This is my second attempt at writing fan fiction, and I think I've put in a considerably greater effort this time. I'm having a lot of difficulty finding words, but I hope this fic would do well enough to please. I forgot to put in a disclaimer in the first fic, so I'm saying it now: I do not own Peter Pan, the Darlings, the Never Land and all its pirates and Indians and mermaids and fairies, not in any technical way. They belong to J. M. Barrie, for whom we should all be thankful for. Of course, if you would look at it in another way, Never Land also belongs to me and to you, and we all belong to it. Anyway, that's just a way of seeing things. This fic's not finished, but I still hope you can read on and enjoy. Works best if you read it aloud in a story-telling voice, heheh. Reviews wouldn't be too bad, either. :)
CHAPTER ONE: The Boy Who Dreamed
There was once a little boy who lived in London. If a person would look at this little boy, he would find nothing particularly outstanding about him. He was not particularly good-looking, he was not particularly good in school, he was not particularly good in games… in fact, he was rather ordinary. He came from an ordinary family: his father was an ordinary assistant in the chemist's and his mother was an ordinary librarian. His older siblings – for he was the youngest – were just ordinary older siblings.
But if one would look closer at his eyes, he would see that they sparkle with the most extraordinary light. What it was exactly, nobody knew, but that was exactly why the sparkle was so special.
Every Saturday afternoon, when the weather permitted it, his mother would take him for a stroll through the park. As they walked through the leafy paths, she would regale him with the most amazing stories that she had read from the library books. Of course, she knew that being a boy, her son would be most interested about pirates and Indians and other such fearsome entities, so her stories were mostly about them. But being a girl herself, she couldn't help but interspersethe tales with mermaids and fairies and the like.
And so the boy lived his days most ordinarily. But when night came, when sleep whispered its secrets to the world, he dreamt. And because little children have the keenest ears for such secrets, their dreams are ever so much more wonderful than grown-up dreams, and there was no ear more keen than this little boy's.
In his dreams, he always came to this curious place. He had no name for it; at first he did not even know that it was actually just one place, for it was, indeed, very huge. The jungles were thick in their greenness, mysterious in their very depths; the seas were vast against the endlessly extending blue skies above. He became acquainted with the pirates and the Indians and the mermaids and the fairies, and all the other beings which walked the lands of That Wonderful Place. Some nights he would discover a new hidden niche, and in time he became quite familiar with many of That Wonderful Place's nooks and crannies. Many, but not all, because that place was, indeed, very huge.
He spoke to no one of this place, for his older siblings would scoff and ridicule him for entertaining himself with such childish thoughts. Pirates and mermaids, indeed!
His father had an even shorter patience for what he called "immature imaginings," and constantly reminded him that when he grew up, he was to be a Respectable Somebody if he wanted to live a more-than-just-ordinary life, and that the way to become that is to use his eyes to see the real world, and not the world of his fantasies. The boy resented his father's speeches, but somehow he knew there must be a point, for fathers know things.
And so he kept his dreams to himself, not even sharing them with his mother, though he knew those stars in her eyes to be a sure sign of her also being a frequent visitor to That Wonderful Place.