Hunger gnaws at him that has nothing do with his stomach. Hunger, need, weakness, desire. It hollows him out, even as it speeds his pace. James almost feels he could run, despite the dark and his age and a leg that hasn’t fully been under his control for years.
Except here, it is. Here, he is the immortal pirate captain Hook. He is ruthless and angry, and even death can’t defeat him. And it hurts. All the living. Pan’s blade running him through a thousand times. Teeth gnashing and tearing him apart beneath the waves. Drowning. He feels it all, and he continues existing in the face of it, and only one thing can make it stop.
“Don’t look at me that way.” James speaks through gritted teeth to the skull cradled in his arms, empty sockets turned up toward him in judgment and sorrow. “You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t know. So just shut up.”
You’ve always been kind to me, James. Why can’t you be kind to the rest of the world? Why can’t you be kind to yourself?
He’s aware of Jane crashing through the brush behind him, her uncle in tow, but their presence barely registers. He doesn’t care if he loses them. Nor does he care if they overhear him talking to Samuel, or what they think of him if they do.
It isn’t like the countless times he’s spoken to Samuel’s memory before, resting his fingertips against the bone, or caressing the silver chased through the skull. The way he hears Samuel’s voice here feels real, not just a memory. Concern, admonishment, a voice with breath behind it telling him he’s too reliant on his drugs. For all the circumstances, the conversation feels almost natural.
“Who’s the one who introduced me to opium anyway?” he snaps, even knowing it’s unfair and unkind.
“Only to help you.” The reply, fading, like the wind carrying it away. “And it isn’t opium you’re chasing now, is it?”
There’s a quality to the words, like wind blowing through a reed. Samuel had given him opium to dull his pain. To dull his reliance on a flower not found in London, hoping eventually that James might cut back to laudanum, and from there cease using opiates all together, but he’d never gotten past that first step. One of the many ways he’d failed Samuel over the years. He’d always had an excuse – life simply weighed too heavily on him, his existence too abrasive.
The circumstances are different now though, and Samuel has no right to judge. He needs the flower to find the blade, what remains of it that isn’t buried in his thigh. He’s certain it must still exist, and that it must be the key to undoing what was done. In the heart of the storm, he couldn’t have severed all the ties fully, the tendrils of shadow binding him to Neverland. He left a door open, and now he needs to see the door not only closed, but destroyed entirely.
* * *
Promise me. Promise me, won’t you?
Samuel’s words trail him, pressed upon James with the fever-heat of skin, Samuel grasping his hand before he’d left the flat and gone out into the night.
Promise.
Had he? James can’t remember. Opium still winds through his blood, keeping the answer to the question at bay. He doesn’t want to break a promise to Samuel. But he can’t ignore the shine that had been in Samuel’s eyes either, his sunken cheeks. Samuel can’t work, he can barely get out of bed. What else is there? How else will they live? And he is determined that Samuel will live.
James turns, his step not quite aimless, only appearing so while carrying him steadily away from the density of lights, into the more shadowed and seedier streets where fewer eyes watch, where those that are watching watch only for their own skins with little care for others. He feels the reassuring weight in his pocket, the blade carried there.
The soft lap of water, the weedy scent of it. Even though the docks are a few streets over, James smells it, hears it—the sea calling to his blood. Without seeing it, he can picture the way the light breaks on the water, the oily shine of it as tiny waves kiss the pier. He turns again, following the sound of someone singing off-key, the sound warbling through the streets and calling to him.
The establishments here cater primarily to those who work the docks, going straight from their shifts—ripe with sweat and sometimes the scent of whatever cargo they’ve been hauling – straight to a worn stool and a pint, two, more. The grinding weariness of their lives, as much as the drink, makes them careless. Makes them easy prey. He’s practically doing these men a favor, like the man who comes into view now, the source of the off-key song. One hand is braced against the wall, the other ostensibly aiming as he pisses against the bricks.
