Okay, I wrote a little bit. Let me know if this has the creepy dark feeling I'm attempting to go for.
Pulling ever so slightly so as not to tear the entire wing from the small fairy’s back, Pan ground his teeth against the shriek of pain that rattled his eardrums. Pushing past the sudden appearance of his small amount of empathy, Pan pulled again, half of the thin effervescent wing now hanging limply off the fairy. The skin on her back started to swell and small red droplets oozed out of the wound, but Pan was more focused on the fairy’s small face, and the black tar-like tear that squeezed itself out of the corner of her bright blue eye.
Catching is before it slid to the ground, Pan gazed at it feverishly, so incredibly impatient. But first, Pan settled his gaze on the diminutive fairy, just about the length of his palm, whose shoulders were shaking with silent sobs of pain. He leaned forward and gently blew on the fairy, watching as her wing knitted itself back together with a small golden light. It fizzled out when the job was done. The fairy glanced up at Pan, gaze hardened with hatred, yet full of misguided love and worship, and kissed his fingertip, before flying back into the dense forest, fighting against the gusty winds that was Pan’s current mood.
He did hate inflicting pain on the small fairies, who he’d taken an almost instant liking to when he’d first been cursed to this island, but he’d found that fairy tears of pain were the most powerful, and the most intoxicating, and so it was a necessary evil.
Placing the tear on the tip of his tongue, Pan leaned back on the sand of the beach, watching the large dark gray storm clouds thin out until they were small wisps in an otherwise clear blue sky. He took a deep breath, the wind dying down, the waves beating against the shore calming to a standstill. Calm, everything was now calm.
How long had Neverland been in a state of grief? A state of anger? Days? Weeks? Possibly months. Time moved so differently on this island, that Pan usually forgot how long it had been since he’d been placed on this miserable island. It could have been yesterday, or five hundred years ago; there was no way to tell. No constellations in the sky to give him any point of reference, just the stars of the souls, and that told him nothing.
A gurgle of water made Pan sit up, brushing sand off his clothes. Besides him, no one else dared lounge about the beach shores, for fear of the creatures that lurked beneath the clear water that surrounded Neverland. The souls roamed Skull Rock, the Lost Boys stayed inland, even Hook had his crew scale cliffs when they docked rather than chance a dock on the beach. It made for easy pickings.
Mermaids as imagined on Earth did not exist, at least not in the beautiful lovely way they were often portrayed. They were instead, horrifying and terrible, and Pan admired their ruthlessness and cunning.
Out of the water rose such a creature, masses of tangled seaweed sprouting from her head, large webbed ears that flattened against her head to hear the singings of her sisters, her hands were smooth and sharp, their webbings disappearing as she snaked onto the sand. Her mouth was small, petite, and when she grinned at Pan, two rows of sharp carnivorous teeth flashed at him. The eyes of the mermaids were what intrigued Pan the most, besides the splitting of the fin to come onto dry land for mere moments of course, as they were incredibly large and doe-like, giving the mermaid a sense of child-like innocence. Before they pulled their victims into the depths of the sea, tearing their flesh from their body, the limbs from their sockets, watching their victim die from drowning or the torture, who could guess, but they liked to witness them die slow painful deaths. With Lost Boys or souls, or even the humans from Hook’s crew, the mermaids had cravings.
“Poppy,” Pan inclined his head to the mermaid, as her fin separated into two legs, complete with scales and barnacles. Not the prettiest site. Poppy hissed at the pain, crawling up next to Pan, her legs still wobbly.
“I found one of your souls,” Poppy smiled, her rows of teeth flashing again, and this time, Peter caught the remnants of a corporeal soul’s cloth gown stuck in the back of her teeth. “Naughty little thing, they seem to have found a way past your defenses. Or perhaps that Captain friend of yours has found a way to release them.” Pan groaned inwardly. Those stupid stupid souls…
Neverland had always been the place where souls that were neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ were sent until their fates could be decided upon by the powers that be, but it wasn’t such a friendly place. Pan wondered what it would have been like before he had been sent there; possibly much more nefarious and disturbing. He’d created a base for all souls to stay, at Skull’s Rock, where they were bound by his magic until their Judgement came in. That had been much easier than searching all over the wretched island for a soul that had gotten itself stuck in a sand pit or found its way to the edges of the shoreline. If they could just do what he had told them to do, he wouldn’t have to renew that barrier every goddamned decade.
“I told you I pick the souls for you and your sisters,” Pan snarled, pooling a teaspoon of freshwater into his now cupped hands from the Cannibal Cove Pool of Madness. He flung it at Poppy and she writhed in pain, every droplet that landed on her burning into her salty scale covered skin, bubbles forming and popping, oozing with golden liquid. “You do not have free reign here.”
“It is not my fault if you fail to do your duty,” Poppy spat, wiping at the blood that leaked from her mouth. “And the souls you pick for us are old and weak. We want fresh souls, maybe even one of those wraiths you keep locked up in the fairy tree.”
Pan balled up his fists and stood, gripping Poppy by the ends of her seaweed hair. It was slimy and covered in algae. He stalked towards the edge of the water and threw Poppy back to the shoreline. The moment she hit the saltwater her wounds closed and her feet fused together, once again a gnarled looking fin. “I’ll have your souls in a fortnight. Do not touch any others until that time, or you will be answering to me.”
Poppy stared at him, a sly smile on her dark green face. Of course, Pan had no actual power over the mermaids, but he knew they saw him as a threat, as someone with a mind like their own. Though, if he crossed into Mermaid’s Cove, he knew he could just as easily be ripped to shreds like the other unfortunate souls that had done so before. “Is it your time to visit the world once again?
We are agreed, Pan. I will tell my sisters.” Poppy’s head slowly disappeared under the water, her fin splashing at the surface before she was gone from sight.
