Chapter 6 #2
“With Peter Pan?” He huffed a laugh. He trilled two notes with his metal hook.
“That boy wouldn’t know what to do with the Madame of Port Royale if she spread her legs and offered him a free night’s stay.
And if you’re asking about my twin, well—far be it from him to ever do anything untoward.
No, I assure you, she is quite safe with him.
He is, after all, the perfect gentleman. ”
“And I’m safe with you, because…we’re on the same side?” Sasha combed her hands through her blonde hair, scratching at her scalp as she tried to think things through. “I’m your sidekick.”
“Or henchman. Depends on where and when we go.” He looked off thoughtfully for a moment. “Sometimes, I am truly alone. Other times, I am merely a concept—a force of nature, or a human emotion. We’ll have to get creative if you decide to take us through stories like those.”
“Give me an example?”
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Hook laughed, a quiet and sadistic noise. “Though watching that kind of mayhem is always good for a lark. You want gruesome and problematic? Nothing quite like child mutilation to wake you up in the morning.”
“Mr. Slugworth is the villain in that story, though.”
“No, he isn’t.” Hook rolled his eyes as he continued to play through the melancholy piece. “And you call yourself a librarian. Slugworth might be a reason why Wonka has pathos and resorts to slave labor to run his factory, but he is hardly the real villain.”
She went to argue about the slave labor, but then she remembered about an edit that turned the Oompa Loompas from “African Pygmies" into the strange orange-and-green monstrosities more well known from the film. She winced. “Well, we are in Peter Pan, right now. We’ll have to deal with the, um, locals, at some point, won’t we?”
“Classic literature is rife with landmines of such a nature. We’ll have to deal with such things as we come across them.
I’ll leave that up to your creative liberties to reinterpret.
That's hardly my area of expertise.” He lifted up his hook to shake it at her.
“And don’t change the subject when you’re about to lose a debate. Bad form.”
He really was both Hook and Vile at the same time. “All right. Well, if Mr. Slugworth isn’t the villain of the story, who do you argue is?” She walked up to the edge of the harpsichord to watch him as he played.
He moved on to a second piece, no less melancholy than the first. “To find the true antagonist of any story, you have to find the underlying theme. What is the theme of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I argue it is a ham-fisted lesson about the dangers of greed and excess.”
Pausing, she shrugged. “All right. So the real villain is ‘greed.’ And I’ll argue that Mr. Slugworth is the person in that story that’s meant to represent that.”
“But he never takes the stage. We only ever hear of him suffering in the wings—and even then, only in the novel. In the film, he’s some kind of, what, pathetic double actor?” With an incredulous snort, he slammed his hand down on the keys, hitting a discordant chord. “Plot hole!”
That made her laugh. “Not a fan of the film?”
“I enjoy it greatly! But that makes no sense.” He resumed playing. “Plot holes are like headaches to something like me. They are simply something we endure.” He paused. “But we won’t be visiting Wonka, I’m afraid.”
“Not that I’m arguing, but why not?”
Hook paused, the music hanging in the air for a moment. “The matter is a bit complex. Let’s simply blame it on the snozzberries.*”
Sasha blinked. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
There had definitely just been something that happened. It was like there was a—she didn’t know how to describe it. A hitch? A flicker? Like the lights had gone off and on again. “Never mind.” She shook her head. “I’m just tired.”
The smile on his face told her that it was probably something. But it also had a slight edge to it that said that even if he knew what it was, he wasn’t going to say. So she let it go.
Walking over to the large diamond-paned window that stretched across the back of his quarters, she looked out at the bay where the ship was moored.
It was gorgeous—a tropical paradise. A place she’d kill to go on vacation to, but she was here trying to dodge getting murdered and rewrite a classic into something “unique.”
“So,” she started, crossing her arms over her chest. “If we manage to kill Peter Pan instead of him killing you—feed the kid to the crocodile, does that count as unique?”
“No, that’s just called lazy writing. ‘Move Mordor closer to the Shire’ or ‘Make Midsummer Night’s Dream a Tragedy’ doesn’t do anything interesting, it just makes the book shorter, dear.
‘The villain wins, tragic ending’ isn’t unique for some genres.
” A creak of wood, and she glanced over to see him get up from the bench of the instrument. He walked over to another cabinet.
He was a foreboding figure, even dressed down and doing something mundane like opening up a cabinet reaching for an antique glass bottle. He made for a perfectly nightmarish but sharply beautiful Captain Hook.
And she couldn’t help but stare.
Vile-as-Hook took the glass bottle—she thought they might be called onion bottles—and uncorked it. Pouring a dark liquid into two thick crystal glasses, he popped the cork back into the neck.
“So an unexpected rewrite to the story isn’t unique enough?”
“I’m afraid not. You’ll need to do something more interesting than surface-level rewrites to satisfy the criteria.” Hook walked up to her, one goblet resting in the bend of his hook and the other in his flesh-and-blood hand. He extended his hand to her, offering her a drink.
She took it. Sniffing the drink revealed it to be brandy. Yeah. She could use a damn drink. “Is this real? Will it work?” She took a sip.
“If you want it to. That’s how fiction works, darling.” He took a sip of his own. His smile was all the more devilish with the trademark Captain Hook goatee. But he wore it very, very well, she decided.
Images flashed through her mind, unbidden, of him fisting her hair in his hand, wrenching her head back, threatening her with that jagged piece of metal—handsome and terrifying, powerful and seductive—
Slamming the door on those thoughts, she balled them up and tried to throw them into a wood chipper in her mind. God, she really needed to get laid more. Stop thirsting after the creepy murder pirate! Wait.
