Star Mile

Author Notes: Wendy is older now and coming to realize that not everything is as simple as good triumphing over evil. Hook/Adult Wendy, based largely on the book and especially the 2003 film starring Jason Isaacs as Hook. Rated T for language.

I started this story almost 20 years ago and life got in the way, but I've recently decided to come back to it. The first step was to give it a bit of a polish and cleanup, so what's here now is an updated version. The story has not changed, but some of the writing has, hopefully, been improved!

The inclusion of a made up "Indian" tribe is one of the unfortunate parts of Peter Pan. I struggled with how to refer to them here, but since it is not a real tribe and the guidance of indigenous peoples has been to refer to them by their proper tribe, I stuck with indian. I do encourage you to google "native land maps" and check the mapping project, especially if you are in North America.

This story is named after a Joshua Radin song of the same title; it's a lovely song and you should check it out.

Prologue

Wendy Darling was not an ordinary girl. Before her thirteenth year, she had experienced adventures so bold and brilliant one could forgive her for not finding interest in the pursuit of more mundane activities as she grew through her young adulthood and into her early twenties, but mercifully one would not need to forgive anything because Wendy was not so narrow-minded.

Certainly, Neverland and its denizens were one thousand times more exciting and interesting than what she learned in lessons at school or from her peers, and she knew it. That kind of knowledge could be dangerous in the wrong mind. She might have become arrogant and unapproachable. She might have believed that because what she learned in lessons was not as exciting as events in her past, it wasn't worth learning anything new or different. She might have decided nothing was more important than what she already knew, and that the only thing for her to do was to relive it over and over without any thoughts for the future.

She might have, but she didn't, and she was better for it. From the dullest arithmetic lecture to the most thrilling philosophical question, she strived to understand new things outside her own ideas. She was clever enough to understand that learning new things made her stories even better, and, after all, it was her stories about which she cared most. As she grew older and more knowledgeable, her stories got better. They were still filled with the whimsy and imagination of a child, but also carried the weight of experience and thoughtfulness.

As it happened, Wendy spent a lot of time writing her stories in a courtyard at her school. It was a less popular area of the campus because it was far enough away from the dormitory to be inconvenient, but Wendy thought it had the nicest flowers, and the lack of impish girls running though it might be the reason. She found the peace and quiet she needed there, and some of the best things she ever imagined were born in that courtyard.

There were days of endless dreaming about adventures and comedies—even some tragedies. She would compose her stories first in thought, then write them out, clearly and perfectly on the page. There was never a wrong stroke of her pen, never a spare drop of ink, and the pages always stayed crisp and clean. Most of this painstaking work was done for her own sake out of an obligation to neatness that she found within herself, but it did occur to her that it was only polite to make one's stories easy to read should she ever decide to let anyone read them.

Wendy much preferred to tell her stories like the great poets and bards of old. She wanted to be like Homer when he relayed the accounts of Ajax or Achilles or Odysseus. Sadly, as she got older, her audiences grew rarer and rarer. Now that they were nearly done with school and practically ladies, her friends were more interested in other things than they were in magic or pirates or goblins. Wendy did not begrudge them this interest; it was as fair for them to look forward to their futures as it was for her to pine for her adventures. She was also not without interest in a future with a man, but who that man was and when they met was not an urgent need and was of less interest to her than the idea of discovering it all and falling in love because that's what happened to them, not because societal pressure said it was time to couple up.

Once in a while, her friends begged her to regale them with a story of a beautiful princess who won the affection of the noblest prince after some terrifying and almost tragic adventure. She obliged, but it was bittersweet. Part of her still wanted to live forever in that land of Happily Ever Afters, but now that she was older and more accomplished in her talent and understanding, she knew it couldn't always be that way.

Her greatest joy was going home for holidays and seeing her brothers, who were on the fast track to growing up themselves (almost too fast, Wendy thought). They would always ask to hear her newest plot invention and sometimes they wanted old favorites, but she liked that just as well when it was for them. The three of them—Wendy, John, and Michael—had been on their own adventures together in Neverland and met their adopted brothers, The Lost Boys. No matter how grown up they got, they would always share a special connection.

When they were all home, they would go up to the nursery at night and sit at the window, staring out at the sky and talking of Peter Pan and the mermaids and Indians. They would mention the pirates sometimes, but the thought of Captain Hook always caused a shudder to run through their little huddle. For the boys, it was because they were still terrified of him and the memories of near death at his hand were too frightening to deal with. For Wendy, it was more complicated.

"After all," she would tell herself, "perhaps there is some redemption for Hook." Or there would have been, if he hadn't died. What made Wendy shudder at his memory was not the distress in which he had placed her, but the barbaric nature of his final moments, during which he maintained every polite formality. Even at the time, despite having been overwhelmed with their victory and cheering, Wendy had felt a heavy weight in her stomach as the captain had disappeared into the snapping jaws of the crocodile. It had been no trouble to ignore it when she was twelve; she didn't even understand it. She often featured him in her imagined stories now, but he was somehow different in her eyes. He was still a pirate, still a killer, still trying to destroy Peter Pan, but there was a new facet to him in her imagination. He was noble somehow; he was fair.

She never exactly considered the idea that maybe—probably not, but maybe—Hook was not totally in the wrong for his bloodlust against Peter. She didn't know the events that led to their great feud, and now that she was older and thought about things more critically, she had to admit that it might not be as simple as Hook being completely evil and Peter being completely good. Another thing she rarely acknowledged was some of the slightly unnerving characteristics of her childhood hero and love. None of this was ever discussed during her holidays with John and Michael or the others because she knew they wouldn't understand.

If Wendy was just a little bit simpler, if she was a little less extraordinary, then she wouldn't be troubled. She would remember that Hook had tried to kill her and her brothers, that Peter Pan saved them, and that would be all. There would be no nagging guilt or curiosity about motives and actions. She would divide them into two separate categories like in her older stories of Good triumphing over Evil.

But Wendy was no ordinary girl.