The Land Beyond | Peter Pan 2003

Chapter 9: Captured

Drums play gently in my head, throbbing my flesh from the inside out. It's repetitive. Within the darkness that surrounded me, I feel suffocated and alone. Before me appears a boy with messy dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. He's wearing leaves and vines as clothing that doesn't completely cover him. He smiles, bowing with one hand across his belly and the other behind his back. Don't I know him? He looks so familiar. He stands straight and reaches his right hand out to me.

"Come with me," he whispers.

"But I don't know you," I reply.

His face scrunches together and he frowns deeply. "Lahona."

The smooth, youthful sound of his voice is refreshing somehow. It's inviting. It can manipulate. I reach back, but the harder I reach the further I become. He looks broken, like I have said something to devastate him. And then his round eyes sadden, his lips part and pout.

My heart aches and the throbbing escalates. Shaking my head, flashes of the boy and I dancing close together in a decrypted castle plays in my mind. And then it switches to us in the water, my arms locked around his neck and our chests together. The image changes. He and I are in a bed of leaves and moss, our foreheads almost touching as we lay comfortably next to each other. My eyes close, but his fingers linger along my face, stopping at my lips and he watches me.

"Stay with me," he whispers.

It all comes rushing back so fast my brain whips back and forth.

"Peter!" I scream, thrusting up from the cold, wet brick floor. My heart races in my chest and my eyes search frantically for Peter but all I find is a dark, cold, and damp room. It's a square with a window high above me. The moonlight beams through the little rectangular cutout. Ahead of me are bars and a door.

Clanking echoes throughout the cell and a light faintly comes into view, cascading the hall in front of the cell to show two shadows coming to the front of the cell. The first one to be seen is a gentleman who is finely dressed in a large red velvet coat with gold embellishments, black pants, and a giant red velvet pirate hat with feather plumes of red and black hanging from the back. He has dark brown curly hair, a nicely trimmed mustache, and a thin beard. His right hand is a hook and a gold pummel sword dangles from his waist. I can't tell the color of his eyes in the darkness but both men glare down at me.

"It is her," he says with a deep voice.

"The girl pan has been with?" Asks an older voice. The other man, who is also finely clad. He's wearing a reddish-orange cap, glasses, a gray-striped shirt, baggy black pants, and a faded green jacket.

"Yes," the red jacketed man smiles evilly. "What is your name, girl?"

"What is it to you, human?" I hiss.

"She's got a temper," he turns to the older man before coming back to me. "My name is Captain James Hook."

"And I am Mr. Smee," the older man chimes.

"I don't think I asked for pleasantries," I mutter.

"You should, because you see here, Captain Hook is buying you," Mr. Smee wags his finger.

"Buying me? Where the hell am I?"

"Tsk, tsk. She doesn't know, Smee."

"No, she doesn't, sir."

"You've been captured by humans," Captain Hook states.

I glance down at my hands and see they are tied with rope, how come I didn't see this before? I am obviously captured, given the cell I am in, but how? I don't remember anything before I passed out - wait. Nick. I remember Nick.