Fuck.
He can read your thoughts.
Chugging the brandy, her cheeks were hot as she walked over to the bar to pour herself a second one. Really, it was an excuse to hide her obvious blush. But it was too late. “Sorry.”
That sent him into a peal of deep laughter. “For what?”
“You can read my thoughts.”
“Only when we’re outside of stories. Whatever just happened is your own business. But now I’m deeply curious. What did you think to yourself that was so scandalous you had to apologize?”
“Nothing.” It was a bad lie. A really bad one.
“Hmm.” He was suddenly right behind her, his presence at her back causing her to jolt in surprise. “Really? Nothing at all?”
When the point of his hook scraped along the edge of her jawline, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear, she shuddered.
It was an open door. An invitation. She wondered—what would he do, if she turned around and—no, no, no. He’s trying to kill you and your sister. He’s trapped you here. He’s an eldritch monster. It doesn’t matter how hot he is as a pirate.
At least her thoughts were her own, now. Or at least, that’s what he was telling her. It was possible he was lying. But it didn’t matter either way. She wasn’t going to take the bait. “Nope. Nothing.”
“Pity.” He was gone as quickly as he had been there. “The matter remains—we cannot simply kill Pan to make for an interesting story. It’s cheap. Uninteresting. Shock value. No, we must play within the larger narrative at work. It must be written in. Work with the themes.”
Okay, fine. Sure. That made sense, she guessed.
Trying to focus her thoughts back to the more important matter at hand, she walked over to a bench by one wall and sat down, needing to feel something stable underneath her.
She sipped the brandy that time. “So, all right. Peter Pan is about childhood innocence versus growing up and the fear of death. Captain Hook is afraid of death, in the form of the crocodile with a literal ticking clock in its stomach.”
“Mmhm.” He was standing at the window, gazing out over the bay.
“I’d say we force Peter Pan to grow up, but that’s been done.” She sighed.
“Now that film is fantastic, and gloriously underrated.” Hook chuckled. “Even if I was annoyed at the ending, as I usually am.”
“It’s one of my favorites.” Pulling her legs up onto the bench, she crossed them underneath her. “Talk about a movie that got the point of the original and played within the themes without feeling the need to break anything. And I like the ending.”
When he shot her a look, she only smiled sweetly back at him. If he was going to drop her into holes and give her a hard time, she was going to return the favor. Especially if she knew he wasn’t going to murder her since she was on his “side.”
“The one thing I appreciate about it the most was that they felt no need to give me some sodding weepy melodramatic backstory.” Hook grimaced as if it made his stomach churn.
Curious. “I mean, I don’t disagree, I don’t think all villains need a tragic backstory. But I thought you’d want to be understood. Empathized with. Have people on your side. Y’know, redemption in the eyes of the audience.”
The expression of sheer and total disgust and horror on his face—like she’d just recommended eating a baby, though she suspected that would actually get less of a reaction out of him—was so overblown it was comical.
Laughing, she shook her head. “Okay, okay. Clearly that’s not what this is about. Sorry.”
“Redemption.” He spat the word out like it was cancerous.
“Why would I ever want something like that? I am what I am, my dear! I am a monster. And I embrace that. Whether or not it is necessary for the audience or the reader to understand why that iteration of myself became the monster is up to the needs of the story. Sometimes, yes. Wonderful. But this—?”
He gestured in front of him with his hook, as if referencing the world outside the ship. “This sickening need to make me sympathetic in every new piece of media is a waste of good villainy! It’s missing the entire point of what I’m meant to be! Now that is goddamn tragic, if you ask me.”
“Noted. Killing the hero won’t count. Check. Don’t needlessly try to redeem the villain. Check.” She chuckled into her glass of port as she took another sip. It was helping to settle her nerves. And made him a little easier to talk to.
“Thank you. No one likes being proselytized to.” He went to the bar to top off her glass and pour himself a second. “And I receive enough half-assed lectures from my brother.”
After replacing the bottle of brandy on the bar, he sat down next to her on the bench. “They will be going to visit the mermaids.”
“That’s where the story really kicks off, doesn’t it? You attack them there, you injure Pan, he almost drowns…and I forget what happens after that.” It’d been a long time since she’d read the book, to be fair.
“Mmhm.” He sipped his glass.
“What if we just…don’t go?”
“Do nothing?”
“Exactly. Don’t ambush them. Don’t start the story.
Just stay here, drink, play pirate games, or whatever the hell you weirdos do when you’re not being pirates.
” She stared down into her glass. What did fictional characters do when they weren’t on the page?
Probably like characters in video games, she assumed.
They just blinked out of the console’s memory and didn’t exist.
“So your solution to a unique story is no story at all.” Tone flat, he stared at her in disbelief. “Genius. Utter genius. Pulitzer Prize winner in the making, you are. This story intentionally left blank.”
“I’m trying to come up with an idea! I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“This is precisely why I keep telling Virtue to stop feeding you this stupid hopeless line about escaping with both of your lives intact. It won’t happen. Because as charming as this conversation has been, I’m getting bored, and I’m about to jump to the next chapter.”
“What do you mean?” She furrowed her brow. Chapter?
Raising his flesh-and-blood hand, he smiled. “We will control the vertical. We will control the horizontal.”
He snapped his fingers.
* Firstly; Not even villains tangle with copyright law. Secondly; Search the phrase “My Uncle Oswald + snozzberries” Hopefully, I have ruined your day just a little. -V