The first thing Wendy did when she realized she was truly, undeniably aboard a spaceship crewed entirely by a gang of disgusting boys who had apparently never cleaned a thing in their short lives was sigh.
The second thing she did was roll up her sleeves and get to work.
Because there was no use complaining about the state of the Neverland when the state of the Neverland was very obviously terrible. Better to fix what she could, enjoy the adventure while it lasted, and ignore the fact that most of the crew seemed to think messiness was a decorative style choice.
The ship itself was astonishing in a number of ways. It was also, unfortunately, first and foremost, astonishingly filthy.
It was held together by what looked like equal parts engineering skill, chewed gum, and reckless optimism. Every surface had either a stain, a smear, or a mysterious sticky spot. If she was going to stay aboard for even a little while, something would have to be done about it.
So she did what she always did when faced with a problem.
She took charge.
Wendy found the cleaning closet near the galley, which turned out to contain mops, brooms, dustpans, rags, scrub brushes, a whole stack of cleaning solutions, and one very suspicious bucket that smelled faintly of old socks. It was exactly the sort of thing she needed. Minus the old sock bucket.
She returned to the galley planted herself in the middle of the mess with her hands on her hips.
The galley was the worst room she had seen so far, which was saying something.
Half-eaten sweets clung to the walls. A sticky puddle had dried across the floor in a wide shiny blotch. Dirty dishes were stacked on every flat surface in the room, and a single sock dangled from a light fixture like some kind of stinky flag. What was it with boys and dirty socks?
“This,” Wendy said, “will not do.” She quickly called a shipwide meeting.
The Starchasers arrived, looking confused. It was normally Peter who called the meetings. They stared at her blankly.
“Listen up, all of you. We’re going to clean this place up. It’s a pig sty,” she said.
Pickle, who had been prodding a panel with a wrench, slowly lowered the tool. Slightly gave his jacket a little tug and offered her a smile so polished it might have been practiced in a mirror. The Twins blinked in perfect unison. Tootles looked as if he had been personally offended by the concept of cleaning.
Peter, meanwhile, was hanging upside down from a pipe near the ceiling, grinning like a boy who believed mess was a form of decoration. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “It looks like home to me.”
Wendy looked up at him. “That is because you have become used to living like a feral space goblin.”
Peter beamed. “Thank you.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“It sounded like one.”
“It absolutely was not.”
Wendy took a breath, then pointed to the floor. “Everyone is going to help. Right now. If you can fly a ship, you can certainly clean one.”
A chorus of groans answered her.
“Ship shape,” she said.
Tootles frowned. “Is that what ship shape means?”
“No,” Pickle said. “I thought it meant the ship was a triangle.”
“It isn’t a triangle,” one of the Twins said.
“It’s more like a cone,” said the other.
Peter laughed from his perch on the ceiling.
Wendy turned to him. “You, especially, can start by getting down before you fall on your head and make the situation worse.”
Peter dropped neatly to the floor, landing with perfect balance. “I would never make a situation worse.”
Wendy gave him a look.
He paused. “Not on purpose.”
That seemed to settle it.
Within minutes, the ship was in motion.
Pickle was tasked with putting tools back where they belonged and cleaning up random puddles of oil and coolant in the engine room.
The Twins were assigned to trash collection, a task they approached with identical seriousness and immediately competitive fervor.
Slightly was put on sweeping duty, and Tootles was given the job of sorting supplies.
John and Michael, thrilled to be part of a real starship crew but unhappy their sister had ended up in charge, had been given the task of washing and drying the seemingly endless stacks of dishes.
“We didn’t come to outer space to wash plates,” John kept mumbling under his breath.
Wendy ignored him, overseeing the operation with a mother’s attention to detail.
Peter, for his part, spent his time flitting around the ship watching Wendy boss around his crew. She knew he was normally the one in charge, so she wondered how it made him feel to have a girl take charge. She didn’t give him any specific cleaning job, and while he didn’t get in anyone’s way, he also didn’t offer any help.
But while Peter was no help, T.I.N.K. seemed to be actively obstructing the operation.
“T.I.N.K.,” Wendy asked firmly, “can you increase the lighting in here?”
The small glowing orb hovering near the ceiling pulsed once. The lights brightened instantly to an intensity that made everyone squint.
“Too bright!” Wendy protested, shielding her eyes.
Then T.I.N.K. dimmed the lights to almost nothing.
“Too dark!” Wendy complained. Her hands found her hips again, and she cocked her head toward the troublesome Pix-E unit. “I said a little brighter. Not blinding. Not cave conditions. In between.”
T.I.N.K. bobbed in the air as if considering this as some great challenge.
