(A/N: Hold your breath and stand struck dumb with awe, dear reader, for this is probably the most pretentious thing your author's ever written, or ever shall write. It is a brief aesthetic description, if you will, of our dear captain looked upon as the arch fiend Satan, and at the same time our friend Charles II. It is rumouredHook was based on both, and I am indebted to several quotes about Charles II and the quote following below from Paradise Lost for the pairing of the two, and the provoked images. Enjoy the feeling of intellectualism this gives you, reader, as I intend to pleasure you with that flattery never more.)
"Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate
With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides
Prone on the food, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim th'ocean stream"
- John Milton, Book 1 of Paradise Lost
The world was dark when Wendy made her way across the ship uncertainly. The tarred deck stretched out black before her like scorched earth, and the roughened wood stung her feet. She looked nearly breathlessly around at the sublime sight of the sails silhouetted against the stars, for the moment oblivious of the presence of the pirates. Just over the surface of the ocean, a thin layer of mist hovered, white and sheer like a crowd of ghosts. Only when she felt something push against her back, and a raw voice telling her to move faster, she realised fully where she was.
She glanced up at the man to her left, who towered over her dressed in dirty red and white muslin whose tatters fluttered and floated dreamily as he walked. His right hand, black with tar and soot, the nails ragged and grimy, clutched his cutlass without noticing it; sunburnt skin and wild dark hair of his arms visible through a tear in his puffed sleeve. She noted these details with the instinctive precision of a writer as they approached their destination. Though the path she was walking was straight and narrow, she had no doubt that what lay behind the door she could see faintly in the near distance was nothing divine.
Suddenly, the strange flock that had accompanied her on this short journey broke up, and Smee was left alone beside her, smiling benignly. His blue and white dress and snow-white beard did nothing to soothe her. She looked up at the door, and tried to make out what it said, but the complex shadows cast by the carvings and decorations that curled lavishly across it, licking the surface of the wood like flames, made it practically impossible. Smee's old hand appeared before her eyes, and edged the door open.
She walked into this new space, startled at once by its blazing colours and overbearing decorations, and startled once more by the music that filled it. Smee mumbled something to her, but she paid it no heed, as she was absorbed by the morbid melody that appalled her anomalously, mixed as it was with a voice she associated with terror of many kinds. She was still frowning with dislike when it stopped, and Hook turned towards her.
There was a glint in his eyes that she could not place as he addressed her, with a term of familiarity which dismayed her more still, and she felt a vehement desire to recoil back into the safe, cool night. No escape was possible now, however. He arose and moved smooth as a trail of fire just past her, glittering hotly with sparks of red and gold in the flickering candlelight. He moved away from her and sank down again, hidden behind a table laden with food as though in ambush.
She did what was expected of her and sat down opposite him, feeling, with his gaze fixed on her, like she was sitting exactly in the firing range of a cannon. Riskily turning her eyes away from her adversary, she looked at the décor of their conference.
Rows and rows of candles threw a hallucinatory light over everything; flickering madly and changing it all in every flutter of their glow. They made the room red and burning with heat one second, and obscured it in flashes the next. The dancing flames twirled around the wicks torturously, throwing their hellish sheen mercilessly onto everything, blazing as death omens.
They emblazoned the room with shades of blood; a thousand colours of red dripped down the walls and windows in the form of drapery, it was stained into the wallpaper, was soft in the carpet underneath her feet, sweet in the wine on the table. It weighed heavily upon her tired eyes, and as she surveyed it, the sense of danger that had lain dormant at the back of her mind leapt to the fore acutely, sending a sudden tremor through her small body.
In the light of the candles, the glitter and the offensive splendour of the room turned into a luring display: all this, the wealth, the heat, the decadence, all this could be hers. If only she… The possibility intoxicated her, but the question of what would allow her to achieve this was even more exhilarating- even if she could but vaguely and confusedly build a picture of its nature, a dim perception made not by her head, but by her body. Thoughts of evil and sin made her heart beat painfully hard, though they were unsound, she told herself, and hastily pushed them aside.
It was too much for a moment or two, as a wealth of thoughts and emotions welled up inside her, and her consciousness was drenched further by the stifling opulence around her. It dazzled her senses, it dazzled her brain, but ultimately, in the depth of her mind, it made her feel extremely tiny and white; vulnerable and pure; mortal and deserving of divine grace, sitting in opposition to all the violent red blood-thirst surrounding her.
Slowly she tore her gaze away from her surroundings and turned back again. There sat her terrific opponent, the reflection of his candles shimmering in his eyes. She sat staring back, afraid that their blue flames would prove to be spellbinding. Then her look shifted, sliding intriguedly over the folds of dark red encasing his body like waves, vast and thick, concealing his true form. And over these the writhing water snakes of hair, iridescent black, and shifting as though mesmerised as he threw his head back to survey her with the calm confidence of an ancient creature over the bowl of red apples that shone attractively from the centre of the table.
Inexplicably, she could not see him as a man. Her brothers, her father, the clerks in stiff suits and hats- those were men. Not him. Something as alive as he had to be immortal, made up not of the same flesh as humans, but of pure force. The liquid folds of his coat that lay about him like an animal's fur, that was a part of him entirely, could harbour only fire, not a human soul. The way his eyes sparked, the way his whole unholy body moved, provoked some strange sensation in her she did not even know existed, and seemed to stop her breath.
There sat a Leviathan in velvet the colour of deepest fire, vast by the power of presence, king in this underworld of blood and greed. There he rested in sensuous domination, enticingly and horrifyingly worldly. There he waited, basking in promises, and she sat opposite him, awaiting anxiously his offer.