James doesn’t bother letting the man finish. No dignity in life, no self-respect, and none in death either. For a moment, he doesn’t need the cane as he slides the blade in clean. The man grunts, a sound of surprise, then slumps forward into the filth and the damp. James lowers him almost gently and goes to work swiftly.
He empties the man’s pockets, taking the ring from his finger. A cheap band, thin. It won’t get him much, but it’s something. Could he have simply stolen from the man without taking his life? James pushes the thought away. Crouched at the back of his mind, Hook smiles. James whistles a snatch of the man’s tune, picking up the thread of his song and carrying it with him as he wends his way back home.
He opens the door on the terrible sound of Samuel coughing, a bloody, wrenching sound that immediately steals James’s own ability to breathe. The last dulling effects of the opium peel away to reveal a world too sharp and too bright. He left Samuel sleeping peacefully, looking better, he’d thought, than he had in days. His pulse thumps, panic replacing the last shreds of his drug-induced dream.
All the lights are out in the flat, leaving only the faintest glow of city light seeping in from outside. Samuel’s entire body shudders on the bed, wracked with pain. The edges of him flicker, and James’s heart drops straight through his chest to his soles.
“Samuel.” It’s scarcely a whisper, but Samuel’s eyes fly open.
“Captain.” Not James, as if all the time between now and Neverland never happened.
Samuel’s eyes are open, but not focused. James stops dead in the act of reaching for Samuel, breath rasping in his lungs. There’s blood on his hands. He can’t possibly touch Samuel in this condition. He stares at them, one flesh, one wood. They’re clean.
Or are they? He did just kill a man, did he not? Or did he hallucinate leaving the flat? Relive the memory of what might have been, or experience a premonition of something that might still occur? Time doesn’t always behave around him. He isn’t always certain of when he is, or where.
“It’s me,” James says, but the words come out rough, and he isn’t certain Samuel hears him. Nor is he entirely sure what he means by them. Is he himself, or more accurately, which self is he?
But Samuel’s expression softens into a smile, or at least an attempt at one. His body relaxes somewhat, but even that is an effort, and the shadow of pain doesn’t lift from him. James grasps his hand, the feel of blood tacky on his skin still clinging to him, even though it’s only in his mind. At least he hopes so.
“I’m here,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
He wants it to be true, but the edges of Samuel still flicker. James thinks of all his lost pirates. He didn’t witness their deaths, but Samuel did. He made it his mission to track down every last one of them. And those he didn’t find found him, like they were called to him, a beacon of compassion to witness them and see them for what they truly were in their last moments before they crumbled away.
Their ghosts crowd Samuel’s eyes. The weight of all that death, dragging him down. James tightens his grip until he imagines Samuel will cry out, but he never does.
“You can’t have him.” The words are almost a growl. James clenches his jaw. Speaking to Neverland. Speaking to Pan. Speaking to the past he swore to leave behind.
He’ll fight any force, any demon, to keep Samuel by his side. But there is nothing. Nothing but weight and time and a life stretched too thin.
“James.” A whisper so soft James can pretend he doesn’t hear it. His name, but there are other words hidden within the shape of it: Let me go.
Words laced with pain. His stubbornness isn’t James’s; it is compassion that’s kept him here, caring. It is James himself, and that is no longer enough.
The breath shatters in James’s lungs, broken edges digging in so he expects his next intake of breath to drown him in blood. This is the end he’s felt coming for them for too long. He isn’t ready. He’ll never be ready. Samuel needs to hold on.
“I—” And even now, the words lodge in his throat.
He cannot let them go, cannot crack the last shell of the fierce and bloody pirate captain who would never be so weak as to admit to his heart aloud. An anchor, but not a chain. A guiding line for Samuel to follow back to his side.
“I—” Silence, as loud as any shipwrecking storm, howling through the room.
James’s fingers close. Within the terrible strength of his grip, James finds himself holding only ash, only sand. Samuel’s hand is there in his, and then it isn’t, the rest of him following even as James throws himself onto the bed, gathers Samuel’s crumbling form into his arms, and clings to him as hard as he can.
