in which shaz writes a million peter pan AUs

yet another au But be warned: Peter Pan - the boy who tempts children away from the loving embraces of their parents with promises of wild adventures in a foreign land - is not the hero of this story.

of captain james hook:

On the morning of 19th February 1797 - five days after the Battle of Cape St. Vincent - Captain James Hook was forced to undergo the amputation of his right hand. The flesh, stinking and superated under the negligent care of the drunken ship's doctor, was carved aside and the bone sawn just above the wrist. Surviving the trauma of surgery had been a close-run thing and had given the future James Hook his deeply-bound reliance on opiates. Forcibly retired from the Royal Navy and forced to make-do with on a miserably navy pension, Hook discovered the true hardship of the unlucky sailors that were not treated to the mercy of dying in battle: a meagre existence as the forgotten victims of England's war with France. ❝ he has an iron hook instead of a right hand, and he claws with it. ❞ Now, in 1800, he makes a pitiful living in London in a rented studio above a tavern - the Jolly Roger in Marylebone Street - as a painter. Still dosing himself with inordinate amounts of laudenam in order to combat the ferocious pains of his phantom hand he takes solace in painting wild and tragic seascapes with black skies and waves like gaping mouths. Very few of his paintings sell. His landlord - and the purveyer of his illicit morphines - is the enigmatically youthful Peter Pan, a man of twenty-something years but the charmingly boyish face of a child. Peter finds the tragic naval captain's paintings oddly delightful and takes any paintings worth anything of note in payment for his opiates - Hook resents the hold the young man has over him. Perhaps the only creature that gives James Hook any real comfort is the young lady Wendy Darling. Wendy, a ward of Peter's and the self-appointed 'mother' of all the young orphaned scoundrels that Peter picks off the street, was the one who fashioned the crude hook that James wears in place of his long-lost hand. Wendy helps Hook: in helping James with all the menial tasks such as clothing and feeding himself she helps to preserve his dignity - and she has been known in the past to nurse him through the crashing downward spirals of his opiate highs. Once or twice she has even modelled for him, in the rare times when Hook can bring himself to paint anything other than murderous seas.

of the ever-youthful peter:

A true child of the streets, Peter was born in a prison cell to a diseased mother who rotted away and died in the two years following Peter's unhappy birth. The boy was passed out of the gaol and in to the hands of the criminal sorority of whores that had considered his mother one of their unfortunate own. Peter always did have something of an escapist mind. As one of the prettier boys of the West End rookeries he would often be called in off the streets to put on some skirts and tread the boards of the more disreputable theatres as a pretty maid, and from then on he always did prefer fantasy to reality. Elaborate cons were Peter's favourite criminal tricks: he loved the make-believe worlds that came with worming his way in to privileged society wearing borrowed clothes and stealing the silver from under the noses of the bourgeoisie. But this was small beer compared to the heinous criminal acts he would later commit: encircling himself with a trusted posse of runaway urchins and street rats Peter became the self-styled leader of the Lost Boys and quickly rose to become one of London's top gang leaders. ❝ a strange smile was playing about his face, and Wendy saw it and shuddered. While that smile was on his face no one dared address him; all they could do was to stand ready to obey. ❞ Peter came in to possession of the Jolly Roger - a Marylebone tavern populaced by impoverished artists, debauched actors and desperate whores - through foul means but ran it with the skilled hand of a much older man. Blessed with the boyish charms and pretty features Peter was popular with customers as long as they knew how to step carefully to avoid triggering his sudden fits of terrifying wrath. Despite being known for his beautiful smile and carefree attitude Peter is a murderous master of the house and lacks nearly every single moral and ethic known to man. When he tempted the Darling brothers and their pretty sister Wendy off their impoverished-yet-honest life on the streets and offered them positions in his criminal outfit he knew he was writing them in to a debt of slavery. It was Peter's habit - he 'saved' the desperate and then counted on their considerable debts of gratitude to further his own gains. So it was with James Hook, the tragically wounded sea captain: Peter 'bought' his paintings and supplied him with opiates, enslaving him with pretty smiles and the much-desired laudanum to keep the tortured man around for his own amusement.

of wendy, your mother and mine:

blah blah whore with a heart of gold, loves peter and hook and doesn't know what to do, Tootles shoots her at one point, Tinker Bell tries to kill her at another. ❝ 'If you knew how great is a mother's love,' Wendy told them triumphantly, 'you would have no fear.' ❞