Jas. Hook, Captain

A Road Paved With Bad Intentions

I imagined a skiff with a small triangular sheet, sufficient for my needs. I imagined salted meat and hard tack, limes and a little rum. I imagined a fair tailwind to speed me away from that accursed island.

In time, the mountain peak dropped over the horizon, and I was alone at last.

Well, not entirely.

Below the hull, a faint ticking noise emanated, and a cold chill paralyzed me. Now and then, a hard bump shook the boat wildly, but in time that too subsided.

I cannot know how long I rocked there upon the Neversea, laying low in the sloshing salt waters pooled in the keel. I drifted in and out of sleep as I drifted aimlessly on the currents, making no attempt to heal my wound nor guide my sail.

Make no mistake, the pain I suffered was excruciating. Nevertheless, my suffering was my own doing, and so I took it as penance.

Somewhere in the haze of my delirium, a light appeared before me, growing brighter till it blinded me, making me wince and shield my eyes with my remaining hand. A jangly little noisome light, like a silver bell tumbling down a hill.

As I lay there, hiding from the world, she found me and gave me one last gift. I felt something that I did not, could not, imagine. A warmth like a tropical tide flooding through me. Tingling and itching while my pain receded.

It was a gift I did not deserve, a debt I could never repay. How was that for the Land of Never? Ha!

She left as quickly as she'd arrived, surely relieved to have this bit of foul business behind her.

"Tink," I muttered, but she was gone.

What remaining love she had for me had evaporated then like the last of the summer rain on a desert hardpan, sizzling in the relentless noonday sun, a hiss and a wisp of steam, then gone.

After what I had done to her and all our little community, our family, I couldn't blame her. I myself, if roles were reversed, would have surely left this miserable creature to succumb to his injuries. Her pity cut me deeply, and pained me nearly as much as the stroke of the sword that stole my hand.

Nearly.

I was grateful for her kindness, and comforted I will admit. Truly, I had not expected the trick to work, after my failure with the dust.

Pirates can't fly, he had said.

You broke the rules, he had also said.

Perhaps I had. I believe a villain had lain dormant in me, like a moth in its cocoon, waiting for the ideal conditions to spread its wings and assume its true nature.

Had I broken the rules? In the Land of Never, never grow up was for us the greatest rule, carrying all others within its scope.

Yes, I had broken that most fundamental rule, a creed by which all Lost Boys had founded their new existence. Those who sided with Pan would remain boys eternal. And yet, those who sided with me had already begun to shed their youth as a snake sheds its skin. They were in the middle stages, not quite too late to forestall or otherwise impede that process against which humankind has long railed and fought. If they were to continue along that mortal path, it was upon me to lead them.

And they would follow. Of that I had no doubt.

But if the umbilicus were to be severed with finality, they needed more than this defeated adolescent. Men they would become if a man were to lead them.

In my weakened state, I needed a confidante, someone I could trust. A single name came to mind.

Without delay, I reached for the halyards with my remaining hand and hauled the sail back up the mast, for it had been drooping loose and lubberly.