The man, the boy, Michael Darling, climbs the deck toward him. At least they are evenly matched now. One of Michael’s arms hangs useless at his side, numb where the girl smashed his shoulder with the sword James now holds. His sword. Hook’s sword. The sword of a captain.
He’d never thought to see it again. But then, he’d never thought to return here either. The air shudders and howls around him, the shades of his lost pirates hungering to tear him apart. Michael continues to climb the deck, sick-gold eyes fixed on James. When he smiles, he shows teeth with blood on them.
Even though he doesn’t have his cane, even though the deck tilts wildly beneath them, Michael Darling seems to have no problem walking. The pirates inside of him, Harrigan, Killdeer, infuse him completely, insensate to his pain. James takes a step back, another. Not running, but buying himself time.
Survive. It’s what he does, against all odds. The immortal pirate captain, unable to die. Turning to violence to save his skin over and over, almost despite himself. Stubborn, and perhaps more than that. Cursed. Breaking his promise to Samuel every time, unable to shed Hook’s skin, unable to let go, but fighting on and on, no matter the cost, always hungering for more life no matter how much blood he had to spill.
Now, perhaps, at the end of everything, he can finally put his cursed existence to good use. Become Hook one last time, and then let him go.
Still backing up, Michael still advancing, James scrambles at the straps holding his wooden hand in place. It drops, thudding to the deck, and his heart goes with it. Not just losing a piece of himself, losing the best part of him, the person he tried to become. His gaze sweeps the howling maelstrom, the mass of shadow pirates swirling closer, snapping teeth and grasping with fingers twisted into claws. But they’re still insubstantial for now. They cannot hurt him. Only Michael Darling can.
James dodges around the shattered remains of the mast as the ship rocks and he nearly loses his balance. He’s running out of time. He searches and finds the faint glow that is Samuel. His light is a candle’s, guttering in the wind. The shadows whipping around him seem to tear pieces of him away with each pass, wearing him down. But Samuel doesn’t move, he remains fixed where he is, and though his eyes are silver now like his skin, James sees the warmth in them where they meet his own.
“I’m sorry.” James’s voice breaks, the words catching in his throat and tearing it bloody, leaving everything else to emerge in a whisper, pained and raw. He doesn’t even know if Samuel will hear him; he can only trust that somehow, even if he can’t, he will still understand.
“I never said the words, and I always should have. But even though I didn’t, they were still true.”
Samuel’s mouth opens as if he would answer, but James can’t bear to hear. His eyes sting and blur. He turns away, jamming the leather cap of the hook over the stump of his wrist.
He bellows—a raw, wordless sound.
It’s like fire running through his veins, waking up his arm again in the worst possible way. The hook fits itself to him like it always did, claiming him, swallowing him whole. He tilts his face to the sky, teeth bared. A shadow jitters there, like a boy, but not a boy at all. A monster who made him a monster in turn, one who was never human.
“You won’t best me,” he says, the words for himself more than the boy who once was. “Not this time, Pan.”
On the last, he looks down, slashing out and sending Michael Darling tumbling back, catching him off guard. Hook leaps over the fallen mast, sword point at Michael’s throat. He could kill him, it would be easy, and for a moment the impulse to lean his weight on the blade and end it now rises in him. But he made a promise, and he’s done breaking his promises. At the last, he will finally keep one, and he will make it count.
Even so, he lets the blade’s tip kiss the side of Michael Darling’s throat, drawing a tiny bead of red. It shines under the red of the sky, and James’s pulse thumps in response, something like hunger. Michael growls at him, only it is Harrigan and Killdeer. It is Pan’s hunting beast, hate shining through the eyes of the body all of the lost fragments have occupied.
Michael’s good arm, the one his niece didn’t smash, jerks to the side, a feint as if he would roll away from the blade. But Hook is faster, even if James is not. He brings the curved sword down a hairsbreadth from Michael’s face, stopping his motion. The shadow of fear passes through the sick-gold of Michael’s eyes, and his throat bobs as he swallows hard.
James lifts his arm, Hook’s arm. The point of his newly regained hook glints in the light, and the fear deepens in Michael’s eyes. Even Harrigan and Killdeer cowered in terror of him once.
While he has the pirates cowed, Hook draws the black blade from his pocket, trading his sword for it. Michael Darling is completely disarmed now, and the pirates inside of him are frightened. Perhaps not frightened enough, not yet, and perhaps some of the fear may belong to Michael himself, but Hook can use that.
The deck sways, and he widens his stance, riding with it. The storm whipping around them is the same that battered them years ago, when he first wielded the blade. Time collapsed around them, as it always does in Neverland. And now, he must play the villain one last time.
Hook crouches, grinning, his face close to Michael’s, the black blade held just above his chest. And underneath his skin, James’s heart beats hard, and his pulse constricts against the weight of drowning. He is afraid too. What he’s about to do might be mad, it might gain him nothing. The shadows might win in the end. But impossible odds never stopped Hook before.
He considers Michael Darling. Hollow—that’s what Jane had said of her uncle. That the war had hollowed him out and left spaces for the shadows to crawl inside.
