DISCLAIMER: The places and characters featured hereinafter are the property of Warner Bros., Joel Shumacher, Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam and no attempt is being made by the author to claim ownership or profit from the use of the aforementioned characters. The Peter Pan works by J.M. Barrie copyright belongs to the Great Ormond Street Hospital and no copyright infringement is intended through its mention and usage in this story. The Picture of Dorian Gray belongs to the Oscar Wilde estate. The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the original authors and any character names or places mentioned in the original works belong to the copyright holders and are used in this story for nonprofit entertainment purposes by an amateur writer. The original characters used in this story are the creative property of Miss Melpomene and are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."

Chapter One

Some runaways plan their escape for months, carefully deciding what they would take with them from their old life when they left, purchasing train tickets or bus tickets in advance. But most of the time the decision to leave at last was made in the heat of the moment, when things became too painful to take anymore. There was no thinking, no time to.

Melissa Van Buren had thought about running away before. Plenty enough times that she had every bus schedule and train schedule in town memorized. She never thought she would go through with it, no matter how bad life seemed to get. It was nice to dream, though, of getting out, getting so far away that she'd forget about her other life altogether. The reasons for never leaving changed daily, in so vast a number she thought she might never run out of excuses. But in the end, what it boiled down to was that she didn't have the courage. Her life could be worse, she told herself. She could be dead. She had a roof over her head, food in her belly. There were people all over the world who didn't even have that much, and how much better would she fair if she went out on the streets? She could get mugged or raped, or worse, and nobody would even care to look for her. She'd just be another runaway.

"Missy!" The shrill call came from the room below her and Melissa cringed. Missy had been the nickname that her mother —her real mother and her father had called her by when she was growing up. Melissa was her name, but Missy had been so much easier for her to pronounce when she was little that her parents picked up on it and took to calling her that themselves.

Melissa remembered when she was growing up, and her mother would say or do funny things. Sometimes the stuff she did or said scared the girl. She remembered the first time her father sat her down and explained what was happening to her mother. She had been eight at the time. Her parents had decided that since she was eight now, she could take a bath without their help. Her father still had to turn the water on for her, though, she still couldn't manage that. He had left her to pick out her pajamas for her, promising to be back in time to turn the water off before the tub overflowed like last time. Melissa was standing by the tub in the bathroom, watching the water rise when her mother came in.

"Get out, Mommy!" She cried, giggling. "Daddy says I'm old enough to give myself a bath now." Her mother looked at her like she couldn't remember seeing her in the house before. After a few seconds of that look, Melissa became uncomfortable and tried speaking to her mother again. "Mommy?"

"What are you doing here?" She asked, and Melissa turned and pointed at the tub. "It's bath time, Mommy. Daddy's getting my jammies." Melissa chirped. "Daddy promised he'd read me a story after bath time, you wanna read a story with us, Mommy?"

"Why do you keep calling me that?" Her mother frowned at her.

"Calling you what, Mommy?" Melissa was confused and scared. She didn't like the way her mother was looking at her.

"That. Mommy. Mommy. MOMMY!" Her mother shrieked and tugged on her hair. Melissa started to cry. "Stop crying. You're not real. You don't belong here. You shouldn't be here. I was a good mother, I loved my Missy. Why do you come here? To torture me? To tease me with what I lost? I WAS A GOOD MOTHER! It's not my fault that she drowned in the lake, her father was supposed to be watching her! You're a thing of evil." Her mother hissed, and Melissa cried harder. "I only looked away for a minute…she wasn't supposed to be alone on the lake."

Three years before, when Melissa had been five, her family had gone on a vacation to their grandparent's lake house. Melissa took to the water like a duckling, wanting to be out on the lake any moment that she wasn't sleeping. One day, about a week into their vacation, a storm hit them. The sky was angry and grey, dropping fat, heavy raindrops on the cabin and lake. Nothing that Melissa's mother and father could say to her would convince her that the weather was too bad to go outside. She waited until her mother and father were otherwise preoccupied and snuck out of the house. She wanted to watch the fairies play in the rain. Her mother told her that inside every raindrop there was a little fairy.

