Author's note: Well, fellow FF readers and writers, I hope all are well. It's a surprise that I have decided to come back to this FF nearly ten years since its publication.

Recently, I have been doing a lot of corrections to grammar mistakes on previous chapters as well as removing and adding new sections to them. That, combined with a renewed interest in Tinkerbell FF's and War of the Worlds, has inspired me to add some extra chapters in order to explore more of the backstory of the main FF during the initial invasion. Each chapter will follow various events, some following the story, others being alternate if certain happenings changed during the story.

A message will be left at the beginning of each chapter. These will not affect the main storyline, UNLESS stated otherwise, so please keep this in mind.

So, without further ado, let us explore other sides to the Martian invasion. Enjoy.

"Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead!"

Tinkerbell groaned. "Please, just a few more minutes,"

Vidia gave her a nudge. "C'mon, Tinkerbell. You're not dead."

With a groan, the tinker fairy sat up, rubbing her eyes, enjoying the embrace of the wind that rushed across her tiny body.

"Jeez, Vidia. A little dark there," she commented as she rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn.

Her purple dressed friend just shrugged. "Well, gotta make sure you're up and ready to see the house." A pause hung in the air as she looked out at the countryside rushing past them, a blur of a mixture of green, brown and, occasionally pale red. "If it's still standing that is." She added lowly.

Tinkerbell heard Vidia's words and could not help but fall a little inside. As much as it was nice to be out here in the country – particularly one that had survived the calamity that had only recently ended with the fall of the few remaining Martian tripods across London and the southwest of England just days ago – part of her still wondered about what was left behind. Indeed, if anything was. What would be standing? Would there be any trees? Would there be flowers or animals or any kind of life out here – as this was close to where they landed all those days ago.

All those days ago?

Had that much time really passed since all this began? Had it really been just a matter of a few weeks – not even a month? Wow! Time had flown since the end of the fighting but had been slow when it had first started.

"Ah, here we are!" a jovial voice – Martin's – called out from the front.

Tinkerbell and the other fairies, who had been chatting amongst themselves or observing the passing countryside, looked out of the front of the side of the car to see a cottage coming into view. The familiarity of it – the same chimney; stone walls; vine covered walls – made the group's hearts soar. What was more, it appeared to have no damage at all. Were it not for the previous mentions of the invasion and the suffering and fear it brought, one would easily take this as a simple family outing to their country house, a time of fun and freedom with no worries, concerns, or anything else that would make one a little anxious of what lay ahead.

"Oh, Father, I hope the house isn't destroyed inside," Lizzy, who sat in the front seat next to Martin, spoke up with a nervous voice, though she was clasping her hands together excitedly like a child awaiting a wonderful surprise.

"Well, we'll know soon enough, sweetie." Her mother, Rebecca, who was sitting next to her, spoke up, her eyes taking in the cottage as they approached with a mixed expression of melancholy and trepidation.

Who knows what could be waiting inside for us? She thought to herself. Or if anything is still there. Anyone could have broken in and made off with whatever they wanted.

The car slowed to a halt on the dirt road outside the front garden. Rebecca climbed out of the car and helped Lizzy down with Martin getting out the other side and walking over to them, quickly noticing that the front gate lay on the path towards the front door of the building. The fairies all fluttered out and hovered alongside them, everyone staring at the cottage and the garden. They wanted to go in, to see this wonderful place, to be at home. But … But it was not easy, not when -

"Well, are we gonna go inside or not?" Vidia asked.

"We don't know what's inside, Vidia," Iridessa pointed out to her. "Anything could be in there, especially if there are any-"

"Well, we won't know that until we actually go and look though," Vidia replied.

Martin told Lizzy and Rebecca to wait by the car and walked into the garden, leaving the others to watch him, hoping nothing would happen. He paused about half-way through the garden, looking in the windows, mentally expecting a face to be staring back at him and then quickly disappear as if something from a horror novel.

If that does happen, then I hope it's human Martin thought to himself, tensing a little at the prospect that something else could be waiting in there for them.

He walked on up to the front door; half raised his hand and stopped it there. Why? It was his home. Why should he even be going to knock?! It was not like anyone was going to be home waiting for them; there were not even cars for a few miles in any direction – aside from his own of course. And the village? Well, the people they had come back with were few in number and nobody had even tried to go with them, not even the Perkins who had stayed behind in said village to see if their own home was still standing, given that this area had been in the path of one of the first assaults by the tripods Martin had gone to investigate. The memories of seeing people be burnt to a crisp, fires sweeping across the land, and all sorts of other grotesque and horrific things made him shudder.

