Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.
AN: I originally intended this fic to be a one-shot; despite reviewers asking for more I felt that it was finished. However, poor AU Wendy and Peter told me very emphatically that they weren't close to done. I've therefore expanded this fic to a three-parter, with part three coming very soon.
A Peep Into The Future.
Two.
Wendy's window had been unlocked, the window of the strange bedroom that must now be hers. It had heartened him a little. Now, hours later, he is not crying any more.
Her narrow bed with the cut out hearts is gone. In its place in the darkened room he can see a large sprawl of dark wood and cream silk, pillows opulent behind the half tester's sleek drapes. My heart's cut out, Peter thinks suddenly, and she doesn't have one any more.
He turns away from the bed.
He is waiting for her at the window, looking down into the murky grey of the nighttime streets when the automobile pulls up. Tinkerbell has explained about these too, and these too he has discovered he hates. A man emerges from the far side, pauses at the front window of the machine, then opens the rear door. A silken leg can be seen, and a spiked heel touches the ground. Rather unsteadily, the rest of Wendy follows.
Peter leans out of the open window; the better to see them make their way to the front door of the Darling house. The dark haired man has an arm around Wendy's waist, and he leans down now to whisper something in her ear. She laughs, shaking a reproving finger and saying something Peter cannot hear. Then she sways, leaning heavily on the brick wall of the house, and with a sick shiver he realises that she is drunk.
The man at her side leans in, and before he goes back to his automobile Peter has to watch this man kiss Wendy's laughing mouth. He cannot breathe. He is so angry he cannot breathe; he clutches the window frame so tightly even this polished wood threatens to splinter his hands. It hurts so much Peter thinks he is going to die.
There is a low click from downstairs as the front door is unlocked, and after a short time and a muffled thump there is the sound of a person in stockinged feet coming stealthily up the stairs. At this late hour he can clearly hear the automobile pull away, and he finds that he can listen until it is gone.
It takes him until she reaches the very door of the room to realise that his knife is drawn. He sheathes it.
The door opens.
Wendy ignores him, and it feels as if he's choking and he thinks that maybe she really can't see him, and then he realises that she is whispering under her breath, and what she is whispering is can't, I can't, I can't.
She weaves a little towards the washstand, and in complete silence he watches her wash her makeup off. Her stiletto shoes lie forlorn on the floor. Quiet watery sounds fill the air. She shrugs off her dark coat and dries her face.
This is surreal. He does not speak.
She retires behind an ornamental screen, sounds of cloth on cloth and a silken shiver that could only be those unholy stockings. Some kind of exotic perfume wafts about the room, rich and redolent with spice. He waits in the glow of the streetlamps; listens to her whisper to herself. If he knew of these things he might have thought that she was praying.
Can't see, I can't, I can't, I can't.
She emerges, and suddenly he cannot breathe; thinks his heart has stopped. A cold diffused gloom hangs about Wendy, barefoot girl in a long white nightgown, pale-faced girl with cropped martyr's hair. One of the buttons of her nightgown is undone; with that perfume comes a sticky sweet air, and while he thinks at once of medicine he knows it must be rum. She tugs on a heavy scarlet dressing gown. Sways. Ties the cord loosely about her waist.
She is drunk, and she looks like a consumptive. She's Wendy, and she's achingly beautiful.
"Wendy," he says softly.
"It's dark," she informs him, her voice low and throaty with cigarettes and drink; faintest echo of the clear story-telling voice he remembers. She does not look at him. "I could be mistaken. You could be a shadow . . . it's dark, you know. I can't see you. I'm not mad."
He stares at her. She says, vaguely, "I can't, you know." Rummaging in a drawer, her short hair hangs over her face. This seems important.
A match flares in the darkness, and he jumps. Now she is holding a lit cigarette and a bottle, nudging the drawer shut with a hip. He remembers exactly how blue her eyes could be, but in this cold and unlit room they could be black.
"Wendy," he says again. She's drunk. He doesn't know what else to say.
The bottle is open; he doesn't know how she has done it. She sips rum, winces, sips again. The sharp, sweet smell twists in the air like the grey cigarette smoke.
"That man outside," Peter says, the taste of medicine in the back of his throat. "Is he your husband?"
She makes a sound that could pass for a laugh. "Dickie? No, God no." She sips again from the half-full bottle, laughing again so that it sounds like a sob. "God no; God knows how I loved you . . . I can't . . . "
She looks at the carpet, shaking her head as if to clear it. "Can't see you. Can't hear you either. I'm not mad. I'm not."