"Fairies love to play in the rain," Mommy said. "They fly up, way, way up to the clouds where the rain comes from, and when they get there, they climb inside the raindrops and ride them all the way back down to the ground." Melissa had tried catching raindrops in a glass before, to see if she could see the fairies; but her mother told her that she would never catch one, because fairies were clever. They always danced away before the drops reached the ground, flying back up to the clouds so they could play some more.

She walked out to the pier where Daddy and Grandpa sat with their fishing poles when the weather was nice. They weren't there today, because the bad weather made Grandpa's bones hurt. Melissa walked out to the edge and peeked out over the water. The raindrops crashed into the water and the lake water jumped up to meet it. Something silver flashed in the water and Melissa gasped. Her grandfather had told her all about the different fish that lived in the lake, even pointed out the skinny, silver ones that he called minnows. She wasn't thinking about that when she bent over and tried to reach into the water. It was raining, and she was thinking that if she could catch the fairy that had fallen into the water, she could show it to Mommy and because Mommy had never seen a fairy before, she would be proud of her. The wood of the pier was slippery beneath her feet and when she leaned over the last time, her feet slipped out from under her and she plunged headfirst into the water.

Being underwater is a terrifying experience, anyone who has almost drowned would tell you the same.

Melissa could see the rain hitting the surface of the lake above her but she couldn't hear it anymore. Her thrashing carried her farther out into the lake, and the last thing she remembered seeing before she slipped under the last time, too tired to keep her head up, was her father running out of the house. When she woke up again, her throat was hurting from coughing, and she was tired.

They brought her in the house and Grandma took her wet clothes off and wrapped her in a blanket, rocking her and singing to her as she cried. That was the first time she saw her mother and father fight. It lasted all night.

She had almost died that day. But she hadn't. She couldn't figure out why her mother thought she had. "I'm not evil, Mommy. I didn't drowned in the lake, Mommy. I'm okay, Mommy. Look!" In the bathroom, she moved toward the crazed woman and her mother screamed.

"You are evil! Taking the image of my baby like that to torment me! I was a good mother! I WAS A GOOD MOTHER!"

When Melissa's father came back he found that the floor in the hall outside the bathroom was wet, and the door was shut. "Missy, did the tub overflow again?" He laughed, turning the knob and pushing the door open. He saw his wife up to her arms in the bathwater, and beyond her, beneath the water, was his limp, eight year old daughter.

"MARIE! What have you done?" He grabbed his wife by the shoulder and threw her against the bathroom wall. He ripped Melissa's still form from the tub and pinched her nose, breathing into her mouth. "Breathe, baby, c'mon Missy.

Melissa remembered her mother screaming when she opened her eyes again, telling Daddy to get away from her and Daddy was yelling and telling her that she needed help. Daddy called Grandpa to watch her and Grandpa let her watch television until Daddy got back from the doctor. He sat with her on her bed, and he cried and hugged her a lot but what she remembered most vividly was what he told her when she asked where Mommy was.

"Missy, sweetheart. Mommy is sick. She's been sick for a long time and Daddy didn't want to believe that she was sick so he didn't help her get the help that she needed."

"Mommy doesn't look sick." Melissa said, confused. Her father leaned in to put his arms around her and pulled her up onto his lap.

"It's a different kind of sick," he said. "an inside kind you can't see."

Melissa didn't understand, but she wanted her daddy to think that she did so she nodded her head. "Where is Mommy?"

"She's at the hospital. The doctors are going to take care of her."

"When will Mommy be back?" Her father was quiet for a long time, and Melissa thought she saw his eyes shining.

"I don't know, baby." He said at last.

"Is she gonna get better?"

