VIOLET
A Colorful Request
A city, any city of the world, is much like that inconstant Moon a man named William Shakespeare once penned poetic to from a candle-lit upstairs bedroom in Stratford. She, who nightly glistens in her spheres and monthly changes in Her circled orb - She who pulls at the tides the same as home pulls at the heart of a soldier. There is no mountain on Earth that will not someday sigh and allow itself to become sand under the power of Her patience, for She and Time hold the same side in the battle against Mortality.
And so, London is not the same London as when James Hook last had visited, Wendy is more than aware of this fact. It was since just after Shakespeare's time, for one thing. For another, a war had come and gone from the minds of her country's people, leaving behind husband and father and son and...and brother-shaped scars that had not even begun to turn pink around their edges. At the moment, it is just a quarter-past six on the evening of May Tenth, in the year of our Lord Nineteen-Hundred and Twenty-One*.
Wendy thinks about all this, because it is far easier than the alternative.
Her well-bred instincts tell her that she should be trying to make some form of discourse with her unexpected companion, but she walks steadily on, head held high, her left hand gripping painfully the handles of her leather bag, and cannot speak. What if she is dreaming, and the people passing her on the street think she speaks only to thin air? She has heard dreadful tales from John about the sorts of things done to patients at the City of London's Lunatic Asylum, where he works as an orderly. So the Nightmare Captain and the Ex-Storyteller walk arm-in-arm through London Town in unreadable silence, their steps taking them west on Northumberland Avenue, through the rush of Trafalgar Square, and up Regent Street.
Wendy Darling, it can be said, is not a woman unto whom the experience of shame comes often. In fact, if she were to ponder the subject for a time, she could count on only three fingers the number of events within her life in which such an emotion has been felt. Once when she was quite small, before Michael was born, she took a thrupenny bit from Mother's purse and was properly, though gently admonished. The second was from seeing the looks on Michael's and John's faces on her first night out of the nursery.
The third, she now adds to her list, is as they round the corner, she and her Nightmare companion, and come into view of the least-fashionable building (Wendy stubbornly ignores the word 'tenement') on Regent Street that has been her home for the last three years.
Glancing up to the slice of profile visible from her escort, she takes note of the indiscriminate curve of a raised brow. But Hook wisely - or perhaps unneedingly - says nothing at all.
Nevertheless, Wendy lifts her chin just that fraction of an inch higher as they ascend the front steps, secretly giving thanks that old man Givers, a downstairs neighbor, is not at his usual spot on the top stoop, calling out to " 'Er 'igh an' Migh'iness" with the stench of chewing tobacco clotting the air around his ill-pronounced words. The fresh tides of Wendy's shame retreat a fraction from the battered shores of her dignity.
Through the front door, the small foyer, down the hall and into the cramped lift, and neither the Woman nor the Pirate has yet said a word.
They stop on the fourth floor, the Captain folding aside the rusting door with ease before he offers a hand and they both set foot on the warped hardwood flooring. The sounds their heels make are the echo-lives of ghosts chasing their ankles all the way to Wendy's door at the end of the hallway.
An ill-fitting key in an ill-made lock, and Hook slips in after Wendy like a snake's head disappearing in water.
They enter into the kitchen-dining room, which is small, but as clean and orderly as the rest of the flat. Wendy gestures to one of the two wooden chairs pulled into the wooden table, but Hook gently shakes his head, disturbing the dark and sleeping giant of his curls. It is then that Wendy finally speaks.
"I'm afraid I can only offer you tea, would you care for some?"
No matter what allowances modern times gave to ladies on the subject of drink, alcohol was not permitted in the Darling household, and so port or rum were not present options.
Hook smiles. "I would be delighted."
He watches her set the kettle, fetch cup and saucer for them both, pour, and mix in sugar and milk into her own. An acceptable amount, and just enough to be sensible with the rations. This English ritual completed, she sets Hook's cup before one unoccupied chair and sits in the other, her own resting unsipped before her. Crossing her ankles and laying her hands in her lap, a picture of Victorian poise that does not sit ten years out-of-date upon her carriage, she gazes steadily across at her guest as he leans against the cracked window sill. Brocade against lace curtains. Storm-green eyes meet ice-blue ones.
"Now, my dear Captain, I believe you owe me an explanation."
She waits. They stare. She sees a black serpent's coil of cunning stir beneath his stone features. When he finally speaks into the quiet, the echo of his timbre is loud without being loud in the small room.
"Wendy Darling. It is not unpleasant to see you again."
Ah, yes. He did have a tendency to be indirect. Wendy raises a brow.
His thin slice of a mouth curves under the immaculately trimmed beard. Relishing in her impatience, she expects. "Why, 'twas but a blink of me blue eyes ago that you sat acro'st from me own jolly spread aboard the Jolly Roger. I know Smee served us lobster, but I cannot for the life o' me remember the taste." Dancer-like, he pushes off from the sill, over-delicately pulls out the remaining chair, and lowers into it. All within seconds (and all while keeping his right arm behind his back), though it seems to take much longer. Wendy also recalls his love for theatrically long moments. It is not something she presently has time for. She ignores his wiles and gathers her cup and saucer into her hands.
"It has been a long time since last I crossed Neverland's shores, Hook. I was under the assumption that was not something in your power to do."
Hook stiffens to a degree imperceptible by normal sight, his pupils narrow, giving them quite a reptilian illusion, and he lazily folds his arms - somehow without revealing his namesake, though maybe Wendy hadn't paid close enough attention - again she wonders. The sharky smile he gives her is wholly unpleasant. "And if the Boy Pan can capture the attentions of a Fairy long enough to tap and listen at a Storyteller's window, why not Hook?" His words are the quietly violent hiss of steam.
