During the climactic battle, Pan made contact with the fabled “hook.” It flew several feet in the air before landing harshly against the wood, with a metallic clank and thud.

Pan heard the gasps before she saw the reason for them.

For Captain Hook was not sporting a stub. Rather, at the end of her arm was a shriveled hand. It looked as if fire had damn near eaten it.

Pan lowered her sword and approached her nemesis. “Who are you?” 

Hook snarled. “I am Captain Mary St. James Hook.”

Pan repeated: “Who ARE you?”

The Lost Girls gazed on with electrified curiosity. Whereas the Pirates looked away. At the sky, at the land, at the water, anywhere but each other. Anywhere but Hook. The single bond ‘tween Pirate and Girl was their shared silence.

She looked at Pan with such intense contempt that Pan—who was generally amused by Hook’s contempt—was a bit disturbed.

And then she told her story.

Xxx

“Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?”
“Nothing, precious,” she said; “they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children.”

But of course that’s not true, during a random electrical storm. If anything, the night-lights leave one’s children in more danger. 

How cursed was her hand that lit the candle, and poured the bloody paraffin.

“Mrs. Hook, I’m sorry. I’m afraid damage to your hand is too substantial for you to ever regain proper use of it.”

“I don’t give a FIG about my hand! Where are my children??”

“In surgery, still. Their burns were far more serious than yours.”

Mr. Hook never blamed her for their deaths. At least not outwardly. But the twin stresses of work and grief laid too much damage to his large heart, and he was dead at 45.

Her parents long in the ground, Mrs. Hook had no living siblings. Just semi-living ghosts. Ugly fairies, her feelings were, that buzzed around her head, unwelcome.

London had far too many children. Living reminders of hope that was forever lost. Of children that were always, and tragically, young.

It took her years to find her way to the Land Where Children Are Never Seen, later shortened to Neverland. Other women followed her; she saw well enough to let them.

“And so I led my merry crew, of widows and spinsters. For centuries, we were happy enough, or at least content. A few of us were happy INDEED.” Several pirates giggled, some snickered, some guffawed, some blushed. Hook continued with her story.

They were doing well, until came Pan and her wretched band of brats! The laughter of those brats bounced, echoed, enhanced by the water and the rocks. The mermaid chorus amplified it yet more. Oh, the pain that sound inflamed! The Hellish lightning anger! 

It was a slow change, from Mrs. Hook to Captain Hook. Not overnight did she replace the soft glove that cloaked her burned and broken hand, to a hook that obscured it entire.

The women followed once again her lead, and her command, to style themselves as pirates. That there was no actual pirating to be done was generally guarded as immaterial. They were pirates in principle, if not in action.

“And I think, ‘old friend,’ you know the rest. You know how and why you find yourself on your ship.”

“The legend of the crocodile?”

“Legends of lizards are exactly that.”

“I thought I’d simply forgotten, the act of cutting off your hand. I thought that was why I couldn’t remember. I have a rather short memory, you know. Even fairies live longer than my memory of yesterday.”

“Yes, Pan. You are fortunate, where I am damned. For my long memory has consumed what was once my soul.” Captain Hook spat the finale word.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, Hook.”

“Foolish child, of course it does. You need this choreography. You need this symbiotic fight, as much you need your hideous crowing and your precious fairy dust.”

“And what do you need?”

“I need my hate. My rage. My hook. As you need me to need those things.”

Pan prided herself on knowing little, for knowledge made one dull and old.

But she knew Hook was right.

Pan raised the fallen hook with the tip of her sword, and laid it inches from Hook’s black boot.

“I’ll wait until you’re wearing it. Our fight can continue then. For now, we take our leave of you, neither victims nor victors. Come along, Lost Girls.”  

Away they went, by the light of Pan’s newest fairy.

None of the Pirates offered to help Hook, as she twisted her hook upon her bad hand, with the angry use of her good one. They all knew better than to do so.

And they couldn’t quite make out the three words she whispered, as Pan’s form grew smaller in the sky. But they knew her well enough to know what she was saying.

“Good Form, child.”