It has been years but suddenly he’s there. He doesn’t even look at you, just wraps his arms around you and pushes his face in your hair and whispers ‘I love you I love you I love you I missed you I love you’ and it’s as if the past five years never happened, as if you haven’t been waiting by an open window every night, heart filled with something more terrible than loneliness and more bitter than wanting.

Your tears start to fall and you wonder, almost hysterically, does he even understand what these are? He must, because as soon as they roll off your check and he can feel them he shakes a little and presses his hand against your lips, whispering ‘shhhh, shhh, no, it’s alright, I’m sorry’ and you wonder if he even knows what he’s apologizing for.

He holds you tightly and rocks you in his arms and he smells like the forest, like the sky, like starlight and you remember flying hand in hand above everything but you weren’t even looking at it, because the world wasn’t ever for you – you were looking at his smile and how it lit up his face brighter than the sun and how you thought you might be dizzy from flying but mostly from proximity, and since when did his name become the only happy thought you needed to soar?

He moves back from you and places his hands on your face to look at you and you try to duck away but his grip is firm. He stares for a long moment, expressionless, but oh, there’s that smile you fell in love with the first time he burst through your window when you were stupid and young and you only knew that it should be impossible for a person to fight with their shadow but how could you have known that this wouldn’t be the first time he would prove that nothing was truly impossible. He says, ‘you’re beautiful’ and you can see in his eyes that he means it, he believes he means it, but how could he? You look at his face and you shouldn’t be surprised but you are – he hasn’t aged a day and you almost want to laugh but somehow you start to cry again.

He frowns (and something inside of you clenches at the wrongness of that) and looks at the tears rolling over his hands and pulls them away. He stares at his palms wonderingly and you know he doesn’t understand, because what could tears mean to someone who lives amongst the stars?

You remember the first time he led you to his home, his “super secret clubhouse” he informed you and you both smiled with the pure delight that comes with sharing a particularly good secret. He’d pulled you inside and held you so close and told you, earnest and wide-eyed, about fairies.

You’d rolled your eyes. “Fairies don’t—”

He slapped his hand over your mouth, eyes wild and frantic. “Don’t ever say that! Ever!”

Your ‘why?’ was muffled by his palm.

He gingerly removed his hand, eyeing you suspiciously as though to make sure you weren’t going to try to finish your sentence on the sly.

“Because it kills fairies to hear that.”

You frowned. “But how can it kill them if they don’t—”

He planted his hand firmly against your mouth again. “Stop saying that!” he hissed. “They do, they do! And if you stop saying that I’ll tell you about them. Okay?”

You gave him a solemn nod. He gave you the meanest warning glance he could muster which strongly resembled the face he made when he was about to burp, but you were suitably intimidated.

“When the first baby – and don’t make a face, don’t interrupt me okay, it’s hard for me to remember things like this– it happened when the first baby, the first baby ever, laughed. That laugh broke into about a million billion different pieces and shot out everywhere. And that made fairies.”

You made an expectant face, resisting the urge to ask ‘is that it?’

This clearly wasn’t the reaction he’d been waiting for. He looked mad and righted himself in the air. “Don’t make that face like what I said isn’t true! It’s true! I remember it being true!”

You felt alarmed because he almost looked as if he was going to cry and you didn’t even think he could cry so you just said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I believe you.”

His face shifted back into a smile and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds and he flipped around the room a few times. “Good! Maybe if you’re lucky, we’ll see a few sometime. I don’t really remember how to find them but sometimes the fairies,” he did a difficult looking dive off the rafters in the ceiling and landed neatly at your feat, “find you!”

You remember the first (and only) time you asked him why he brought you there. “Was it because you were lonely?”

He had been flying next to a goose, and you think he might even have been talking to it, he’d been up there for so long, making strange gestures and honking noises. When he heard your voice, though, he stopped the honking and gestures and gave the goose a friendly wave before  flying down to settle on a stump next to you. “Lonely? What’s lonely?”

