Sunset, Neverland. The ship at anchor and two on deck drink from jeweled goblets. A fat man and another, gaunt and grim. A shrill, silver hook hangs his side and is touched with a crimson sung out from the west. A red burning yet from the ends of the earth and the Captain calls for his pipe.
"Fetch the pipe, Smee."
His eyes move between Captain and hook. "Captain, ye don't want it again. After last night?"
"Don't be simple, Smee. There is no last night." The Captain speaks flatly and is turned to a sea swelling scarlet. "The pipe, Smee."
A pause. "What say we sets you with a choice of strumpet from shore and-"
"There is only one girl. Bring me the muse."
Smee stands up and is still a moment, is weighing inevitability. He takes up his bottle and approaches the man, wavers a moment before pouring into his Captain's chalice and leaning to speak lowly. "Now you just let old Smee-"
"The fucking pipe!" He flings the goblet to the deck with a wooden clank and the scream tears out to sea. Smee is still. The Captain has drawn a pistol and pulls sterling back into his thumb, hammer tapping a chill into the salted air, barrel shaking and Smee's eyes follow it.
"Aye, the pipe."
The Captain is left to ponder horizons he'll never touch. A green darkness touches the saltwater, clapping softly. There will be no storm, the sky nigh bled out. He is dark-eyed and scarred. A quiet canyon falls from his socket as if to suggest the man once held tears to burn skin away. Mirrored by a twin scar opposite his pocked face, cast up from black tangles of beard. A face what tells of blades escaped.
Smee's hollow step speaks out his approach. He bears a wooden chest, and a lantern bearing likewise a white light darting about its iron limits, flickering fiercely and ringing out. A pixie.
The Captain looks fondly onto the light. "The lady arrives."
Her voice comes in bells. "You left-handed salt-sucker, you let me go and play fair once in your life."
"Feisty as a fish on the hook, love."
The light is quivering. Perhaps she is frightened, though expression does not show through the glow illuminating the deck, the only light left them and under her shine Smee unpacks an oaken, smoke-blasted bowl and pipe. Smee fits twists of pipe-weed into the pipe with blackened, calloused fingers. His cheeks are blackened with grease and rise ruddy from a beard in want of never a trim. He is beginning to gray and always has been.
Hook eyes the fairy, still and silent. "Smee. What of the weed are we left?"
"Not more'n half a cask, afraid. Injuns won't budge, won't deal with us, Captain. They been askin' for the dust."
"The dust does not leave the ship. Does it, dear?"
"Eat seaweed you slobbering sea-urchin. If Pan was here he-"
"He'd what?" roars the Hook, shot up from his chair.
Smee touches his shoulder to stay him. "Now, Captain. You know that little elfin Pansy won't show 'is face anywheres near the camp nevermind find the brass to confront ye, Captain. The Hook?" The words loosen his Captain's expression and seem to sit him down.
"No, sir, he won't. Ever since ye razed their little clubhouse and got hold of her majesty here, he hasn't durned showed his face outside of shadows and rumor. The boys 've scattered. They're lost, Captain."
The Captain nods. "Lost, yes." He turns on his captive. "No, darling, not without his wings he won't. So long as you're mine the child is naught but a salt on the lips." He spits.
She flares up and rings out, "If you'd half the gall as Pan you'll go back to the island and face him alone." Her color is no honest white, but blue and pink and yellow between, a kaleidoscopic mingling to brilliance. "You're only a crooked old cod-swallower afraid of a boy thrice the man of you." As she rings, she burns and flaps and sparks snow from her shape.
He howls something sinister, stares at the bright pool of dust she has shed. "That's it. Sing me your song." He lifts a bottle. "Wake it up for me, love." The bells are stilled and he pulls in silence. All eye the Captain. He lowers the bottle and considers the pixie. "Produce." She is still and softens her light. The Captain growls and lifts the rum, drains it slowly. All eye the pixie. Empty now, he rises and sends the bottle in a dark and whistling arc, splash telling none can see. All eye the pixie. "Take her, Smee."
She stares at the man who takes up her cage. Smee holds it still a moment, perhaps weighing the gravity of the star within, perhaps weighing its beauty and counting it holy and with it regret. She grips the iron bracingly and a wing flickers. Smee holds the cage over the bowl and gives it a slow, heavy thump that rings out as brass on a cymbal, flaring out light and spilling forth sparks that drift slowly to the bowl beneath and burn there, kept alive by their own radiance and pulsing as if some life-form all their own. He is slow in it and repeats.
The Captain nears and tears the cage from him, hook piercing through the bars. He lifts it to his face and the fairy cowers away. Heat touches his brow and he grins for it and then viciously shakes the cage in a fit of light and noise. She is thrown from and into iron, helpless to avoid the hook fit through a notch in the bars. Sparks crash forth and sound also, and so brilliant is the flash it can be seen from shore, a clamor flung crashing through trees like some terrible call to worship or if not then a challenge to all the island, boys and men.
The dust produced, Hook drops the cage with a rattle. The fairy lies face-down and flickering, yet lives. A gash crosses her back and from a hissing hook drips pale-burning blood, sin unreckonable.
Collected in a stone spoon and fed to the tobacco, the dust screams smoke through shank and stem to turn and brew within dungeonous lungs, and Smee descends to the ship as one escaping a storm.
The Captain pulls innocence from a flame while the pixie lay still. A breeze turns in, lifts and drops a wing. Overhead, constellations of sickles and spiders turn at an observable clip and with two pale-green shepherds to steer the great wheel. One full, one curved akin to the hook below. Neither waxing, neither waning.