"Once upon a time, there lived a loving husband and wife. Their names were Mr. and Mrs. Darling, and they had three children, Wendy, John and Michael."
Wiggins grinned. "Yer can jus' say it was you, Doctor, we ain' gonna tell!"
"Don't interrupt." Watson glanced over at Holmes, sitting immobile at the end of the bed, arms locked around his knees... The look on his face wasn't precisely detached, the odd flicker of eye movement proved that he was listening – partly, anyhow. What Watson wouldn't give to know what his brother was thinking...
Once upon a time, there lived a loving husband and wife, who had a beautiful little boy. He had hair as black as shadows, and grey eyes the exact colour of morning mist. His parents loved him very much, and doted on him day and night. Every evening, his mother would tell him as she tucked him into bed about all the wonderful things that were in store for him as he grew older: school, college, a shining career, a loving wife and children of his own. It was only what all parents wish for their children... How could they realise that his frightened tears at night were for that very reason, the terrible, growing knowledge that he could not stay a little boy and have fun forever? The grownups in his world were such sad, solemn figures, bent and broken by care and hard work, faces growing ever more like the wrinkled skin of the oak apples in the autumn, hair turning white and brittle as frost, until at last they stopped breathing and were shut up in long wooden boxes, never to be seen again...
"...Neverland is a place that most people will only ever visit in dreams. By the time Wendy was born, our parents had all but forgotten about it, and the magical creatures and people who lived there. But Wendy, Michael and I would visit the island every day as we played in the nursery: swimming with the mermaids, playing tricks on the fairies, and hunting for pirate treasure. And the most wonderful person of all in Neverland was a young boy, who called himself Peter Pan..."
Out in the park with his mother one day, the thought of dying frightened the grey-eyed boy so much that he began to scream, beating the sides of his pram with his fists. Alas! The pram was resting at the top of a grassy slope and began to roll away downhill. His mother had merely stopped to retie her bootlace, and made a grab for the handlebar, an instant too late. Her cry of alarm alerted several others, and all of them chased the runaway pram down to the bottom of the hill, where its flight was mercifully arrested by a handy flowerbed. Weak with relief, the boy's mother rushed over, meaning to snatch him up in her arms and cover him with kisses... but let out a wail of anguish when she saw that the pram was starkly, impossibly empty. The grey-eyed boy had gone, vanished away like a sigh on the wind, and was never seen again...
"...our mother put the shadow away in a drawer and forgot about it, so Peter had to come back with Tinker Bell one night to search the nursery. We'd already known him for so long, it didn't seem the least bit surprising to wake up and see him actually standing on the nursery carpet! And then... oh, and then..." Watson's voice grew hushed, his eyes aglow; "he showed us how to fly. A sprinkle of Tinker Bell's fairy dust, and a moment later, we were all bumping our heads against the ceiling, and the stars were beckoning through the open window..."
Fairies, sad to tell, are a great deal like magpies. If they see an especially attractive baby while visiting the human world, they will often steal them away out of their pram or cradle, purely on impulse. And the saddest thing of all is that this impulse only ever lasts until the infant begins to cry, or becomes any sort of trouble. Then the disenchanted kidnapper will attempt to find another unsuspecting fairy to take the child, for they are all short-lived creatures, with memories to match. The poor, wailing infant might be passed around for days, before eventually succumbing to hunger, thirst, or cold. It was purely by chance that the grey-eyed boy passed into the hands of a common brownie, who was more accustomed to actual hard work than many of the other fairies, mending saucepans and kettles by night when the humans of a house were asleep...
"Poor Tink... She hated Wendy on sight, and who could blame her? Fairies are so small, you see, that they only have room in them for one feeling at a time. Peter only had eyes for my sister from the first time he eavesdropped at our window, and even when he forgot about us, as he often did, he always remembered her again the quickest. Tink grew so jealous of Wendy at last, that she flew ahead to the island and tricked the Lost Boys into shooting her down." Watson directed a kindly smile towards Holmes to show that there were no hard feelings. "It was Peter's kiss on the chain around her neck that saved her from Tootle's arrow." Was it his imagination, or did Holmes's ears look just a trifle red? "The Lost Boys were overjoyed that Peter had brought them a new mother, and when Wendy awoke from her faint, she took them all to her heart in an instant..."
If the grey-eyed boy had not been so sweet and charming, even when driving her to distraction, Tinker Bell might very well have left him to fend for himself. He grew surprisingly quickly, for in Neverland time does not pass the way it does in the human world, in small, neat parcels. And as he grew, so did his ability to find adventure, often bringing it back with him to the underground cave in the centre of the fairy grove that was now his home. Once he even returned with a young crocodile from the lagoon, and proceeded to feed its apparently bottomless appetite with all sorts of scavenged items from the fairy bowers, before losing interest. It was left to Tinker Bell to wedge the snapping jaws open with a mantle clock, then drag the beast back to the shore by the tail and leave it to work the clock loose on its own, her boy's helpless laughter at the absurd sight ringing in her ears. She was deeply thankful when he suddenly stopped growing any taller, until he began to bring home the newest arrivals to Neverland that the other fairies had abandoned...
"Goodness knows why Wendy was so content to do almost nothing besides keep house and tell stories to us in our underground home, for Neverland was just as we children had imagined it, and more besides, with adventures around every rock and tree. It would take far too long to describe them all, so I am only going to tell you two of them. The first was our battle with the pirates at Marooner's Rock..." Watson paused warily as Holmes frowned, shifting to a cross-legged position, elbows on his knees, chin on his hands. Now came the really difficult bit... and why didn't that damn sleeping pill seem to be having any effect yet?