Disclaimer: I don't own Peter Pan or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Paniacs like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received. (That said, is Peter Pan public domain now? Barrie's been dead a long time. I can't remember if the time limit is fifty years or a hundred.) (And just to be clear, I hate Peter Pan. I'm a dedicated Hook fan. I'm no blackguard, but I identify with the scoundrel anyway. And it's not as if he doesn't have good manners, at least. Other than wanting to kill a bunch of kids and giving the hook to his crew for the slightest infraction.)

Rating: T. Hopefully. You never really know with me.

Spoilers: Oo, let's say many, though this is definitely AU.

A Pirate Looks Back…

Mother mother ocean,

After all the years, I've found

Occupational hazard being

My occupation's just not around.

I feel like I've drowned.

Jimmy Buffett-"A Pirate Looks at Forty"

He was seated at the furthest, darkest end of the bar, far away from anyone else, holding a tumbler of what looked like Scotch in his left hand and occasionally sipping from it. He was a little hard to see, thanks to the lack of light, but he looked rather…handsome. Maybe forty-five, maybe a little older, with wavy, slightly curly dark hair that hung a little past his ears and a neatly trimmed goatee. Anna liked her men a little…seasoned. She gathered up her courage and sat down a couple of stools to the right of him.

She looked at him with a shy smile and he glanced at her. Even in the dim light she could see he had pale and oh, so blue eyes. Colored contacts, maybe? If they were real, they were gorgeous. Movie star gorgeous. She felt a blush coming on.

He smiled back at her. "Hello there," he said, and his voice was rich, cultured, and accented. British. It sent chills up her spine, pleasant ones.

She was definitely blushing now. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and offered him her right hand. "Hi. My name's Anna. What's yours?"

He took his right hand out of his lap and put it up on the bar, and now she saw that it ended in a stainless steel claw hand rather than a real one. He transferred his glass from left to right - the claw gripped it cleverly, perhaps through muscle movement inside the prosthetic - and took her hand in his left. Instead of shaking with her, he raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them. "My name is Jas, and I beg your forgiveness for what you no doubt think of as an inexcusable familiarity. I have had it beaten into me over the years and I have come to an understanding that women can be and do whatever they want, but it is much more difficult to abandon your principles of good form."

He released her fingers and took another sip of his drink. Anna ducked her head down a little and said, "You have an unusual name. Is it short for something? Jason?"

"James, actually."

"I don't think I've seen you in this place before. Are you new around here?"

"I lead a rather gypsy existence, new in every place I wander. I might stay for a time, I might move on. I never know for certain. You live in the area?"

"Just a couple blocks away. So, um…you travel a lot? For work?"

He smiled into his drink. "I'm retired, actually."

"Retired? So young?"

"Well, it wasn't really my choice. The job quit me. And I'm…older than I look."

He threw back the last of his Scotch and gestured to the bartender. "May I buy you a drink?" he said. "Anything you please."

"Thank you, I'll have whatever you're having," Anna said, blushing again. She moved one stool closer to him. The bartender put a tumbler in front of her and poured a generous measure of Scotch into her glass, then did the same for James. "So, Jas - tell me a little about yourself. Where are you from?"

"Everywhere and nowhere," he said.

"Well, where were you born?" she asked.

He looked at her with one black eyebrow raised high. "England."

She laughed lightly. "Well I can kinda tell that. Where in England?"

Now his expression seemed contemplative, his gaze far away. "…London, I think. Which part of it I cannot recall."

"You think? You can't remember where you were born? How about where you were raised?" she asked.

"London. I think. I don't…often…think about my past, particularly not so distant past. I have a vague recollection of standing as an Oppidan Scholar at Eton, but…I can't even say that with surety. I don't think I made it to a Colleger, if I did go there. As I recall I was before the mast ere that."

"Before the mast? You were a sailor?"

He closed his eyes and clicked his teeth hard together and clenched them, then sighed and said, "Captain of my own ship, once upon a time." He chuckled. There was no humor in the sound. "That was the time, my Lady. That was the time. Wandering the sea bests wandering the shore any day."

"What made you leave it?"

"The world changed and I didn't," he said. He did not seem eager to say anything more.

"Well…how did you become a sailor? I don't know much about Eton but I would guess you were young if you didn't make it to be an upperclassman."

This time the chuckle had humor in it. "I was crimped. Don't ask me why. I might've known once but no longer."

"Crimped? What does that mean?"

"Struck on the head with a belaying pin while I was walking near a wharf and shanghaied into service on a sailing vessel. It was quite the tradition in the olden days - even the Royal Navy did it. I don't think they do it any longer, but what do I know? What use they felt there was in a young Eton Blue I honestly could not say. But then, that was Smee. He was always a little…different."

