Drip...drip...drip...drip...

A silvery sewing needle flashed back and forth, in and out of the rough fabric like a polished, burrowing worm.  The water falling steadily into the drip pan set the rhythm, and Wendy's little fingers danced nervously over the gutted seam; her head bent down in concentration and her thin lip sucked in between her teeth.

In...out...in...out...

drip...drip...drip...drip...

On the ground above her something lowly went scuttling across the rain fed puddle that had collected between the trees, blocking, just for an instant, the infernal muddy crack in the bedrock with it's slippery, water bloated feet.  In the home beneath the ground, the steady dripping missed a beat.  Wendy fumbled a stitch and the needle jammed it's single toothed head into her thumb.

She was startled more than hurt, but she did yelp for it, and instinctively stuck the pad of her thumb between her lips and sucked at the tiny wound.  In the basket above her head she heard Michael shift and kick in his sleep before settling again to dream.  Wendy glared up at the thin crack in the ceiling and decided it had done that with malicious intent, just to make her prick herself.  It was silly, and she knew it, but she thought it none the less.

Curly looked up at her dully from his seat at the enormous fireplace.  He was a pathetic site, with his skin mottled grey and red (which was better than it had been when he'd dragged himself home, when he had been a solid and unhealthy grey under his dark skin pigment) and shivering under the bear skin cloak that had somehow made it's way here from the indian village a few weeks ago.  He had scared Wendy nearly to death when he had come tumbling down the tree (being alone in the underground house was far more unpleasant when it was raining and damp, even if she wasn't really alone)  but she had quickly seen that he was cold and wet and stripped him of his torn shirt and trousers, and set him down by the fire to dry.  It was a very motherly reaction and she would have been quite pleased with herself had she been told this.

"Did you hurt yourself?" he mumbled, his brain still feeling cold.

Wendy shook her head and looked down at the mending shirt again.  Curly seemed content enough with that and stared at the flickering fire once more.

Drip...drip...drip...drip...

It felt like she'd been waiting for the boys to come home since the beginning of the world.

Drip...drip...drip...

Actually, it felt like she'd been waiting for PETER to come home since the beginning of the world.

It had started raining sometime late in the night before.  Peter had gone missing that morning.  Wendy had been afraid that he and Tinkerbell had drown somewhere, and as evening fell into night with no sign of the boy, the others had decided to go out looking for him.  She'd tried to convince them that it was unhealthy to go flitting about in the drowning rain, in the dark, but they had left anyway, for children have a marvelous way of thinking they know better than their mother, even when their common sense agrees with her.  She didn't know how long they had really been gone now, though before Curly had come stumbling in she had managed to sew patches into three pairs of trousers and darn all their socks.

Sometimes she most sincerely missed little things like mantle clocks.

Of course, it didn't really matter what time it was, since there was no one to put to bed except for Michael, who had already fallen asleep on the floor and left it to Wendy to lift him up to his basket.  It wouldn't be healthy to put Curly to bed yet, not until he stopped shivering anyway, but she was sure that the moment her boys came home she was going to make every one of them change out of their wet clothes and get into bed this instant.  Peter would stay up, of course, for he would be eager to tell her about whatever mad adventure had kept him out so many hours of this dismal day.  Or perhaps he wouldn't tell her anything at all, and simply wish to stay up because he was Father and it was his right.

The girl knew that Peter and her boys were coming home, that it was simply a matter of time before they would be back in their underground house and sleeping soundly in their beds.  She knew this only because it was inconceivable for them not to come back; after all, they were neither redskins nor pirates, not little birds nor house mice, nor beetles on their backs on the sidewalk; they were none of the things that died.  They were boys, and boys only were naughty and stayed away for long times, making their mothers WORRY that they had died.  They never really did.

Though there had been Frederick, at the public school, that had stayed home with dyptheria and never come back.  But they had been told he had simply gone away.  No one had said that he had died.

Tonight she worried, though; a little bit different of a worry than what she scolded for because it was what mothers were supposed to do.  Perhaps it was only because of the rain, or the smell of the mud in the walls, and the terrible little worms that stuck their heads out from between the tree roots and wiggled.  It might have been because of the drip drip dripping of the water, setting her on edge.

It was funny...she almost remembered something from that morning, something from only a few hours after Peter had left.  The walls of the little underground home had twitched.  It wasn't a big twitch, or even a notable one, but a few minutes later the west wall of the little home had poured with worms; worms and moles and little crawly beasties she hadn't even realized could burrow.  She had made a big show of shrieking and standing up on her sewing stool so they couldn't touch her, and the Lost Boys had rushed to her rescue giggling and posing.  The worms and crawly things just slipped down into the floor and kept on their way, but the moles stayed above panicking long enough for the lost boys to catch them up by their fat little middles and chase each other with them.  They had all been promptly bitten, of course, and she had almost forgot about the worms in the rush to mend and scold them.

