(A/N: This is a one-chapter story, one could call it a psychological drabble, I suppose, in which are explored inner turmoil and (sexual) frustrations of our dear pirate captain. It was provoked by an overdose of Romantic poetry in general, and especially The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I was researching, paired with a study of Peter Pan, and my continuing studies of pirates and nautical characters in literature. The character of the Ancient Mariner was one of the most imitated and influential, and inspired such characters as Ahab, Long John Silver, and also possibly Hook. As I wrote this, I felt the connection coming to life and becoming clear. This was the main aim of writing this, and if anything, stylistically I feel it came across very well, and is as vivid as I imagined. This is the first serious work I publish; please forgive me, and I promise I'll never do it again. Sincerely, The Duchess.)
"Since then at an uncertain hour,
Now oftimes and now fewer,
That anguish comes and makes me tell
My ghastly adventure.
I pass like night, from land to land,
I have strange power of speech,
The moment that his face I see,
I know the man who must hear me;
To him my tale I teach."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', from 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798)
He could feel it as soon as his feet reached the ground that morning. He slowly rose, nearly uncertainly, getting used to the motion underneath him. The waves were very high, and as he walked through the door into the cabin, he could hear the furniture shifting.
"Smee!" he called, wiping back the mop of unruly black hair that was obscuring his vision, and, swaggering as a drunk man, pulled on some breeches and his dressing gown. "Smee!"
The door opened, and the familiar face appeared, the white beard dripping with rain. "Breakfast, please," he said, and turned around, to the window.
The sea heaved monstrously, its shifting huge grey masses a direct reflection of those in the sky. Equally drab-looking rain beat down on the deck above his head. The restless, hard tapping made him feel uneasy, though he did not know why. He frowned slightly, his black eyebrows arching in elegant disdain. The ship groaned around him as it was pushed over, and he for a moment struggled to keep his balance, which he felt was rather a silly thing for a captain of a ship to do, and he was glad no-one could see him.
The thing was, however, the weather here was never other than fine, and he could only remember one other occasion on which it had been like this. An occasion he preferred not to think about too much. He wondered what could have caused such a storm. What could possibly have happened here, where even the weather was governed by the whims of a single mind? He heard the door open behind him again, and how Smee, observing he was in no mood, silently crept back out again.
After breakfast, with Smee returned, he turned to the ritual that shaped him, that ordered his mind as it ordered his appearance. However, today something forever appeared to be missing. As his body was swathed in a thousand layers of dark cloth; coarse silk, and thick linen, fabric fit for a storm, and combed his hair into cultivated curls, it did not feel right. Even with his sword fit snugly in his belt, and a big, woollen cloak against the rain, he did not feel at ease. Frowning ever more severely, he wandered slowly over to the window again, and, in contemplating a dark blue cloud, he knew what he was to do.
He thundered onto the deck, crossing it in a few steps. There was no-one there, and no sign of life could be discerned apart from the smoke from the kitchen below. Rain splashed desolately over what seemed now a veritable plain of wooden boards, soaked red with water. He surveyed it with an eye that, however ominously it glittered, was by far the most cheerful sight around, and, for once, felt disconnected from it all. This was not where he belonged.
He threw his own, adapted oars into a dinghy, climbed in after them, and let himself down. He cared not that the waves were high enough to overthrow him in a second. He felt he could handle the elements today. There was an odd power that sung in his muscles like the wind over the sea. With deft, impossibly effective strikes of the oars he danced his way across the waves. There were moments when he found himself balanced precariously on top of a mountain of water, the tension between gravity, the sea, and one human being making the wood of the boat shiver.
As he rowed into the bay, the waters became slightly more calm, and he had hardly any trouble keeping balance, as the boat appeared to be kept steady by some kind of invisible force. Something touched at his leg, and he was surprised, if not a little revolted, by the presence of a mermaid. Or rather, he observed as he looked down into the water, a small school of mermaids, that were crowded around the boat.
One of them, her red eyes narrowed, had put her….hand? fin? claw? on the calf of his leg, and was looking at him with a disturbing sort of leer. Without thinking twice, he batted it away with his hook, though careful not to injure her. She fell back into the water, blinking angrily. He gazed down at the gleaming bodies of the mermaids, that looked back with burning eyes, making high, eerie wailing sounds.
