The snow that began to fall in earnest at midday hasn’t let up. James watches it through the window, thick flakes driven sideways by the wind until almost everything beyond the glass is erased in a flurry of white. It’s a proper storm, unlike anything James can remember seeing in London before, and part of him can’t help thinking that it isn’t entirely of this world.
He takes another sip from his glass. Wind catches the edge of the house as it whips around it, howling, and for a moment, the flakes rearrange themselves. He sees teeth. A snout. A mouth open to shriek its displeasure with the voice of the wind.
He’d brought his pipe with him, of course, and found a quiet moment to draw in a few lungfuls of smoke from his dwindling supply, guilt dogging him as he did, but he’s certain this is no illusion. A premonition, then? The beast is still out there, still hunting them, hunting him, and with all three of them who have been touched by Neverland together now, surely it can’t miss. And perhaps that is better. No more hiding, cowering, hoping the creature will miss its mark and his luck will hold. He will face it as befits a captain encountering his foe of old.
“We’re, uh.” A hand touches his shoulder, and James starts. “We’re just about to sit down to supper, if you’re ready.”
Ned, Wendy’s husband. He withdraws his hand quickly, rocking back a step. He looks uneasy, and James makes an effort to smooth his features, to look unthreatening. Sometimes, whether he wants to be or not, he is still the pirate captain, Hook rising to the surface to bury James. The way Ned looks at him, wary, makes James think the man must have tried to get his attention several times before now, only touching his arm as a last resort.
“Apologies, I was lost in thought.” He is a stranger here, an intruder in their home, but he does not want this man to be afraid of him. He does not want any of them to be afraid of him. “And thank you. I’ll be in in a moment.”
James leans heavily on his cane, making a show of it, moving slowly. In truth, he needs a moment to collect himself, to make certain the veneer is in place. He’s been slipping more and more recently, the opium helping and harming in equal measure as memories pull at him and try to unanchor him from time. He cannot afford to get lost, not here, not now.
A sharp nod from Wendy’s husband and he withdraws, his movements still skittish and uncertain. James glances back one last time to the window, searching for teeth, searching for jaws in the storm. There’s nothing, but the feeling of waiting, of a confrontation ticking ever-closer through the storm.
* * *
James braces his arm in his lap, trying again to tighten the straps of the wooden hand Samuel carved for him. He no longer shakes thanks to the opium and laudanum Samuel secured for him, but neither saves him for being purely clumsy. Even though they don’t carry the strength of Neverland’s flowers, at least the drugs take the edge from his yearning, keep the fever and cramping at bay. They quiet the nightmares, and give him some measure of peace.
As he tries to line up the strap with the buckle, the hand slips again and he nearly growls in frustration. He’s sick at himself, his helplessness. He needs to be able to do this on his own without Samuel helping him.
Samuel has assured him over and over again that he’ll grow accustomed with practice, but at the moment, James feels useless. He’s grateful, and the hand is beautiful, expertly carved, decorated with whorls of silver, and yet in some way he can’t explain, it unsettles him.
It isn’t the mechanics of the hand itself, it’s what it might mean. It is the memory of Samuel’s face as he returned late from his work and presented James with a wooden box. When he’d opened it, James had seen at once that the hand wasn’t merely functional, but a work of art. There’s a warmth to the wood, not merely blond or red, but a bit of both, the natural grain of it somehow suggesting grace and motion.
He hadn’t asked where Samuel obtained the wood, or the silver, but some part of him couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow it had been carried over from Neverland. Something about the hand spoke of magic, and when he touched it, the wood had been warm, as if it held on to the light of another sun.
Had he carried the wood with him for this sole purpose? Or had he planned to make the hand for James even before, in Neverland?
There had been such hope in Samuel’s eyes as he offered up the box, a light that caught James utterly off guard. Waiting for James’s judgment, fearing disappointment. James had felt anything but. But when he’d looked up from the open box in his lap, utterly at a loss for words in the face of the surgeon’s kindness, James had been stunned all over again to see sorrow.
