Name: Shira
DW username: N/A
E-Mail: stitchmymouth[at]hotmail[dot]com
IM: shira syndrome
Plurk: whatinthefuck

Other Characters: Adam Milligan (halfwinchester)

Character Name: Peter Pan
Series: Once Upon a Time
Timeline: Post-3.11: "Going Home"
Canon Resource Link: Here or here!

Character History:

On the surface, Once Upon a Time's most basic premise is that the fairytale characters we all know and love are sent to our world and trapped in a town called Storybrooke because of a curse instigated by the Evil Queen of Snow White fame. Emma Swan, the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, is destined to break the curse and free them when she turns twenty eight.

One particular theme that occurs again and again over the telling of this story is the act of parents abandoning their children. Abandonment is prevalent in the series, affecting multiple generations of people. If not for the fact that Snow White and Prince Charming are forced to send Emma to our world as a newborn baby before disaster strikes, she would never be able to break the Evil Queen's curse. Similarly, if not for Emma abandoning her own child, Henry, as a baby, he would never grow up and eventually seek out his birth mother in order to bring her to Storybrooke. In the same vein, the father of Emma's child is a man named Baelfire, another denizen of the fairytale world who is abandoned by his father as a child. His family has a history even more complex and tragic than Emma's, for the men in Baelfire's life have consistently struggled with choosing power and greed at the cost of family. Bae's father, Rumplestiltskin, one of the most powerful and feared villains in the series, is so afraid of parting with his dark magic that his self-interest is what ultimately leads him to abandon Bae and accidentally send him through a magical portal to another world, leading him to Emma.

What does this have to do with Peter Pan, you may ask?

Well, the truth is, despite looking like a teenager Peter Pan is actually Rumplestiltskin's father, Baelfire's grandfather, and as a result, Henry's great-grandfather. He is at once the product of, and the catalyst to, the men in his family leaving their loved ones in increasingly horrible ways.

His story starts hundreds of years in the past in the Enchanted Forest (the world where fairytale characters come from), at least four hundred going by the characters' ages. Peter Pan wasn't always Peter Pan: he started out as a normal boy named Malcolm, who was sold to a blacksmith by his father in his youth. Miserable and feeling lost in his life, Malcolm starts to "think lovely thoughts" before bed and begins to dream of a place called Neverland. Neverland is a place separate from our world and the Enchanted Forest, a dream world where children can visit in their sleep and live out any desire they want. Anything is possible in Neverland so long as a person believes, and we get the sense that Malcolm takes to this freedom with great relish--it is the happiest time in his life.

But every boy has to grow up sometime, don't they?

As Malcolm grows into an older man and has a son of his own, he is forced to take care of the child alone and sacrifice the boyhood dreams of his past. The qualities that made him charming as a child--impishness, playfulness, youthful recklessness--become detriments to him as an adult. His love for games and being free of responsibilities translates into carousing and hustling people in card games, never quite moving on from the idea that if he could just be free, he could be happy. He is effectively at heart a boy who's never grown up; as a result, a child's selfishness characterizes everything he does. He would rather rely on the skills he's developed as a con artist than do an honest day's work, and it's a struggle for him to provide for a young Rumple when he secretly resents the boy for taking up so much of his time and energy. A good father figure? Not really.

His reputation for being irresponsible and untrustworthy is so pervasive that no one in their community is willing to hire him, leaving him and a pre-teen Rumple nearly destitute. At this stage, Malcolm is very much sick of fatherhood; Rumple may be his son, and a part of him may truly care for the boy, but a much larger part of him feels the needy, clingy boy is a burden. In order to tend to his own desires, he leaves Rumple in the care of two spinsters, who offer Rumple a chance for a better life by giving him a magic bean that can open a portal to another world. They say he can make a fresh start, provided he leaves his father behind as they can tell Malcolm is more of a burden to Rumple than the other way around.

