness that had drained her emotions just moments before shattered, leaving nothing but raw terror in its place.

  She thrashed, jerking her arms, trying to wrench free, but Pan’s grip didn’t budge.

  She kicked at him, her legs flailing against his sides, but he only shifted his weight in response, sliding his leg over her side and fully sitting on her.

  Wendy snarled in frustration, her panic tipping into blind, desperate fury. She did the only thing she could—she threw her whole body into flailing, legs kicking, shoulders twisting, trying to tear herself free by sheer force—

  Pan pushed her wrist away from her head, looming over her face from his seat on her stomach.

  Her struggles stopped short with a strangled gasp, her arms yanked together above her head, wrists trapped effortlessly in his grip.

  His free hand moved.

  Gently.

  Fingertips traced along her cheek, cradling her face in a mockery of tenderness.

  A breath of warmth. A slow, lingering pause.

  “Pan,” she whispered, voice barely a breath. “D-Don’t—” her mind spiraling, trying to make sense of the situation.

  Her breath hitched in her throat. The warmth of his hand, the slight press of his fingers curling against her face.

  Then his palm shifted—

  And covered her left eye.

  Wendy went still.

  A horrible, instinctive dread pooled in her stomach.

  His fingers tightened.

  Then—

  They pressed inward.

  A bolt of white-hot pain shot through Wendy’s skull, splintering through her nerves, lancing down her spine.

  The world exploded.

  A ragged, visceral scream tore from her throat as her back arched violently, every muscle in her body seizing at once. The pain was indescribable, not just a physical agony, but something deeper, something worse.

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  Pan’s fingers weren’t just burrowing into her eye socket, but into something beyond flesh.

  Her head slammed back against the floor, her body writhing beneath him, but he was immovable. No matter how she fought, how she twisted, how she screamed, nothing changed.

  His fingers dug deeper.

  White-hot pain turned to blinding agony, a consuming fire racing through every nerve. Her body convulsed against the floor, her legs kicking uselessly, her hands clenching into fists.

  With a wet, sickening suck, Pan ripped it free.

  A noise that shouldn’t exist slurped through the air, like something being pulled from the depths of thick, stagnant water.

  For a moment, Wendy could still feel it.

  A thread of herself stretching, pulling, tearing, then, nothing.

  The pain didn’t fade.

  It hollowed her out, left an aching void, pulsing in time with her ragged breaths.

  Her body sagged, the fight drained from her limbs. Her chest rose and fell in weak, uneven tremors, blood and tears streaking down her face.

  Her eye was gone.

  And she felt it.

  Pan held it up, inspecting the thing that had once belonged to her.

  Wendy could barely process the sight, squinting through her remaining eye, vision blurred with tears and pain.

  Her eye, her other eye, was still connected to a writhing, pulsing strand of black sludge, veined with twisting silver threads. It twitched, alive, as though it still belonged to her.

  For a breathless second, she swore she could still see.

  Not from her remaining eye, but from the one Pan held aloft, the dangling, slithering, pulsing thread twining around his fingers and wrist.

  The vision warped. Turned inside out. The room was backwards, impossibly stretched, as though she were looking at the world through a reflection in a rippling lake. The room cracked, lines of silver threading through the walls, through her vision, through her skull. Her thoughts didn’t come in order anymore. She was still screaming, she was still convulsing, she was watching herself from the floor, she was watching through the eye in Pan’s hand.

  Pan made a soft, satisfied sound.

  With effortless casualness, he snapped his teeth down on the strand.

  Bit clean through it.

  Spat the severed piece onto the floor.

  It sizzled, a hissing, unnatural shriek filling the air as the fragment writhed violently, curling in on itself, then dissolved.

  Wendy was still gasping when Pan moved again. His fingers rose to his own face.

  There was no hesitation.

  His nails pressed into his skin, digging into the flesh around his golden eye.

  A sharp twist.

  A wet pop.

  His own eye came free.

  He didn’t pause.

  Didn’t even flinch.

  With unshaken ease, he lifted Wendy’s bloodied eye to his own hollow socket, and pressed it in. For a brief moment it seemed to roll about haphazardly, before twitching, righting itself, and synchronizing with the movements of his other eye. Her blue eye blinked back at her, a moment before a spot of gold seemed to form in the iris. The colors swirled for a moment, settling into an arcadian green.

  Wendy made a weak, broken noise.

  It was too much.

  She could barely see him through the haze of pain and exhaustion.

  Barely react as he leaned over her again, gripping her head, forcing it still.

  He smiled.

  Then, slowly, carefully, he pressed his remaining eye into her empty socket. The moment it touched her, the world exploded.

  Pain.

  Blinding. White-hot.

  A consuming firestorm tearing through her skull.

  It was like being filled with something too big, something that didn’t belong, something that wasn’t hers.

  It sank into her bones.

  Into her mind.

  Like it wasn’t just changing her body.

  But something deeper.

  Wendy had no breath left to scream.

  There was only the pain.

  And Pan’s laughter.

  Rich, delighted, victorious.

  And endless.

  Her body convulsed, her hands clawing at his arms, but Pan was inhumanly strong, pinning her down with one arm, his breath warm against her ear.

  “Shh,” he murmured, mockingly soothing. “I know, Darling. I know. But this is going to help. You’ll thank me later.”

  She thrashed, nails raking his skin, but it was useless.

  Not just an agony that burned, it was deeper, crawling beneath her skin, inside her bones, sinking its claws into something fundamental.

  Something was forcing its way in.

  It crawled into her empty socket, cold and slow, burning. Like ice spreading through her skull, like a thousand voices whispering in a language she didn’t know, flooding into her mind all at once. As the eye settled into place, a terrible pressure filled her skull—like something had reached inside and was pressing its thumb into the soft, pulsing center of her brain.