Samuel had softened his voice and delivered news James had expected, but still hadn’t prepared himself for fully. Samuel had found Anna, buried in a small churchyard, over fifty years ago. He’d been even more right than he’d known when it had occurred to him that the London he’d returned to wasn’t the London he’d once called home. Years had passed, decades, the century had turned. While he’d been gone, Anna had grown, married, had children and grandchildren, and died after living a full life without him.
Holding the box with the hand in his lap, he’d tried to picture her grave. Would the stone be worn, or well cared for? She would have been buried next to her husband, he assumed, under a different name. Did her children and grandchildren visit? Did they lay flowers? Samuel had offered to take him there, but James had shaken his head.
“I’m a different person now,” he’d told the surgeon. “Her brother never really came home.”
Samuel hadn’t seemed surprised, and James had wondered then if the hand was meant almost as a distraction, to soften the blow.
“I can help you try it on, if you’d like.” Samuel had indicated, offering a saddened smile.
Words born of pride, making him want to snap a refusal, curled and died on James’s tongue. He’d allowed Samuel to help, watching the surgeon’s face rather than his hands as he secured the straps to hold the hand in place, utterly unable to look away. Samuel’s touch was light and sure. And he’d found himself blushing when Samuel looked up, hating himself for it.
“How does it feel?” Samuel had asked.
James had barely registered the hand at all, stupidly spell-caught and feeling foolish for being unable to turn his attention away from the man kneeling before him with hope in his eyes. But the answer he’d given had been honest either way.
“Perfect.”
The door bangs open. Startled, James nearly drops the hand, catching it just before it hits the floor. Samuel stands in the doorway, rain-drenched, pale and shaken.
“What is it?” James rises too quickly, and his leg reprimands him with a sharp pain that makes him catch his breath.
Normally, Samuel would key to the pain immediately. That he doesn’t tells James, as much as his haunted expression, that something is truly wrong.
As quickly as his leg allows, he moves past Samuel to close the door. One-handed, and using the stump of his other wrist for support, he takes Samuel’s coat from him, and hangs it near the door. Water pools at Samuel’s feet. His hair hangs into his eyes, soaked as well, though he scarcely seems to notice. James retrieves a towel, hands it to him silently, then sets about, as best he can, making tea.
“On the way home, past the docks…” Samuel’s voice shakes, the words trail.
James turns. Samuel’s eyes are glassy, not seeing their flat, but something else entirely. His expression is hunted, as though something terrible might have followed him home. With one hand, James pours hot water from the kettle. He carries cups and the pot one at a time to the table in the center of the room, then gently guides Samuel to a chair.
In the months since they’ve been here, Samuel’s work has brought them enough to move from the small, rented room they occupied when they first arrived to the entire third floor of a building looking out over the city through a window shaped like an eye. There’s a small stove where they can prepare meals, and a bathroom one floor down that would be shared with other tenants if the floors beneath them were not currently empty. A building no one else wants in a neighborhood where others would prefer not to live.
There is only one bed, which James gave over to Samuel, ignoring every one of his protests. The place is Samuel’s rightly, paid for with his coin. When James sleeps, which is rare enough anyway, it is on the chaise near the window.
His existence is by Samuel’s grace alone, and as much as he wishes he could repay him, at the moment, James feels useless.
Samuel rubs his arms against a chill, as if finally noticing he’s soaking wet. James puts a teacup in his hand and takes the chair opposite him.
“The docks,” he repeats, prompting.
There is only one reason why Samuel would be at the docks, because there’s no logical route that would carry him past the water on his way home. Somewhere in the pocket of his sodden coat, still dripping on the floor, is a waxen envelope filled with opium. Guilt needles James. Whatever happened to Samuel that has him so shaken, it is only because he was there on James’s account.
There are no obvious signs of bruising or violence. His pulse rises and falls again—fear and relief two sides of a single heartbeat.
“I saw…” Samuel hesitates, his eyes are once again those of a man looking to his captain for guidance, leadership, assurance that the storm will not sink them.
“Maitland,” Samuel says finally, and James can only stare at him.