A sort of tinkling by his head made him jump a little. Looking, he saw the little purple dressed fairy friend of Tinkerbell and Lizzy's hovering there, looking at him with a nervous expression her tiny eyes changing from him to the door and then back again, as if saying: Should we go in?! Martin stared back at her, his eyes too glancing back and forth from the door and the tiny humanoid hovering before him. Well, we best do.

Gathering up some courage, he pushed the door open and froze; Vidia did the same next to him.

"Guys! Get over here!" she called to them.

The other fairies looked at each other and quickly came over at the call of their fellow fairy. Tinkerbell, the last to leave, looked back at Lizzy and her mother with a questioning look, wondering if they would come with them. Lizzy looked up at her mother, who gripped her hand tighter as if fearing her daughter was going to run with her fairy friends and be exposed to … whatever it was one of these fairies had seen.

"Mother, shouldn't we go over?" Lizzy asked.

Rebecca glanced down at her daughter and then at Tinkerbell. Should we?

"Rebecca," Martin called out from the house. "Come have a look at this."

Rebecca looked back at Lizzy and then at the house and finally at Tinkerbell; the young green fairy giving a slight nod towards the house, a clear: well, you better go see. She nodded and moved on, Lizzy following alongside her. Tinkerbell sat on her shoulder, resting a comforting hand on her cheek.

When they arrived at the door and looked in, what they saw before completely surprised them.

The room was … well, it was … untouched. Everything was in exactly the same place as it had been when they left here before. All the chairs, pots, pans, the table, the things the fairies and Lizzy had been using on the day they left. None of it had moved and had barely changed – such change only being a layer of dust that had resulted from a lack of cleaning in the absence of the cottage's residents, and the firewood in the fireplace having burnt out. Aside from this, nothing was changed. They had expected the place to be either completely stripped of anything of value by looters, or to be turned into a pit by any Martians who were looking to scour and survey anything that would be of interest to them as they colonised this new world. Martin had even expected the house to be completely, or at least partially destroyed by a tripod. Yet, there was no damage. Absolutely nothing at all.

"Father, can we go look around the house?" Lizzy asked him.

Martin looked down at her apprehensively and up at Rebecca, unsure if such a thing was the right thing to do.

"Well … just, be careful. And take your fairy friends with you, just in case." He said, though he was worried.

"I will," she cheerfully said and, with her fairy friends in tow, went upstairs, chatting somewhat happily as they investigated the upstairs floor.

Martin and Rebecca walked into Martin's study, nervous as before in expecting to see some kind of damage. When they entered, though, it was the same as in the previous room. There was no damage whatsoever. Again, apart from the layers of dust that seemed to cloud everything, there was nothing here to tell that this cottage had been ransacked or even touched.

"I … I don't understand," Rebecca spoke. Walking over to the desk where Martin worked. "I expected this place to be completely turned over,"

Martin nodded. "As did I." he replied, brushing some of the dust off the desk with his hand.

Rebecca looked up at the wall. "What about all your display cases though?" she asked him.

"Oh, well the fairies didn't like seeing them. Lizzy asked me to take them down and get rid of them," he explained, taking in the mostly empty wall behind his desk and gave a slight titter. "A new start, eh?" he asked rhetorically.

Rebecca smiled at him and went to speak when a scream from upstairs made her and her husband's blood run cold for a brief moment. That one sense of danger and panic at the sound of a child screaming was what they felt now.

Both parents rushed upstairs, only to run into one of the fairies about half-way up, the red haired one who was known to them as Rosetta, exclaiming something to them and pointing frantically up towards the sound where the scream came from. Though it was all jingling to them, they understood how severe it was. They rushed past her and onto the landing, seeing several of the other fairies trying to calm down one dressed in a yellow dress and who looked like was hyperventilating. One of the green fairies, with messy brown hair and pair of large glasses with dew drops as substitutes for the glass, pointed at one of the rooms where a door stood open. Lizzy's room!

Martin and Rebecca rushed inside, both gasping loudly at the sight before them.

Their daughter stood crouched down by the end of her bed, a look of pure terror on her face. Two of the fairies, Tinkerbell and Vidia, were hiding on the top of the bed, ducking down behind the frame, all three of them looking over at the window where a few books lay scattered on the floor and a globe next to it.

