Remember What We Had *Sequel to Remember the Rules*

The Loyalty of Those We Love

Felix's POV:

I was beginning to actually enjoy my life again. I'd managed to convince Lily to stay for exactly forty-five days, which would be about three days on Neverland if Pan didn't change the timeline. Hopefully he wouldn't; he rarely did anyway, and now that there was an actual threat to the island it was even more unlikely.

Or at least, that was what I told her.

There was something Lily didn't seem to entirely grasp, and that was that Pan was losing power. For whatever reason, she seemed to assume that he stayed at the same level of power even while he was dying, but if that were the case (which I now knew for sure that it wasn't), she wouldn't have been able to hide from him so easily. I decided against telling her that in her current emotional state, though, because it was very possible that if I did, she would go back as soon as she deemed herself able, and she wasn't really capable of deeming herself able anymore-- never had been.

No, Lily needed to stay with me. Even in the first few days, there was improvement. Within the first week, she'd become good friends with Tommy, which I found a little strange-- he tended to shy away from people from what I could tell, but he bought the "siblings" lie easily enough so I supposed that it didn't matter much. By the end of her second week in Camelot, she was eating regularly again. By the third, she was sleeping through the night.

Something had triggered her nightmares again. Even she didn't know what it was, but I knew that it had something to do with Rosalie and Uriel, the personality that took over when the girl next to me woke up in the middle of the night, whimpering and so terrified that she didn't know her own name. Luckily, those nights faded with the nightmares; Uriel wasn't as easy to deal with as the others.

The only thing that didn't improve (seemed to worsen, actually) was Lily's control over the... others. The smallest thing could set her off, could bring out those other sides of her. If I spoke too loudly or a floorboard creaked at night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep, she'd curl into herself as Uriel, murmuring apologies for misgivings she hadn't committed. If she got too irritated (or, god forbid, homesick), Rosalie would rear her head, fiery and dangerous. It was all I could do to keep her calm and happy; fixing them altogether was impossible, especially since when she switched back, she had no memory of anything happening.

So yeah, when the nightmares stopped, I was glad. But the switches- when they happened -were far, far worse.

I'd read something about this once, from one of the books Pan got me from the land without magic. Dissociative Personality Disorder or something like that. There was no cure, not without serious magic that I wasn't capable of. Lily's issue wasn't psychological; mostly, it was mystical. Something I couldn't help for the life of me.

That's not even to mention my own nightmares, but those didn't even compare in the grand scheme of things (though sometimes I still woke up paralyzed from fear) because she needed my help so badly. When she would shake me awake at night (I would already be awake, my eyes burning, blistering from a pain long since past), I talked her down quietly the way I would for the younger boys when they woke up from nightmares or homesickness. I learned what I could about Uriel when she was calm enough to talk at night (a scream of agony stuck in my throat) and bonded with Rosalie when she appeared, which was pretty often in the beginning. Rosalie reminded me of myself before Neverland (before the echo of my brother's comforting words bounced poisonously in my ear), before I met Peter. Naturally, that brought back old memories long-since buried (the acrid smell of that burning liquid, the pain of my skin bubbling, tearing) and not necessarily good. I wanted to help her, but without a leader, I'd never been much good.