He doesn't know how he feels or what he feels, only that he feels and that it is excruciating. He thinks - it hasn't all come true - and he's staring as she goes past him to the window. "God knows how I killed you," she says softly, and the window goes up with a rush of cold air. Swirling rum tobacco sharp night air, and she's so close to him now her heady perfume is dizzying.
"Don't you remember?" he is asking. She lowers herself carefully onto the windowsill, her bare feet hanging over a two-storey drop. He is looking down at her, her profile in the moonlight and her eyes gaslight blue. That bed with the cut out hearts, and the warmth of her, and her hair when it brushed his face. Sunlight through her hair; sunlight trapped in her long brown hair.
"I've forgotten all about you," she says mechanically, though she couldn't possibly have heard.
He says, "Wendy," kneeling on the carpet behind her, and though he'd sworn he wouldn't cry again his eyes his eyes burn and his voice is stricken and very small. "Is Slightly really dead?"
She does not look at him, staring out at the stars as her cigarette burns down. He thinks she is not going to reply, but then she begins to speak, so quietly he must move closer just to hear her, so close he thinks he will drown in the low hum of her voice.
"The day we got the letter saying that my brother had died," she is saying, "my mother didn't say a word. And then the day after the memorial, we heard her laughing in an empty room. She was holding armfuls of flowers, and she said didn't the house seem brighter since John had come home."
My brother, he thinks, my mother. They've fallen away; she keeps them away. Wendy's mother's smile behind those flowers. It all hurts so much, pain building on pain building on her heady perfume until he can barely breathe.
She tips the rum bottle again; sips delicately. Cold stars in the cold sky. "We thought she'd stop it eventually," she says, her voice without expression. "Everything was so difficult, and then Stephen caught the 'flu . . . " she stops, thinking for a moment. "Slightly," she says, with a bare trace of uncertainty. "Before he was my cousin. We called him Slightly then."
Peter nods. The road far below her, he thinks, grey road in the grey night. We called him Slightly. How many nights does she sit here, as drunk as she is now, without anyone to catch her? Her cigarette has almost burnt down, and with a negligent gesture she drops it down to that grey road, watching the glowing speck of it fall. He can't stop thinking of Slightly, and of Wendy's brother, both dying far from home.
"We nursed him in turns, my mother and my aunt and I. And then one day I was . . . I was fetching water for someone, a glass of water, and my mother came out of the sickroom and said, come quickly, he's sitting up and feeling much better."
Her voice is very calm, very detached. "I knew. I didn't have to see him to know. White like that on the pillow, you see, and my mother chatting away to him, I didn't have to . . . I did. She went away before the funeral. Talking to them in that place. Saying why doesn't Wendy visit anymore."
She closes her eyes, and says, "Because I killed them. Talking about mothers, bringing them back to wars and epidemics. I brought them here, and they died here, and my mother cracked, and now I - "
Wendy opens those blue eyes and looks right at him, that drunken intensity. "Now I see you," she says, very softly. "Now I see you. How did you die, Peter?"
He stares back at her, shaken as much by what she's saying as by her eyes. "I didn't," he says, "I didn't -"
"Weren't we happy, right at the end? Every question answered," she says to herself, looking away and out at the stars again. "And now there really is nothing. I'm cold."
Her hand comes to her face, and lightly her fingers drift in the cold air over the place where her kiss used to be. "Every question," she repeats, "every question, but now I don't know how you died."
He is afraid to touch her again, wanting it desperately. Powerless not to. Instead of answering again he reaches out, slowly as if in a dream, and when his hands close over her slight shoulders it's a shock, cool and solid as if he'd expected her to be the ghost. She doesn't move or resist, and very gently he picks her up. She's so light, lighter he thinks now than she was five years ago. She doesn't say anything, not even when he lays her carefully down on that great bed. This is the thing to be done; this is the only thing that can be done. Slightly dead and John dead, and Wendy's mother mad and Wendy herself drunk and wishing herself dead – there is a warmth on his face that must be tears. He's not crying, but the tears come and won't stop.
She watches him under her lashes. He's folding the bedclothes over onto her, tucking the blankets around her cool body. She says softly, "I still don't know," and he doesn't know what she means.
She passes out very gently, and before he knows it she is sleeping like the dead - like a drunken angel. Like Sleeping Beauty.
Like a fairytale suicide.
Peter tips the rum out of the window, dropping the bottle into the street below. He gets a little on his hands; sticky and sweet, it tastes like death or maybe like Wendy's mouth. He closes the window. Lights the lamps.
In the low warm light, he watches Wendy sleep.