She twiddled the needle in her fingers and set it down against the fabric, falling into the rhythm again.  She only had a few inches left before she would reach the hem and could double back again to tie the knot.

In..out...in...out...

Funny....the rain almost sounded like footsteps up above.  She stitched to the hem and turned the seam.
 

The sky bled with streaks and blurs of fairy light, far away through the rain that made the Twins blink and squint to see, though their other senses were agreeably lost to the water.  It didn't make sense for so many to be about now, especially not in this weather.  Unless they were looking for Peter, too.  It was hopeless to try and find him, when they could hardly see a foot in front of them, and it was a simultaneous and unspoken decision to turn tails and tell Nibs that there had been no sighting on this side of the crooked mountain (but no one had expected they would find Peter there, since the bulk of the Crooked Mountain was poisoned by a volcanic vent near the peak, which bled down sulfur and killed everything on the northern side.  All that survived it was a pocket of thick, thorned briar, sitting at the very base of the poison, that gladly lapped up every deadly trickle and grew the stronger for it.)

Of course, it could never be so simple in Neverland as to just give up and go home.  With their hands clasped between them so they might not loose each other in the dark, the Twins turned about and were promptly struck by a mess of wet feathers, protesting bird flesh, sewn leaves, hinged sticks, and a basket made from woven grass.  The Twins shouted and swatted it away, and the whatever-it-was fell a good dozen feet to land on the sticky sulfuric mud below them.

"What was--"

"--that?"

Keeping firm hold of each other they dropped the remaining distance to the ground and landed on either side of it, bending low to examine the mess that now flopped, shouted, and...glowed?

A miserable bird with a bright red beak, about the size of a cat, flipped to it's feet in the mud and flapped it's sticky wings, splattering the wet boys with filth.  It was wearing a raincoat made of glossy leaves and the snapped remnants of a tiny ballooning basket hung from hinges on it's belly.  Beside it, glowing fierce fuscia at the moment and shrieking angrily, a familiar looking fairy was scraping the mud from her silver dress and stamping her little silver shoes.

"Why don't you watch where you're going!" she shrieked, looking incredibly pathetic as the rain drenched her into a muddy little scrap of girl.

"What do you mean, look where we're going?"

"You hit US!"

The bird puffed it's wet feathers "We most certainly did not!  You flew right into my path and you know it!"

"We did not!"

"You did!" it insisted.  "And now look, the poor Queen in all wet and muddy!"  It put a wing out over her head like an umbrella, but with his raincoat ruined the feathers just stuck together in clumps and didn't keep her very dry.

"You're the Queen?" the black twin asked in confusion.

"Queen Mab?" his brother pointed.

"Of course I am, didn't anyone ever teach you who's-who of the ruling class, you giant ingrates!" she shouted in a shrill voice.  "And now look what you've done!  I'm down here in the MUD and I'm WET and this stupid island isn't even part of my kingdom!"

"Then what are you--"

"--Doing here?  Are you--

"--looking for Peter?"

Her glow flashed to a slightly calmer color for a moment. "Peter?  You mean the boy who played the pipes back at the garden?  No, why would I come all the way from Kensington just to look in on the piper!"  She turned greenish now "My sister Titania is away from Small Monday Island; she and her King are on diplomatic relations somewhere off in the Orient!  When something went wrong in Neverland she asked ME to look in on it because I was closer than they were!"

The Twins frowned.  "What went wrong in Neverland?" they asked.

The Queen of the western world's fairies stamped her silver shoe again and crossed her arms "I won't speak another word until you oafs pick us out of this mud and take us on our way!  You owe Captain Partlet and I for crashing us in the first place!"

Though they were still insistent that they had not been the ones responsible for the crash, they collected the poor creatures from the mud, the black twin carrying Captain Partlet under his arm like a football and the smaller one holding the Queen between the shields of his hands.

"Careful!" Partlet wailed, kicking unhappily against the twin's hip. "Don't rough her!  She's had a very strenuous day!"

The twins half expected the Queen to snap at him for being an overbearing twit, but she seemed to like being fretted over, and she calmed a bit at his discomfort.  The twin stuck an eye to the space between his thumbs and watched her wring the water out of her hair.

"Do you mind?!  She's a lady!" he spouted again.  The black twin had a sudden urge to squeeze him.

"Just tell us where you need to go--"

"--so we can get back to the others!" They said, feeling the cold and wet and becoming irritable at the Queen and her transport.

"Just a moment!"  The lady began to search through the pockets hidden in her skirt folds, then when that seemed to fail, to reach down her bodice.  Her hands came up empty.