Rumple, however, makes the mistake of insisting he and his father can make a new life together and reveals the bean to Malcolm. It seems for a time that Malcolm believes in the power of a clean slate if they can but find a better home for themselves, yet he, like the man his son grows up to be, is weak to the temptations of self-interest. When Malcolm suggests they do what no one has ever attempted before and live in Neverland, he realizes once the bean transports them there that Neverland is not a place for adults to visit, let alone live in, and that the magic from his childhood will no longer work for him. The disappointment reminds him of how much he's lost as an adult, not how much he's gained in the form of a son who loves him. He is then approached by the only inhabitant of the island, a living shadow, who advises him on a way to reclaim what he's lost if he is willing to make the sacrifice: get rid of the one thing that reminds him he's not a child anymore. That thing is Rumplestiltskin, his son.

He decides to follow the shadow's advice, justifying his actions by believing he was never meant to be a father. By allowing the shadow to carry Rumple out of Neverland and consequently abandoning the thing keeping him an adult, Malcolm is able to transform back into his fifteen-year-old self, allowing Neverland's magic to become a part of him. Boyhood, unlike fatherhood, offers him a second chance at happiness, or so he thinks. The sacrifice doesn't come without regret, however. The last the young Rumple sees of his "father" is a teenager weeping in grief for what he's done.

In tribute, Malcolm renames himself Peter Pan after one of Rumple's toy dolls. This is where the story we know of the immortal boy who lives in Neverland begins.

As it often does in the series, however, powerful magic can come with unforeseen drawbacks. Peter finds out from the shadow that although he is now frozen at the age of fifteen, his immortality has a time limit. In a place called Skull Rock, there sits an hourglass that represents Peter's lifespan, and when the hourglass is empty, his time as Peter Pan will end, and he will age and die.

Vowing to hold onto his youth--the thing he values first and foremost above all else in Rumple's absence--Peter then sets out on a quest to find a way to counteract the hourglass. When he has already made the ultimate sacrifice, no cost is too great. From this point onward, the selfishness that had made Malcolm a failure of a father is honed to a fine point in Peter, turning him from a weak-willed man into a highly motivated and ruthless child. There is a moment many years later when Rumple attempts to explain his relationship to Peter without revealing their familial connection. He says that "Peter Pan destroyed my father," and in a sense, this is true. Malcolm's worst traits are amplified by magic, and he loses his sense of conscience as power corrupts him. But even the other characters note that Peter stands a cut above the average villain. He isn't just consumed by magic, he uses it to become the best version of himself: strong, capable, and resourceful. His playfulness turns into maliciousness, his charm hiding a clever, vindictive nature that in many ways puts the other series' antagonists to shame.

Long story short, Peter Pan quickly becomes an individual to be feared. A demon in the guise of a boy, in their words.

A young Killian Jones, who one day later becomes Captain Hook, learns the hard way that Peter Pan is not to be underestimated when he and his brother Liam sail to Neverland in search of a plant that grows on the island. They believe that the plant, called dreamshade, is a type of medicine, but Peter greets them on the shore and informs them that it is in fact one of the most potent poisons in all the realms. Believing Peter to be no more than a strange, mischievous youth, they dismiss his warning, which proves to be fatal. Killian's brother unintentionally poisons himself with the plant, and although Peter offers Killian a way to save him by letting him drink from one of Neverland's springs, he purposely fails to tell Killian that leaving the island will mean the cure will wear off. He says only that they must not leave the island unless they're willing to pay magic's price. Naturally, the two fail to understand this riddle and sail away, which ends in Liam's death.

Consequently, Killian is the first to get a taste of Peter's love of tricks and less than altruistic nature. Although Peter is not overtly violent or vengeful like others, Killian often says he's the most treacherous villain he's ever faced. He offers people a solution to the games he plays, provided they can figure out the rules or are willing to make the sacrifice, but they are almost never benevolent; rather than destroy people himself, Peter puts people on the path to destroying themselves by their own hands, simply because he can, because it's amusing.