The name means nothing, and then it does, and memory rushes back to him, like a wave, rocking the deck beneath his feet. Maitland. The boatswain. How could he have forgotten? The blade in his hand and the storm raging, the deck slick, cutting and cutting at shadows.
“Are you certain? Did you speak to him?”
“I…” Samuel’s hand jitters, tea spilling over the edge of the cup.
It shakes badly enough that James leans forward, taking it and setting it aside.
“At first it was as though he couldn’t see me. He was unloading crates. I stood right in his path and still he looked right through me.”
Without the cup in his hand, Samuel is steadier, but he still looks as though he might leap up and bolt, a rabbit wary of a hawk about to stoop.
“I thought he would walk right into me. It wasn’t the crate he was carrying either. He could see over it. But…” Samuel shakes his head. “There was a…thinness to him, like when people tell stories about ghosts.”
James stands, goes to the shelf beneath the window and returns with a bottle. He pours a measure of brandy into Samuel’s cup. Samuel grimaces as he swallows. But he looks grateful when he sets the cup down, and something in James warms.
“I said his name, and it’s only when I spoke that Maitland saw me. He startled, like he was afraid. And…” Samuel rubs a hand over his face, as if to rub away the memory.
“He dropped the crate. It broke open and oranges went rolling everywhere.” A hysterical edge rises in Samuel’s voice, and James tightens his grip on the bottle in his hand.
“He collapsed. The other men went right on working, like once Maitland saw me, we were invisible to everyone else.” James thinks of his ship, the storm, the blurred sensation of seeing his men and not at the same time. Ghosts, split between this world and Neverland. Samuel continues. “I tried to lift him. He tried to speak, but I couldn’t understand him. Then he…he fell apart in my hands.”
“Fell apart?” James knows his tone should be kinder, gentler, but he can’t make sense of Samuel’s words.
“Like wet newspaper, coming apart in the rain. He…dissolved. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.”
Samuel picks up his cup, drains it, and unasked, James refills it with brandy alone this time.
“He was a solid, flesh and blood man one moment, and then he wasn’t anything at all. Like he was rooted in this world until I saw him, and then he remembered he’d once been something else. I think… I think he remembered Neverland, and it killed him.”
The cup rattles in Samuel’s hand. James takes it again and sets it aside. The motion puts him closer to Samuel than he intended to be.
“What if the same thing happens to us?” Samuel asks, dark pupils at the center of his eyes wide and drinking the light.
“It won’t.” James says it with as much confidence as he can, but his voice betrays him by catching.
He wants the words to be true, and more than that he wants Samuel to believe them. He wants to keep Samuel safe, and even more than that, James wants him to feel that safety. Because he’s no longer certain what he would do without him.
It isn’t just Samuel’s coin, paying for the roof over their heads. If it came to it, James would find a way to survive. He is stubborn, above all else. But from the moment they fell through the world and into London, neither of them had even once considered going separate ways. They hadn’t even asked the question.
Guilt flickers through him. It strikes him—he’d forgotten about his other pirates. Until Samuel mentioned Maitland, he hadn’t once considered their fate once he’d opened the door in the sky and severed the shadows tying them to Neverland. At least, he thought he’d severed the ties, but he hadn’t been sure—not then, just as he isn’t sure now. He should have looked for them, they’re his crew and he should be responsible for them. But once he knew Samuel had crossed with him safely, nothing else really seemed to matter.
“Why aren’t you more bothered by this?” It isn’t quite an accusation, but it’s edging on one, as if Samuel knows exactly what he’s thinking.
James flinches, trying to hide the motion with another sip from his cup. Samuel is afraid; James understands. Anger is always easier than fear, always safer. If Samuel needs to lash out to protect himself, James won’t fault him, but he won’t apologize either.
“We’re safe. That’s all that matters.” He doesn’t mean it to sound flippant, cruel, but it does.
He sees it the moment Samuel’s eyes shift—moss green shading to slate gray, like clouds coming down over the sun. Samuel’s hand closes into a fist against the table to stop it from shaking.
“You don’t know that. Just like you didn’t know what would happen when you came here. You blundered ahead and you didn’t ask and…” Samuel’s voice trembles too.
