A/N: Due to a hectic week here at home and the fact I won't feel that comfortable about going much further into Season 3 without seeing 3x17 and all the delicious details it will give me, there probably won't be an update on this story until next week. I need to slow my posting time. Don't worry. The next six chapters are all written and things are going well, so I expect smooth sailing. Coming up? Hook starts a fight with a tree. You'll find out why.
Everything between leaving the ship and arriving on this beach blurs together, the night too still and heavy to keep one's eyes from scanning the entire place for shadows, both the dependent and independent types.
"We don't have to do it this way." Leave to Regina to break the silence, although in this case he'll thank her for it. It reels one's attention back into the here and now. "I can fix the Jolly Roger. My magic is powerful enough to execute the pirate's plan."
The pirate... He hangs back and takes one more glance at the ship, the feeling that he won't be seeing it for a while growing ever close to a certainty. Swan has distanced herself from the rest, eyes only on what lies ahead, just like the beanstalk. Her mind is hard at work, yet he'd be at a loss if she ended up truly considering Regina's words.
"A sneak attack? Let's not be naïve. Save your magic. We'll need it later because Pan already knows we're here," she says, her calm still intact. Her eyes move along the line they've formed. "It's time to stop running. Gold was right. This land is run on belief. We've all been so busy being at each other's throats to be believers. I was just as wrong as anyone else," she adds, averting her parents' eyes. They lean forward but don't move while she finds words in the sand, either words or courage. "It's time to start believing, not in magic, but in each other."
Then they'll perish, he considers arguing. Her concentration will be wasted on keeping them all in check rather than her son. But then they did band together earlier...and for his part he'll behave, will follow her around this nightmarish place without complaint if it will result in Henry's recovery.
"You want to be friends?" Regina asks, and he hears just the hint of hopefulness in her voice, that maybe it wouldn't be too far out of the realm of possibility. "After everything that's happened-"
"I don't want or expect that," she says, shaking her head. "I know there's a lot of history here, and a lot of hate."
No more from his end, never again.
"Actually, I quite fancy you from time to time when you're not yelling at me." It's the most impatient glare he's ever received, but he deserves it. With a slow blink, she switches her eyes over towards the others.
"We don't need to be friends. What we need to know is the only way to get Henry back is cooperation."
"With her?" David blurts out, done rubbing his temples and, Killian presumes, considering himself patient enough to hear the idea to now bring some "sense" into the equation. Although, to be fair, he thinks, Regina's plagued their family for longer than Emma had even been alive, and if he were David, his patience might have run its course, too. "With him?"
Oh, well that's just a fine thing to say to your ride over here in the first place...
"No, Emma, we have to do this the right way."
Yes, he sniffs, because Pan has in his possession a guide to how to kidnap children and fight off anyone mad enough to try to get them back.
"No, we don't," Swan almost snaps. "We just need to succeed, and the way we do that is by just being who we are—a hero, a villain, a pirate...it doesn't matter which because we're going to need all those skills whether we can stomach them or not!" She's right, the practicality of her words taking precedence even over this lighter...absurdly lighter...feeling floating around in his head and his chest that she differentiated between a villain and a pirate, that somewhere in her mind, even if it's in the darkest, most neglected corner, she sees him in a grayer hue than the woman who both cursed her family and raised her son.
"And what's your skill, Savior?" Regina tosses at her. For one moment that lasts longer than he feels it should have, he sees her fist clench. The faintest sneer washes over her face. But she inhales, and whoever she was before the petty question returns.
"I'm a mother, and now I'm also your leader, so either help me get my son back or get out of the way." She doesn't wait for a response, a far cry from the woman he'd seen cow down and try to make peace through self-deprecation back outside the eatery in Storybrooke his first night there. Any animosity for the circumstances her parents harbor is as if it never existed. They both beam with pride and follow her into the brush with weapons at the ready. It feels fun, almost, charging in with them on a mission. He throws Regina a little nod, prompting her out of her sulky position, and wonders if Pan has ever seen anything like Swan in his life.