Not surprisingly, by the time Peter is around one hundred years old, any goodness he once had seems to have become a faded memory. He grows bored and lonely living on an uninhabited island by himself, his only company the children who visit Neverland in their dreams. He gets the idea to bring people to Neverland to settle there with him permanently and travels back to the place where his grown-up son still resides, Rumplestiltskin.

Rumple, who is now known as the Dark One, is the most powerful practitioner of dark magic in the Enchanted Forest, and due to the trauma his father's actions caused him, he clings to power as a means of trying to protect his own son, the fourteen-year-old Baelfire. However, Rumple has often proven to be more like his father than he cares to admit, and these weaknesses have created a rift between Rumple and Bae much like they did between Malcolm and Rumple. Peter takes advantage of this by targeting Bae as he travels through the city of Hamelin, using a magic pipe to lure boys out of their homes at night.

Sound familiar? Yep, you guessed it, Peter Pan is also the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

He enchants the pipe to attract young boys who feel unloved and unwanted by their families, including Bae, intending to create his first group of Lost Boys. Rumple, once he learns of this, follows the trail back to their camp where he then confronts the mysterious piper, only to discover the culprit is his young father.

For seemingly no other reason than to show off his power, Peter mocks Rumple, pointing out that he must be able to hear the pipes because he also feels abandoned and that he's never truly forgiven Malcolm for his actions, just as Bae doesn't forgive Rumple for all of the horrible things he's done as the Dark One. Peter offers Rumple a deal: ask Baelfire if he would like to stay with Rumple, or go to Neverland with Peter, whom he doesn't realize is his grandfather. The choice is Bae's. Frightened of both facing his father and the possibility of his son abandoning him, Rumple instead forces Bae to return with him, an act which angers Peter. For different reasons, they effectively disown each other as family: Peter, due to his emotional detachment to them, and Rumple, due to the fact he views Peter Pan as a threat to his son and his power.

Peter's descendents are, however, the key to ultimately finding true immortality for himself, but it is unclear whether he realizes this fact at this time. Regardless, it doesn't change that he tries to make Bae a Lost Boy out of pure callous enjoyment at Rumple's reaction. Peter is at this point a clearly malevolent force, and he takes a special amount of glee in antagonizing his own family. In a way, it's the only means by which he can stay in their lives.

Not long later, after Rumple abandons Bae in an eerily similar manner to the way he himself was abandoned and Bae is henceforth transported through a portal to Victorian England, Peter again targets Baelfire in an attempt to bring him to Neverland. In the time since, Peter has made an enterprise out of kidnapping children with his Lost Boys acting as his henchmen. He has also discovered the way to make the hourglass stop counting down: by finding a very special boy, one who has the heart of "the truest believer." By harnessing this boy's heart, he expects he'll be able to save his own life. The young Bae plays a role in finding this heart because the boy Peter is searching for is in fact Henry, the son Bae will one day have with Emma. Again, it is unclear whether Peter knows Bae is Henry's future father or not; it can be argued that his interest in bringing Bae to Neverland is to keep him from aging (time does not move in Neverland) until Emma can be born, or that he simply suspects Baelfire will eventually lead him to the boy. Either way, Peter sends the shadow to collect his grandson, and it begins to menace the city soon after Bae arrives.

Bae is eventually adopted by the Darling family and becomes a foster sibling to Wendy, John, and Michael. Soon after this, the shadow begins appearing at the Darlings' window at night, enticing the Darling children to come to Neverland with promises of magic and adventure. Wendy, who doesn't heed Bae's warning about the suspicious nature of the shadow, decides to go with it but ends up returning the next morning. She says she was sent back because Peter wanted a boy, not a girl, and then warns her family that the only reason she escaped Neverland is because the shadow intends to take one of the boys in her place.

