SAWBONES

Disclaimer: Characters and setting created by JM Barrie for his novel Peter Pan. I write these stories purely for the love of it and gather no financial gain from them.

Author's Note: The fact that this story got written at all is purely due to my husband's mention of the fact that slicing off a human hand is not as simple as the movies and books make it seem. (Yes, I have the kind of husband who knows these things. Don't ask.) Barrie says right hand...for some reason, this time, I went with left.

The arm of a fully grown man is not made of marshmallow and straw: it is not some flimsy thing which, if pressed, will snap like a green stick from the hedge.

A man's forearm is made of bone, sinew, nerve and tendon: it has weight to it, bulk, mass and reality. In all normal worlds, to slice through a man's forearm in combat will require two things - an exceedingly sharp blade, and superlative physical strength.

And in all normal worlds, the contest of the sword between a young boy and a trained adult should have been no contest at all. The man's weight and strength alone should have prevailed in time, even if his child opponent had many times the normal agility of youth and the weapon skills of the devil himself.

But Neverland by its very nature is designed to function slightly to the left of the normal world. Under a stormy sky rent with blue lightning, over a black sea with chopping waves, a young boy and a trained adult are doing battle.

The boy is laughing as he jumps from standing and shoots up into the air like an arrow, the thin golden blade in his hand gleaming in the rain. His opponent turns his head to the skies with a roar of rage, his black curls swinging. Peter crows down at the pirate.

"Too slow, Captain Codfish!"

The pirate leaps: up to the rigging, big deft hands gripping the rough ropes. This scene has been played a thousand times, and a thousand times the outcome is the same. Sometimes the pirate falls to the deck, sometimes he drops into the deep water and surfaces with only his dignity bruised. But always he falls, always he loses. His anger over this is an ever-simmering cauldron. He doesn't know why the cursed elf-child has chosen him as a target, but Peter's games are relentless, cruel, and without apparent purpose.

His name is Captain James Hook. It's not the name he was born with, but when your first kill is perpetrated aboard a pirate ship with a large gaff hook, the results are inevitable. He keeps the hook still as a reminder of his past, brings it out occasionally, its point still stained with old blood, to threaten disobedient swabs who should know better.

The flying boy dives: his feet smack into the side of the pirate's head, dazing him and losing him his precious balance on the rigging. He falls, again. The deck, this time. Not a soft landing. Hook sits up, groggily, shakes his left fist at the skies as Peter darts away over the clouds. The anger in his head is poisonous, it thumps through his temples like bad blood and coats his tongue like bitter almonds.

It is this anger that drives him back into the trackless jungle day after day, searching for the boy who has been a boy for so many years, searching for the one moment when he will finally break the pattern, finally win.

The crew already think their captain is crazy. This place they have been moored at for so long is no ordinary island. None of them can remember how they got here: not the navigator, nor the lookout, not even the powder monkeys who normally have their eyes open for everything. The seasons are odd. Mornings spent locked in frozen seas give way to afternoons of tropical rain and evenings of Indian sunshine, and there are siren calls from the mermaids in the bay. Some of the men are afraid to spend too long away from the Jolly Roger in case they get pixie-led and never return.

So, as often happens, Hook pursues his personal vendetta alone that night, taking the rowboat ashore and slipping into the jungle on foot under a heavy silver moon. He is past the glow of his youth now, but he is still quick, silent. All in black, the gaudy red and gold of his outer coat discarded, he pads along the trails like a panther, head down, dark lantern held low in one hand and his sword gripped in the other.

Hook does not fear the dark, nor what hides in it, because he knows himself to be the most dangerous thing abroad this night. The thought causes his cruel mouth to curl in a smile. The crew have told tales of monsters that crawl the coastline and lurk in the depths of the lazy green river. Giant crocodiles. Man-eating lions. Hook sneers in the shadows. Fear is for the weak, especially unfounded fears. The only things he's ever seen in this jungle are teenage red Indians, flitting, flickering faeries….and idiot small boys.