He allows Regina to bring up the rear, recalling the last time she was behind him resulted in a near-lethal run-in with Maleficent, so instead he busies himself with becoming reacquainted with the terrain. Much of Neverland looks the same to a novice, but although its jungle often feels endless, it eventually gives way to mountains capped with snow, forests so thick their canopies obscure the sky, and lagoons so serene and lush it's tempting to stay and just sit and breathe in one in spite of the mermaids retiring there on occasion to sun bathe and comb out their hair.
Henry won't be in any of those places. Pan will have taken him somewhere more remote, made camp in some hidden clearing, probably surrounded by as much dreamshade as possible. That's what worries him more than the wild hogs or the shape-sifting sirens. Neverland's darker than it's ever been before and so the thorns will be even easier to bump into at any time on this trek.
"Hook, come up here. I need you."
There won't be much he can provide her from memory without the aid of a map, but he's so tired of disappointing her. She's too used to disappointment and low morale is not something she can afford here.
"Any ideas?" she asks.
"He'll keep him in the jungle, to be certain. He's the most hidden away that way." He closes his eyes briefly, the lay of the land reentering his mind section by section. "There's a ridge, one of the highest points on the island without venturing into the mountains. Lookout Point, creatively. That should give us some indication of where Pan's been, is, if we're lucky."
"How far is it from where we are?"
"Not far. Come. Follow me."
David squeezes between them up to the front and begins hacking away at the vines. Well, let him, he decides. Someone will have to do it anyway.
"What's happening? Where are we going?" Regina all but pushes past Snow.
"Place called Lookout Point," Swan says, glancing downward. He follows her eyes until he sees Regina's...very pointy boots. "You going to be okay to walk a while?"
Rolling her eyes, the queen lifts one leg after the other and taps the heels of her boots, extending the hell out into a rounder, thicker bottom. She smirks at Emma and, for once, Emma smirks back.
"Good to see you know how to 'rough it.' Let's go."
It occurs to him that Pan will have remembered the ridge, which will be unfortunate indeed since one can't see the full scope of the island otherwise, unless one braves the steep mountains or knows how to fly. Minutes into the walk, a faster pace set now that some are more magically-suited for the exertion, he feels the incline. It helps to serpentine, but the foliage is too compact.
"The ridge is just a few hundred paces up ahead," he calls back to the others.
"Do you really think we're going to be able to see Pan's hideout?" Swan calls back.
"From there, we should be able to see everything, including where he's keeping your son." He looks back to gauge the incline. Steeper than before, everyone looking smaller.
"You know I could have just poofed us up here in an instant," Regina grumbles, and if anything will try his patience about this whole endeavor, it will be grumbling. Sorry, Your Highness, that you have run out of lackeys to go find your own son for you. He will give her reasoning only once, and that should be plenty.
"Where? Have you any idea what's up here or anywhere?" "Poof" them right into the coils of a python. "There are dangers all about. Only I can guide us past them."
"He's right. Hook's lived here before. If he says hiking up is the best way, then we listen," Swan says with a little shrug. He can't disappoint her, and he can't leave Henry here. The exact reasons for Pan doing what he does escape adult thought, but he's never had to seek out children before. Not like this, anyway. Children from various lands learn varying stories, stories of a land that promises fun and freedom if only they will let go of what they know to reach it. That it ends badly, always, and the pitiable creatures were all but tricked into it, but that's how Pan has always operated before, on trickery and deception, not using others to steal away a child. The only, only, solace he can find in the horror that Henry is an anomaly is that Pan won't kill him right away. Whatever he wants with him, he could have killed him before even leaving Storybrooke if that was the goal.
And he wouldn't wish the pain of having a loved one killed in Neverland on anyone.
The moonlight catches some bramble and thorns up ahead. Ah, the start of the dreamshade. He lets out a groan. That will slow their pace. David moves to slash at them.
"No," he orders, catching his arm, only to be rebuffed. Stubborn ass... "No!"
