Author’s Note: Although the reader can intuit the necessary details of this Peter Pan retelling, an even greater experience can be found by reading two previous short stories: Never, Never and The Test. Enjoy!
*****
Commander James F. Hoogeveen stared after the redheaded boy who shot into the sky like a shuttle launching.
How could any of this be?
The fifth planet revolving the second Numquami star was populated. Its inhabitants? Glowing pixies, feral boys, and one stubborn, flying brat named Peter.
Yet, Jim’s boots toed solid soil, its mineral and organic content verified by Mission Specialist Trista Smith. His lungs drew in air fresh with vellichor and verdant greenery, and his skin prickled with sunlight instead of needling, acidic raindrops.
Beside him, Tris helped the other member of their party stand. Mission Specialist Janet Roark wavered before gaining her feet, still rubbing her skull. The myriad cuts speckling her suit no longer bled, although she still looked dazed from the pixie attack. She eyed the hovering ball of light who had healed her, then glanced at Jim.
“What happened, sir?”
The pixie, Tink, chittered with laughter, then alighted on Jim’s outstretched hand. “My friends wanted to eat you. After all, with that silly white suit, you look like a marshmallow. We love marshmallows.” Shecocked her head at a petrified Roark, raising a tiny eyebrow at the woman’s pretty visage. “But now I see you are less interesting than that.” Tink spun back to Jim and beamed. “You, however, are very interesting, Jamesy. You found Neverland, all by yourself. I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”
Jim’s throat tightened. “I became a starship captain after we first met. I’ve been searching for a new Earth for decades.”
Tink danced across his palm, then sized up his forefinger. She gave him a suggestive wink, then sat on the fleshy spot near his thumb. “Has it been that long? Did you bring me a new dress? Food? Another parasol? The one you gave me was paper, and it dissolved in the first thunderstorm.”
A shaky, prepubescent voice interrupted their bizarre conversation. “Umm, is the game over? ‘Cause Tootles is bleeding lots.”
Jim started. The boy emerging from the underbrush seemed strangely familiar. Tanned hide covered his waist, and red paint streaked his bare chest. His shaggy brown hair as filthy as a used mop, his knees and elbows scarred with roughhousing, the boy stood uncertain as he stared from Tris to Tink. The boy’s mouth drooped open as he awaited guidance, revealing prominent buck teeth that made him look rather doltish.
“Tommy?” Jim barely breathed the name, nestled deep in his nightmarish childhood at Hoogeveen Orphanage, but against all logic, the fellow orphan boy glanced toward him.
“So the game is over?” the boy repeated.
“Yes,” Tink replied, seeming bored. “Ugh, he always picks slow ones, doesn’t he?” She gave Jim another bright smile. “That’s why he left you behind. Afraid of competition, I think.”
“Tommy from Hoogeveen?” Jim said again, anger and shock coloring his voice.
Tink sighed and alighted, burning bright to a shapeless orb. “I’ll go fix Tootles. You are all so boring.” She flew purposefully into Roark, causing the woman to fall backward, and disappeared in the trees with jingling laughter.
Tommy grabbed a slingshot from his belt, although he wrung its handle anxiously rather than loading it. “How you know my name?”
Jim felt it all return: the bitterness of betrayal and abandonment, the fury of rejection, the resolve to do whatever it took to become more than an orphan on a ruined Earth. He had grown up. He had learned astronomy, navigation, leadership. He had done everything right, repressing memories of Tommy and Milly and all the other orphans who disappeared, to ascend society’s brutal ranks and become a space commander. James Frederick, leader of the Gamma expedition, became no more than that scared little boy alone in white walls.
“You left me behind, Tommy,” he whispered.
Tommy’s face twisted. “Who’re you?”
“Jim?” Trista tugged his arm. “It’s not possible for you to know a native on an unexplored planet.”
But Tommy’s stupefaction said otherwise. His teeth showed with that familiar, numb expression; his chin tucked into his neck as he reared his head back. He cowered. “Jimmy?”
“Damn right.” Jim wanted to slug the boy, but remembered he himself was a grownup. How was Tommy not? “You followed that redhead Peter here?”
Tommy shrugged, seeming to recover. Had he already forgotten that he abandoned Jim in that empty room with a flash of blinding light? “Well, sure, yeah. He said it would be fun, and free. And it is, Jimmy! It is. We get to play games all day, and there are fairies and mermaids and magic—”
“But you left me there.” Jim’s voice shook with rage. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“And the best part,” Tommy blundered on, now brightening as his story engaged both Tris and Roark, “is that we never get sick, never age. We just play all day, forever. I don’t know how long the last game was, but I guess it was maybe weeks?”
“Years,” Tink chimed, reappearing with another boy in her glittering wake. A round scar marred his chubby gut, and Jim realized the red around it was drying blood rather than warpaint. “A quite tedious round, if you ask me.”
Roark backed away, this time recognizing the danger of the pixies enough to hide behind her commander. Jim subconsciously put a protective arm out, as though that motion could stay any sort of magical attack.