Resting a hand, or it more or less being there limply, was the figure of a dragon that lay against the wooden wall behind it below the closed windows. A Martian. Upon first glance, anyone seeing this would have reacted the same way as Lizzy, but also run as fast as their legs would have carried them from the cottage, likely screaming and hollering all the way given the new meaning these creatures had. Except, this one's appearance made them stay where they were.

The body was rail thin, similar to the one they had seen at the Thames crawling out from the wreckage of the tripod that had been taken down, along with the Elizabethan/Big Ben clock tower. The skin, once a silver colour, was now faded and covered with an orangey fluid. One of the horns had cracked, the back legs (seeing as the group had seen them walk on all fours even though the front two 'legs' also counted as arms) looked somewhat shrivelled. The arms too looked like all the fat and muscle had been stripped away from under the skin, leaving only the bony remnants of the creature behind.

What really shocked those viewing it, however, was that it was breathing, though it was barely a whisper and the chest looked almost still.

"Elizabeth, come here!" Rebecca told her daughter in a half-whisper/half-exclaim, rushing into the room and grabbing her daughter and pulling her away as quickly as she could, Martin pushing them behind him.

From atop the bedframe, Tinkerbell and Vidia looked down at the Martian, tensing a little as its eyes flickered a little and it looked up at the three humans standing in the doorway. The eyes, once harbouring a soulless void of pitch black, were lighter, almost greyish/white. They looked at the humans and made a light noise – a strangled breath, cut short by a loud sound that was akin to a person vomiting and choking at the same time.

"Mother Dove!" Tinkerbell breathed.

"What do we do?" Vidia asked, not taking her purple eyes off the dying creature.

Martin gingerly stepped forward towards the creature, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the small revolver. It had been in his pocket since they had left in case they ran into anything dangerous, human or not. Despite owning it for a while, Martin had scoffed at the idea of holding onto it, thinking that it was a waste, a dangerously pointless possession that he would do better to be rid of.

How wrong I was.

He stopped just in front of the creature, heart racing that it was going to suddenly jump up and try and kill him. He gripped the revolver tighter, half-raising it from his hip with the barrel pointed at the Martian. He stared at its dying eyes as if trying to find a way to communicate with it. The creature breathed weakly, a small river of orangey fluid rolling from the mouth and down its chin to the floor when it did this, and looked up at the human standing before it.

No words.

It was begging. Pleading. Hell, if it could, it would be crying. Martin could see all of it.

He inhaled deeply, but quietly. He knew what it wanted – no, what it needed.

The Martian tried to hold its gaze, but another weak breath caused another spout of orangey fluid to be yacked up, this time onto the floor. The hand on the globe fell to the floor, said object rolling away, gone, out of reach.

"Father?" Lizzy spoke up.

Martin looked back at her, then at Rebecca, silently telling her what to do. The woman called the two fairies down from the top of the bed and pulled her daughter from the room, closing the door once the fairies had joined them.

The human and the Martian were alone.

Martin cocked the revolver and took a step closer to the Martian, now raising said weapon and pointing it at the creature, one finger resting on the triggering mechanism.

The Martian looked up, eyes flickering once again, at the human standing closer, now with a weapon drawn at it.

Relief. Peace. That was all it felt now, and what Martin noticed as it gazed into the eyes of the creature. It looked at the mouth and saw the lips curl back a little, a sort of … smile. Yes.

Eyes closed. Waiting.

From outside the door, Rebecca cradled her daughter tight to her, the fairies either floating near them and cuddling up to the human in their own attempt to calm her, or engaged in conversation, though keeping the jingling quiet, lest they -

CRACK!

The sound made them jump, all eyes darting towards the door. It was like the air exploded inside the room, the sound still ringing within them.

The door opened and Martin stepped out, shutting it firmly behind him, as he looked up briefly at the others, then down at the floor, his hands empty.

"I'll go back to the village. Wait downstairs." He told them. "Do not go into the room." He added. Firm. Angry even; something so alien to them. Something frightening yet bringing all with him to obey without argument.

The body was removed the room by the army when Martin returned with them an hour later. For the rest of the day, silence passed between the three humans as they tried to rebuild their shattered lives. Their fairy counterparts flooded out into the surrounding countryside, soon making contact with the fairies and animals that were returning from Neverland, or who had survived the invasion.

Martin threw out the other display cases the next day, not wanting to be surrounded by death anymore in any way, shape or form.

Lizzy wanted to sleep with her parents in their room for a while, something they did not protest.

Though they were able to get over what happened, the fairies saw that it affected the small family quite deeply. The invasion had left them shaken and would take them all a long time before they recovered.

But Tinkerbell made sure that with all their help, they made it through. Together.