For some reason you struggled to describe loneliness. You couldn’t…remember…had you ever been lonely? Had you ever lived anywhere else but in the swaying trees or the plush grass or in the arms of a strange boy who could fly better than he could walk? Who knew how to sword fight and wrestled crocodiles and was beloved by mermaids and tasted like summer? 

“I don’t remember.”

He smiled and reached out and the sight of that smile was enough to lift you up as well and you joined him in the air. “I think I probably just wanted to be with you,” he confided and you didn’t know if that really was the reason why – if it had been because you were there, that you believed, that you wanted to leave just as badly as he wanted someone to come with him, but it didn’t matter anymore. You had each other, you had each other here, and that was enough.

You began to notice that he didn’t understand a lot of things. Like, when you asked him:

“Why are your clothes made out of leaves?”

He was floating somewhere above you, and you could barely discern the outline of his shadow making rude gestures towards him from across the wall.

“I don’t understand.” His head appeared upside down next to you where you were lying on a bottom bunk.  His habit of sitting Indian style while upside down was one that both perplexed and amazed you. Every time you’d made an attempt, you ended up in a pile on the floor, huffing, while he floated overhead, crowing with laughter.

“Why are your clothes made out of leaves?” you repeated.

“What else would they be made out of?” he asked, rotating in mid-air.

You stared at him for a while, nearly hypnotized. “I have no idea,” you breathed softly, after a while. Your eyes remained transfixed on the spot where his face had been, long after he’d lost interest in the conversation and floated back to the ceiling to harass his shadow.

He would do things that surprised you. He was selfish but not in an unkind way. It was just his nature to think only of himself sometimes – he could go days without appearing in the hollowed out trees they called their home. He’d fly back in smiling and smelling of sunlight and stardust and when you informed him of how long he’d been gone and that you might have even become a little worried, he just tilted his head and gave you that smile, the one that said he didn’t understand what you were talking about but he’d pretend to make you happy.  To make up for these absences that he understood upset you in some vague, abstract way, he’d bring you bushels full of huge red strawberries that seemed to be perpetually ripe.

He laughed the first time he saw you eat so many it gave you a stomachache.  He reached over and grabbed a few strawberries out of their bushel, juggling them in the air as they landed one by one into his mouth. “You don’t have to eat them at one time,” he said, sniggering. “They won’t run away or anything.” He tossed one in the sky and let it land carelessly on the floor. You made an angry noise at such casual waste, which only made him laugh more. “There’s plenty more. There’s always more.”

“Don’t they rot?” you asked, inspecting the strawberry that he’d dropped and dusting it off with your sleeve.

He flew around the room for a bit before landing on his head next to the basket of berries. He grabbed a handful and crushed it. “What is rot?” He stretched out the strange word in his mouth, as if tasting the foreign syllables and finding it wanting.

You tried to remember. In this world of perpetual youth and plenty, what would the word rot mean to someone like him? What did it mean to you now? You examined the backs of your hands and touched them tenderly with your strawberry-stained fingertips. They were as smooth and ageless as the day he brought you here, windswept and giddy with adventure, with life. He’d kissed you on the lips when you’d landed and you were so surprised that you fell down. He laughed as if you’d made a good joke and fell down as well. You only stared, amazed. Even when he fell it looked like flying.

You pinched the soft fleshy skin between your fingers and pulled. You examined your clear and healthy nails. You turned your hands over and searched the lines on your palms. Had they always looked this way?

You turned back to look at him and were surprised that you still had his attention. He continued to gaze at you,  but was half-focused on the handful of strawberries he was shoving in his mouth, smearing over his lips and making them red, so red. You put your hands on his shoulders and lower your mouth to meet his, knowing that he’d forgotten his question before he’d even asked. You didn’t know the answer, anyway.

Staying with him became a lesson in the art of forgetting. You woke up one morning and realized you couldn’t remember your mother’s face. You were walking along the shoreline of the bay and watching the two suns fall into the water as they set when you forgot the name of your sister. You were climbing a tree to try and talk to a bright green parrot with sharp eyes when you remembered you once had a dog but then it was gone and you thought, what is a dog?

It was in his arms, when he was grounded and still and no longer belonged to the incandescent sky but only to you (as much as he could ever belong to one person) that you forgot what it was like to be home at all.