"But only children understand the secret to fly, and Pan can never stay long in any case," she replies pointedly. Can you stay for any longer?
The pirate captain drops his head ever so slightly - a beast in the grass considering whether to charge. She suppresses a tremble; no matter the reason, she should still not press her luck with him. The thunderstorm of his presence boils over and fills the whole room from the other side of the table. "Ahh, indeed, the flightiness of Youth. I envy not their cruel and quick-changing ways, the cruelty of Wisdom is burden enough." He pauses like a metaphoric talon above her throat, then raises his head again and sighs, the thunderstorm unexpectedly dissipating as he breaks her stare to gaze unseeingly at the wall. "In truth, Ms. Wendy, I am here to...garner your assistance."
A heart's palpitation of silence. She has never seen him so quick to drop a charade. Or so tired.
Wendy Darling blinks, then pulls in her surprise. "And what possible assistance could I offer you?"
From the corner of her eye she sees one thick finger tracing the swirls of embroidering on the sleeve of his bicep. A nervous tick, she realizes with some shock. When he glances back and catches her looking, he casually unfolds his arms and reaches for the handle of his teacup to raise it to his lips. He cradles the fine porcelain without a trace of roughness - a gentleman pirate indeed. When he speaks, he has ahold of himself again. "Nothing but your skills as a Storyteller, I assure you. You will not even have to travel from your home at all, for I shall be able to come to you here."
This time Wendy cannot hide her surprise, or the hint of a smile, and her eyebrows shoot toward her waved hairline. "It is not your way to make housecalls, Captain. Are...are you shipwrecked in England?"
Hook takes her reaction in with a frown that is only a leapfrog-hop away from sullenness over the rim of his cup, and places it back on the saucer. "It is brave of you to describe it thus. But yes - " his lip curls in mockery " - I am 'shipwrecked' indeed."
Wendy hides her triumphant smirk behind her own tea and asks, "Then tell me how my Stories are expected to assist you, for it has been a long time since I slept in the nursery with my brothers. And, unless I recall incorrectly," she takes a further risk in bluntness, " - the last time I saw you, you were meant to be dead."
Another silence. Her ladies manners had whispered to her (and in the tight-lipped voice of Aunt Millicent) about the rudeness of bringing up a person's own demise, but Aunt Millicent had never been good at instructing her niece on the properness pertaining to Dreams and Illusions. And so, the old ways were, more often than not, the best ways.
A flash of crocodile teeth and Hook chuckles without humor. "Ah, me hearty, that is one thing I do not quite understand meself. 'Twas another portion of the tale I'd hoped ye'd fill in."
Wendy thinks on this, then settles her face into long-practiced non-committance. "I take it then that you survived the encounter. And so you wish for me to continue with Hook's story, is that correct?"
The pirate lord of Neverland inclines his head. Wendy sips at her tea.
"But my dear Captain, I have grown up in the years of your absence. What convinces you that I am still capable of finishing a tale that has already ended?"
Hook's fingers tighten around the cup handle and his eyes turn to hard steel. "There are gaps yet left in your tapestry, Madam. You put the final dash through the end line but failed to write even the first page. For how can Hook End without a Beginning? Once I have both, you have my word I shall quit of you forever."
Wendy stammers under such sudden intensity, thinking briefly back to the last time she took his word, when he sacked the Lost Boys' home. "I...I do not take your meaning..."
"Again, the cruelties of Youth." He sneers like a scar. "You have done me a great disservice, Ms. Wendy. Cutting my eternity short before you completely finished tellin' me tale. I came back because my story is not whole." The teacup rattles ever so slightly, close to the breaking point. For the sake of Mother's last china, Wendy finds herself brave.
"Yes, and you died while I grew up."
Quietly, like a guilty admission with no guilt attached, he says, "I know. And for the sake of my own rest, I request you try and recall yourself as you once were. You owe me that much at least, my Storyteller." He releases the unoffending cup and glides to a standing position, tall as a lighthouse and warning Wendy against the tricky reefs she will find if she digs too deep, comes too close, or refuses his "request". "I will await your decision and I hope, for both our sakes, it comes with haste. And so I bid to good day, Wendy Lady."
And with a slight bow more sardonic than any grand gesture could have hoped to be, he is gone and silently thundering down the hall, leaving Wendy with her tea poised before her breast, staring straight into a doom she does not understand.
For several minutes after his departure, Wendy sits frozen and tries to convince herself that the griefs of her life had finally taken their toll, and that she had but conjured the image of James Hook from her mind. She was not far off the mark in considering this, but in a way she is not yet comfortable recognizing as fact.
Particularly when, as that fact is, Hook is Back.
*The day the first woman joined the English Bar (became a lawyer), a fitting start date for a heroine-centric story. Her name was Ivy Williams.
So I had only ever planned for VIOLET to be a one-shot, but over the past two years I've kept gotten an adamant request every once in a while for a continuation, and yesterday it finally bit me. I'd done research on the timeline and period ages ago, so I dug through me old notebooks and sat down and wrote this all out last night. So yes, leave some reviews, tell me how I'm doing (it takes a while to get back in the swing, I'm sure you know) and to all those who ever reviewed in the past, or followed this story, or followed ME because of this story, I'm sorry to keep you waiting :)
(Leaving for Portland tomorrow, so when I return I might come back and make a few edits, usually I sit and stare at a piece for days tweaking before putting it up!)