WHO: Hook and Snow. WHAT: A pirate and a princess walk into a wood. There are a few questions, little answers, and no one really leaves more enlightened than when they arrived. WHERE: The Homelands, somewhere in a forest. WHEN: Let's go with recently; before Rose's warning about the cottage WARNINGS: Nada.
He was alone. And it was quiet. There were no endless waves crashing in on one another, or breaking against the hull of the ship. No seagulls screaming as they circled the crow’s nest. It smelled neither like salt nor sea, but like earth and moss. There was an eerie emptiness all around, smudged here and there by black on black - what Hook assumed were trees, spaced far enough apart for him to wind blindly through, using the trunks for balance.
He didn’t know where he was going, and it was only because he was alone that he admitted such to himself. He’d come through that blasted door and expected to find himself in his quarters aboard the Jolly Roger. Instead, he was in an ocean of trees in the middle of night. It wasn’t so dark as to be completely unable to see - after all, the sea, calm, at midnight, with clouds overhead, was black - true black. The wood was a wash of grays, stars obscured.
Hook’s hook met the shaggy bark of a tree with a thud, and he felt at it with his hand. It crumbled between his fingers. It was dry - perhaps dead. He cast his eyes around him, narrowed and acute. But a forest was not the flat of the sea and he saw nothing that told him where he was.
“Drat.”
The branch beneath Snow’s foot cracked noisily at that.
It had been a while since she had been in the forest, her work in Fabletown keeping her busy enough, more than enough if her sister had any say in it. Finally she spared the world outside her office more than a passing moment and tried to visit Red’s in the tiny cottage her grandmother used to live in, leaving the basket of gifts in the home before sunset when the girl wasn’t home. Still, the peace that she found in the forest, this part of the forest anyway, called to her and she found herself taking a much more leisurely route home. Before she knew it, night had fallen and she wasn’t trekking through the darkness.
Not that it made her any more worried.
Despite re-emergences of familiar names, Snow White felt little apprehension walking through the woods. She hadn’t encountered any evil witch or employed huntsman in months. At worst there were wolves but she could manage those. The mundane animals of the forest were nothing to be afraid of and their occasional sound didn’t catch her attention.
A man’s voice did, though, making her foot fall harder than she intended.
“Who’s there?” Her voice rang out clear in the forest as she looked around. Heavy olive cloak over her shoulders and hair, it obscured her shirt and jeans ensemble but she had mostly stopped caring to dress the part of the other Homeland residents.
The captain’s head snapped up at the sharp splintering of wood, and his own eyes widened in the dark. The forest spun out around him in a way that, despite its size, made him closed in and caged. There was a pale form hovering just on the edge of his field of vision, a smear of white surrounded by varying gradients of black, and the man was almost afraid. Had he not his sword, he perhaps would have been. Yet he was armed, and once the voice called out, clear and feminine, high and needle-pointed, he calmed. His hand dropped from where it had been hovering over the grip of his sword.
“I might ask you the same.” Hook spoke lightly. The night was bright yet, despite its darkness, and his own words carried themselves confidently, with something of a swagger, and the smooth, well-used curve of charm embroidering each syllable. There was a twinkle of amusement there too. No matter how close he may have been only a span of moments before to fear, he showed none of it.
The man, dressed as he was in heavy black, his leather jacket dusting his knees, his boots nearly as high, black tunic open and eyes edged with charcoal, melted into the trees. He tripped - only just - over the exposed root of an especially large tree, but that didn’t stop him from approaching the strange woman. What someone else was doing in the middle of the woods - especially a woman, alone, he didn’t know, but he intended to find out.
It would be just her luck to meet a strange man in the woods. Rather than looking fearful, by the time he came closer a pair of blue eyes were looking most unimpressed by the intrusion. He wasn’t anyone she recognized, though that hardly meant anything. The comings and goings of this world didn’t concern her - as she liked to remind herself and everyone in earshot.