"Smee?"

"An old friend. And annoyance. Both in equal measures, but a good fellow. Long gone now."

"His name was really Smee?"

"Short for Smith, his surname. The mates used to call him 'Smitty' but that was just too much trouble to take on his behalf."

This relieved Anna for a reason she could not, exactly, pinpoint. "I see."

A silence fell between them as James seemed to lose himself in memories long forgotten and Anna sipped cautiously at her drink. And then, Billy came over.

Billy was a constant annoyance. He came to get drunk, and when he was drunk he got amorous, and Anna was his favorite target. He also got rather handsy, which made it all the worse. Anna could not stand Billy.

"Annie, what are you doin' sittin' next to this one-armed little girl?" he said, breathing rank whiskey breath into her ear. "Come over an' sit by me. I got two good hands to put all over ya."

"Back off, Billy," she said, irritated. He only moved in closer, so she slid over onto the stool next to James.

Billy came closer. "Come on, girl. I got a table right over there, and you can crawl under it and give me a sweet little present with that pretty mouth of yours."

"Bad form," James said into his glass of Scotch. "That is not the way to speak to a lady." Anna spared him a glance. It was just her imagination, surely - a trick of the shadows and colored glass lampshades in this dimly lit bar - but she could swear his eyes had turned blood red.

"Go fuck yourself, Miss Priss; this is between me and sweet little Annie," Billy said, and put his hands on her arms and leaned in to slobber a kiss on her ear.

"Get off me, Billy!" Anna said, trying her best to get away. Billy only held on tighter and reached over to squeeze her breast. "Get off!"

James reached his right arm around Anna's shoulders and his claw hand gripped Billy's ear. Then it twisted, and Billy dropped to his knees in pain.

"I can rip it off," James said, quite calmly. "Do not think for a moment I cannot." He let this thought sink in, and then said, "When a lady tells you to back away and cease bothering her, back. Away. And cease bothering her."

He let go, and Billy backed away, sniveling. James returned to his drink. "Thanks," Anna said. "Don't suppose you could hang around and do that for me every time Billy gets touchy-feely?"

"Perhaps he'll learn from this," he said. "But I do not think you can count on it. Men as a species are stupid creatures. Particularly when they're drunk."

"Well, I appreciate you putting the run on him tonight."

"My apologies for being so brutal about it," James said. "My old hand could, at times, get the point across without violence, but this one is more useful in its way. Couldn't grip a thing with the other." He shook his head, chuckling. "Modernity."

"Was your old hand a hook?" Anna asked. James laughed aloud.

"Yes."

"How…long ago was that?" she asked.

"Oh…I believe I got the claw…sometime in the nineteen eighties, maybe the early nineties. However, the hook I had immediately before that was not the hook I had originally. It was considerably less of a weapon. I prefer the claw."

"Were you…born without a hand?" she asked. "I'm sorry if that's a painful question. I just can't help being curious."

"Oh no, I once had two good, flesh-and-blood hands." He raised his claw. "Lost this one in a tragic accident. At least, that's the way I look at it now."

"What happened?" she said, then shook her head. "I'm sorry. That's none of my business."

"No, it's all right. It was cut off by an eleven-year-old boy who was playing with a sword. I do not know quite why he did what he did next, and he played it off as deliberate, but I believe now that he was terrified by the blood and by what he had done. He picked it up and threw it, right into the jaws of a nearby crocodile."

"Oh, my- Wait, let me guess. Then the crocodile swallowed a clock, and chased you around Never Never Land for years," Anna said, starting to grin.

James did not grin. He cocked an eyebrow in an expression that could only be called sardonic and raised his glass to his lips. A sip of Scotch and then, "Yes," he said, returning the glass to the bar.

Anna laughed, not very happily. "You're not Captain Hook."

He smiled, and reached over with his left hand and touched her wrist. "You don't wear a wristwatch," he said. "If you did, I would not sit next to you. I would have got up and left. Even if it did not make a sound. Some phobias persist long past any rational explanation for them. I can deal with cell phone clocks as long as they're not pulled out in front of me. Maybe it has less to do with the crocodile now than time itself. It has been no friend of mine."

Anna sat and pondered over this for a long moment. Was she sitting next to a lunatic? No, he was just trying to exploit how sexy women tended to think pirates were. If he had two good hands, he would be pretending to be Jack Sparrow. That was what was going on here. Role-play. Could she accept that? Why yes, maybe she could.

She leaned over close to him. "All right then, Captain. Tell me about your adventures. What happened to you after you were eaten by the crocodile? How did you escape?"