It was strange how they were the only ones that saw what he really was (a man, he thought to himself), the only ones that attempted to establish contact. Even if their intentions were evil; God knew, his own were hardly ever different. Their slimy, grey skin and cold breasts glittering with scales held no temptation for him, though. Nor did their song seem anything to him but a haunting, dreadful noise, let alone a melody of seduction.
Perhaps there had been a time they had seemed something like women to him, but if so, he could not remember it. It would have to have been a long time ago, before……that…… happened. If that even happened in the past. Memories were highly unreliable things in this part of the world, and time was a fickle, fitful thing. He had learnt that.
The boat slowed down and finally stopped in the sand. He jumped out and, holding his cloak up, sloshed towards the shore. He pulled the boat up with him, and tied it to a tree, to prevent it from being blown away. He walked into the forest a few paces, until he was relatively sheltered by the trees, and turned to look back over the bay.
The ship, his ship, lay swaying restlessly on the huge waves, a black silhouette against the violently grey and purple sky. The wind lashed rain against it, howling a duet with the mermaids, who were sending their mournful songs up into the sky in an attempt to lure him back. As he stood there, his feet planted firmly in the damp sand, his thoughts began to slip back, back to that one night, the night that he was sure had happened, or would.
A bolt of lightning split the heavens like a crack a china cup. For a second he felt concern; he hoped the thunderstorm would not come closer; he doubted if he could survive the loss of his ship. But then the thunder itself came; growling hugely, the sound itself making his body tremble. The world suddenly seemed tense with static; he could feel a power he had no word for in the air, and felt remarkably at home in it.
Maybe this was the same substance that caused the strange stirrings and heat and tensions between his hips, that made him wake up at night, writhing with a strange, yearning energy, that caused his thoughts to return, ever and anon, to what could have happened that night. He growled lowly in unison with the thunder, unaware of the fact, and held up the shining weapon that had been used to replace his soft hand.
He saw his own eyes reflected in the steel, not noticing that the two were the same colour, and anger welled up unstoppably inside him. He lowered his arm again, and turned away from the hostile ocean to the peaceful, deep green. The forest was humid, and there was a smell so heavy and earthy it seemed to be a solid substance. It was also unusually quiet; birds dared not sing today, and though the wind whistled noisily through the treetops, it stirred no leaves down below. Occasionally drops of rain found their way in, and rattled down from the sky through miles of vegetation.
The silence and the shadows made his senses feel even more on edge than usual, as they struggled to keep up with the pace he was setting with both mind and body. He stalked soundlessly through the forest, stealthily fast, his feet sinking into the moist and crumbling earth, and yet could not get rid of the maddeningly strong desires that had settled themselves irrevocably in his lower body.
She would have become a woman in his hands, he was sure of it. The rules of time did not apply here, the rules of nothing but the mind applied here, and his mind was fixed on her, and her only. She would have grown to be his, and he damned the person who prevented it, he damned himself for letting said person distract him into forgetting; for distracting from the thing that really mattered. In his hands, she would have become something more beautiful than she ever could become in that far away land he remembered from his youth; when he still had solid memories.
He wished there would be some form of life that crossed his path; but nothing came near him. He wished there was something, someone he could force into penance for what was out of his grasp. He wished there was someone like her on this godforsaken island, someone he could lure into his arms and feel warm and moving underneath him, someone to share in the fire that was driving him into despair. His thoughts were so consuming, that he was hardly aware of what he was doing, and how he was flying through the forest like a great, black fury.
And then, he came to an opening in the woodland. The ground was soft and green, and stray drops of rain fell down more slowly than elsewhere. He recognised this spot; but from where? He stopped at the edge of it, and ever so slowly, and silently, crept closer. For there was something on the lowest branch of a tree at the other end of the clearing. He stalked noiselessly closer, and closer, until it was nearly in his reach.
Peter was startled from his thoughts by an odd noise behind him. He turned, expecting to see the one he was hoping to see- but even before he saw the man-like shadow, with his wild hair dancing in the breeze and his eyes glowing with traces of an unnatural red, he knew that it would not be her.
Hook saw the boy wake up from his reverie, and tensed his body like a spring, his hook in the air like a cat's claw, his eyes fixed on the slender, pale back, ready to pounce. This time, he thought, his mind searing with rage, this time, I will not be defeated.