“Don’t. Don’t go.” He says the words over and over again, until they mean nothing.
Samuel’s eyes are twin candle flames in the dark, then they are nothing at all. James holds only a skull, and that fact that it remains feels like both a gift and a painful mockery. Why should this linger when everything else is gone?
Rage breaks in him like a wave, rising up from the ocean of loss that is the greater part of him now. He wants to hurl the skull against the wall, smash it to pieces, curse the skies and death itself and above all, Pan, for even now taking everything from him.
But he does none of those things. James brings the skull to his lips, which tastes of salt now, and, weeping, rests one last kiss on his lover’s brow.
NEVERLAND – NOW
The scent hits James before the flowers come into view, and he rushes forward, panting, open-mouthed as if to drink the air. There’s a thickness to it, like syrup, already blunting the edge of his pain, and at the same time, making his hunger even worse. Even in the dull light, the petals glow, like embers, like the blossoms are aflame. He imagines he could almost breathe in the smoke of them without doing anything at all.
“What are you doing?” Jane’s voice is sharp and she catches his arm, yanking him backward. “Don’t you know what those are?”
Her eyes are wide in the dark, a hint of fear, but stubborn anger as well.
“Of course I do.” James pulls his arm away roughly. “Do you?”
“If you know, then why would you…” Jane lets the question trail, disgust clouding her expression. For a moment, it looks like she will abandon him to his vice, but then she catches his arm again and tightens her grip. “They’re what Peter used to make the tea he gave me when I first arrived in Neverland. They make you forget yourself.”
Revulsion is clear in Jane’s features, and for a brief moment, James feels that revulsion himself. The fierce pirate captain a coward, running from himself, hiding inside the numbing effects of the bloom.
“Forgetting myself is precisely what I need.” He steps past her, shaking her off and seizing one of the blooms, snapping it from its stem.
His pipe—he left it in his bag on the beach. He’ll have to make do. Thick sap oozes from the broken end of the flower and he touches it to his tongue, then sucks at it greedily. The effect is immediate, lightning to his spine, an old friend, coming home. Jane makes a sound of frustration beside him, but James can’t help but smile. A slow, syrupy thing in its own right.
“Are you sure?” He holds out the blossom to her, hearing the slur in his words. She smacks it from his hand. He barely feels the blow.
“Disgusting,” she says. And then she says, “What would he think of you?”
James stares at her. The words come from Jane, but they’re not hers. Her voice, but not, because how could she know?
She’s barely looking at him, glancing around as if she expects a fresh attack any moment. James can’t stop staring at her. A second mouth has opened across her cheek, just above the line of her jaw. It speaks in a hissing whisper, even as her lips remain closed.
“What would he think of you? No better than an animal. All hunger. Like a pig rutting in filth. You would break his heart.”
James’s own heart thuds against his ribs, painful, running too fast. His first instinct is to take more of the sap, to chase the vision away. But he isn’t holding the flower anymore. He looks down, noticing the other blooms now, scattered and trampled as if underfoot. Not merely shaken by the wind. Harvested, he thinks. Tasted. By whom? The boys who attacked them at the camp?
And why should it surprise him that Pan would drug the boys in his thrall, as Jane claimed he drugged her, keeping them loyal to him? In Pan’s absence, why wouldn’t they turn to the drug again to dull the horror of their existence? Feral things, trapped here, abandoned by their leader. He’d seen the skull at the camp. How long had it been before the boys turned on each other, slaughtered one of their own?
The thought brings him a kind of grim satisfaction. After the number of times he tried and failed to even wound them, here they are, doing the work for him. At the same time, some deep-buried sense of pity swells in him. They are in-between things, trapped as he was in a life they never asked for, not boys in truth any longer, but not men either.
He plucks another flower, devours more of the sap. He extends the blossom to the bound man this time, ignoring Jane. Michael. Yes. He remembers a child bound with rope a very long time ago. He tied the rope himself. Lashed the child to the mast, and waited for Pan to come. James chuckles to himself.