“Are you lost?” That sometimes happened with anyone new, if he was new, and her lily-white hand gestured back down the way she came, to the path that she had strayed from some ways back. It wouldn’t do to send him in Rose’s direction but the other would at steer him to the closest village. “Following the path and the river downstream,” away from her old family cottage, “should take you back to the closest village. It would best if you don’t linger in the woods.”
Sound advice from a woman caught going in the opposite direction. Even now, once shifted her attention from the faraway safehaven to the man’s face, she gave him one cool appraisal, a long glance from head to toe before she started to pull the hood of her cloak over her hair and to hide her face. Already he had seen her face and that rankled her more than she liked to admit. “Good night. Stay safe,” and she was turning back down to travel through the dark thicket.
He was lost, but it wouldn’t do to admit that so early on. Hook could only just make out the woman in the twilight, and, though he had seen his share of beautiful women, he was struck, even still, by the fairness of one before him, in complexion and countenance. An angular face, with sharp cheekbones and the cool eyes of a cat, he could see now that he was closer, skin white as milk. Her hair was black and shining, but of course, that disappeared once she drew her hood up and deepened the shadows that hid her.
“Does the lady need an escort?” Such were the ways of the fairy tales. Hook certainly would never have considered offering the same to a man, but a child or a woman? Wandering alone? That didn’t sit well with him despite the grayness of his moral compass. “If there are beings I ought fear for lingering, then I think I should be happy to walk with you a ways.”
Those cool eyes narrowed, the effect only slightly obscured by the shadows over her face. It wasn’t a bad idea, nor was it impolite, but Snow never did trust strangers in the wood so easily. Her fingers itched for the dagger in her boot but she kept her hands at her side. If she had to, she’d reach for it when the time was right.
“Mine is more than simply a ways away, and you’ll never find your way back to this village.” She gave him another look and this time a faint smile, a touch of amusement though no one would call it warm. “Besides, what if I’m one of those beings you ought to fear?”
“If you are, milady, then I have a sword to slay you with,” replied the pirate lightly with an appropriately roguish smile. He was adept at keeping amusement in his voice, even as his eyes narrowed on the marble woman. She was, in truth, almost empyrean - unearthly in her pallor. He would not have been entirely surprised to find her an apparition. Whatever it had been that had pushed her initial question from her throat with such fear had vanished, only to be replaced by a smooth stone of calm. “And I am not headed to any village.”
“No?” She wouldn’t dignify his claim that he could kill her. She’d heard it all many times before and it didn’t garner a smile or a hint of fear. Instead she shrugged and ignored it, turning down to the wood and walking in earnest, the hem of her cloak quietly skirting the ground. “Where are you going, then, if not a village? If it’s a castle you’re looking for,” this was the land of fairy tales after all, “you won’t reach one tonight, or even by morning. And, for that matter, how did you end up here?” He could have simply had a plight like her, a whisper in her brain that lived on the side of the door, but it never hurt to be sure.
To keep a captaincy over a crew of unruly, stubborn, often wild men, one learned to use words only after deliberation. Of course, they were uttered quickly and with confidence, as it wouldn’t do to have one’s courage, nor especially wit, questioned by men with no more than three teeth in their heads, but they were allowed a moment’s thought. Hook had chosen his wording carefully, and he made no claim as to be able to kill the woman in the cloak. He didn’t know that he could. He had only intended to convey that he had a sword. The lack of reaction was noted and the details were added to the few others he’d gleaned thus far.
She began walking. Hook followed after her leisurely, careful to pick his boots up over silvery roots.
“That is a question I would very much like to know the answer to myself. I am a ship’s captain, you see. And for all its beauty and its dangers, the forest is not the sea.” The man scratched under his chin with the shining point of his hook.
The hook caught the moonlight and her attention, stopping her in her tracks as she turned her head to look at him. Really look at him.
“You’re Captain Hook?” Though it was a question, it fell flat as a statement, daring him to say otherwise. She had never met the man in her world, his lands already overtaken by the Adversary’s army before he reached Snow’s, but she had heard of him. And she had seen the way he was depicted in the Mundane world surrounding Fabletown, he didn’t look much like the pictures she had seen, no pompous pirate attire or bumbling lackeys behind him. But he had the hook, and that must be enough.