"I can handle a couple of thorns!"
"That's dreamshade." He can't even look away from it, the inky poison dribbling off the points too thick to even resemble dew. It reminds him of when he once saw a young milkmaid drop her pitcher and shower a few bushes with cream. "It's not the thorns you have to worry about. It's the poison they inject you with. This plant is the source of the toxins I used on the Dark One."
"The poison that almost killed Gold?" Swan asks, holding up the lantern. She and her mother wear the same leery expression.
"Indeed. I used a concentrated dose. In its natural form death would be much slower and far more painful." He scans around for an opening, settling on slicing through the weeds with dying heather to his right. It won't take but a few steps to avert the poison. "I suggest we go this way."
"We'll go this way." David points with his sword to the same surroundings, only to their left, and for once he's glad to see Regina rolling her eyes. At least one other finds it irritating, displeasing company as she is. Sighing, Snow and Emma follow her.
"Your father's a distrustful fellow," he can't help but note.
"He's just not used to working with the bad guys," she says, a tilt of her head and one eye on the path before them indication she doesn't quite share David's sentiment.
"I can assure you on this island I am not the bad guy."
"Yeah, well, Pan's not supposed to be one either." She moves along, nonplussed at the very idea of Pan as anything besides a ruthless, unscrupulous hellion. Surely Neal warned her not to listen to whatever charms Pan throws at their world to entice the children to come. Logic dictated that at some point any whimsical stories would evolve into frightening cautionary tales, Pan not unlike the monster that lurks beneath every child's bed.
"What possibly gave you that idea?"
"Every story I ever heard as a child." This tone of hers, it conjures up the notion of her, smaller, being whisked away to Neverland even though Pan seems to prefer boys. Having no one to love her or protect her for so long, it wouldn't have been too far out of the realm of possibility.
"Well, they got it all wrong. Pan is the most treacherous villain I've ever faced." Rumpelstiltskin included, he refuses to admit out loud, even to her. Dark One, certainly, but child catcher, never. Gods, stories of Pan being good and virtuous and Neverland a paradise...no wonder she had heard of Captain Hook, he thinks, smiling. "Tell me something, love."
She stops, giving him time to catch up to her.
"In these stories, what was I like?" She rolls her eyes one of two ways, he notices, sincere frustration and this one, finding something amusing. Wouldn't that be a lovely thing for those lips to confess—a young and innocent fancy to him when she thought him fictitious. "Other than a villain. Handsome, I gather?" She's looking down at the ground...good sign...but her eyebrows fly up.
"If waxed mustaches and perms are your thing..."
She continues the hike, leaving him to wonder if these occasional bursts of her seeming to talk of an alternate universe will ever become a thing of the past.
"I take it from your tone, perms are bad?"
She doesn't answer him, no time considering her father calls up from the summit. He catches up and gazes out on what appears to be a labyrinthine deathtrap even to him; he can't imagine what new eyes make of it. Pan did like to camp a good distance from the springs, he recalls, squinting and stretching his neck. One of his favorite games, ordering a Lost Boy to go get some water and then stalk him like prey and "thin him out" if he didn't do it in a timely-enough fashion. He retrieves his spyglass.
"Pan's lair should be just right..."
"Where? All I see is jungle," Regina waits, looking ready to stamp her foot. He opens it with his mouth and peers out, agreeing with her in regards to the vastness of the Dark Jungle. The boy preferred hollow trees, only about five altogether large enough for him and his followers to slide down into the underground. Now...
"It's...uh, grown so much since I last stepped foot in Neverland." Bloody hell, can't do anything good just once? Fate should grant him this one, a boy's well-being at stake, after all.
"So this nature hike was for nothing."
He waits for it, Emma's, Swan's exasperation, maybe an accusation of posturing with a dash of "why aren't you better than this" thrown in, but she doesn't open her mouth.
"Hook may have led us astray," David begins, and he just about can't bear this. He won't keep her from her son again, won't, and yet he does anyway. "But at least we're in a good position to start combing the jungle."