In order to save his new family, Bae sacrifices himself to the shadow and is successfully brought to Neverland, only for the Lost Boys to ascertain that he's not the boy they're looking for. Baelfire is, however, forced to stay on the island for years as a Lost Boy. Wanting to save him, the Darlings try to rescue him, but they are unable to defeat Peter and as punishment, he takes Wendy hostage for over a century, unbeknownst to Baelfire. After they reach adulthood, he stops Michael and John from aging, keeping them alive in order to do his bidding with the threat of their sister's death hanging over their heads if they disobey.

Many years later, Baelfire eventually "escapes" Neverland, though in truth it's implied that Peter orchestrated his leaving the island. He ends up on Earth, grows to a young man, and meets Emma, which leads to Henry's creation and the very thing Peter has been waiting for for centuries. When Emma, who gives birth while in prison, decides to give Henry up for adoption, Peter sends John and Michael to collect the boy for him but they're unable to adopt him before Regina, the woman otherwise known as the Evil Queen in the cursed Storybrooke, can. Wanting a new family and a son to call her own, Regina becomes his adoptive mother, oblivious to the special nature of Henry's heart. Peter is forced to wait another ten years until Henry brings Emma back to Storybrooke and she breaks the curse which conceals the town from the rest of the world.

While watching and waiting during these ten years, Peter begins setting up additional pawns for his end game. He has a woman, Tamara, seduce his grandson Baelfire in order to keep a spy close to Bae's side. Having never known his relationship with Emma resulted in a child, Bae and Tamara become engaged.

Finally, once the curse is broken, Peter is ready to make his final move.

He sends Tamara to Storybrooke with one additional person: Greg Mendell, a man who believes Regina kidnapped his father. Both have reasons not just to believe in magic, but to hate it, and Peter proves just how much of a master manipulator he is when he is able to convince them that they're working for a "Home Office," a kind of scientific institution whose goal is to eradicate all traces of magic from the world. Part of their mission is to capture Henry and bring him to Neverland, where they believe they will destroy the magic on the island, but they only discover the truth once Henry is in the Lost Boys' hands. With their usefulness at an end, they are killed.

To replace his eyes and ears in Storybrooke, he sends Michael and John to Storybrooke before its residents can secure the town against more intruders, while at the same time a rescue party composed of Emma, Snow White, Prince Charming, the Evil Queen, Rumplestiltskin, and Captain Hook set out for Neverland to retrieve Henry. With the Darlings taking the place of Greg and Tamara, Peter ensures that no help from Storybrooke will be forthcoming as he deals with the rescue party on his home turf.

Those who haven't met Peter Pan are uncertain how this cutesy character from the stories can be so awful as to kidnap a child, but Rumple, who knows better than anyone what kind of foe they're up against, decides that holding their hands will only slow him down, and he sets off into Neverland alone. He is greeted by Felix, Peter's most loyal and trustworthy Lost Boy, who declares that on Peter's orders Rumple is free to stay on the island as long as he likes, provided he doesn't try to save Henry. This is the only concession Peter makes to members of the rescue party. He goes to great lengths to convince Rumple to stand down peacefully, even having his shadow shape-shift into the form of the woman Rumple is in love with to try and convince Rumple to leave with his life intact.

Although it's good strategy to want to remove the strongest of the rescuers from the playing field, there is also an element of sincerity to Peter's actions. Twisted beyond recognition though it is, Peter very clearly has regrets over his relationship with his son. He's willing to kill Rumple, but he tries every other tactic he can to avoid that outcome at first. If Rumple is willing to let Peter have his immortality, then there's no need to fight with one another. Rumple can go back to his life. He is even willing to offer Rumple what they talked about more than three centuries in the past: a fresh start with him.

For the person Peter Pan has become, this is as close to love as he can get. Rumple, however, believes that Peter is too corrupt to be allowed to have his way and vows to save Henry, just as the others do.