“You’re a long way from the sea. I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen one around here.”
“At your service.” The captain smiled, ducking in a slight bow, his long coat billowing out behind him, as they paused in their weaving through the hard lines of the black trees. The little moonlight there was spilled through the canopy of dead branches and frosted him in a silhouette of silver. It shined off his hook and his smile. It dusted the woman too, touching the fringes of her cloak, and cutting against her high cheekbones. It threw the rest of her deeper in shadow, but that didn’t bother Hook. Fair as she was, the coldness she kept wrapped up tight in the folds of her cloak were best kept there, he thought.
It was little surprise that he was recognized. There were few other men who dressed like a pirate and wore a hook instead of a hand. But, there were other reasons too, of course. The man was finding this new land to be a strange wash of several realities and it didn’t surprise him to find that, though perhaps he and the woman before him were not of the same place, there had been someone like him where she came from. Now, if only he knew who she was. The captain lifted the hook at the end of his arm until it too glinted in pricks of light and gazed at it intently before smiling again. “What gave it away?”
As if there was anything more obvious. True it could be common place, a pirate with a hook for a hand that happened to be captain? There must be around somewhere. But Snow at least knew this was an uncommon wood.
“Something in the smile, I suppose,” she murmured idly, watching him bow and grin at her from the safety of her heavy cloak, eyeing the curve of his hook a moment longer. “So it’s your ship you’re looking for? Or is it the children?” The tale of Peter Pan was a hard one to miss, no matter how much one wanted to, and even if he wasn’t the exact same, there were often a few details that never changed. “You wouldn’t find either, the way I’m headed.”
Children. Had Hook not been a man adept at maintaining facades, he might have frowned. But, he was, very much so, and his smiled only widened, a crescent of white in the dark.
“What is down this path, if I might ask?” He didn’t bother spending breath on answering her question. Hook trod a step or two as a gentle sort of insistence that they begin moving again. He peered at the woman, his hand and hook both back at his sides. He was not ignorant of the fact that she knew more about him than he did her. Whether or not that was a liability, only time would tell.
Like him, she found her answers in observation, and what he didn’t say was more telling than anything else. When he peered at her she turned to look at him as well. She didn’t know him, she didn’t fear him, and a pair of steady blue eyes gazed back at him and his hook. “Home for me. Nothing of interest for you.” As the words left her mouth she would have flinched at how they sounded, the invitation to be contrary so easy. But other than the barest hint of a frown she remained unperturbed. “You won’t find your ship there. That I know for a fact.”
Another few steps, boots faintly crushing the grass and disturbing the dirt under her feet, and she couldn’t help but ask, “When did you start coming here? To this world? Have you spoken with anyone upon your arrival?” She hadn’t seen him around before but that meant nothing. Well, nothing more than someone else having more information than her. Another frown pulled at her lips, clearer than before as her hood slid back down her dark hair and the moon illuminated her pale face.
“Your home is the only thing in this direction? Curious.” Hook appeared skeptical, one eyebrow lifted in question. The woods seemed to go for leagues and the idea that the ended in the garden of but one cottage or castle or what-have-you was laughable. The captain didn’t laugh in the midnight quiet, but he did smile, falling into step beside the woman easily. One didn’t swagger in the forest, but there was an undeniable air of confidence and humor that accompanied Hook - quite different from his current companion. She certainly had something akin to self-assurance, but there was nothing warm about her.
Her next questions were considered carefully. The man strolled silently for a span, wondering what exactly she meant.
“Do you come to this place through a door?” It was no true answer, but it held enough information. Hook did not doubt she could glean something from it.
Snow relaxed a touch, and only a touch, as he confirmed that suspicion of her. Her guard remained up, cool wariness straightening her shoulders there, but there was something reassuring about having some similarity in predicament. In answer to his question she reached into her cloak and blouse and pulled out her key, silver metal hanging off a chain and glinting in the moonlight.
