Author's Note: This chapter, again, is not drastically different from the first draft, though I made quite a few changes that you probably won't notice. :)

Thanks: Thanks again to my husband and Mara Trinity Scully for their beta-reading. And thanks again, also, to those who have taken the time to review.

Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me. This fic, however, is mine. Please don't take it without my permission.

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Chapter 16:
It Works in Stories
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Silence filled the room quite as completely as the firing of the revolver had done. The occupants of Wendy's bedchamber were momentarily frozen, as if in tableau.

The gun fell from Aunt Millicent's hand with a clatter, her arm still extended as if she were frozen in place. Then, with a halting step forward, still staring in horror at the dead, unblinking eyes of Captain Hook, she said softly, "A noise woke me." She looked around her as if suddenly emerging from a dream. "I hid in the doorway," she murmured, as if feeling some deep need to explain herself. "I ... I killed a man!"

For, indeed, when faced with danger, Aunt Millicent had found bravery in her heart which she had previously considered impossible, and had boldly faced a pirate without even realizing she had done so. At this moment, however, she could think only of the horror of what she had done.

She walked slowly forward as if compelled, staring fixedly at Captain Hook. As she drew near in the dim lamplight, she gasped, "It is Dr. Carew!" glancing around the room in disbelief, looking for some explanation that would erase all of this sudden and incomprehensible whirl of strangeness. With his long curling hair, Captain Hook of course looked quite different from the elegantly brilliantined gentleman who had so frequently conversed with her over mutton cutlets at luncheon, but there was no mistaking the features of his face, which she had so often admired in her soft, romantic heart.

But Peter paid the older lady no attention whatsoever. Captain Hook was no longer an issue, and so his only concern was for Wendy, who did not appear to be moving even so much as to breathe. "Wendy!" he sobbed. "Please don't leave me! Please don't die!" His tears dripped down to land upon Wendy's peaceful face, wetting her lashes with the moisture from his own eyes.

Gathering Wendy into his arms, Peter pressed her to him as if attempting to pass his own strength and warmth directly into her body. Her arms dangled from where he held her, and her head rolled heavily backward until Peter pressed it firmly against his own bare shoulder. "Wendy!" he cried, rocking her in some instinctive desire to comfort both her and himself. "Wendy!" The skin of her face was cool against his neck. All traces of her fever had departed. She did not move.

Aunt Millicent seemed to come to herself suddenly, realizing that her niece lay upon the floor, held by the mysteriously returned beggar boy Peter, who was now scantily and improbably dressed in nothing but leaves and vines. This all seemed quite an inexplicable development, and quite improper as well.

It might be noted that Aunt Millicent oddly seemed to be at that moment considerably more concerned about the impropriety of her niece's embrace with a scantily-clad young man in her bedchamber than she was about the dead gentleman whose eyes now stared at some faraway place no living person has ever seen. But, in that elegant lady's defense, the problem of a dead gentleman on the floor was considerably outside her sphere of understanding, and so she focused on that which she could understand.

"Unhand my niece, young man!" demanded Aunt Millicent numbly. "She is not even properly clothed! Nor are you!"

"Clothes?" shouted Peter. "Clothes? Wendy is dead! And you care about clothes!" Cradling Wendy's head close to him, Peter continued to weep, and continued to rock.

"Dead?" Aunt Millicent felt suddenly as if it were she who had been killed. Her body felt quite leaden, as if all meaning for life had left her in one horrible moment. Yes, Dr. Woodhouse had warned her of this eventuality, but to have it occur so unexpectedly soon! For the beautiful Wendy who had been once so filled with life ... for her beloved niece to be gone ... it was simply unimaginable. The young lady had been the center of her life for so long now that her absence felt like the absence of Aunt Millicent's own heart. Guilt and grief flooded her in painful waves.

Pressing another desperate, tear-flavored kiss to Wendy's lips -- perhaps it takes more than one to work -- Peter whimpered, "It works in your stories, Wendy! Why won't you wake up? It works in your stories!" He pressed another kiss to her lips, and another, and another, convinced that Wendy's stories were true, convinced that he could save her just as so many princes had saved so many ladies in the tales Wendy had told him, for Peter did not understand that London was not a realm of stories as Neverland was.

Peter looked up at Aunt Millicent in grief and betrayal. Wendy would not wake up, and the world was a very very wrong place to allow such a horrible thing to happen. But as he looked up at the older lady who stood nearby with her hand pressed to her trembling mouth, Peter felt something against the side of his neck which was wet with tears.

He felt a breath. A breath against his neck. Wendy's breath.

"It worked!" he cried, pressing several kisses to Wendy's mouth as if to ensure that she continue breathing. Now, in truth, it would be difficult to say whether Peter's kisses did truly awaken Wendy as he believed, or whether Wendy had been breathing softly throughout the entirety of his lamentations and he simply had not noticed. But Peter's belief was the most true explanation from the perspective of the heart, and so let us believe as he does.

Wendy was once again saved by Peter's kiss.