His lack of fear is his downfall. In his blind hatred of Peter's cockiness, he utterly fails to perceive his own.

The Lost Boys take him down when Neverland's second moon slips behind a cloud and the shadows are at their deepest.

It's a childish trap, of course. They know no other kinds. The rope suddenly tautens before his surefooted stride, cuts across his ankles to send him sprawling into a pile of mud and leaf mould. His sword knocked from his grip, Hook is temporarily blinded as the thick soil drives into his eyes, and it only takes the few short moments while he curses and scrabbles at his face for the six boys to leap on his back and start trussing him like a turkey.

This too has happened before, but only once. Hook lashes out as small hands grapple with him, gaining little satisfaction from the cries of his assailants when his fists and boots occasionally manage to connect. It's not really good form, hitting those smaller than yourself, but he is severely outnumbered and losing anyway: what more has the villain of the piece got to lose?

Bound and gagged tightly with vines, bits of string, and rope stolen from his own ship, Hook lies impotently on the jungle floor and listens with roiling anger to the victorious chatter of the children.

"We got 'im! We got 'im!"

"He caught Tootles a good one. Show us the bruise, Tootles." A pause for admiration of the war wound. Hook rolls his eyes in the darkness. Children. How he hates them. After a few more rounds of inane bickering as to who could actually claim the honour of having trapped Hook, it is Slightly who eventually poses the important question:

"Now we got 'im, what do we do with 'im?"

Another pause, then all shouting together.

"Throw him to the mermaids!"

"Tie him up in the crocodile's lair!"

"Hang him by his feet over the swamp!"

"What would Peter do?" asks Nibs, and Hook flinches. Bad though the swamp had been the last time, the indignity of being at Peter's mercy had been far worse. He snarls through the leaf gag.

"Yes, what would Peter do? We should take him to Peter!"

"Peter! Peter!"

Their slavish adoration of the flying boy grates on Hook's ears as the Lost Boys drag him away. Children. Always remember, he thinks, these are children. Just children, the youngest a babe of no more than seven years. Children should not kidnap their elders. He, as a grown man, should not be intimidated by a group of scruffy urchins. He's almost certain that a long, long time ago, when this island and its magic was no more than an odd dream to him, he would have easily and cheerfully beaten young scoundrels who dared to cheek him like this. It worries him sometimes when he is sunk in black depression that he is not as strong as he used to be when he was not in Neverland – or perhaps, his darkest thoughts whisper, that the children are simply stronger.

And now, as he looks up at the moon, flickering in and out of view through the trees above him, his head jolting and bouncing over tree roots and clumps of moss, he realizes that he is intimidated. Tonight feels different. Something is afoot.

At some point in the dragging, they blindfold him, and this too adds to his growing sense of unease. He stops his muffled shouts of defiant outrage, stops struggling, and a few minutes later he stops moving entirely.

Wherever they have been taking him, they've arrived.

The Lost Boys give a series of whistling calls, like young falcons. It takes a while, but eventually there is an answering crow from above that Hook would have known anywhere.

Pan. The boy's feet barely make a thump as he lands.

"Look, Peter!" Nibs cries. "Look what we did!"

"What's this?" comes Peter's laughing voice. "You've netted a great big ugly old catfish! Look at his whiskers trembling!"

Hook snarls again at the insouciant tone, moustaches indeed trembling as he struggles against his bonds. The leaf stuffed in his mouth is gnashed to shreds in his fury and he spits it out.

"I'll wring your neck, boy, see if I don't! The last thing you'll feel will be my fingers squeezing that cock-crow out of your throat!"

He is gratified to be able to sense, if not see, some of the boys drawing back from him. But Peter merely laughs again, merrily.

"You'll have to catch hold of me first, old man. Didn't you bring your famous hook with you today?"

"Gut him like a fish!" mimics one boy, and "Rip him from gullet to gusset!" giggles another, deepening his voice to mock Hook's own dark tones. Their captive strains against his bonds, fury overcoming his earlier misgivings.

"Why, if you only carried that hook with you always, you could have gutted us all by now!"