"Oh!  I must have dropped it!  You!  The big dark oaf!" she shouted, standing up between the twin's hands and pointing at his brother. "Put down the Captain and get down in the mud!  I've lost my sister's compass!"

"We can get you a new compass at Small Monday Island!"

"We know the directions, anyway."

"No no no!" she shouted, her glow getting red again.  "It's no ordinary compass, you boob!  It's been enchanted to point to where there's trouble on the island, and I NEED it to know the direction I'm supposed to go!  Captain Partlet!"

"My queen!" he stiffened to attention.

"Get down from there and start going through the mud!"

"Yes, your majesty!"

He kicked and squirmed until the boy let him go, and landed with a wet thock in the mud.  The rain was beginning to lessen a little, and it was easy to see him flopping through the sulfuric muck, dragging his toes and digging with his beak.  After a few moments he snapped his head up, something small and dirty hanging from his beak.

"Oh, lovely!" the queen squealed.  She put her arms out to him and the black twin obligingly lifted up the Captain so he could deliver the trinket.  The queen grimaced and wiped the muck off it with her delicate little hands.  It was a pretty little thing, if it would have been cleaner, made of gold and tiny diamond chips on a red silken cord.  She peered down at the dials and pointers and wrinkled up her nose.

"It say's we're almost on top of it!" She rubbed the glass with her thumb and adjusted one of the dials.  "Captain, look around!  See if you can spot anything!"

He stuck his long neck up and swiveled his head like a periscope, but it wasn't that hard to see what was wrong, not when the rain was dying down now.  Both the twins peered about and stopped at the same spot.

"Well?  What is it?" she demanded indignantly, finding herself in an impossible position to look and see.  The white twin lifted his hands to the right direction, and it became quiet.

"...Has that always been there?" she asked hopefully.

"No."

The muddy mountain side petered and dropped, studded by stones and undissolved sulfur, down into the pocket of briars some twenty feet below them.  It was no longer a small pocket, though.  It had opened in the rain, wide like a mouth studded with a hundred million thorny teeth, into a thick and crooked valley.  The stone was slick with water and freshly cleaved, and stuck into the wall was a carved granite slab, covering a door to who knew what.  It had only recently been shoved aside and awkwardly replaced.

"Captain Partlet?"  The Queen wavered.

"Yes, my queen?"

"I don't think this is good ...."
 

Wendy felt so domestic right then.  Michael was sleeping so softly above her, and Curly had dropped off by the fire (though he was far too heavy for Wendy to get into the bed, so she let him stay).  She sat on her little sewing stool, picking over the little tears and scratches that had afflicted his poor garments.  She was sure he had run into the branches of a tree when he was flying, from the little bits of leaves and bark that clung to his wet clothes and stuck out at odd angles from his drying hair.  He would never admit to that, though.  Poor Curly.

Her ears pricked with interest as the sound of the drip pan began to slow.  Maybe the rain had stopped; what a lovely thing that would be!  Perhaps the boys would come home, now, too.

drip........drip.............drip.....{scritch}.....drip.........drip........

Skritch?

Wendy looked up from the torn trousers and frowned.  It sounded like a mouse, or a rat.

...{skritch}.....

That time she could pinpoint it.  The noise was coming from the top of the entrance trees; like something was trying to get down.  A racoon?  She stood and pressed her ear to Peter's door.  It was silent for a moment until there came a scrabbling on the wood, and the sound of a body sliding down the entrance.

Peter was home!

She let a joyous cry and threw open the door, but in an instant her voice rose to a startled shriek, as a jumbled mess of white skin and rough fabric and yellowed linen shirt came tumbling down to land with splayed legs on the ground at her feet.  Curly was awake in an instant and at her side (though he looked about as threatening as a cotton ball standing there in his drawers).  Whatever it was that had landed at their feet blinked and looked about himself with smudged black eyes.

His confused silence was hard to break, and in the few seconds it stretched the pair could get a good enough look at him to know he wasn't right.  It was a boy, maybe nine years old, maybe ten; his skin was white like an old woman's and his hair was a dull and unremarkable color, something like a mouse.  He seemed to be...missing...in places, they could find no more appropriate way to state the sentiment.  His left ear didn't match his right, the left having been stripped of the rim and the lobe, with a patch of shiny, naked scalp above it, a few inches high and as wide as a finger.

Curly hunched down his shoulders, ready to attack him if he had to.  "Who are you?"

"M...Mur....."  the boy paused and frowned, and decided to change his answer.  "Jason."  That pale brow furrowed and his lip peeled back.  Something seemed to shift in his demeanor and suddenly he was alive, animated and his face split into a grin, revealing white teeth worn down to the nerve.

"My name is Jason."