Once Upon a Time (He Sailed the Seven Seas)
His daughter couldn't swim. All he asked for, and she couldn't swim. She lived on a Godforsaken island, and she couldn't swim. She couldn't sail. But she could plunder. And she could plunder well. She could steal, not in secret, like that infernal Jay, but she could march into a shop and take whatever she wanted because all the shop owners were too scared of her, of a girl a third of their age. They didn't know that at home (and how he hated to have one, allocated, run-down home) all she did was scrub the floors and the windows and cook the food because that was all she was good for. And she was a girl. Girls could never be pirates.
The villains could only perform true magick (not the trick Maleficent did with her eyes) once a year, on Samhain. And on that day, he would change her into a poor, lost child, and hope Peter Pan would come to take her (and, by extension, him) away to his new Neverland (they were living in the old one, however strange it may seem). And he never did. Apparently, hurt, abused children on the Isle were not lost children, lost children (boys, why wasn't she just boy?) were bored children with two functioning, good, parents. So Helena would never make it to the New Neverland.
And neither would he.
That didn't stop Captain Hook from trying. Just like the lack of healthy, sanitary water on the Isle didn't stop him from trying to teach Helena to swim, even when her skin cracked open and she bled on her mattress (because she was never good enough for sheets, or anything other than Auradon's leftovers, because that was what they were, leftovers). And if Helena screamed when he pushed her into whatever shallow (or extremely deep) patches of water he could find, well, it was for the "Greater Good".
At least he never questioned her strange alliance (not friendship, never friendship) with Grimhilde's girl- Evie- who was surprisingly good-looking for her age (she was quite a few years older than Helena). He didn't ask where they went whenever Helena was done with her chores, never asked where they 'found' the material Evie used to make those new dresses Helena wore. But he did question it whenever Helena came home with that ditzy smile on her face and her skirt skewed and ruffled like she was some kind of slut. He did question her when he saw lipstick prints on her collarbone, and when she came home in a girl's shirt that definitely wasn't hers, because HOW COULD SHE!? All he asked for was a boy, and if she couldn't achieve that, she would damn well be a proper girl.
So he made her attend lessons with Grimhilde and made sure she went out with boys, like that charming Gaston Jr. or Dimitri Tremaine, and signed her up for Anastasia's School of Dance. He forced her to do this, and still cast spells on her on Samhain, not realising that she had long since grown up in matters of the heart and head, and that was what counted to Peter Pan.
No one was still a child on the Isle of the Lost.
When the brats broke the Isle's barrier, he tried to swim away, but the barrier snapped shut. So he was still stuck, and he'd come so close. And whenever those children that had been raised here came to distribute bread and implement solutions for clean water, he wanted to rip their throats out and make them bleed, because none of the villains were fucking charity cases, and they knew that.
When Mal killed her husband, Captain Hook knew his life was forfeit. His daughter and Queen Evie had always had… a close relationship and their new kings and queens would accept her (as much as villains could accept other villains). He wasn't shocked when they came for him. Not at all. He wasn't shocked when they pushed him into the same water that they pumped out of the Isle. He was shocked when he spied his daughter through the bars of his prison cell, arm in arm with a pretty Asian girl in pink. She was in the dungeon for a reason.
To kill him.
And kill him she did.
(Because maybe Helena Hook couldn't swim, but she could kill a prepubescent boy in green tights.)
(And her father.)