Peter's laugh sears across Hook's every nerve like salt in a fresh wound.

"What shall we do with our prisoner, men?" Peter asks, standing with his head thrown back proudly and one hand knuckled on his hip. A flurry of hands are raised in front of him, and young voices shout suggestions. Peter listens generously for a minute or so, then raises his hand imperiously. "Silence! I'm the Captain of this ship, ye dogs. I say…"

The pause is excruciating, both for Peter's loyal boys and for their captive.

"I say we cut off his hand and feed it to the crocodile!"

Hook goes cold from the centre of his stomach out to the tips of his ten fingers. The child can't be serious. But the Lost Boys are raising a ragged cheer, full of support for the idea. Peter, encouraged, continues in dramatic tones: "Then when on dark nights like tonight when the crocodile prowls the jungle and the sea, it'll have one thought in its bloodthirsty mind! The taste of pirate! It'll leave us alone and keep any pirate from leaving the ship for fear of being gobbled up!"

Another cheer. "What say ye scurvy dogs?" crows Peter.

"Aye!"

"Tonight we take the hand of our hated enemy Captain Hook?"

"Aye!"

Hook roars and thrashes. The vines holding him creak with the strain of his desperation, but the boys are as good as young sailors with knots: his bonds hold fast. He falls still only when the sharp point of Peter's short sword tips up his chin. Still blindfolded, every inch of the pirate's skin feels twenty times as sensitive as normal, and the tickle of the blade seems unbearably intense. The horrible thought strikes him: if the merest brush of a sword can feel as immense and shocking as a whiplash, how will it feel to have the same sword slicing into his forearm?

"You won't dare," he finds himself muttering hoarsely, childishly, "you won't dare do it. It's my hand, boy…my hand…."

The blindfold is raised the merest inch: moonlight floods in bright and silver. Hook looks up, squinting, into Peter's mischievous grin.

"To the crocodile's lair!" he cries, and in a clenching, sickening swell of terror Hook remembers something from his youth: that there are few things more capable of thoughtless cruelty than an impetuous child.

A normal child will say "I want to kill so-and-so!" or "I hate the teacher, I wish he was dead!" without any genuine malice perhaps four or five times a week - but normal children simply do not have the freedom or the resources to act upon their careless words. These words are discounted, forgotten, and in the morning they will take so-and-so to their heart again and leave an apple for the teacher.

But Neverland has no normal children, not any more. Neverland children are armed to the teeth, opportunistic, and no-one has ever told them no.

Here on the island, "I want" becomes "I act" within seconds.

Even pirates would balk at such bad form, Hook thinks as he feels his hands being dragged into position, even pirates have a form of honour, a code, rough and unfair though it often is. His crew don't stay with him simply because they fear him (although they do) but because he provides crude protection from more unscrupulous people abroad on the seas. He keeps them in food and rum and there is always a share in the treasure. Occasionally they will pay for insubordination or mistakes with their blood. But this…this is purposeless torture.

He fights with every inch of movement that he has to prevent his wrist being tied down. The blindfold, replaced for his journey to the crocodile's cave, is ripped away by Slightly, and Hook looks around the bare, damp cave walls rapidly, blue eyes almost black as his pupils expand to take in what light they can from the subterranean darkness.

He has been secured to the cleats on an old mooring rock at the edge of the water, with more of the stolen rope. The Lost Boys are gathered around him like worshippers at an altar: Nibs comes forward, a lit torch in one filthy hand. They are quiet, now, as if appreciating the gravity of what they are about to do.

"Any last words from the criminal, Constable Nibs?"

Peter's voice sounds older as it echoes from the low rock ceiling. Nibs salutes, clumsily.

"No!"

Peter approaches out of the gloom, a golden child with a pixie's face. The shadows seem to slide off him like water from a duck's back. He almost glows, as if his young skin is lit from within. Hook watches him approach from behind a curtain of knotted, muddy black curls and has never hated him more. His anger surges like bile through his throat, burning into the fear that has coiled round his gut and joining with it until the sheer force of the emotion threatens to choke him. Only his mind holds him steady, promising him revenge for this night's work if it takes him the rest of his life and costs him another hand.