He looks stricken, not just by his own fear, but by his daring in talking back to his captain, in challenging his rule, even though that’s not what they are to each other anymore.
“Samuel—” James reaches, unsure exactly what he means to do, perhaps lay a comforting hand on the other man’s arm, but Samuel jerks back, sending his teacup spinning to shatter on the floor.
“No. I can’t.” Samuel stands rapidly, chair legs scraping the floor. He leaves it unsaid what he can’t do, burying his fingers in his hair and tugging as if he could pull free the sight of Maitland crumbling before him.
James tries to logic it out. Samuel is a scientist after all—if he can appeal to his rational mind he might soothe his worries. James has never once felt on the verge of crumbling. He is real and solid, yet he hasn’t forgotten Neverland, comfortably astride two worlds, and if he ever feels too much the tug of one or the other, he has Samuel to remind him that it’s within his power to choose who he wants to be.
Perhaps it’s that. He and Samuel have each other. The rest of the crew, he presumes, were scattered, left to their own devices. It was easier for them to become lost, or there was already less of them to begin with. He never asked—he never thought to, never cared to—whether any of them remembered a life beyond his ship and the sea. Maybe whatever of them remained when he cut them free from Neverland was too fragile to be sustained for long.
None of this is comforting though. Samuel lowers his hand, half turned away. The hunch of his shoulders speaks misery even more than his voice, which is soft, still looking away from James while he speaks.
“Sometimes I feel…hollow, like part of me is missing. Don’t you ever feel it? Like there’s something I’m forgetting, a name on the tip of my tongue, or…” He lets the words trail.
James stands, using the chair for support. His hand lingers in the space between them with no firm decision as to where it will land. Why is this so hard? Compassion. Caring. He’s no stranger to pain, but he’s always been the one feeling it or causing it. This—healing—is Samuel’s territory, and he’s utterly lost.
“It’s like part of me still exists there. Whatever…Peter did to us changed us, and I can’t help feeling that one day it will call me back as though we never left at all.”
“You’re not like Maitland. You’re not like the others.”
“Why?” Samuel faces him now, the motion all at once pleading and accusing. He needs something from James, a tug James feels like a thread tied deep within his core. “Why am I different? What keeps me safe?”
Me. The word is there like a thunderclap, but he doesn’t say it aloud even as it changes the air pressure in James’s chest, flipping the world upside down. Defeated, Samuel drops back into his chair, shoulders slumped. But he’s still looking at James, asking for assurance that nothing bad will ever happen to him.
An ache stretches all the way through him, a hollow, but not like the one Samuel described. It’s a specific hunger, and if he let himself, it would be easy enough to fill. Because he knows exactly what it is that’s missing, what he wants. And it isn’t some undefinable piece of him left behind in Neverland. It’s right here.
He forgot Maitland. He forgot the other pirates. Because nothing besides Samuel had been worth remembering.
James moves a step closer so his shadow falls over Samuel. Close enough that his leg almost touches Samuel’s where they splay almost boneless. For one terrible moment, James sees it—a thinness—and he imagines Samuel vanishing the way he described Maitland crumbling. He will not let that happen.
His breath tangles in his throat, heart beating a rhythm that’s almost painful. Everything hangs on the cusp, waiting to tip over into the moment that has been there ever since they crossed, hunting him, haunting him, as sure as Pan’s stalking beast, but a thousand times kinder and more terrible.
He places the stump of his wrist alongside Samuel’s cheek, against his scar. Samuel doesn’t pull away. His face is already tipped up toward James with naked wanting, asking for comfort. James’s touch nudges Samuel’s chin up further. James holds him there a moment, holds his breath a moment, to see if Samuel will startle back like a spooked horse.
His eyes are only green now, the clouds receded. James hears the faint catch in Samuel’s breath—the shift from one kind of need to another.
There’s barely any space to close now when James finally leans down to put his lips against Samuel’s. He tastes brandy and tea, heat and fear and hunger. He threads the fingers of his hand through Samuel’s hair, still rain damp. He pulls Samuel to stand with him. For once, his leg doesn’t ache, and he’s able to move almost with ease.