“There are many thing this way,” she said idly, not warmer but with less of a bite, as she tucked the key back into her shirt. “More villages. More villagers. My home just happens to be among them.” Granted, hers was no mere village, but trying to explain the modern world to someone used to the life of fairytales was beyond what patience she had for the evening. “There’s another village I can show you.” Or drop him off, rather, but such things go unsaid. “It’s farther than the one I suggested earlier,” no subtlety in reminding him of her previous sound advice, “but you can stay there. They might be able to point you to the sea better than I could.”
Relief obvious on the pirate’s face as well, a little tightness slackening around the eyes. She could have just as easily been ignorant to what he was asking and likely would have thought him quite mad, and while that certainly wasn’t terrible, an understanding was better. Hook inspected the key curiously. It was pretty in the drops of moonlight. His own was an ugly thing he kept in his boot, copper and skeletal. The man simply nodded to say he understood.
“The lady would escort me?” He pretended to ponder the offer. It would be good to find his ship again, though she really could be anywhere in this vast land. Alas. He nodded again. “I would enjoy that, I think.”
“You’d enjoy a babysitter?” There was a laugh somewhere there, lacing the farthest edges of her voice, but Snow wasn’t one to indulge in a full on chuckle with a stranger. “You say that now but just wait. You’ll be running for other’s company when we barely have the village in sights.” Snow knew she wasn’t much in the way of company, preferred it really and no more so now. The stop at the village was some ways away, the magic of the wood often making the trip seem shorter. Or maybe it was the magic in her that Rose so often reminded her existed. It didn’t matter. Eventually she’d leave him there, and she had to make sure he wouldn’t even think of following her on her way home.
“So this was you first turn through the door? Did you not talk to anyone through the books? Find out that there’s mostly forest here, and a distinct lack of sea?”
The amusement that edged the woman’s words was not missed by Hook. He smiled, his eyebrows rising high on his forehead. She had nearly laughed, then offered something of a self-deprecating comment, all within a few second’s time. It wasn’t an abrupt change, no, but it was unexpected - and quite welcome. She might not indulge in expressions of humor in front of strangers, but such could not be said for the man. He laughed lowly. “Have faith, my lady. A man does not become a captain if he is weak of will.”
A small chill had the captain holding the throat of his coat closed as they continued along the path. He bent his head low.
“On the contrary, I have come through a good number of times. Though this is indeed the first I have found myself so far inland. I’m not certain what the intent there was, if there was any at all. That inn - or rather, that hotel -” The word was spoken carefully and foreign. Hook shook his head. “- is a curious thing to say the least. Do you tend to return to the place you left on your last visit?”
“Oh?” The breeze that had the man closing his coat blew her hood back over her ears, and her pale hands hurriedly pulling it back over her dark hair. “And how does a man become a captain then?” She wondered if he’d play it coy or spin stories of bravado and bloodshed. She knew his name, but she hardly knew the man.
His question momentarily threw her offguard and the surprise flickered across her face before warring with confusion. “Return to my home?” She could only think he meant visiting via the hotel door.
Why she was so insistent on remaining hidden, given the black fall of shadows around them, Hook didn’t know, nor did he ask. That was her business. He’d seen her face and it mattered not to him that she chose to hide it, however much of a pity it was. The man squinted at the blur of dark trees ahead as he considered her question.
“Were we trekking to your home of villagers, I might well have time for the tale,” was all he said about that, smirk evident in his voice. Hook released his hold on his coat, glancing at the woman as he did so. “Perhaps, if that is where you usually end your adventures.” And surely she had adventures. Women who did not did not trapise alone through a dark wood when the moon was so very high in the sky. “Last I was here I was on my ship, and yet today I found myself in that clearing, and I’ve not an inkling as to why or how I should’ve ended up there.”
Though his mouth didn’t follow, she heard that smirk, and her lips warred with lifting to smirk in kind or deepen and frown. He caught her. She’d give him that. “It’s at least one story away. A good one, certainly. Or two boring ones.” Though when he did give her a glance as he relinquished his hold on his coat, she smirked in earnest.