He grimaced. "Not a pleasant memory, love, and not at all a happy one. Not that I have many memories that are otherwise. Still, I suppose it could be said that I got the upper hand in the end - or the upper hook, as it were. The beast swallowed me whole. I cut my way out of its belly, then gathered up what little of my crew weren't drowned because sailors once held an absolutely ridiculous superstition that the sea would kill them if they learned to swim - how's that for irony? - and put the Never-Land behind me forever. Finally started to remember that I had a life beyond that wretched island. Such as it was."

"That was a long time ago, wasn't it? How is it you're still alive, and still look so young? How old are you?"

"Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to, love. In any event, I couldn't tell you. I don't remember when I was born, when I came to the Never-Land, or when I left, but the latter has been at least a hundred years."

"So…what kept you alive this long? The curse of Never Never Land? Pan never aged either, though I always thought that was because he was really a dead child."

"I don't know. That the curse existed I believe, for however long we remained there, and though I might not know how long I do believe it was a long time indeed, not one man of my crew grew old or passed away naturally, and Smee was quite aged when we came there. When we left, however, the aging process began again for all of them, and they died off one by one over the years, leaving me wondering when it would happen to me. But it never has. Then again, I was always different from them."

"How so?"

He chuckled. "My eyes turn red when I'm in a killing rage, and when they do I weep tears of deadly poison which I save in a vial I carry on my person in case I'm ever taken alive by my enemies, few of which I have these days. That's not exactly normal, now is it? Many of my crew were rather strange in their own way, but still more or less ordinary people. Me? I seem rather more…demonic, wouldn't you say? And then I am, by necessity, a southpaw now, which is of course considered the 'sinister' hand."

Anna was taken aback by that "red eyes" thing. Had she really seen that? No, that wasn't possible. There had to be another explanation for why his eyes happened to look red right at the moment before he almost ripped Billy's left ear off. Still, she had not seen it since, and she had been looking, oh yes indeed. Those eyes were so utterly entrancing.

She decided to let it go. She had no rationalization for it, but it could not be what he said it was. That was ridiculous. Just…let it go. Like ghosts and poltergeists and alien visitations, it was something that had a perfectly logical explanation that no one yet knew.

"So, what have you been doing with yourself for the last hundred years?" she asked.

"Ha. Nothing so very much. I kept to the seas for a time, until technology left me utterly behind and practicality wiped my profession fairly from the face of the earth. I turned to a degree of piracy on land, but organized mobs of criminals eventually made that impractical as well. So now I just wander. I can't remain any one place too long, because I can't explain why I never get any older, and I have no proper identification nor citizenship records for any nation on the planet. Technically I am a citizen of England, but I cannot prove even that: If ever I had such a thing as a birth certificate, that's long gone. In fact, I don't recall what my true surname might have been, so I couldn't begin to look for such a record, even if I could make anyone believe it belonged to me, though perhaps living in bedlam for a century or so might be diverting."

Was she really going to do this? Anna did not typically take strangers home, particularly strangers who had lied to her with every word they spoke, but…some things could not be passed up. She scotched in closer and put a hand on his thigh.

"I know something else that can be diverting," she said, feeling ridiculously shy for how forward she was being.

He looked at her, his expression hard to read, and then he smiled. There was something rather melancholy about it. He took her hand off his thigh with his left and kissed it again, then placed it in her lap and patted it gently. "I'm not a man for the one-night stand," he said, "and more than that, you would not like me come the morning." He stood, paid up his tab from a thick wad of cash held together with a broccoli rubber band, and said, "I thank you for speaking with me. A pleasant conversation with a lovely young woman is a rarity and always welcome." He turned to walk away. Anna spun her barstool to watch him go, confused. What was that all about if it had not been about getting into her panties?

She saw him pass close to the table where Billy held sway, talking loudly to a woman who had not yet been warned off of him, apparently, and she saw him draw something out of his pocket. She could not really see it very well from where she sat, but it looked like a small glass vial. She saw him tip it over Billy's glass of rye and clearly saw a drop of something bright red fall out of it and into the tumbler. Then he slipped it back into his pocket and walked out the door, whistling something that sounded very much like an old-time sea chantey.

Dumbstruck, Anna watched as Billy turned back and put the glass to his lips. One sip, he gagged, and dropped sideways out of his chair and onto the floor. People stood up, gasping, and someone yelled "Call an ambulance!"

Still stunned, Anna stood where she was as the EMTs came bustling in. She heard the one kneeling down by Billy's side pronounce him DOA. Slowly, shakily, she turned back to the bar and sat down and tossed back the remainder of her drink.

FIN