The floor sways beneath them, the deck of a ship. Crashing them into each other and tipping them back toward the bed. Samuel’s bed. Only it isn’t. Because it has always been their bed, and like everything else, it isn’t even a question between them.
James works at the top button of Samuel’s shirt one-handed, frustrated when it won’t yield. In his impatience, he tears it. The button makes a soft sound hitting the floor and rolling away, and a small wave of shame takes him—that he should be so undone by this man who never belonged among his pirates—too kind, too good.
“Let me.” The gentle curve of Samuel’s smile, the look in his eyes, takes the shame away immediately. It is what James has wanted since they first arrived here, for things to be equal between them. And now they finally are.
Samuel undresses them both. It is a slower, more methodical thing than James would ever have accomplished. For the first time since arriving in London, he wishes for his hook; he is used to navigating the world with it, and with it he wouldn’t feel so helpless. He could simply slash the buttons from both of their clothing in a single motion.
But there is virtue in Samuel’s method as well. The delay, the anticipation. James shivers. Samuel’s smile deepens. Not a surgeon and his captain anymore. No part of James is in command of even himself now, let alone anyone else. His legs tremble, weak, and he decides to simply abandon himself to it. It is only a matter of a single, light push to the center of his chest—that and Samuel’s eyes, green and steady on his own—toppling him backward onto the bed. Their bed.
A ship, tossed at sea, and this, a haven in the midst of the storm. An anchor for each other, giving weight to the promise he tried to make moments ago. James will hold on as hard as he can. He will not let Samuel go. They will keep each other safe from disappearing. This, here, the hunger sweeping through him—greater and sweeter than his hunger for any drug—is real. James lets that hunger consume him. He lets himself consume, so that every space in him is filled, and there is no room for any world but this one.
Neverland cannot touch them. Not ever again.
LONDON – 1939
Snow taps against the glass, thick and fast. James feels it at his back, the storm growing worse. Even though he’s a stranger in her home, Wendy has given him the place at the head of the table, perhaps so she can keep an eye on him. Wendy and Ned sit opposite each other next to him, Michael beside his sister, Jane beside her father.
The table fairly groans with food, candles lit in the spaces between the plates and cups for wine. The strains of music swirl, just on the edge of his hearing. Not Christmas music, as would suit the occasion, but an old drinking song, something his men would sing. He’s certain no one can hear it but him. There are flickers, shadows, moving around the edge of the table like ghosts. He tries not to look for Samuel among them. When the wind circles the house, even though the exterior is brick, James hears the creak of boards on a ship.
He is here and he is not here and something terrible is coming.
He lifts his glass. It doesn’t feel right to offer a toast, but at least he might thank his hosts. He opens his mouth and just then the wind comes like a battering ram, striking the window behind him. The glass shatters. Darkness screams through the room, extinguishing the candles. James throws himself forward, old memories of cannonballs splintering wood making him instinctively seek cover. Chairs crash over, but Jane is the first to rise.
“It’s here.” The wind snatches her words, tearing them away.
James raises his head. Another gust eddies snow into the room, which unerringly finds the back of his neck. But the ice tripping the length of his spine is nothing to do with the weather. The beast is there. Do the others see it? Open jaws, and a long, scaled tail.
“He’s the one you want. He’s here.” Jane makes a grab at his shoulder, as if to push him into the beast’s path.
The creature turns, lashing, snapping. At last, James thinks. And he sees what took the beast so long. Its eyes are moonlight and smoke, blinded by cataracts. Not Pan’s creature anymore, but some broken fragment of it. But who holds the leash?
He pushes Jane away, and his hand goes to his hip as he tries to get his feet under him, but of course his sword is longer there. His cane leans against the wall and he stretches, managing to snag the tip of it and pull it close enough that he can lever himself up. And just as soon as he does, pain doubles him over, like a hot poker driven into his thigh, the shards of an ancient knife, shattered and buried there at once burning and freezing.