Peter is not so sentimental about the rest of the rescue party or his great-grandson, whom he immediately keeps cloistered in a camp deep in the jungle. He doesn't strike at his opponents outright, but falls back on his favorite and most effective tactic: playing mind games. As Neverland is a place of belief and imagination, Peter has those in spades, and he is able to use them to ferret out weaknesses in other people and twist their belief until their resolve is broken.

In Emma's case, for instance, he gives her a map that will lead her straight to Henry, but one that will only work if she accepts who she is--an orphan who is still angry at her parents for abandoning her, just as Henry is still angry with her. For Greg and Tamara, this was turning their belief in magic into hatred. For Hook and Rumple, it is preying on their survival instincts, promising them free passage off the island if they are but willing to follow his orders. Neverland isn't a place of good or evil, it's a gray area much like Peter himself; everyday it forces the rescue party to face ugly truths about themselves and make difficult decisions, events which create tension amongst them and slows down their rescue efforts until Peter can get what he wants.

And what Peter wants most of all is Henry's belief. Not just his belief in magic, but for him to believe in Peter, so that when Peter takes the heart of the truest believer it will be a willing sacrifice, a show of faith that will grant Henry's heart power when it's in Peter's possession.

For the most part, Peter doesn't fabricate the truth so much as he bends it, but for Henry he has to make the boy believe that Peter brought him to Neverland for a noble cause, specifically for him to save Neverland's magic, which means spinning an utter lie. He does so by isolating Henry and slowly indoctrinating him into the lawless group of Lost Boys. Eventually Baelfire, having learned of Henry's existence, returns to Neverland to try and save his son, but although Rumple and Bae join forces to overpower Peter, Peter is able to convince Henry that seeing his family was a dream, and that dreaming of what one has lost and what one is hoping for is normal. The important thing for Henry to remember is that one's dreams will change over time, and that even grief will fade. He is able to bond with Henry by speaking of his own experience: that eventually he stopped dreaming of his regrets and found new dreams to believe in, ones that can come true thanks to Neverland's magic. His confession makes it clear that he's given himself over fully to the dream of immortality, having set his past life aside.

However, despite Peter's best efforts to distract and confuse the rescue party, they are able to get a message through to Henry that they are coming to take him home, which strengthens Henry's resolve not to let Peter influence him. In retaliation, Peter then uses Henry's desire to be a hero against the boy by having him "find" Wendy. Knowing that Peter may harm John and Michael if she is unable to help him win Henry over, she pretends that she is gravelly ill and that Peter is trying to save magic in order to save her life and everyone else's.

Peter's ruse works, just as the others manage to thwart John and Michael in Storybrooke and send Pandora's box to Neverland, a magical item that can trap Peter inside it. Refusing to buy into Peter's warnings to leave the island, Rumple intends to activate the box on Peter before Henry can come to harm, though Peter makes every effort to appeal to his son at the last minute, even reminding him that he took the name Peter Pan to remember Rumple, and that they can have their second chance in Neverland.

His pleas are the softest show of emotion he's displayed in a long while, but because of his devious nature, it's impossible to tell what is true, what is half-true, and what is a flat-out lie. Peter doesn't just deceive other people; he believes his own falsehoods to an extent--that he can make up for his mistakes with Rumple if only he can attain true immortality, that there is a good reason for everything he does. This quality is what makes him exceedingly talented at manipulation and misrepresentation, and at the same time shows that Peter is still the same capricious man he was as Malcolm. His mood changes depending on how the wind blows; if he gets what he wants, he's charismatic, congenial, willing to show benevolence to others. If something infringes on his interests, he can turn vicious and cruel. This makes it extremely hard to tell how genuine Peter is about anything at all, as he is the type of person to buy into his own perverse justifications no matter how unreasonable they are at the time.

Peter's penchant for duplicity is made painfully clear when Rumple insists on using Pandora's box, only to find it doesn't work. Peter reveals that it won't activate because he switched the box with a fake during their conversation, and without hesitation he uses the real box to trap his son inside it, neutralizing the threat the Dark One poses.

