"After all this is over," he once considered telling her, "we could practice together. We'll get you into the advanced class and during breaks we could sit on the hill and sip chilled lemonade, or we could go to that little restaurant and—"

But he'd never said those words—in the end he wasn't sure if it was because he never had the opportunity or if he did and he just never took it. They had an after, of course. The Monster Raven was defeated, Rue was saved and Siegfried went back into the story, his heart completed, but Duck was stuck as a duck and Fakir still couldn't control his stories.

Their after consisted of sleepy days spent at the edge of a pond; the little yellow duck bobbing on the water while he stained his fingers with ink, trying desperately to write the feathers into soft skin.

So they had their after.

But here was the truth: after was a hell of a lot harder to deal with than he had initially thought. Duck still had that spark of recognition in her eyes when she watched him write, but it wasn't the same at all. She could no longer pester him with her questions, or beg him to write stories—not that she had to anymore, he was trying of his own volition. She didn't even accuse him with her eyes or tell him to hurry up. She just watched.

And Fakir failed.

Story after story failed; nothing changed, aside from Duck's learned agility. When he raised his fist with papers smashed between his fingers, it meant that he was about to throw them into the lake.

She would swim out of the way.

He never hit her with them, and she fled mostly because she did not like to see the look in his eyes. It terrified her.

But because Duck was still Duck she would return and nuzzle his hand with her downy yellow head, pretending that nothing had happened.

Occasionally he would pat her back, but more often than not he'd ignore her presence. It hurt them both.

Duck tried to dance, sometimes, when the other ducks chased her away from the edges of the pond. She'd stand tall on her webbed duck feet and stumble her way through a ballet, never once meeting his eyes.

Fakir knew that she was reliving her last dance, the one with the ravens.

Once upon a time… He wrote, but he can't continue the sentence. He had ideas, once, but when the soft duck feather quill touched the paper they scattered in his mind. All he could think of was that she isn't growing up and he told himself that was the key—the key to something, but he wasn't sure what.

Years passed quickly; Fakir graduated, but decided against moving on to higher education. He got a job at the library. He wrote stories in his spare time. He nursed the sick Duck when she fell ill.

No vet seemed to be able to help, and everybody that he asked said that it was to be expected; ducks didn't live that long anyway.

"I'll meet you again." He whispered to the little duck and she quacked weakly in response. Her eyes don't glitter like they used to and he's not sure if she's responding to his words or the sound of them.

He stood a silent vigil at her grave the next day, writing one last, desperate story.

She woke to a brilliant sun in her vision and moved a wing to shield her eyes.

It wasn't a wing that offered her comfort, though. A fully-formed, slightly tanned hand formed the protection that she desired.

She sat up and squealed.

"Fakir! Fakir, it worked! I'm a girl!"

Duck looked around, frantically excited, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. Dimly, she was aware that the last time she saw him he wasn't really a boy but that was the strongest image she had of him, still.

"Fakir?"

She stood, dusting the dirt off of her legs (she was wearing an airy white dress that she would have found odd if she had stopped to think about it) and walked over to where the little cabin should be. Duck was stopped by the mist—something about it kept her from walking through, and although she could get a few feet into it, she never got out of sight of the lake. It was maddening, and she gave up after a few hours of walking around the perimeter.

"Hello?" she called out into the empty air. "Is anybody there?"

Nothing responded, not even the dull hum of crickets or cicadas.

Duck sat back down and settled in for a long wait, but could never be sure of how much time passed at the lakes edge. She supposed she slept, but with no discernable sun, she couldn't tell if it moved in the sky or not.

Until one day—or night, or something—there was a shape in the mist.

"Hello!" Duck called out. "Hello! Hello!"

"…Duck?"

"Who… who are you?" Duck asked the unfamiliar old lady.

"Duck!" The woman wailed, and with a strength that Duck hadn't expected, she launched herself at the former waterfowl.

"Duck, it's me, Pike. Oh, I've grown so old and you're… Well, you're real, to begin with."

"Of course I'm real." Duck said, offended slightly. "I've always been real."

"I knew it." The old woman with Pike's eyes smiled.

"Knew what?"

"We always felt that something was different, you know? Lilie and me, I mean."

"Oh."

"And it wasn't until Lilie dated Autor for a little that the story fell into place—he wasn't good a keeping secrets from her, but I don't think anybody really was—that you were a duck. And the big white bird, too." Pike quieted and considered the young girl before her.

"But I suppose that because I'm seeing you here, I've finally died, huh? Fakir was pretty torn up when his pet duck died—which now I understand was you, sorry, Lilie didn't date Autor until much later."

Duck was completely unsure of how to respond.

"Where is Lilie?" she finally asked. "And Autor? And Fakir?"

Pike sighed and pulled her face tight in concentration.

"Lilie died in an accident with one of those automobiles." Seeing Duck's blank face, Pike elaborated.

"They're machines that people ride around in, all the rage once the wall was taken down, you know. Um, let's see… I'm not sure what happened to Autor. When Lilie died he moved away and nobody's ever heard anything from him again. Fakir used to get letters but they came less and less frequently until they simply stopped."

"And Fakir?" Duck asked, uncharacteristically quiet. "He promised he'd meet me again. He said he'd find me."

Pike frowned and looked down at her hands, biting her lip to avoid answering her question.

"Pike? Please."

"He died over twenty years ago, Duck. I don't know why you haven't seen him."

"Oh."

Duck considered the woman's words and digested them.

"That's okay. I guess he's just a little late! I don't know how long I've been here, you know—oh, what if I've missed him! What if I was the late one and he thought—oh, no!" Her face fell and she looked around as if the boy would suddenly appear.

"Duck, if he hasn't shown up yet… I'm sorry. I don't think he's coming."

"No," she told Pike, confident, "he'll come. He said he would. He said that we'd meet again."

"If you say so." Pike says. "But I think I've got to go now, Duck." Pike stood and found the bridge at the edge of the mist, the one that Duck had been unable to make herself cross.

"It was really nice talking to you. But did you ever think that maybe he's already moved on? Maybe he's waiting for you, now." Pike smiled, and for a second she was the young girl that Duck had known during her own short stint of humanity.

"I'll see you on the other side when you're ready, okay?"

Duck watched the girl-woman disappear, swallowed by the mist.

"Hey—wait!"

She tried to follow and her footsteps rang out on the wooden bridge, but she couldn't see where she was going. The mist obscured her vision, but it grew brighter and thicker as she went. The sound of water came from below her feet, but she couldn't figure out why the almost deafening sound of a heartbeat drummed its rhythm out above her.

"Watch out, idiot."

"Oh, you watch out. I might be an idiot but…"

"But what, idiot?"

"Do I know you? You seem… familiar."

"I'd remember meeting somebody as clumsy as you."

"Oh, I just…"

"What is it? Finish your sentences."

"Do you want to go and grab a coffee or something? I know this cute little restaurant out in the middle of the forest, of all places and I just thought that you seemed so lonely and I was kind of lonely and maybe we could go and not be lonely together because—"

"Take a breath every now and then, idiot. I'll go get coffee with you."

Once upon a time, there was a duck that died.

Once upon a time there was a boy that wished.

And once upon a time, they were reunited.

A/N

This was going to be a really happy, really fluffy story, it really was. And then it wasn't.

I didn't include Mytho or Rue because I figured that they were back in the story and story characters don't really die, do they?