As he bends with the pain, the beast sails over his head. Jane shouts a warning, but too late. Michael, the last still seated at the table, is right in the beast’s path. Jane lurches toward her uncle, but misses. James looks up in time to see the shadow-beast strike Michael Darling full force in the center of the chest. Rather than emptying him though, it sinks into him. The chair topples over backward, Michael with it, both crashing to the ground.
Wendy yells, scrabbling over broken plates to reach her brother. A steady wave of pain throbs up James’s leg.
“Michael. Can you hear me?” Wendy shakes her brother.
As she bends over him, James sees not the man, but a boy with a mop of blond hair and wide blue eyes clutching his sister’s hand, another boy with moonstruck owl eyes behind over-large glasses on her other side, all three crowded together against the mast of his ship.
“It’s in him.” Jane’s voice shakes, anger just as much as fear. “It didn’t kill him. Is it because he’s been to Neverland too, even if he doesn’t remember?”
She asks the question out loud to no one in particular. Is that what the beast meant to do to him, James wonders, burrow inside him? Did it mistake Michael Darling for him?
“Perhaps we should—” Ned begins, but whatever he is about to suggest is cut off by Jane whirling away from her uncle and toward James, her teeth practically bared and a wildness in her eyes.
“It should have been you.”
He steps back, startled by her fierceness.
“You brought that thing here. You…” She lets the words trail, and for a moment, James thinks she might strike him.
“Jane.” Wendy reaches for her daughter’s arm, a gentling motion. “What—”
Jane spins toward her mother now, her eyes bright, her anger leaving her shaking.
“It should have been him. It came hunting him, but it found Uncle Michael instead, after it killed Peg, after…” Jane takes a shuddering breath. “It found the hollow and hurting place inside Uncle Michael, and now it’s a part of him.”
Wendy raises a hand to cover her mouth. Above her splayed fingers, her eyes are terribly bright—guilt and loss. For a moment, James can almost see the thoughts flickering behind her eyes—the creature took her brother, but it never once turned to her.
Michael stands, an unnatural, jerky motion. It’s like his body is made of wood, someone else pulling the strings. In the next moment, as Michael moves, James thinks no, more like a suit moved by the body inside of it. Michael’s cane lies on the ground, knocked over when his chair fell. He takes a step without it, the brace evident beneath his clothing perhaps the only thing keeping him from falling, the pain utterly ignored, because it is nothing to the thing inside of him.
“Michael?” Wendy reaches for her brother, who looks straight past her, straight at James.
At Hook.
There, like an arrow, shot straight to the heart of him. Recognition, and the old name falling back upon him. His pulse thuds. Michael’s lips open, and it’s a moment before sound emerges, and when it does, it’s as broken and unsteady as his motion.
“Captain.”
The voice coming from Michael Darling’s lips is not Michael Darling’s at all. It is an amalgam of voices. Harrigan. Killdeer. His lost pirates.
“We waited.” The voices fracture, stutter, rise and fall, laced with an animal growl.
Michael’s eyes, glassy in their focus, are muddy brown, and James is almost certain that Michael Darling’s eyes, until a moment ago, were blue. Because they aren’t Michael Darling’s eyes, he thinks. They are Killdeer’s, and Harrigan’s. Maybe Maitland and Bartholomew as well. All the pirates he freed, or tried to free.
“We waited, Captain. For you. Hook. And you didn’t come. You forgot about us, but we didn’t forget. You. We remembered. The beast remembered.”
James stares at Wendy’s brother, at the thing—the things—inside him. Pan’s beast, his pirates, some terrible amalgamation of all of them at once. Fragments of his pirates left behind in Neverland, the trapped shades of them making some terrible deal with Pan’s hunting beast to find him. How, he wonders, has it been for them? How long have they suffered, blaming him for their demise? Brown eyes glare at Hook. Brown, tinted with a sick yellow-gold. The creature, the creatures, wearing Michael Darling like a second skin fix Hook in their gaze, and the look they turn on him is one of pure and utter hatred.
“We waited.” A smile, nothing human, with too many teeth, stretches Michael Darling’s lips. James grips the head of his cane. “Until you got careless. Hook. Until you opened. The door. And let us in.”