“Don’t you dare!” Jane’s tone is furious, stepping between James and her uncle.
“But he’s in pain,” James says. “Anyone can see that.”
Michael Darling is hurting. His ghosts—not ones from Neverland, his own, the ones he carried here with him—are clear in his eyes. Men dying. James sees them, reflected in Michael’s eyes. The scars of a war.
“Can’t you?” James points, clumsily.
His heart goes out to the boy. He was never a soldier, but he understands endless battle, endless death. He understands what it is to be the only one left, the one who survives.
Jane turns to look at her uncle, her expression pained, caught between the two of them. There’s a kind of aura about her, a shimmering gold, and he has the urge to run his hands through it. It’s hurt. It’s armor. She’s like Samuel in so many ways, caring so much about everyone around her that it vibrates from her on a frequency he couldn’t see until now. Should he warn her of all the ways the world will try to break her, wear her thin if she lets it until she crumbles to ash?
“Jane?” It’s Michael Darling’s voice, and James turns his head.
Michael, once again surfacing from the shadows. This might be the truest James has seen him—Michael Darling himself, and not anything else.
“Promise me you won’t go to war.” Michael moves swiftly, surprising James, catching Jane off guard.
“What are you—?” Jane tries to step back, but Michael grabs his niece by the upper arm. His expression is that of a man who fears being pulled under by a vast tide, speaking quickly while he can.
“Promise!” He shakes Jane, and tears start in the girl’s eyes. “I see you there in the tents, in the blood and the screaming, and I can’t…” His voice breaks, his hands fist around the lapels of her coat, dragging Jane closer until it looks as though he’ll swallow her whole.
His eyes are bright too—bright with ghosts and tears.
“I—” Jane catches a breath, but there are no words.
James watches them from a distance, removed by the flower, fascinated. These children of Neverland. These broken things.
“James?” The voice breaks through everything, his name, clear and heartbreaking.
Samuel stands at the edge of the trees, almost swallowed between them. He’s dressed not as James last saw him, but as he was in Neverland—the surgeon’s clothing he wore on the ship. He looks young and lost. Smoke and silver, like an opium dream given flesh.
James takes a step, reaching, and now his leg does fail him, folding and crashing him to the ground. Samuel’s skull flies from his grasp and rolls across the forest floor to rest at the ghost’s feet. James wheezes for breath. He tries to claw his way toward the skull, toward Samuel. He’s vaguely aware of a crashing noise behind him, like someone plunging through the brush, and he ignores it. It isn’t important now. What’s important is—
“Samuel.” The name rasps as James struggles for another breath.
His fingertips reach, but the skull is so far away, the toes of Samuel’s boots are so far away.
Samuel isn’t looking at him, but at his own skull. There’s a dispassionate curiosity to his gaze, and it surprises James how much the expression hurts him. He wants to tell Samuel to look away. What will it do to him, seeing his own death? Does he know James is at fault?
“Don’t,” he wheezes, but Samuel ignores him. He bends at the waist, but instead of picking up the skull, his fingers pass right through it.
“What did you do to me?” Samuel’s head snaps up, his gaze fixing James, fixing Hook, burning silver rage.
“I didn’t… I’m sorry.” James pushes himself up, crawling toward Samuel.
His fingers brush Samuel’s knee, reach for the hem of his coat. His touch passes straight through the ghost of his lover, leaving him grasping at nothing.
“Please,” he gasps. There’s salt on his lips. There’s something he needs to say, before it’s too late. A spell to hold Samuel with him, an anchor to keep him from drifting away again.
“I—” But before he can get any further, Samuel throws his head back and howls, a chilling, inhuman sound.
The silver mist of him dissipates and James is left alone in the clearing among the sick-sweet scent of bruised petals. He collapses, misery dragging him down. Samuel is gone. And dully, he is aware that Jane is also gone. Even Michael is gone, along with the ghosts filling him. James is as alone as he’s ever been—his only companion, Samuel’s skull.