Fishing

Title: Fishing
Pairing: Hook/Wendy, and um, mermaids >__>
Rating: R
Warnings: violence? Scarily unbetaed? Slasher writing het?
A/N: Written for [info]dancing_salome's birthday-- she inspires me with her writing ethic. This incorporates the TNL challenge from eons ago (mentioning leather belts, seaweed, and shadows. dorkily).


Her thoughts are never pure anymore, Wendy notices, and this is perhaps the cruelest of what Hook has done. He is a bewildering man, capable of having tea with her and chatting as if he had not just thrust into her on the bed, her legs bent, her own knees shoved into her breasts in time… cold hook mercifully taken off and almost forgotten until the bed dips enough and it slides down to her cheek, startling her half to death though the captain makes no pause to remove it.

And there her mind goes again, not wandering but quite the opposite—dwelling, dwelling on him even when he has left her alone in his cabin. It’s been a long time since she was shanghaied. Her Neverland adventures with the boys were like a firework, memorable but over in a flash compared to the stretching sea of time she seems to have spent with Hook. No, not even memorable, she decides, as thoughts of Hook invade her every attempt to recall what it was that they did.

She remembers going to the mermaid lagoon—but mostly she remembers Hook’s men, stranded in Neverland even after the boy was dead, even after the island had stopped mourning him and thawed. They had learned they were stranded and were half-crazed with appetites never to be fulfilled, going fishing for creatures of the deep in their desperation…

She remembers in great detail, in fact. How the men unloaded from the longboat, two of them doing their utmost to hold down the lid of the large barrel being hoisted up onto the deck. How it fell, four waiflike monstrous bodies spilling out of it along with a wave of salt water and seaweed like so much afterbirth. Swift and dangerous in the ocean, they seemed hopeless on dry land, flopping about, clumsy, disoriented enough for the men to grab at them.

Not that anything useful could be gotten out of them, even with their clawing hands subdued by leather belts around the wrists. They still had their sharp teeth and unpartable legs, sewn together by nature itself. Hook stood smiling, she remembers, holding her tight by the wrist, the only man with more than a teasing reminder of how it felt to have a real woman sit on his knee, use her mouth on him, part her legs for him to plunder, fearfully loving because there was nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to.

Wendy always shudders to think about what he did next, though it may well have been a kindness to his crew.

There was rowdy shouting. One of the maidens had escaped them, and had slowly made her way toward the side of the ship in hopes of scaling it and returning into her element. She stopped when she espied Hook near her path, and gave him something of a smirk. A challenge that ended up costing her her life.

Wendy remembers how the Captain let go of her arm and grabbed the monster by the hair before she could flip overboard. She remembers how the hook glinted in the sunlight before coming down, probably with incredible speed, but seeming to take a century. She remembers the sight of the scales ripping, the blue blood spraying on his clothes, she remembers screaming, and she remembers how Hook completely ignored her, announcing to the rest of the men that this was the way to get themselves a proper woman out of the sea.

She did not stay to watch what ensued. She remembers coming up to the deck later in the evening, finding only one of them still alive, her sisters raped to death, corpses thrown overboard but huge puddles of discolored blood still decorating the wood. She drew up seawater for the one still living but could not tell if those soulless black eyes were grateful or cursing her for prolonging her misery. The remaining mermaid died the next afternoon and then there was only Wendy on the ship again with a hoard of men only grown more brutal from their brief taste of lustful violence. She clung to Hook more than ever after that day.

And what else was there to remember about the mermaid lagoon? Nothing. She is sure she had visited it with the boys but her mind is all shadows. And just when she feels she might be on the brink of recalling her brothers’ faces, or that flying boy’s name, or how it was that they ever left home in the first place, the Captain enters and her mind is occupied by other thoughts entirely. She must think about pleasing him and ways to make him, in turn, forget how he is isolated in this lonely abandoned nightmare of a world.