Chapter Text
Peter Pan wants a mother; Captain Hook wants a daughter.
She looks between them, and can’t fathom the difference. Shadows converge, lines blur. She sees across the expanse of time, and they are one: Peter, a young Hook, as ruthless in play as he will one day be in battle; Hook, an aged Peter, hardened and cruel.
Neither sees her as she is. They demand she cook and clean: Pan, with the careless expectation of boyhood; Hook, with the overbearing demand of a father.
Pan plays at giving her the world, a choice, offers her servitude with flourish and a great grin on a silver platter he calls freedom. At least with Hook, there are no illusions: she obeys, or she dies. She can work with that. At least with Hook, she has the chance to earn her freedom, through her own carefully cultivated cunning.
She takes the choice she is given, which is no choice at all, tears it from the seams at both ends, wraps it round her finger, and claims it as her own. She latches it to her belt and vows to weave a new story from the thread, vibrant and bright and hers, as she parries and stabs, scrubs and swashes, and sails the seven seas.
**
“I should like more girls on my ship, Peter Pan.”
The late Saturday afternoon sun beats down on them where they lie on their backs in the sand, waves lapping their feet greedily, hands over their eyes.
“Oh, Wendy; I would give you Hook’s head for your supper if it would please you, but girls are not meant for pirating and adventuring. They should faint at the life you lead on your pirate ship. They could not bear it.”
Wendy shoots upright, waits ‘til he turns his head to her and squints at her behind his hand, fixes him with the full power of her regal glare.
“Tut, tut, Peter,” she says, and the sun around her black locks is a golden crown. “Have I taught you nothing? And you wonder why I’ve had my fill of you. You have your Lost Boys. Now, I shall gather my own family of Lost Girls to love and protect. If you deny me this request, we shan’t play with you any longer. We hardly need you, but who else do you have that can match us?”
**
When all’s said and done, she takes what’s left of Hook’s head and burns it to ash herself.
**
Wendy invites girls who have been hurt, been downtrodden and abused; girls unloved, girls pitied and hated and feared, girls without a home; girls with beautiful dark skin like her own, disabled girls, trans girls. She brings them all under her gentle wing, tells them stories and bakes their favourite dishes; teaches them to read, to fight, to dance, to swear and stump; fisticuffs and sword fights, sailing and navigation. All the things a good pirate needs. And they all of them become her sisters, daughters, friends, and her love for them knows no bounds.
Yet none so treasured as her dearest Green-Eyed Sue.
Her name is Suzanne, and she signs her contract Green-Eyed Sue without thought or hesitation, as though she’s spent her life dreaming of this day.
She takes to the sword quicker than the others, like she were born with a sword in each hand, parries and thrusts with grace, skill, and a playful glint in her eye.
Green-Eyed Sue wears her dark hair in a single tight, neat braid down her back, which she chops off with a rapier two days after she arrives, leaving uneven, short-cropped hair that blows in the breeze like flames.
“I always wanted to be rid of the damned thing,” she says. “I never thought I could.”
“Here, you can do anything,” Wendy says.
Sue’s knees are scabbed, a black and blue mess of tissue and bone. Freckles paint her brown cheeks like a star map, and Wendy reaches calloused fingers forward to trace the way home: second star to the right, and straight on ‘til morning.
Sue quirks her lips, questioning and bemused. She moves Wendy’s hand down for a playful kiss, bends over in a mocking bow. “My lady,” she says, and Wendy thinks she’s never seen a girl so beautiful. She thinks she could spend her eternal young womanhood stargazing in those sea-green eyes.
Wendy is a Pirate Queen, Admiral of the Fae fleet; she rules the seas with an iron fist and a gentle word. She could take the world, if she wished, and she thinks she’d like to give it to Sue.
**
The decision to leave is unexpected.
“Come with me,” she says with wild eyes, arms wide, and a star-shining smile.
“There is nothing there for me.”
Wendy reaches, takes Sue’s hand in hers. “There is everything there for you. There is me. We shall be together for always, just as we’ve sworn. We’ll grow old together. Life shall be our greatest adventure.”
“How could any adventure be greater than this? This is the only place we are free.“
**
Wendy will not be persuaded to stay.
“I’ll miss you, dearest one,” she says.
“I’ll ne’er forgive you leaving me, Wendy Darling.” (and it’s always been a pet name, but Sue crosses her arms as she speaks, turns away with a set jaw and hard eyes, and this time, Wendy thinks perhaps her beloved speaks only her name).
Wendy graces her cheek with one last tender kiss, and hopes that one day she will.
**
When she is grown and married, she sits her daughter on her knee like she used to her brothers, and tells her the adventures of Pirate Queen Red Jill and her beloved First Mate Lady Green-Eyed Sue, who ruled the seas and commanded the Fae army with iron fists and warm hearts. She tells how they never failed in their duty to do battle with the dastardly and cruel boy Peter Pan, who stole boys and girls from their beds in the dead of night. She tells her about Neverland and Tinkerbell, Lost Girls and Lost Boys, and ticking clocks.
**
“I’ve come to take your daughter away, if she so chooses it.”
Sue sits cross-legged in her windowsill, black captain’s hat in her lap, and Wendy shouldn’t be surprised to see her, but her lips part and her hand goes to her chest just the same. She never forgot, but all those adventures had begun to feel like a dream, their edges faded.
She is smaller than Wendy remembers, scrawny and fragile, all freckles and sand-covered wild curls. Her brown skin and tattered clothes are grey with salt. Green eyes shine ferocious as the sea. Wendy closes her eyes, smells sea-salt, hears waves lapping against the sides of her boat, and her heart aches for the home she left, the girl she abandoned.
“Nothing would make me happier, dearest one.”
When Sue is gone with her child, she sits in her windowsill, looks out at the tower, and sobs grief and relief in equal measure down her nightgown. The love of her life is now but a child and she is grown and old; could any fate be crueler? Yet Green-Eyed Sue has forgiven her Captain at last, and takes her daughter as restitution.