Chapter Text
She was older now, but she remembered. All of it, as if the days and weeks and months and years had never passed.
She chose not to dwell on what had happened, though. Her life was here and she didn't regret that. The only thing she truly missed was flying.
Once in a while, she thought of Peter, and those memories were as sharp and as bittersweet as only the memories of that first and truest love can be. It stood to reason that she should've dreamed about him, too. In her youth she had, more often than not, that bright smile and that dear face returning to haunt her, by day and by night.
But Wendy was no longer a child, no longer as innocent, and in her dreams, she stood alone on the deck of the Jolly Roger. Moonlight flooded the ship, turning the water to liquid silver. The wind didn't touch her, but she felt the wooden planks beneath her feet as if they were real.
Ghostlike, she drifted through the door to the cabin and she found him there. Nothing had changed, except for this: she wasn't afraid.
He slept on his side, metal hook discarded, and he clutched his right arm to his chest, the way, Wendy imagined, he must have done when the wound was still fresh.
Because it was a dream, she leaned over him, so very, very close, as if she had the right. His lips parted, but his eyelids remained closed, lashes resting against his cheeks. Dark hair trailed across the pillows, as long as it had ever been. She could hear no other sound than that of him breathing and it was soft, it was gentle, like so little else about him was, or could hope to be.
He exposed his throat to her, unconsciously, if not in surrender, and he had pushed the covers down, at some point, baring the curve of his shoulders and the pale skin that the sun could not reach.
"It's Wendy," she whispered. "I've grown up."
But the words, when they left her mouth, broke like waves against a seawall. He paid them no heed. She wished he would, every time, almost as much as she dreaded it.
She wanted to see his eyes.
When she woke, she always woke in her own bed, in her own room, far away from that place. She got up, whether it was light or dark outside and she sat at the small table in the kitchen, drinking tea, waiting for her heart to settle back to a normal beat.
It was a well-established routine.
Just like checking her feet for splinters.