She still did not move, however, and lay very cold and still. Her whisper-soft breath against Peter's neck had been barely perceptible.

"She is alive," he told Aunt Millicent, who breathed a most unladylike sob of relief, which sounded rather like a most inelegant hiccup. "But something is wrong with her. Hook said he did something to her!"

"She has been very ill," explained Aunt Millicent, her expression still deeply sad as she stepped nearer and knelt artlessly in her nightdress beside Wendy and Peter upon the rug.

"Ill?" asked Peter in confusion. "She told me so, before, but what is it?"

"She ... does not have long to live," the older lady explained gently, fighting tears.

But Peter shook his head stubbornly. "No!" he insisted. "I will save her! My kiss will save her!" Peter shifted Wendy in his arms so that he could see her face more clearly. "I will save you, Wendy. I will. I promise."

Aunt Millicent gently put her hand upon the young boy's bare arm, explaining with obvious sorrow and compassion for the boy's obvious distress, "There is nothing we can do for her now. The doctor has said so."

Peter gazed down into Wendy's pale, peaceful face, unable to even see her chest rising with her meager breaths. He tried to think, but his thoughts kept getting muddled. He thought of Hook's taunt on that subject, and his face set in determined lines. He would think! He would!

And, suddenly, inspiration!

"I have an idea," he said to the older lady who knelt beside him. "I think I can save her, but I have to take her away right now, before she ... while she ... it needs to be right now."

"But ... where would you take her? And what would you do to her? I ... simply cannot permit this. I am sorry, but ... she is my responsibility, and I cannot fail her again." Aunt Millicent's tears were beginning to fall, though she seemed not even to notice them as they dropped into the neck of her nightdress and upon the waves of her loose auburn hair.

"But I think I can save her!" Peter objected desperately. "If I take her now, I think Neverland can save her! But we must go now! It might not work if she dies! I must go now!"

Aunt Millicent hesitated, torn most terribly between the advice of her head and her heart. Her head insisted that allowing a leaf-clad boy to abscond with her near-dead niece in the darkest of night would be not only the greatest of improprieties but also a disservice to the trust Wendy's parents had placed in her when they'd given their daughter into her care, that it might be perhaps even worse than the horrible error she had committed in trusting Wendy's health to Dr. Carew's care.

Aunt Millicent's heart, however, said that her very dearly beloved niece was dying, and that if there was some small chance that Peter could save her, then she should let him try. He had saved the girl before. And he was, after all, the one Wendy's kiss belonged to, and one could not underestimate the significance of that fact.

Not accustomed to listening to her heart, and feeling still some bruising from the last time she had done so in entrusting her feelings to Dr. Carew, Aunt Millicent struggled for a long moment, but even she realized there was little time to lose. Wendy looked quite nearly dead already, and so if she were to give her charge into the care of this Peter Pan, Aunt Millicent would need to do so now.

Perhaps everything is possible still, in the right light, with the right gentleman, she thought to herself once more, her lifetime's worth of dreams and hopes and wishes brushing thick around her like spirits in the darkened bedchamber.

"Go!" she finally cried, her eyes shining with even more tears which slid down her cheeks in glistening streams. And Aunt Millicent looked quite young in that moment, as if some girlhood hope had returned to her heart, even as she wept for her failure to protect such a precious charge. "Go! Save her, and keep her safe, as I have not been able to do."

But Peter shook his head a moment, insisting, "This was Hook's doing, not yours." Aunt Millicent had not the slightest idea of who "Hook" might be, but this was not a time to ask questions. She understood that the boy was saying that she was not to blame for her niece's endangerment ... and perhaps one day she would come to believe what he said. Perhaps she would one day forgive herself for her own role in Wendy's terrible illness. But that day would not be this day.

And though Aunt Millicent would not have guessed so in that moment, that day of relief and forgiveness would come in the future partly through the support and caring given to her by a different doctor entirely, and one far more trustworthy, for the kind and merry Dr. Woodhouse was of an appropriate age and was not, in fact, a pirate in disguise, which was a considerable point in his favor.

"Go," Aunt Millicent said softly to the strange leaf-clad boy she barely knew, the boy who had somehow brought hope once more to her heart. "Save her if you can."

And so Peter stood somewhat awkwardly, holding Wendy's body in his arms. Though she was some years older than he was now, she had become so frail and thin that her weight was inconsequential. The only difficulty presented by her greater age was that she was rather taller than would have been easiest for Peter to carry.

But Peter was determined, and so he held Wendy to his bare chest and walked to the open window. He glanced back only once, and did not throw Hook's motionless body even the barest glance. Instead, he smiled to Aunt Millicent and said, for perhaps the first time in his young existence, "Thank you."

And then, without waiting for a response, Peter flew from the window with Wendy in his arms, leaving Aunt Millicent to run to the window in awestruck wonder. She stood framed in the window, where a single perfect shining acorn sat upon the sill, as she watched the skies into which Wendy and Peter had disappeared, and thought with blossoming hope in her heart, A boy who can fly ... perhaps he can save her after all.

Next chapter ... the finale!