Tink’s laughter was the ringing of a bell. “Silly marshmallow woman.” Then she floated in front of Tris, leering at the ecology expert with even more contempt than she had given Roark. “And you, even sillier. Of course Jamesy knows me. How could he possibly forget me? We go way back.” Her last statement was delivered in a sultry, secret voice, and Tris shot an uncomfortable look at Jim.
“I think we ought to return to the ship, Commander,” she suggested. “To regroup. As I said before, we must have care in the case of a planet with sentient life.”
“Why?” Tink demanded.
“To avoid imbalancing a balanced ecosystem,” Tris replied just as quickly. “We don’t know how your planet works yet.” She spoke with respect, despite the impertinence of the pixie.
“And to respect your culture and way of life,” Roark peeped, her voice shaking. “We come in peace, ambassadors if you will.”
Jim comprehended little of the conversation, his attention still digging into the boy in front of him. Tommy returned to cowering. Good, perhaps his shame would catch up with him. Shame for leaving Jim at the orphanage the night Peter and Tink visited. Shame for abandoning little Milly, who had only made it a few more months before she too had disappeared. Shame for taking the easy way out without a single thought for Jim, his closest friend.
But then Tommy did something unexpected.
He straightened, tucking his slingshot into his belt and balling his fists. He looked up at Jim and jutted his chin. “Peter says all grownups are selfish liars. And you’re a grownup.” He crossed his arms over his scrawny painted chest.
The boy Tootles echoed his movements, and Jim scowled.
“We are explorers. I always told you that’s what I wanted to be, and I’m not the selfish one here.”
Bolstered by Tootles’ presence, Tommy retrieved his slingshot, this time arming it with a small stone from the satchel. “I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t have to listen to anyone but Peter. I can do whatever I want.”
“Yeah,” said Tootles.
“I don’t have to listen to grownups,” Tommy shouted, raising the slingshot high as Tootles crowed. “I have all the friends I need. Tootles here is my best friend, and I don’t need you or any other grownups anymore.” Tommy was screaming now, his young voice cracking with emotion. He began to pull the string back when Tink interrupted.
“The game is over,” she said coolly. “Stupid lost boy.”
“I’m not stupid,” Tommy shrieked. “Peter never calls me stupid. That’s why you got left behind, Jimmy. Because you’re too good for the rest of us. None of us were ever enough. None of us could keep up. Well now we have this place, and you can’t have it. Get out!” He loosed his slingshot from a much closer distance than Jim would have liked, and the stone crunched against his shoulder like a bullet on a vest.
Despite the hatred he bore for this boy since childhood, Jim had reined his temper in with the discipline demanded by his position.
So he thought, until Tootles raised his own slingshot and aimed it at Tris.
“Don’t,” Jim said, his voice hard, but the boy ignored him, instead hooting like an animal and releasing.
The stone smacked Tris in the cheek, knocking her off-balance. Jim caught her as she staggered. Roark ducked under her other shoulder, and they sprinted away to the rising war cries of boys in the shadowed trees. Stones flew once again, despite the nattering ring and flashing of angry fairies. Jim’s ire burst within him in an unending flood.
With one more look back, he spied Tommy standing in the clearing, naked to his midriff and wild-eyed, and Tootles, jumping with glee and glory from their victory.
Then, instead of aiming his phaser at Tommy, he raised it slightly right. He squeezed the trigger with little further consideration, sensing the gentle kick of a power pulse leaving the gun as its light flashed bright. He didn’t really mean to hit anything essential, but his vengeful anger nudged his hand a little higher.
When Tootles’ forehead blackened with the phaser burn, all Jim could think of was pottage. Nutrient-filled gruel, the mash of those who had little else to contribute to Earth’s society, filtered and served as tepid glop to others who had little hope and less choice. Tommy would have been gruel at the orphanage. Tootles likely would have been too.
Now he was even less. No one would benefit from his death, not even the starving orphans of Earth. Tootles was nothing.
The horror on Tommy’s face was all the retribution Jim needed, so satisfying he could almost ignore the slight tap of guilt on his conscience.
You don’t get to win this game, Jim thought. Not this time, because I, James Frederick Hoogeveen, Captain of the starship Celeste and Commander of the Gamma Expedition, do not play games.
Jim ignored the berating of Tink, who dipped beside him momentarily to admonish him for such a grievous wound.
“Now I have to heal again,” she chided. “This wasn’t the fun I wanted from you, Jamesy.”
Then she was gone, along with her fellow pixies, and Jim was limping onto his shuttle with a dazed Trista and an overwhelmed Roark. They watched the outer door shut with heaving breaths, but no words, their suits ripped and their helmets cracked.
Jim examined Trista, turning her swollen cheek toward him. “You alright, Mission Specialist Smith?”
Tris sobbed. “I don’t understand anything that just happened, sir.”
Jim winced at the bruising beginning to appear in the corner of her eye. It would blacken before long, but at least her nose wasn’t broken. “I could explain, although it all sounds unbelievable even to me. Did you know, Smith, that before I was a captain who founded Beta, before you and I met in the station’s records library, long before I was a citizen accepted into the rigorous captain’s training program…that I was an orphan of Earth?”