  The world was too bright—too unstable—flickering at the edges, as if reality itself couldn’t decide where she belonged. For a single, awful moment, she felt like she wasn’t inside her body at all. Like something else had moved in.

  Too much.

  Too much.

  Too much.

  She gasped, convulsing, her fingers scraping against the stone floor as she tried to hold onto something real. But the world tilted.

  She could see.

  Not with her remaining eye.

  With the new one.

  And it did not see like a human eye should.

  The darkness peeled back.

  Shapes moved in the shadows, things she had never been able to see before. Wisps of smoke, threads of silver unraveling from the walls, coiling through the air like ghostly veins. The stone beneath her pulsed, slow and alive, like a living thing watching her back.

  And Pan.

  Pan was different.

  Still crouched over her, still grinning, but she could see beneath his skin.

  His form flickered at the edges, as if the space around him was struggling to contain him. His body was a shape, but not the only shape he could wear.

  Golden veins ran beneath his skin, shifting like molten light. His wild hair curled at the ends, twisted like the tips of dark antlers. And his teeth—too sharp, too many, glinted with something hungrier than amusement.

  And then—her eye.

  Her eye sat inside his skull now.

  Blackened veins curled outward from the socket like roots sinking into soil. It pulsed in its new place, and deep in Wendy’s gut, a horrible realization took root—

  He can see through me now.

  Her stomach turned.

  Her breath hitched, her hands flying to her face as if she could undo what had just been done.

  "W-What—" her voice cracked. "What did you do to me?"

  Pan rocked back on his heels, stretching, rolling his shoulders like he had just finished a particularly tedious chore.

  "Saved you," he said simply.

  Wendy stared.

  Then—rage.

  The rage hit before the horror.

  It came fast, white-hot, obliterating the pain, overriding the nausea, shoving aside the creeping wrongness that curled in her bones.

  "You—" Wendy choked, voice breaking, hands trembling as she pressed them against her face. Against it.

  Against the thing in her skull that wasn't hers.

  "You ripped out my eye!" she shrieked, the words tearing from her like something raw and bloody, like something clawing its way up from her gut.

  Pan snorted. Actually snorted. Like she had just complained about a stubbed toe.

  "Well, yeah," he said, shrugging as he stood, helping her up with a hand on her elbow. "But only because it was infected."

  The words hit like ice water, shocking her, cutting through the rage for a single breath.

  Infected.

  Her stomach lurched. Her hands curled tighter against her face, her fingers ghosting over the smooth, unnatural surface of the thing lodged in her skull. It thrummed faintly beneath her fingertips, cool and foreign, like a second pulse beating beneath her skin.

  "You could have warned me!" she screamed, trying to jerk away from his steadying hand.

  Her voice cracked.

  Pan only grinned wider, unapologetic, unconcerned, as if this was all so perfectly reasonable.

  "And what?" he said lightly, shoulders shrugging. "Let you run?" His grin turned wolfish. "We both know you wouldn’t have let me do it willingly."

  "You think?" she spat, rage flaring hot again, burning through the breathless horror, through the sickening, creeping loss of control.

  Pan laughed.

  A delighted, amused, utterly unbothered sound. Like none of this mattered. Like it was all just a game.

  Wendy snapped.

  "You took something from me!" she snarled, lunging at him, shoving against his chest with all the force she had left. Her hands shook violently, her vision blurred with pain, rage, exhaustion.

  Pan didn’t stop her.

  Didn’t grab her wrists. Didn’t fight back.

  He let go.

  Just… let go.

  The moment he let go, so did she.

  Her knees buckled instantly, her body crumpling forward without resistance, without thought, the last of her strength giving way all at once.

  She didn’t hit the floor, because Pan was still there.

  Her weight hit his chest, and instead of letting her collapse, he moved with her, catching her as she folded inward. His arms shifted instinctively, his body lowering as she sank, following her descent, making sure she didn’t hit the floor hard.

  But Wendy didn’t care about the floor.

  Because the second she felt warmth, the second she felt something solid, something real, her hands clawed their way to his chest, gripping the fabric of his shirt with desperate, shaking fingers.

  And then she broke.

  The first sob tore from her throat like something being ripped out, raw and ragged.

  Then another.

  Then she was screaming, sobbing so hard it shook her, her face buried in his clothes, tears soaking into the fabric as her whole body convulsed against him.

  It wasn’t quiet.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  It was horrible, gut-wrenching, animalistic. A sound torn from the depths of grief and pain and fear so great it had nowhere else to go.

  Pan said nothing.

  Didn’t flinch. Didn’t tense.

  He just let her wail into him, let her claw at him, clutch at him, let her sob until she was half-choking on her own breath, until her body trembled so hard she could barely hold on.

  Pan didn’t move at first.

  Didn’t speak. Didn’t tease. Didn’t gloat.

  Slowly, steadily, his arms came around her. As if unsure what to do next.

  Wrapping around her shoulders, pulling her against him, one hand resting against the back of her head, fingers threading lightly through her hair.

  He held her.

  Just held her.

  Not mockingly.

  Not like a predator savoring its kill.

  Just… solid.

  Real.

  And Wendy—wrecked, shaking, broken—clung to him like he was the last thing tethering her to the world.

  Her sobs tore through her like something jagged, like something being wrenched from deep inside, too raw, too much.

  Pan let her cry.

  Let her crumble.

  Let her dissolve into something small and wrecked and shuddering in his arms.

  She didn’t know how long they sat there.

  Didn’t know how long it took for the storm to burn itself out.

  Wendy’s consciousness gave out before her grief did, and she barely felt it when Pan moved her to a bed.