Much to the others' horror, Peter is then able to convince Henry to pull his own heart out of his chest and put it inside Peter's, a trade that will allow Peter to live at the cost of Henry's life. Weakened from the exchanged, Peter leaves the others with Henry's body and flees to his "thinking tree," a place the Lost Boys knows he goes to when he wants to be alone. The thinking tree is the same tree he abandoned Rumple under, and over the centuries it's become a tree of regret, attacking anyone with regret in their hearts. When Emma, Snow White, and the Evil Queen pursue him to get Henry's heart back, the tree restrains them. He confesses it is a creation of his own regret thanks to the events that led him to become Peter Pan in the first place, but that he no longer has to worry about being separated from his child as he can now keep his son close to him forever inside Pandora's box.

This admission, more than anything, shows Peter's warped sense of remorse. He may have regretted what he's done at one time, but he is now in a position to hold Rumple hostage in Neverland alongside him if he must, rather than attempt to make amends for past mistakes. In his eyes, they were not so much mistakes as stepping stones in what Peter sees as a journey to finally being reunited with his child--as Peter Pan, the treacherous leader of Neverland, not a father.

Against his expectations, Peter discovers that the regret in his heart is still greater than the Evil Queen's, despite everything. To his surprise, she doesn't regret any of the terrible acts that she's committed and is able to break free from the tree as a result. Plunging her hand into his chest, she reclaims Henry's heart and Pandora's box with Rumplestiltskin still inside, leaving Peter for dead while the rescue party prepares to escape the island with the Lost Boys. In order to protect Henry from further attempts to steal his heart, Regina casts a spell over him that prevents his heart from being removed, though everyone believes they've defeated Peter for good.

They're wrong.

Unbeknownst to anyone, he sneaks on board Captain Hook's ship, desperate now for Henry's power. He corners the boy alone in an attempt to take his heart by force, but once he realizes that is no longer an option he resorts to violence by ripping at Henry's shadow, a type of magic that is both painful and fatal. Sensing his father is on board, the newly freed Rumple arrives just in time to active Pandora's box on Peter before he can hurt Henry. Rumple thinks his father is finally immobilized, but what he doesn't know is that in a last-ditch Hail Mary Peter cast a body-switching spell that put his consciousness into Henry's body, and Henry's into his. The person really trapped in Pandora's box is Henry, while the gang inadvertently brings Peter Pan back home to Storybrooke with free reign to incorporate the town into his schemes.

Being away from Neverland means Peter is forced to adjust to a new environment where the conditions are no longer in his favor, thrilling though it is to be challenged with a situation he hadn't been expecting. As a consequence Peter is, if anything, even more cutthroat in his attempt to put the ball back in his court. He's unused to being beaten at his own games; finding himself in Storybrooke brings out his true colors in that some of his smug, playful demeanor gets thrown by the wayside in favor of a single-minded determination to win.

He comes up with a new plan: turn Storybrooke into a new version of Neverland by stopping time there.

To do this, he needs the dark curse that the Evil Queen originally cast to bring the series' characters to our world, the curse that created Storybrooke. His first step is inciting panic in the town by ordering his shadow to kill one of the townspeople. Believing Peter Pan is still terrorizing them from inside Pandora's box, Emma and Rumple plot to release him in a magic-free environment where he will be powerless, then kill him once for all. When they do, Emma comes to the realization that it is her own child speaking to her through Peter's body, which casts light on what Peter has done. While this is happening, he is able to trick Regina into bringing "Henry" into her magic vault where he steals the curse. Using Felix--his most loyal Lost Boy and the person he loves most for that loyalty--as a human sacrifice for the spell, Peter is able to recast the Evil Queen's curse. The only difference this time around is that Emma will no longer be able to break it; it will be a curse with no one destined to put a stop to it, making it theoretically impregnable.