James lets the tip of the blade rest against Michael’s skin, just below one of the buttons on his shirt. Teeth bared, breathing hard, Killdeer and Harrigan watch him through Michael’s eyes to see what he will do. He raises the hook again and holds it where they can see, lets the shadow of it fall across Michael Darling’s face.
There is a hollow inside of him too. Carved by loss, carved by grief that remains unhealed after fifteen years. He has lived hundreds of lifetimes, barely knowing himself, turning away from the truth, the goodness, in fear, just as many times as he died and was reborn. He wore violence like a second skin, as if it could keep him from pain, and all the while it wore away at him. The hollow space inside of him is so much vaster than Michael Darling’s could ever be, vast enough to contain multitudes. And he will welcome them in.
“Has a mutiny occurred?” Hook asks softly.
He brings the hook to rest against Michael Darling’s cheek. Inside, Killdeer and Harrigan and whatever fragments of the others they’ve gathered flinch away.
“You won’t win,” Killdeer snarls. “You’re old, you’re frail. You’re—” His words cut off as Hook presses the tip of the weapon that is his hand against Michael’s skin, not hard enough to break it, but enough to make it known.
“Wrong. I am still captain of this ship. The men aboard, whatever state they are in, are still mine to command. They always have been, and they always will be, even you.”
He does not give himself time to doubt. He promised Wendy’s daughter he would save Michael Darling, but even so, he plunges the black blade into his chest. The blade does what all blades do, cuts one thing from another, but unlike other blades, this one operates on a level more fundamental than flesh. Michael gasps, mouth wrenched impossibly open, as though he would scream, but instead of sound, only shadows pour forth. His body arches painfully. The darkness whips around him, howling where Michael, where Killdeer, where Harrigan cannot—a scream of utter, frustrated rage.
Hook stands, an easier motion than it has been in years. Before he can give himself time to doubt, he turns his hook on himself, burying the point in his chest and dragging it downward, opening a way to the hollow within. Pain—but no worse than he’s felt a thousand times before in the beast’s jaws, at the end of Pan’s blade. He follows the hook with the black knife, changing the wound into something else, a gaping, hungering maw. Because in this world, desire can be a door, a knife can be a key, and a man—a captain—can contain multitudes. Hook uses the blade to hold the wound open as his voice rings above the storm.
“I am still your captain, and I command you. You wanted my flesh and bones. Come take them, if you can.”
Michael Darling’s body shudders, shadows still pouring out of him. Darkness swirls around Hook and he grits his teeth against the pain, against the urge to pass out. Too stubborn to die. He must remain so for just a little while longer.
The first shadow strikes him like a blow, almost knocking him from his feet. But he has ridden out worse storms, and he manages to keep his boots planted on the deck as the darkness burrows into him. His clenches his jaw hard as a second follows, and a third. He cannot breathe. He is drowning in the air, on dry land as shadows choke him and fill up the spaces inside of him. And yet there is more space to fill. He is vast enough to hold them all.
They flow faster now, pulled, called, unable to resist. Like water filling his lungs, they batter into him, but he refuses to fall under the weight even if he staggers. Every part of him is raw, bruised. Every part of him aches and the shadows claw at him from the inside now, tricked, trapped, desperate to get out. But he will hold on to all of them, keeping them bound inside his skin.
Wind and rain lash at him, a storm in truth now as the ship rocks beneath him. Hook faces the darkness down, and as he does, the darkness grins back at him.
His pulse skips, drops a beat, and his nerve almost falters. James, inside Hook, gives way to a moment of panic, sweat prickling his skin, his limbs trembling. Pan’s hunting beast roils out of the air, eyes no longer moon-blind, but burning gold and full of hate as they ever were. Hook restored and his immortal enemy restored too.
“There you are.” Hook’s lips twist, a sneer.
Of course it would be the beast at last. Its massive legs swim in the air, thick armored scales glistening with rain. Its jaws open, not hunger, but a smile. It knows him. It understands him. And he knows it as well.
“Well, come on, then. What are you waiting for?”
Still holding the blade against his wound, Hook doesn’t give himself further time to doubt. He lashes out, driving the point of his hook into the beast’s eye. The creature thrashes—both solid and smoke—but Hook doesn’t relent, dragging the beast toward the wound in his chest.
Whatever the hunting beast expected, it was not this—an embrace, Hook’s very own death roll. He wraps his arm around the beast, crushing it tight in a terrible hold. He pulls his other arm free beneath it, holding the black blade. He keeps his grip, forcing the beast so close there is no space between them, so close they might as well be the same. Two beasts, created by Pan, born for violence, locked in an eternal battle to the end.
Jaws close, teeth sinking in, but still Hook doesn’t let go.
“A good captain always goes down with his ship, and I was the best of them.”
Bearing the beast down with him, Hook lets himself fall. He plunges the blade into the deck, shattering it again, as he did all those years ago. Inside him, the ghosts of all his dead pirates scream. The ship falls and falls and falls again. Plunging into the sand. Plunging up into the sky to break against the teeth of the stars. Everything howls and rips apart. The world goes white then black. Lightning cracks the sky and Hook laughs while James weeps, rooted to his sinking ship by the tip of an impossible blade, and this time, he will not let go.
Now, the blade is no longer a door to step through, but an anchor to keep him secured where he was always meant to be.