Wendy narrowed her eyes. “You understand the concept of in between, don’t you?”
The orb flashed a quick, cheerful blue.
Then it made the lights flicker twice, just enough to be annoying.
Peter, from somewhere near the sink, snorted. “She’s teasing you.”
Wendy shot him a look. “I know she’s teasing me.”
T.I.N.K. brightened as if pleased to be understood, then dimmed again the moment Wendy pointed at it.
“Oh, don’t start with me,” Wendy muttered.
The droid drifted lower, hovering just out of reach, and let out a chirp that sounded suspiciously pleased with itself.
“Peter,” Wendy said, “does this thing always behave like a nuisance?”
Peter, who was half under the table with a rag in one hand and absolutely no intention of doing anything useful with it, shrugged. “Mostly.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It’s honest.”
Wendy turned back to the lights. “All right. One more time. Bright enough to see. Not bright enough to make everyone miserable.”
T.I.N.K. paused.
For a hopeful moment, Wendy thought perhaps it had finally accepted the assignment.
Then the lights flashed so bright that Pickle yelped and dropped the wrench on his foot.
“Excellent,” Peter said. “Now we’re all awake.”
Wendy spun toward the droid. “That is not excellent.”
T.I.N.K. went still.
Then, very deliberately, it dimmed the lights until the galley was once again too shadowy to see the floor properly.
Wendy let out a long breath through her nose.
“It is doing this on purpose,” she said.
Peter lifted his head. “What makes you say that?”
“She likes you better,” Wendy snapped.
That got Peter’s attention.
T.I.N.K. flashed a pleased little green.
Peter blinked. “Oh.”
Wendy folded her arms. “So now we know. The ship has chosen sides.”
T.I.N.K. gave a tiny, smug whirl in the air.
Slightly, trying to be helpful, said, “Perhaps it responds better to authority.”
Wendy looked at him. “I am the only one in this room speaking in complete sentences.”
“True,” said one of the Twins.
“Very true,” said the other.
Wendy pointed at the ceiling. “T.I.N.K., if you are capable of understanding me, then I need you to cooperate. We are cleaning. Cleaning requires light. Light should stay where I put it.”
T.I.N.K. drifted left.
Wendy took one step after it. “Don’t you dare.”
The droid drifted right.
She followed.
It floated higher.
She looked up, exasperated. “You are behaving like a toddler.”
The orb flickered red.
Peter coughed to hide a laugh.
Wendy heard him.
“T.I.N.K.,” she said, keeping her tone as level as she could manage, “if you want attention, you can have it after the work is done. Right now, you are going to help, or at the very least stop making things worse.”
The droid hovered in place.
For one second, there was no movement at all.
Then every light in the galley went out.
Silence.
A beat later, Michael’s voice drifted out of the dark. “I can’t see my plate.”
“Exactly,” Wendy said, feeling for the edge of the table.
A tiny glow appeared above her head.
Then another, farther away.
T.I.N.K. had turned on a pair of narrow little lights and aimed them directly at Peter and the Twins, leaving Wendy in the dark.
Peter laughed. “I think she has a favorite.”
Wendy glared upward, now fully convinced the droid was doing this out of spite.
“Fine,” she said. “If you want to act like a brat, then you can be a very useless brat by yourself.”
T.I.N.K. flickered indignantly.
Wendy pointed to the floor. “Now, either give us proper lighting, or I am going to start assigning you chores.”
The droid paused.
Wendy had the distinct impression it did not like that idea at all.
It brightened the room by a small, grudging amount.
Not enough to please her, though.
Wendy stepped closer and looked the glowing orb right in the eye, as much as one could look a robot in the eye.
“There,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard.”
T.I.N.K. gave a crisp little chirp that sounded exactly like disagreement.
Then, just as Wendy turned back to the dishes, it hummed, zipped to the far side of the room, and switched the lights over there to full brightness while leaving her side dim again.
Wendy stopped.
Peter, leaning on the counter with a grin, said, “She’s definitely doing that on purpose.”
Wendy closed her eyes.
“Wonderful,” she muttered. “I’ve been aboard this ship for less than an hour, and already I’m in a feud with the robot. Honestly, you’re worse than Peter.”
T.I.N.K. flashed brightly, almost proudly.
✧✧✧
By the time the crew was done cleaning, the Neverland felt very different than it had before.
It wasn’t just that it was clean. It had lost it’s delightful chaos. Everything was organized, put away, stowed where it belonged. Peter was almost disappointed.
