The room wasn’t still when you woke—though it should have been. A bedroom like yours, soft and white and cocooned in lace and pale curtains, ought to have kept its silence. But the air had a different weight, a pressure that prickled the back of your neck as though someone had exhaled into the very marrow of the walls.

And then, like a shadow peeling itself off of the corner, he was there.

Peter Pan—But not the one you remember from bedtime stories.

This Peter wore black ruffles stained faintly at the cuffs, a shirt that once belonged to someone noble, now torn and clinging to his frame. His trousers were slashed at the knees, and the boots on his feet rattled faintly with small, silver chains. You could smell the forest on him — wet moss, smoke, and iron. And something else — something sweet, like sap left to rot. His black hair was a storm that fell into his eyes, his bangs shadowing them in a way that made the whites seem to glint faintly in the dim light of your room. He pulled himself through the frame with the slow, deliberate grace of something that had learned how to move like a man but wasn’t entirely one anymore. His boots hit the floorboards with a sound like the soft thud of dirt closing over a grave.

He moved with the casual arrogance of someone who believed the whole world — and everyone in it — was his to rearrange. The vanity groaned under the weight of his boot as he propped it up, the chain on his boot jingling like a tiny, broken lullaby.

Behind him, shadows slipped through the window too — shapes without definition, crawling across your ceiling like liquid silhouettes. They whispered, their voices wet and papery.

He looked up at them and smirked. “Quiet, my boys. You’ll scare her.”

One boot balanced precariously on the edge of your vanity, his elbow resting on his knee as though your furniture was meant to cradle him. He was watching you with eyes that were too awake, too alive—fever-bright and rimmed in smeared kohl that made me look carved out of some ancient, wicked painting.

He plucked up a perfume bottle with long fingers and brought it to his nose. A deep inhale, then a soft, wicked laugh. “Is that…Roses?” He glanced back at you, his grin splitting wider. “Do you know how fast roses die in Neverland? They rot before the sun even sets. Everything beautiful does.”