❝Never fight fire with fire.
Everything you love will burn.❞
➳
Adi Morris has fire. Peter Pan likes fire. But she's prepared to use that fire against him if it means keeping her freedom. Adi has never been one to follow the rules, and not even a man...
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"I am the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass; I try to picture me without you but I can't - cause we could be immortals, just not for long, for long." Immortals - Fall Out Boy
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FOR A HEARTBEAT, Adi froze. Every muscle in her was poised to run, to disappear. Her first instinct was to back away slowly, a prey animal trying in vain to escape before its throat was torn out. And then she thought with a vicious thrill of satisfaction: Oh. I've surprised him. This was never part of his plan. And suddenly she didn't feel like running at all.
Adi wiped her expression so as not to raise Henry's suspicions as she stepped closer. Henry, however, was not focused on her at all, which meant he fortunately missed the death glare Pan was fixing Adi with.
"So I save magic, and she'll be okay?" Henry asked.
Pan wrangled his fury into something more patient as he looked to Henry. "Yes, but more than that. If you save magic, you save us all – Adeline and Slightly and Felix and Tootles and Devon and Chris and all the others. To do it, you have to truly believe."
"I believe," Henry said with resolve.
"Good, because we don't have much time," said Pan. Then he glanced at Adi. "Henry, can you find your way back to camp? It's not far. I need to speak with Adeline for a moment, if you don't mind."
"I can take him and then come back," Adi said, feeling a little like a soccer mom offering a friend's child a ride. "So he doesn't get lost."
"No, I can do it," Henry rushed to say. Now he seemed to have picked up on the tension and looked like he would rather be anywhere else. "No problem." Before Adi could protest or search for another way to buy herself time, Henry had already headed into the woods.
Once his footsteps had faded, Adi founded on Pan. "So, what the hell?"
"What happened with my shadow?"
Adi valiantly managed to stop herself from decking him. "They captured it. Not sure why you expected anything different."
Pan clicked his tongue. "And here I thought you didn't appreciate being underestimated."
"It shouldn't be a problem if you have everything under control," she shot back. "You wouldn't have sent me if you weren't on some level okay with them capturing your shadow, right?"
Pan smiled a little. He almost looked proud of her.
"Now tell me what this is," Adi continued, waving her hand around the clearing and gesturing to the girl, who was either asleep or pretending to be. "Who is that?"
He lifted his hand in a gesture meant to be calming. It was not calming. "Everything I've had you do, everything I have and haven't told you, has been part of the plan. It's all going to pay off in the end. You heard Henry – he wants to save us."