His left wrist lies exposed, the sleeve of his black shirt rolled back. Hook is not a coward, and in the grip of his rage he glowers up at Peter with eyes turned red as hellfire.

"You're just a child," he snarls, "in the end. Just a child."

From behind his back Peter draws the shining golden sword.

"If you were a man, Peter Pan, you'd fight me like one."

The blade of the sword rests across Hook's forearm lightly, taps a couple of times.

"If I was a man, I wouldn't be able to have fun all the time."

Peter leans his weight on the blade and it starts to cut into the pirate's skin.

"Like this."

The pain takes a long twenty heartbeats to register, as the blade is very sharp and slices cleanly. It starts as a hot stinging, then a deeper, muscular ache, then the staggering sharp agony as the nerves come through their shock and scream their violation to the brain. Hook's eyes burn fiercely and his teeth clench so hard it feels as if they will break. Peter frowns delicately with effort, pushing down harder. The pain in the arm becomes a focus for the whole body : Hook loses all sense of his other arm, his legs, his torso. He thrashes against the ropes and finally cries out, a strangled yawp of agony and fury. Blood runs down the golden blade, over the smooth grey of the rock. Tootles watches the slow drip into the water, fascinated and horrified all at once.

"It's not coming off, Peter," says Nibs, and Peter waves a bloodspattered hand at him impatiently.

"The sword's just not big enough, that's all." He turns a bright smile on the boys. "Aye, to cut off a pirate's hand you need a pirate sword, right, me hearties?"

There is a rather less enthusiastic "Aye!" from the little group.

Slightly comes forward, flinching away from Hook's spasming fingers as they flick blood over his ragged clothes. He hands Peter Hook's lost cutlass, holding it in both his hands because it's too heavy for him. Peter wields it awkwardly, used to his own light blade. He swings it up over one thin shoulder - Hook's wild eyes track it along every inch of the swing - before bringing it slamming down.

This time the pirate screams, echoes of his agony reverberating through the cavern. The heavier blade has cut through the tendons this time, succeeding where the light sword could not. It hits the solid resistance of bone and grates along it, skidding off in the slick flow of blood running freely from the severed veins. Peter draws it out of the deep wound and chops down again.

Hook howls. His eyes are glowing like brands. He wants to give his outrage words, but the screaming has left him almost mute, and the pain seems to have robbed him of his ability to form coherent words. Curse you, Peter Pan!

"Peter, it's still not coming off." This from Nibs, who is now hiding the eyes of a smaller boy against his chest. Peter turns, a single drop of blood running carelessly down his smooth cheek, and looks at them. The Lost Boys are cringed away from the rock now, some of them not looking, some of them unable to look away.

"Oh, it will," Peter says confidently, with a small smile. "It will. It has to."

The bloodied cutlass falls from his hand with a clang. He bends over Hook's labouring chest, picks up a rock.

Hook's wrist is a slashed horror: the bone itself showing through the blood, the hand hanging at an ugly angle with the fingers trembling as the ruined nerves twitch. The pirate's head lolls to the side, and his eyes stare at the mess his arm has become in disbelief and rage. Gasps of pain force themselves through his lips, involuntary and unstoppable.

Peter leans over Hook, so close his fine hair is lifted by the pirate's agonised exhalations, gripping the rock in one hand. He pulls harder to tighten the rope round Hook's elbow that holds the man's arm flush against the stone, his young face inches from the pirate's as he concentrates on the knots.

Between gasps, Hook wrenches his head back and spits in Peter's eyes. Peter rears back in shock and wipes his slim hand across his face.

"Peter."

Nibs' voice, tremulous now, but Peter isn't listening. He is triumphant.

"Did you see that? He spat at me!"

"Peter…"

The boy grins down at Hook, who grimaces back, mouth locked in pain, breath hissing through his teeth.