"Not exactly. The Dark Jungle's the last place you want to set foot. We'll have to go around it." They can search the fields, mazes of tall grass the smaller children like to get lost in...and then scream for Pan to end the game and fish them out. It's unlikely he's keeping Henry in the center of the jungle anyway, he thinks. Too many dangers all too willing to rip Pan's newest prize into shreds. But remote and hidden away, of course. Going around the Dark Jungle could take months if they plan on leaving no stone unturned. "In order to do that, we're going to need our strength. I suggest we make camp."
"You want to sleep while my son is out there suffering?" Regina bellows.
"If we want to live long enough to save the boy..." Emma's face closes itself off to him and to everyone right now, her unreadable expression unknowingly revealing her deepest fears. "Yes."
It escaped him at some point that Snow isn't quite a stranger when it comes to surviving the wilderness. She builds shelters faster than the rest of them, humming to herself as she hovers between assisting David and supervising Emma's work. It's an evil thought, but if Henry were with them and they were all here for some different purpose, the princess might consider it prime family bonding time. She brushes away one last section of leaves before surveying the camp.
"Well, as long as there isn't a hurricane or anything like that, these should hold up," she says, her mouth moving like she planned to say more. He raises an eyebrow at her wringing her hands. "Before we all turn in...bathing might not be such a bad idea."
"Oh, good, spa treatment before getting my beauty sleep," Regina mumbles.
"You laugh, but we need to stay as dry and clean as we can." For all the fretting motherhood and, he supposes, grandmother-hood, adds, he rather likes Snow when she can demand one to listen without raising her voice. "We don't have a lot of sets of clothes and as Emma said earlier, you need to save your magic for times we need it. Also, if anyone has a scratch or a cut from the hike, it would be better to look at it right away than let it fester and turn into something we really won't have time to deal with later."
Folding her arms, Regina sighs.
"Fine. Ladies first then?"
Emma's been terribly quiet, scarcely a word even when learning how to build the shelters in the first place. She jerks her head around every so often in search of a bodiless noise. Not used to the crying, he thinks. The others remain oblivious to it, which makes sense. Regina's mother had rather the exact opposite problem of abandoning her daughter and, while he doesn't know much about Snow or David's upbringing, he doubts royalty could just abandon their children and be discreet about it.
"There's a pond about fifty paces in that direction," he says, finishing the bottom layer of his makeshift cot.
"Fresh water?" Snow asks.
"It's all fresh water inland, milady."
Emma follows her mother and Regina, winding around one more time like someone called her name.
"Are you cut anywhere?" David asks him, setting down one more armload of firewood in the center of camp.
"No. You?" He pays little attention to David shaking his head, too busy rolling his eyes at what needs to come out of his mouth next. "It'll be best to not wander too far off alone. Pan seems to be a believer in safety in numbers."
"If you need someone to sing you a song so you can relieve yourself, you're just out of luck," is David's reply. His expected reply. "You can take the first watch, too. If we're ambushed, you'll be the only one to not lead us running blindly into just some other trap."
"That was my intention." A thought hits him that it might be amusing to toy with the man a little and ask if he's sure the nefarious pirate won't just slit all their throats in their sleep, but now is not the time, and he most certainly does not want to share his watch with the prince.
"And..." David marches from one end of the camp to a deer-made path woven into the jungle just out of the clearing. "That's where your post is going to be. I'll take the one after you." It's about as far from the rest of the blankets and mats as can be.
The infernal crying teases him, a wail fading out to almost nothingness only for an unrestrained sob to take its place. There's no way to really mark time in a place where time does not exist, so he'd started counting in his head to distinguish minutes from just endless night, but that had grown too tedious. He's decided he will just keep his watch until his body feels ready to plop over and then he'll wake the prince.
"Hey! Hey, wake up! Guys!"