The galley table was visible for the first time in recent memory, the floors were no longer sticky, and the air didn’t smell like the inside of one of Pickle’s dirty socks, so that was something. But Peter couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss that some of the character of the Neverland had been scrubbed away. Forever lost to some girl’s vision of tidiness.
The Starchasers stood in the doorway, staring at the cleanliness they had wrought.
“Wow,” Michael breathed. “The ship looks… bigger.”
“That’s because you can see the floor,” Wendy said, clearly pleased with herself.
Peter scratched his head, conflicted. Part of him missed the way the ship had been, but a part of himself he didn’t quite recognize felt oddly proud. “Well, it’s alright, I guess,” he admitted.
That night, as the crew gathered in the galley for dinner, Wendy directed them to make a proper meal with properly cleaned mugs and actual plates. As they sat an ate as a crew, Peter did what Peter always did when things felt strange.
He told a story.
“So,” he began, slopping his drink and getting a look from Wendy sharp enough to crack an asteroid, “have I ever told you about the time I beat Captain Kragtooth?”
Every head snapped up. Grins all around. They loved this one.
Wendy paused mid-sip and peered at him over the rim of her glass. “I haven’t heard of this Kragtooth. He sounds dreadful.”
Peter grinned wider. “Oh, he is. And this is a great story. Kragtooth was the terror of the Outer Drift,” he began. “Huge. Half metal. Teeth like a shark,” he clacked his teeth together, “clang, clang. His ship was called The Bleeding Star. It was so terrible, you could hear it coming before you saw it.”
“What did he do?” Michael asked.
“What didn’t he do?” Peter said. “Raided trade lanes, stole cargo, and this is true, held an entire moon hostage over a card game.”
“That can’t be true,” Wendy said.
“It is too!” Peter shot back. “Besides, he cheated.”
“Of course he did,” Slightly muttered.
“Oh, always,” Peter said. Then he threw his head back and let out a jagged, grinding cackle. “Krrr-HAH-HAH! That’s how he laughed. Like a broken engine. Awful.”
A few of the Starchasers laughed. Wendy tried not to.
“So what happened when you met him?” Pickles asked, leaning forward like it was the first time he had heard the story.
“First time?” Peter said. “He tried to steal the Neverland. Didn’t work, of course. I was too smart for him! The second time, he chased me through an asteroid field. Fastest flying you have ever seen. He thought he had me. But I was too fast for him!”
“And the third time?” Wendy asked, despite herself.
Peter’s grin sharpened. “That was the best one,” Peter said. “We fought on the deck of his ship. A terrible sword fight!”
He sprang fully onto the table, grabbing an invisible blade and fencing an invisible foe.
“He was bigger than me,” Peter said, staggering back a step. “Much bigger. Stronger too.” He pretended to fight along the table, knocking food and plates aside, making a mess,
“But you won!” the Twins said.
“Obviously,” Peter replied. “He was a big slow grown-up.”
“So what did you do?” John asked.
Peter lowered his voice. “I let him think he had me. Let him get confident. Then I drew him in, right near a gravity well.”
Wendy blinked. “You drew him in?”
“He fired his plasma pistol at me,” Peter said, brushing past her concern. “Boom! Threw himself off balance.”
The table went still.
“And then?” someone whispered.
Peter hopped down from the table, let the silence stretch just long enough, then grinned.
“I knocked him over the edge of the ship. Straight into the gravity well.”
The Starchasers erupted with cheers and applause. Peter beamed from ear to ear, bowing to his crew.
Wendy shook her head, smiling despite herself. “And you, of course, escaped at the last possible moment?”
Peter shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“What happened to Kragtooth?” asked John.
“Yeah, is he dead?” asked Michael.
“Nah,” Peter said, shrugging. “His crew fished him out of the gravity well after a while.”
“I bet he was none too happy with you after all that,” said Wendy.
Peter looked at her and cocked his head to the side. Grown-ups were always getting cross with him about something or other. Why was old Kragtooth any different? “Yeah, I suppose,” he said. “So what?”
“Aren’t you worried that Captain Kragtooth will come after you? Aren’t you afraid?” Wendy asked.
The other Starchaers got really quiet. They stopped eating and all eyes were on Wendy and Peter. You see, no one questioned Peter’s courage. No one. It was the only rule other than to never grow up.
Peter looked at Wendy. Gave her a hard stare, hands on his hips.
“I wouldn’t be afraid of that two bit buccaneer if he was standing in front of me with his sword to my neck and both of my hands tied behind my back,” Peter said defiantly.
Wendy looked back at Peter and shook her head. “He just seems like a dreadful man, and I would…”
“I’m not afraid of nothing,” Peter said, and he got up and stormed out of the galley.