"You want to play spit ball, old man? You want to play with us?" He raises the rock above the shattered mess of Hook's forearm. Hook's head lolls. His lifeblood is pouring down the rock and dribbling into the salt waves below his hanging feet, and he is mercifully becoming light-headed. The pain throbs cleanly through the blood loss haze in time with his hammering pulse. "I complain of you. You're all grown up. You don't get to play."

The rock is brought down clenched in two slender hands, and this time Hook hears the splintering crack before the new bolt of agony registers properly, breaking through his growing fog of near-unconsciousness. He screams again, through a throat already raw and wrecked. The bone has shattered along the line of the cutlass fracture, and his hand is attached now by flesh alone. His mind slinks willingly into shock like a beaten dog to its kennel, senses shutting down, as Peter cuts away the last shreds of meat with his golden blade and holds the hand aloft victoriously, its fingers curling up like the legs of a dying spider.

The last thing he hears before slipping into grateful oblivion is Nibs' frightened voice saying: "Peter…there's so much blood, Peter…"

What the Lost Boys do next will not come as any surprise to those who have ever had children or who recall their own childhood vividly. Nibs' discomfort at seeing the sheer volume of blood spilt before them communicates itself to the others and gives them an uneasy feeling in their bellies that they cannot put a name to, but only know that they do not like.

So like any schoolboy caught in the act of stealing sweets or breaking his mother's priceless tableware, they simply run away from the bad feeling, trusting in the firm knowledge that everything will turn out all right by dawn. It always does. The hand they had clamoured so much to amputate is tossed into the river as the dark back of the giant crocodile breaks surface. The maw of the beast gapes dark and huge, and it swallows the hand whole, barely seeming to taste it. The boys murmur and point in delighted vicarious fear as the massive creature turns and dives again, and Peter nods in satisfaction. A success. When their newly improved pirate foe comes after them again, he will be doing so under that vast scaly shadow.

It never occurs to them that this particular foe may not be coming after them again for some time. With the hand removed and its owner sunk into limp senselessness, he is no longer part of their adventure. They are only children after all, up long past their bedtime, and they head back to their home gladly, ready to relive the fun in a few horror stories before sleep.

Although he doesn't know it, Peter's act of tying the binding rope tighter has probably saved Hook's life: it acts as a crude tourniquet and he is no longer losing blood so rapidly. A stray wave slaps him across the face as the tide begins to rise, the salt stinging his chapped lips, and he comes to with a ragged cry of alarm.

There is a single moment common to all those who wake from a nightmare, a moment of confusion where the dreamer is uncertain whether the dream has ended and wakefulness begun. Hook lies dizzily bathing in that moment, then his wandering eyes fall to the bloody stump of his left arm, and he howls anew, a ringing cry of loss and fury.

In those few waking seconds, he had believed the whole experience to be a terrible fantasy. He had even believed that he could feel the clasping and unclasping of the fingers on his lost hand, so powerful had his denial of the horror been.

But now as he strains his neck and stares at the livid wound, even his strong mind cannot refute it. It is enough to break ten lesser men's wits for good or drive hardened warriors to weeping: for Hook it is enough to drive him into a rage for vengeance beyond all reason and shatter his self-control like a wren's egg. He roars and raves like a rabid beast, throwing his new, insane strength against the ties that bind him.

When Mr Smee and the rescue party from the Jolly Roger finally discover him, Hook is a raving madman in the cavern, his shouting an animal bellow to rival the crocodile's. The pirates given the task of cutting the bonds that hold their captain to the rock exchange horrified glances as they approach him. They have seen Hook's blue eyes blaze red before, in the heat of battle or argument: but their leader is far beyond heated now. He is a grotesque demon, eyes blazing like lava behind his swinging black curls, and the stump of his ruined forearm slashing out at them wildly as they work to free him.

It is Smee who truly saves him: Smee who approaches him when, once freed, he staggers onto the little shore, scrabbling for his cutlass and striking out at anything moving.

"Captain," Smee pleads. "Captain. Your poor arm. Let me bind it, Captain, you'll bleed t'death."

