In the stories Wendy had told Jane of the Tailor and the Little White Bird, she’d turned Hook from a pirate into a prince, a wicked and cursed one. Petals scattered from the hem of his coat every time he turned, and poisoned blossoms sprang up beneath the heels of his polished boots. He’d used their petals to lure the Little White Bird into a deadly sleep, until the Clever Tailor had woven a net out of every color of thread to trap the prince and save the Bird.

Wendy shakes her head. Her stories seem foolish now, and her actual time with the pirates almost seems like one of them. Were they ever truly in danger? At the time, the threat seemed real. She remembers the sour stink of fear, the way Michael had trembled, pressed against her side as Hook tied them to the mast. John, with his chin raised but his eyes owl-wide behind the gleam of his glasses. For all his bluster, though, Hook had never really been cruel to her or her brothers.

He’d lashed them to the mast, but the bonds hadn’t been tight, and hadn’t he made sure they had tea to drink, and biscuits from the ship’s stores? She’d hated him, but only because she was meant to; he was Peter’s enemy, therefore he was her enemy too. She hadn’t seen it clearly then, but now Wendy can picture the slant of Hook’s shoulders, the lackluster movement of his hand and his hook as he’d secured their bindings. They’d been merely bait, but even Hook must have known that when he came for them Peter would inevitably escape. He’d captured Wendy and her brothers knowing he had nothing to gain, only frightening them, fulfilling the one role Peter designed for him to play.

She wonders—is it that Hook couldn’t hurt them, or he chose not to? How easy would it have been for him to turn his sneering posturing into true violence, taking his impotence against Peter out on them instead? They had been in Neverland, but not of it, not yet. Did its rules still apply, or could he truly have fed them to the monster beneath the waves, or even simply snapped their necks?

Wendy shivers at the thought, caught between horror and sympathy for the man she once hated and feared so much. That heady floral scent she’d always taken for the oil in Hook’s hair, what if it had been something else? A drug, to ease the pain of being trapped here, forced into the role of a villain.