Although Rumple is able to switch Henry and Peter back into their proper bodies, he's too late to prevent Peter from using the spell. Rather than kill him immediately, Rumple attempts to keep him powerless with an anti-magic item taken from Greg and Tamara that saps away magical power, long enough for one last conversation with his father, to talk to him, to show him the harm he's caused. Though Peter himself believes he's pulled victory from the jaws of defeat, he's still angry at Rumple's defiance, and this time when Rumple asks him to truly ruminate on all that's happened, he's indignant rather than repentant.

As far as he's concerned, he gave Rumple his chance to join him, and in the aftermath he doesn't hesitate to show how truly unrepentant he is at heart.

"Of course, to look at my son here at the end... and really see him, and think about what might have been. Is that what you want?" he says. "Because I do. I remember looking at you, the littlest babe, helpless and all mine. Those big, big eyes just full of tears, pulling at me, pulling away my name, my money, my time. Pulling away any hope of making my life into something better for myself."

For the first time, Peter reveals how deep his level of selfishness runs, straight from his own mouth. Rumple, resigned to killing his father, prepares to end him, which leads Peter to throw his trump card on the table: that he was the one who made the anti-magic device for Greg and Tamara and that it doesn't work on him. He overpowers Rumple and threatens that because of his friends' special meaning to Rumple, he's not just going to let the curse manipulate their memories, he's going to kill them. Rumple won't do a thing to stop him, as without magic he's back to being a coward, just as he always was. A weak, human, helpless coward. In this sense, Peter predicts that they're alike, that Rumple, like him, can't triumph without his magic. That they're both too self-absorbed to make sacrifices for the sake of others.

This time, Peter is wrong. Before Peter can hurt Baelfire, Rumple embraces his father and stabs Peter with the source of his own magic as the Dark One, something Rumple believes will kill Peter at the cost of his own life. The power keeping him young dispelled, Peter returns to his form as Malcolm; his son has enough time to kiss his cheek before the two disappear in a ball of light.

And like a true fairytale villain, Peter has to have the last laugh.

The only way for Regina to stop the curse he activated is to unmake everything the curse ever created, meaning Storybrooke and the lives they've lived there for the past twenty eight years. With Peter's death, he essentially brings Storybrooke down with him.

Basically, the moral of this story is that Peter Pan's a dick, don't let him near your children. :(


Abilities/Special Powers:

Peter can perform magic and is virtually immortal (he doesn't age and it's stated he can't be killed without the Dark One's power). In Once Upon a Time, age and experience seem to play a part in how powerful a magical creature is, putting Peter in the top tier of magic-users as he's incredibly old and well-versed in the magical arts. As far as what abilities he has, magic allows characters to basically do anything possible short of bringing people back from the dead or creating love, so given his experience he is likely capable of, or at least knowledgeable about, most types of magic.

To put it as succinctly as possible, magic basically represents raw potential, something Peter has plenty of. This is a list of abilities he's been showing using on his own:

→ Teleportation
Disappearing and reappearing in a blink of an eye, travelling long distances, being annoyingly hard to pin down.
→ Superhuman speed
When Peter is standing still, he has proven he can move faster than the average person by snatching high-speed projectiles out of the air with both his dominant and non-dominant hand.
→ Superhuman strength
This isn't something we've seen evidence of him using, but given that Rumplestiltskin was granted above-average strength by his dark magic and that he's stated he can't overpower Peter, it's likely that he's stronger than he looks at first glance.
→ Magic use
Basically everything magic-users can do to cast spells or use magical attacks falls under this heading. In the past, Peter has specifically enchanted pipes to play music that only certain people can hear, used spells with subtle mental/emotional manipulation, created protective barriers, and used paralysis spellwork that can freeze even powerful magical creatures in place. As well, he is able to grant people agelessness (in other words, stop them from aging), create magical items, conjure things, and teleport items out of people's hands into his own. In more heavy-handed shows of power, he can also use a type of telekinesis, in that he can knock people around with blasts of magic.
→ Immunity to magical restraints
This is more an area of expertise, but Greg and Tamara display intimate knowledge of how to block magic, as well as how to weaken a magic-user sufficiently enough to torture them and drain their magic. Given that he was their benefactor who supplied them with their education, it stands to reason that Peter is capable of doing this to others and of protecting himself from the same effects. Likewise, he is strong enough on his own to resist most attempts at immobilization, such as sleeping spells. The only thing in canon that can temporarily stop him is a special type of squid ink, very rare and very difficult to obtain.
→ Indestructibility
The term is a bit misleading, too, as Peter can be hurt, it just takes some effort to do so. He can bleed and suffer injuries like anyone else, but wounds will not affect him as much as they would a normal person.
→ Possession
He canpossess someone else's body if he sees fit, though the canon scenario was closer to a Freaky Friday episode in that he can switch two souls and put them in different bodies.
→ Ripping out hearts
This is a skill most magically inclined people can do in Once Upon a Time, and it involves reaching in and pulling out a person's heart, which immediately becomes enchanted the moment it leaves the body. Crushing a heart can kill the person in question, but possessing someone's heart can also mean manipulating their actions as a ventriloquist would.
→ Flying
Possible, but only with pixie dust.
→ Shadow manipulation
Peter will not have a shadow coming into Wonderland as it was destroyed in an earlier conflict, however he knows a type of magic that allows him to both rip someone's shadow out of their body (an act almost akin to ripping a soul out that will end in death), or cut one away, sparing that person's life but detaching the shadow.

When shadows are detached, they are essentially living entities that will follow commands. They are canonically able to fly, travel across realms, manipulate physical objects, shape shift, expand their size, and can communicate (they are not shown speaking, but Peter seems to have enchanted his to impress messages onto people in a telepathic sense, just as magic-users can do to animals in canon). If shadows attack a living entity, they can grab onto that thing's shadow and hurt the entity through that medium, but physical weapons don't really work on shadows as they're not really flesh and blood. Given this, though, they're extremely weak to light and fire.

Third-Person Sample:

For Peter Pan, the boy who always had something to do or a new game to invent in Neverland, boredom and curiosity were a dangerous combination. Wonderland wasn't like his home; it was a strange land, broken, built on the backs of memories rather than the imagination he was used to.

And the people... well. A motley crew if he'd ever seen one.

Learning about them was an experience in new and oftentimes odd behavior. The way they went about their captivity, their talents, their race... Even the way they went about dressing themselves could vary from person to person, depending on their realm and the customs in that world. For a place that could assemble so many different types of people, how was it some days could pass by so quietly? Didn't these strangers know how to liven things up between events?

"What's this, then?" There was no one around to answer the question, but then that was the whole point of exploring someone's bedroom when they were out. An audience just wouldn't do.

Peter turned the little knickknack over in his hand, what looked like a toy woman in a grass skirt and a necklace of flowers. The figure was attached to a spring that made it bob and weave when flicked. Odd, very odd.

"These are the toys people enjoy in their worlds? What's the point?"

They'd never had such things in Neverland, and perhaps for good reason.

First-Person Sample:

<sub>[The fact that these communication devices have a bad habit of turning on by themselves is a problem Peter hasn't figured how to solve quite yet... Well, short of destroying them, but that would take away half the fun. His device clicks on to capture him sitting on a bookshelf in the library, a book open on his lap.

As if sensing something is amiss, the youth turns his head toward the camera. When he shifts the book, one can see the title reads Peter and Wendy.]</sub>

I don't understand how these stories can be so wrong. _{[He makes a face, as if in silent plea for an answer now that he has an audience. Incredulity leaks from him.]} Wendy, my mother? Why ever would the Lost Boys and I need her to be our mother? No wonder this is considered fiction. It's far from the truth.

_{[A smile comes to his face, small but still impish.]}

Devoured by a crocodile, though, eh? How apt.