He leaps to his feet, hand on his sword. He knew it—he knew two should have kept the same watch, one at each end and now it's too late. He tramps through some of the tall grass only to return to David and Snow rubbing their eyes and staggering to their feet while Swan rouses Regina, nudging her in the arm. Her eyes dart up at him and she sprints towards him, holding some parchment or something in her hand.
"Pan was here," she pants, stopping right in front of him, and he's speechless. Pan, in and out. Appearing only to her. She holds up the parchment as everyone else gathers around them. "He gave me this. He said it was a map to Henry, only that...nothing's going to show up on it..." she trails off, shaking her head at herself. "Nothing's going to show up on it unless I 'stop denying who I really am,'" she says in one breath.
"Pan confronted you?" Snow breathes. "Why didn't you wake one of us?"
"Not for lack of trying..." He can almost see the words "I can take care of myself" on the tips of her lips, but she clamps them shut and turns to him instead. "Is it legit?"
"He is fond of puzzles," he says, peering over at the map, blank, sure enough. "Although he's just as fond of luring someone away from camp only to capture them." He barely hears David state he and Snow will be scouting the area for evidence of any such trap in place since Swan is reading him, staring at him with that hard, deciphering look in spite of no lie having been told.
"I'll tell you the next time I see him," she murmurs, holding the map with both hands and ambling over to a rock. She stretches it out and smooths the creases as if there are actual words on it. Squatting down, she holds her head in her hands as she collects her thoughts, so he will do the same, sitting down while Regina paces.
"He so likes his games," he says out loud. Denying who she really is...the object of the game as cryptic as the rules.
"What game? There's nothing there," Regina says after walking behind Emma and glancing at it herself.
"If he said there's a map on this parchment, then there is."
"Great," Emma huffs. "So if I just stop denying who I really am, whatever that means, then we'll be able to read this thing."
"But how do we know Pan won't use it to lead us straight into a trap?" Regina counters.
"Because he doesn't need to. This whole island's his bloody trap." He'll grant Regina credit where credit is due, but the woman over-complicates everything, not exactly a tactician. She forgets villainy can be so ridiculously easy, requiring very little action at all. For example, he thinks, standing up, killing her before this is all over sounds easier and easier with each passing second.
"There's no sign of him anywhere." David returns, sword and lantern out, and Snow catches up to him with her bow and quiver.
"Any luck with the map?" she asks.
"Don't hold your breath."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Swan snaps at her.
"Don't you see what he's doing? Every second we spend talking about this is another second we're not looking for my son!"
"You got a better idea?" It's nearly a growl and he sighs. If Emma Swan truly loses her patience with them, it's all over.
"Magic."
Oh, bloody hell, this again? David's exhale is loud enough to rustle the branches and Swan looks about ready to bang her forehead into the broad side of her rock. Childish Regina—inexplicably spoiled for such a love-deprived person. He begins to wonder if they'd have fared better if she'd been the one to leave and Rumpelstiltskin were with them now. "If there's a lock on there, I'll find a way around it."
Emma slams her hand over the map.
"Pan said it had to be me."
"I'd listen to Emma, love. Breaking Pan's rules would be unwise." Who knows what the demon child has in mind for just this occasion?
"Sadly, I agree with the pirate," David says...and he supposes he should fall on his knees and thank the Good Prince for being of one mind with his lowly self for one brief shining moment.
"I'm winning you over. I can feel it," he shoots over in his direction, enjoying the disgust mounted on David's face.
"And your magic doesn't exactly have a gentle touch, Regina," Snow adds, and this seems to give the queen something to consider.
"Use it on the map and it might blow up in all our faces," David says.
"Well that's a risk I'm willing to take," she growls back at them, hand still on her hip.
"Well I'm not." Emma stands, her tone as soft and yet commanding as Snow's was earlier with the shelters. "If I'm the one who's supposed to figure out this thing, I need to do what Pan said."
"Great..."
"She'll get there!" Snow exchanges a look with her daughter, the latter beginning to get swept away with doubt. "Hey. Don't give up. If he's playing a game, you can win."