Hook growls and gibbers like a lunatic, holding Smee at bay with the business end of the cutlass. Blood drips onto the little stretch of sand.

"Easy, Captain," Smee wheedles, still moving forward with the generous wariness of one who approaches a strange, aggressive dog. "I know it must hurt a lot. Show old Smee. You know me, Captain? Loyal Smee wouldn't hurt you…"

It takes a lot more kind, gentle words and a few more minutes: but Hook is weakening rapidly and he falls against Smee as the smaller man slings the ruined arm over one shoulder as gently as he can, using his captain's good arm to guide him towards the waiting dinghy. Smee gains a lot more respect from the crew that night, although he is unaware of it. The other pirates would no more have gone near Hook in his pain-fuelled fury than they would have stuck their arms into the jaws of the crocodile.

And in all the remaining time before dawn, Smee stays with him. Hook's rage, just like lava, cools and hardens into something more dangerous: solid resolve. He lies only semi-conscious in his bunk, unresponsive to anything until Smee raises a red-hot sword blade and apologetically says:

"Now, Captain, this is going t'hurt more than a little…"

And then the screaming begins again, and the crew slink into their hammocks or their duties as much as they can to try and block it out.

Hook spends the next two hours alternating between being drunk and getting drunker. Smee willingly plies him with rum, casting worried eyes over the cauterised stump and shaking his head in pity at the state of the man lying mutilated before him. The captain's cabin reeks of burnt flesh and alcohol: the captain himself, usually so sleek and flamboyantly dressed, reeks likewise of drink, blood and terror.

He drinks himself into unconsciousness just as the sun is beginning to rise and Smee breathes a sigh of relief, mopping his brow with a red cloth. He cautiously pulls a sheet over Hook's body, hiding the bandaged stump from view. Hook mutters and groans, but does not wake.

"That's right, Cap'n," Smee murmurs, "You sleep. 'S a great healer, my mum used to say."

In any normal world, Smee's mum would have been correct - over a matter of months, that is. A normal world does not permit healing so rapid it can be achieved in a single night's slumber. A man's arm is not made of putty, to be moulded and re-moulded at will, nor of cloth that can be patched and made good with threads and wishes. It is made of bone, sinew, nerve and tendon: it has weight to it, bulk, mass and reality. But Neverland by its very nature functions slightly to the left of the normal world: and in the bright Neverland morning James Hook sits up in his bunk, hungover and bleary, and regards the lumpen but perfectly healed stump of his forearm with complete horror.

His cry of utter dismay and renewed rage brings Smee rushing to his cabin, but this time even the faithful little Irish bo'sun cannot calm him. The ship rings with the sound of destruction as Hook goes wild, smashing up his room, his furniture, his door, anything and everything within reach. His anger is not just at the massive loss of his hand, nor the memory of the torment he endured at the hands of mere children: it is because after all this time in Neverland Hook finally understands. The boys will come after him again today, he knows it. They want to play at fighting pirates again, and so Neverland, ever-obliging, provides one who will be a real challenge. One who can stand up and fight, not a wounded man lying helpless and feverish on his sickbed. And so it will continue, day after day, for as long as the boys, and particularly Peter, will it. An endless cycle of pain, defeat and humiliation.

It is at this point that James Hook breaks the one part of himself that even Neverland cannot fix, not in a thousand moons: his sanity.

Smee backs into a corner as Hook, raving and mindless, smashes the cupboards on his walls. With a dull metal clank, the famous hook falls off the remains of its shelf onto the wooden floor, and the sound brings the captain to an abrupt halt. Peter's taunting words ring in his fury-fevered head.

"Why, if you only carried that hook with you always, you could have gutted us all by now!"

Smee watches fearfully as his captain bends, scoops up the ugly metal hook in his remaining hand and weighs it thoughtfully. His forget-me-not blue eyes seem suspiciously calm, focussed; his air is of quiet resignation.

"Smee," he murmurs, almost lovingly, his gaze caressing every rusty curve and sharp edge of the hook in his grip. "Bring me some leather strapping."