You finally remembered when he brought someone else to the island. A tall boy with scars on his cheeks and sadness in his eyes and when you wondered out loud why he was there, the only answer you received was “Because he wanted to come.”

The longer you stared at the new boy the harder your heart began to beat and your palms began to sweat and you looked down at them again and in a flash you saw the wrongness of this life and you looked back at him and saw your mother’s face and knew your sister’s name (your heart seemed to beat with it—sorasorasora) and saw your dog, frantic and tiny in your arms and you cried because you knew you couldn’t stay here any longer.

Maybe it was something about the way the sunlight caught the boy’s hair, or the strangeness of his clothes or the way he still smelled like a city – and god, cities, so many,  how could you have forgotten them all? But being around him was bringing everything back. Everything.

It was the last night on the island when you lay down beside him and held him close and whispered into his hair softly, so softly, “I have to go back.”

He didn’t say a word. He only held onto you tightly and you weren’t even sure he’d heard you, never mind understood you, when you felt a nod nudge your shoulder and even then you weren’t sure he understood until you realized his entire body was shaking.

You couldn’t help but wonder if this meant he knew, in his vast ignorance, what made a broken heart.

The last time you saw him he was holding your hands and looking anywhere but at your face. The light that somehow always seemed to exude from his skin was dimmed and his face looked shattered. “Come with me,” you said.

He didn’t answer.

“Come with me.”

He started shaking again. “I’ll forget you.”

You stared, and thought, that isn’t an answer. But with an ache you realized, for him, it was.

You tried one last time. “Please. Come with me.”

You stretched out your hand like a bridge, like a promise, and he stared before turning his back and promising you, “I will definitely forget you.”

You could almost feel your heart collapsing in your chest with the weight of all the things you both weren’t saying. “Don’t forget me,” you begged.

You reached forward and he jumped when your hand brushed his shoulder. You pretended that didn’t hurt as badly as it did. “Come back with me, instead. Don’t stay here and forget me, please, please. I’ll help you remember if you come with me, just don’t go back there and forget me. Do anything but forget me.”

He finally turned back to face you and his eyes were as solemn as the moon. You thought, this isn’t right, he shouldn’t be this way, what have I done.

He placed his palms on your face and it was so heartbreaking and tender and familiar, all at the same time, that the tears you’d been holding in began to flow.  He made no move to wipe them away, and you doubted he even noticed them at all.

He stared and stared and stared and you thought it would never end, that you two would simply die here together between these two impossible worlds and you almost wanted it to end that way until he pulled you close and kissed you and whispered into your hair, your mouth, your skin, “How could I ever forget you. I’ll come back for you. I’ll come back,” and it wasn’t a question, it was a promise, and then he was gone.

You waited by the windows every night and memorized the shadows of the trees and the glittering outline of the city at night. You pressed your face against the glass and dreamt of impossible things, of half-truths and mermaids and fairies and wondered if you’d become more than a little mad. You were waiting for a boy who could fly and had a smile like sunlight and wore clothes made out of leaves to remember you and it was only when you’d really begun to give up that he came back.

He held you and it was so hard not to beat at his chest and yell that it had been five years, how could he have forgotten you for five years, you bastard, you bastard but instead you smoothed your hands over his leaves and kissed every inch of his face you could reach and you can't help but think to yourself, over and over, like a prayer, he came back, he came back.

a/n: idk what the this is. i was watching videos of donghae being a moron and looking at his tweets about toys and i was like, this is peter pan, and then somehow this story happened because i have strong feelings about peter pan? the whole not remembering bit comes from the end of the jm barrie novel when wendy asks about tinkerbell and peter says, "who is that?" and it was horrifying and monumentally sad to me then and even more so now. anyways sorry this is some bull but i hope you guys at least enjoyed it a little! and for the lazy faces who didn't read the note in the beginning, saudade is a portugese word meaning the feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. a vague and constant desire for something that doesn't exist and probably cannot exist. as always, mucho thanks to oppaoppaoppa for reading over this and being awesome in all ways. comments are appreciated, y'all!