lost_boy | (no subject)

I had no idea what she was doing.

She probably knew I was there, I had been following her for a little while now, watching as she seemed to test trees for some reason, and I hadn't made any real attempt to hide that I was there. I hadn't meant to follow her without saying a word, just watching as she worked, but once she started up with the trees, I found myself distracted trying to work out what she was doing.

I would have tested trees to see whether or not they would make good snares. I didn't think that was what she was doing. In a place like Darrow, snares weren't necessary, not for hunting, not for security either. There were better ways to do both those things and although I couldn't say for certain she would know that, I had to assume she would.

Someone who knew how to make snares would be smart enough to figure that out.

Eventually she was going to get annoyed with me, so I finally stepped closer, my hands in my pockets, and asked, "What are you doing?"

Hopefully she would answer me. But probably not before thinking I was Elio first, just like everyone else, even though we sounded nothing alike.

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"Mithros," she breathes, at a loss. Plenty of questions spring to mind. Persuasive or not, why go with this boy, Peter, in the first place? Was life at home so terrible?

It might very well have been, which makes her hesitate to ask.

She's not sure how much Jamie really wants to share. And either way, it seems a little unfair, to have him just heap painful details of his own past in her lap while she just sits there and takes them.

"I left home when I was thirteen," she offers after a few moments' thought. "Bandits hit our farm while I was away. Everything was just... gone. Nothing to stay for." She hesitates for a beat. "I s'pose I wouldn't have been hard to persuade, either. Though I didn't feel much like a child anymore, after all that."

"Bandits," I echoed. "Like pirates?"

There were some things I only knew about very vaguely, because I spent so much time on the Island and wasn't introduced to the same things other people were, but I thought bandits and pirates might very well be similar things. Which meant I probably shouldn't tell Daine I had been thinking about becoming a pirate near the end of my time with Peter.

I knew I was supposed to hate them, but I had been so blind to all the cruelties of Peter Pan and I'd begun to wonder if maybe he was the real villain. If perhaps the pirates were only our enemies because we had attacked them first.

Daine hums in affirmation. "Near enough. Except pirates only travel by sea in my realm. Snowsdale was up in the mountains, so it was bandits we had to worry about."

And that's about all that can be said about it without going into some truly nasty details. She doesn't much care for telling anyone about how she'd run mad with the Pack, least of all folk she's just met. Just because he knows what pirates are doesn't mean he'll understand the vengeance she took.

"Seems so cruel," I said. "For them to just attack like that. Without provocation."

Like we did all the time. Because it was fun for Peter to see us raid the pirate's camp. For him to burn it all to the ground. We had become monsters under his guidance and looking back now, I often couldn't believe what we had done. Why had I thought it was so much fun at the time? Was it because I wanted so badly to see Peter smile?

I hated myself for that. I had to be better than that now. I had to try harder and not simply follow someone because I wanted them to be happy with me. I had to think for myself.

It is cruel, but a sort of two-legger cruelty she's so well acquainted with that all she can do is shrug. "Some folk find it easier to take things than work for them. It happens here, too, I expect; it's just that folk are more careful about it, and they don't run in gangs so much." Or if they do, they seem more concerned with holding their own territory than sweeping through someone else's.

Really, the nearest Darrow has ever gotten to the sort of lawlessness she'd see back home was the Purge. And there's been no sign that they're doing that again.

Peter had never worked for anything. He always just took. I supposed I was guilty of that, too, of taking things from the pirates instead of working for them, but I'm not sure where we would have worked on the Island. I supposed Peter had taken that possibility from us, too.

I had worked for our food at least. I had grown vegetables and hunted rabbits and gone fishing when I could. I was still terribly conflicted about the idea of becoming a pirate, but Peter had been no better.

"At least here it's possible to work," I said. "Where I came from, there wasn't anything like there is here."