The shine in her father's eyes got brighter until the glistening liquid held there spilled over and down his face. Melissa had never seen her father cry before, she didn't think adults cried at all. "Mommy's head isn't like my head or your head." He told her. "It's broken, and sometimes she doesn't remember things. The doctors think that medicine will help her, but you can't make this kind of sick go away completely."

Something was still bothering Melissa, and as much as she wanted to ask, one thing kept coming back. "Why was Mommy mad at me?"

Her father made a sound like he was choking. "She wasn't mad at you, baby, she's just sick. Her head told her something that wasn't true and because she's sick, she believed it. Your mommy loves you very much, Missy. She might say things that sound strange or scary, but just remember that your mommy loves you more than anything in the whole world."

Two years later, her mother killed herself. The two years during which her mother's mental illness drove her to the brink were hell for Melissa's entire family. The adults around her cried all the time, and Melissa's mother never remembered who her daughter was. She screamed and cried every time Daddy brought her to visit, and though Daddy would show her mother pictures of her and explain that she hadn't died at all, Mommy got angry at him. She cried for the daughter she thought she lost, but Melissa never forgot what her father said to her the night her mother tried to kill her. Even when her mother would call her horrible things, she never forgot that her Mommy had loved her at one point. Back when there were smiles and hugs when her mother saw her, instead of tears and screams.

Back when her world was alright and there were always fairies in the rain.

"MISSY!" The call came again, and Melissa knew that if she didn't answer it soon, her stepmother would come upstairs and she wanted to avoid that at all costs. Even if it meant going downstairs and facing the woman in person. Her stepmother Renee was much younger than her father had been when he'd married her, and Melissa had always been bothered by that. Her father married the woman when she was twelve, and because her father was all that she had and his happiness meant more to her than her own, she was willing to cooperate with her new stepmother. She promised herself that she would try to get along with Renee, if only for her father's sake; and for the three years that Melissa, her father, and Renee lived together, things were alright. She and Renee got along well enough, and her dad was happy.

That was until he went out to the store to pick up a carton of milk and was shot by a young man who, at the time her father came in, was attempting to rob the store, and panicked. For the next two years, Melissa lived with her stepmother, who, after her father's death, transformed in a malicious, vindictive woman who was bent on taking her grief out on Melissa. Melissa tried to respect that Renee must have loved her father, and even if she had never cared for the woman herself, her father had most certainly loved her back. She hadn't been the only one who lost something the night her father died, and different people reacted to grief differently. Some people got reckless and wild, some lost the will to live, and some people, like Renee, just needed someone to blame.

She left her room with little urgency in her pace, preparing herself mentally as she descended the stairs. Renee was waiting for her in the kitchen. "Yes, Renee?"

"Do you have any idea who I've just been on the phone speaking to?" Her stepmother held clutched in her left hand the cordless phone that usually hung on the wall by the fridge.

"I don't know, Renee." Melissa said, because honestly she didn't.

"Your principal." Renee said, and Melissa's stomach dropped into her feet. "He said you weren't in school today. I had to LIE, to your principal, just to keep your worthless ass out of trouble. I told him you weren't feeling well today and so help me, Missy, if you don't convince me within the next thirty seconds that you had a VERY good reason for skipping school, I'm going to give you a reason to not feel well." Melissa said nothing, but kept her eyes trained on her sneakers. "Where were you, Missy?"

"Please, don't call me that, Renee." Renee knew well that it bothered Melissa when she called her by that name, she did it because it was the one thing she could do that truly upset Melissa, apart from bringing up her father.

"I'm your mother, I'll call you whatever I like! Now, where were you?" Melissa thought about reminding Renee that she wasn't her mother, but that would lead to a whole other argument that she didn't want to get into at the moment.

