Monster // Peter Pan (Robbie Kay) (OUAT)

Chapter Eighteen

Hey guys!

Wow, what a quick update compared to the months you've waited before!

Too bad this chapter sucks, or else it'd be even better but without a laptop and only a phone to type on it tends to get tiring.

Anyway, announcements:

1. I have gotten a head start on Chapter 19, so that should be out soon!

2. After Chapter 20 ends, the book will pretty much begin a 180. Things will be different quite quickly. I'm sorry it took forever to get to that point, but with everything going on this summer and with school it was pretty hard.

3. Competitive cheer tryouts start tomorrow, and I'm very nervous ahah. That will take up a bunch of my time until March.

4. My twitter is @m_salvano (:

5. Okay, my weekend was quite the time. If you'd like to know haha, I had some firsts on Friday night (haha oops). I did go to the blackout night at the haunted house a few towns away last night and it was a blast ahah. At school this past week, I found out the boy my friend likes has a crush on me. I feel really bad omg

Song Recommendation: Come A Little Closer by Cage the Elephant

Reader Questions I'm answering are at the end, enjoy(:

Chapter Eighteen

Days in Neverland: 30

The boys played drums.

It sounded like the ones they played when I first arrived, peals of delectation, of relish. How could the lost boys play in content when their friend is condemned today?

I sat on the tablets of rock benched around the fire pit, their gray skin warmed with blaze. The island was washed with pink light and bad habits, the pearls in the rays moving with the sun like motion sickness. The trees were drenched in its luster, as was I, watching the firelight tangle in the draft.

Except for my grubby, soot-stained beige crumpled figure,
the clearing was untenanted. Each hut was still as the sunset licked the panes of their windows, leaving behind spots of dusk. The boys were off somewhere in the forest, down Well Path, I assumed, their drums crying out to the sky. Somewhere, the drums were snaring. The island rumbled with heartbeat, and yet, a heartbeat was to end soon.

I fiddled with the wearing bandage edges swathing my mending bones in my hand, running my clean thumb along the soiled, unraveling threads of gauze. I could wiggle my knuckles in its packaging now; it no longer strained or stabbed or felt like it was tearing itself apart when the joints shifted beneath the skin.

I glanced through the trees and across the bluff so I could see the sliver of hot orange flirting with the end of the sky. The anxiety grew up inside me, the nervous ache coiled through my lungs like briars. Kian will be gone, Kian will be gone, Kian will be gone...

Amid the drums, I heard my name breathed softly.

"Andria?"

I looked up quickly, dropping the macerated bandage to see Gale, wrapped in a burlap cloak, anxiously clutching at the drawstrings and picking at their sparse threads.

"Hey," I said, clasping my hands and looking back the fire, the simmering air lapping at my cheeks.

I felt the grating fabric of his cloak scratch down my arm as he sat on the stone against me, the warm of his body drafting in pleasant scent.

"It's almost time," he said.

I blinked away, my eyes growing balmy and tearful. "I know."

The crackle of the fire and screaming of the smoldering wood grew hotter as it coiled around the brimstone keeping it in its pit.