“My adventures? I’m no captain missing a ship. There aren’t any adventures to have.” There wasn’t a hint of falsehood in her words. Snow’s world revolved around her work in Fabletown. The occasional brush with beast or witch were simply that—occasional, and hardly qualified as adventures. “Maybe the door thinks you should spend a little less time on the sea and more on land.” An inanimate object with an opinion? That was par for the course around here.
The reflection of the upward pull of his own smirk on her face was certainly an improvement, if he did say so himself. There was some satisfaction to be gleaned from that feat - and a feat it most assuredly was. He’d had her pegged as colder than that, but there was nothing Hook liked more than to be proven wrong on counts such as that. The captain sniffed at the woman’s whip-sharp response. There were few better ways to pass time at sea than tall tales. Every sailor fancied himself a right storyteller, a weaver of words, Hook among them. He had skill, however, to backup his claims, unlike many.
“I shan’t enchant you tonight, my lady. Not with that tale. Truth be told, it’s hardly appropriate to repeat in front of a lady such as yourself.” It was a bit of goading, yes. Hook flashed the woman a well-oiled smile that shone with charm. “You are no captain?” He repeated the sentence as a question. “Then what are you, if I may ask? You know who I am, and yet you are as dark as this forest to me. If one isn’t a lost captain wandering forlornly on land nor an adventurer, then your being here seems somewhat out of place, does it not? Moreso than my own.”
As to the comment about the door, Hook would need to think on that. Perhaps she was right.
There was little lady-like about the eyeroll she gave his response and though she hadn’t settled back into her icy glare, she tossed one good in glower in the face of that smile. “I’m less of a lady than you seem to think.” Ladies, good and proper as she had met in her courtly years, didn’t go wandering about the forest at night. They didn’t wander, period.
It was one of the many reasons she stopped enjoying being a lady.
“I’m just a traveler, captain. Visiting people and then returning home. That’s hardly out of place when walking between villages. I would say that wolves and wanderers are probably what you’d find in the forest the most.” As if on cue, a howl echoed in the distance, a far away sound that still managed to carry through the silent air around them. Snow merely smiled wanly, no ripple of fear on her face.
“It’s not meant as an insult, love,” the captain replied, his words deliberate and light. There were assumptions that weighted the word ‘lady’ down, and images of frills and full skirts, of women too helpless, but such were not what Hook meant when he spoke it. It was a simple phrase, a bit of pirate’s chivalry, much like endearment ‘love.’ And that she should take offense to such suggested a certain defiance to the man, as well as confirmed that she held more to the traditional assumptions of what a ‘lady’ indeed was.
There was silence a moment, punctuated only by the swishing of cloth and leather, and boots on dirt. The wolf’s howl did not perturb the pirate, though it perhaps should have. He glanced up as if searching for the culprit of a moon.
“I would agree, were it not so late. Therein lies the puzzle.”
“Is it that late?” The moon was high and the sky was dark; it was indeed that late. But Snow wasn’t about to act like she shouldn’t be out there in the woods. Not when he was the one searching for a ship in the middle of a forest.
“So if not captain, or adventurer, or traveler,” each word was said with a pronounced step, no slowing for Snow, not when there were personal questions being strewn about, “then what do you think I am?”
Hook looked at the woman as they walked. Her steps were long and sure, even in her long cloak, similar to his own steps - despite his lack of knowledge of the terrain and despite the wolf’s howls that rattled through the dry trees. He thought on what or who she might be, if not captain, adventurer, or traveler. There was the possibility of her being some manner of creature. A witch, perhaps? An apparition? She was much too human for the latter, though she could easily have been the former. She was no pixie, no fairy. She spoke and moved with an unmistakable air of authority. Still she did not appear royal - Hook had a good eye for those types. He robbed them enough. So what was she? What did that leave?
“I’m unsure. A leader in some capacity, I know, but I cannot fathom what.”
Snow gave him an unwavering stare for a long moment before her shoulders lifted into a shrug. “Good guess,” she said simply, a non-answer simply being the best answer she would give him on the matter. “Come, the village is still a ways away.” She inclined her head down the way they were headed, intent on leaving him there with no way more hints about who she was and where she was going.
She had helped him out of the woods. As far as she was concerned, her good deeds were done for the month.