"I was in the park." She couldn't stand being inside a cold, cement building all day, not when she could take a book and lie on the grass in the park all day instead. Letting a dead author spin fantastic tales of hedonism and a young man who traded his soul for immortal youth was far more fascinating than listening to her teachers talk about algebra or ancient wars.

"Who do you think you are? Do you think that everyone else has to go to school but you're somehow above that? Well, do you?"

"No."

"I'm sick of this, Missy. Sick of you hiding up in your room all day, sick of getting calls from school that you're not showing up to class, or not paying attention when you do condescend to show up for school. But mostly, I'm sick of you. You. Everything about you annoys me. The way you talk, the way you look, the way you're always off with your head in the clouds."

"If you hate me so much, why don't you kick me out?" Her cheek was stinging before she even knew that Renee had moved.

"Don't you dare talk to me that way. You're mine. Until you turn eighteen and walk out that door, I OWN you. You think I wanted you? No, but I married your father anyway. I loved that man, and you killed him." Melissa winced, and Renee smiled. "He wouldn't have gone to that store if you hadn't whined about the damn milk. He never could deny you anything, and look where it got him. He's dead, and I'm stuck with you. You'd be happier living on the street, wouldn't you?" Melissa stared at her shoes, biting her lip. Renee smacked her again. "Answer me!"

"Yes."

"Aha." Renee smiled. "That's why you're stuck with me. You worthless girl. What better punishment for taking away the man I love than keeping you here, with me, where I can remind you every day of what you've done."

"I didn't kill him." Melissa whispered, and Renee probably wouldn't have heard her if not for how quiet the house was.

"What did you say?"

Melissa looked up, and her eyes were hard. "I didn't kill my father."

"Just like you didn't kill your mother?" Melissa froze, her mouth falling open in shock. "You drove that woman insane and she tried to kill you. When she failed, she killed herself. You're an evil girl and everything you touch dies!"

"SHUT UP!" Melissa screamed. "You don't know anything about my mother! My mother loved me! My father loved me! My mother was sick. She may have been crazy, but she never would have tried to hurt me if she hadn't been. Not like you. You're twisted and evil and you tell me things that aren't true just to hurt me! I'm sorry that Dad died, but it's not my fault that he died! I'm sick to death of you telling me it was my fault! It wasn't my fault!"

"How dare you!" Renee brought the phone she was still holding down hard across Melissa's face. Stunned, the girl stumbled back into the kitchen table. Her hands fumbled across the surface of the table until they touched something smooth and cold. She wrapped her hands around the vase of flowers and brought it crashing down on her stepmother's wicked head. Renee crumpled to the ground, unconscious, but alive. Melissa ran out of the kitchen, knowing that she had precious little time until her stepmother came to and called the police.

Melissa had always thought about running away. She never thought she would actually go through with it but as she blew into her room, she knew the moment had come.

The breaking point.

She ripped her backpack off her bed, gripped the cool leather in her hands and shook her school supplies out onto the floor. She ripped open every drawer and grabbed the first things her hands touched, stuffing them into her bag. She did the same to the cabinet in the bathroom. One book she took from the shelf of many, her favorite, and added that to the bag as well. A map followed, along with all the money she'd saved, totaling six hundred and eighteen dollars. She took the bag and the stairs two at a time, barreling into the kitchen where her still unconscious stepmother kept her purse. She pocketed every bit of cash Renee had, two hundred dollars, and grabbed her jacket out of the hall closet, freezing as the smell of the worn brown leather wafted to her nose and took her back to when she'd first saved up enough money to buy the jacket.

She'd been so happy.

Outside the house, she stopped to look back at the home she'd shared with her father before Renee had come along. She reached up and touched the locket hanging around her throat, fingered the place where "Missy" had been engraved on the back, and opened it. Her parents' faces stared back at her, smiling and young. Their wedding day.

"I'm sorry." was all she said before she closed the locket, threw her backpack on and felt the rain hitting her face and hair.

"...fairies." She whispered, and she ran.

Thank you for reading.