“Or henchman. Depends on where and when we go.” He looked off thoughtfully for a moment. “Sometimes, I am truly alone. Other times, I am merely a concept—a force of nature, or a human emotion. We’ll have to get creative if you decide to take us through stories like those.”
“Give me an example?”
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”Hook laughed, a quiet and sadistic noise. “Though watching that kind of mayhem is alwaysgood for a lark. You want gruesome and problematic? Nothing quite like child mutilation to wake you up in the morning.”
“Mr. Slugworth is the villain in that story, though.”
“No, he isn’t.” Hook rolled his eyes as he continued to play through the melancholy piece. “And you call yourself alibrarian.Slugworth might be a reason why Wonka has pathos and resorts to slave labor to run his factory, but he is hardly the real villain.”
She went to argue about the slave labor, but then she remembered about an edit that turned the Oompa Loompas from “African Pygmies" into the strange orange-and-green monstrosities more well known from the film. She winced. “Well, we are in Peter Pan, right now. We’ll have to deal with the, um, locals, at some point, won’t we?”
“Classic literature is rife with landmines of such a nature. We’ll have to deal with such things as we come across them. I’ll leave that up to your creative liberties to reinterpret. That's hardly my area of expertise.” He lifted up his hook to shake it at her. “And don’t change the subject when you’re about to lose a debate. Bad form.”
He really was both Hook and Vile at the same time. “All right. Well, if Mr. Slugworth isn’t the villain of the story, who do you argue is?” She walked up to the edge of the harpsichord to watch him as he played.
He moved on to a second piece, no less melancholy than the first. “To find the true antagonist of any story, you have to find the underlying theme. What is the theme ofCharlie and the Chocolate Factory?I argue it is a ham-fisted lesson about the dangers of greed and excess.”
Pausing, she shrugged. “All right. So the real villain is ‘greed.’ And I’ll argue that Mr. Slugworth is the person in that story that’s meant to represent that.”
“But he never takes the stage. We only ever hear of him suffering in the wings—and even then, only in the novel. In the film, he’s some kind of, what, pathetic double actor?” With an incredulous snort, he slammed his hand down on the keys, hitting a discordant chord. “Plot hole!”
That made her laugh. “Not a fan of the film?”
“I enjoy it greatly! But that makes no sense.” He resumed playing. “Plot holes are like headaches to something like me. They are simply something we endure.” He paused. “But we won’t be visiting Wonka, I’m afraid.”
“Not that I’m arguing, but why not?”
Hook paused, the music hanging in the air for a moment. “The matter is a bit complex. Let’s simply blame it on the snozzberries.?*”
Sasha blinked. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
There had definitely just beensomethingthat happened. It was like there was a—she didn’t know how to describe it. A hitch? A flicker? Like the lights had gone off and on again. “Never mind.” She shook her head. “I’m just tired.”
The smile on his face told her that it was probably something. But it also had a slight edge to it that said that even if he knew what it was, he wasn’t going to say. So she let it go.
Walking over to the large diamond-paned window that stretched across the back of his quarters, she looked out at the bay where the ship was moored. It was gorgeous—a tropical paradise. A place she’d kill to go on vacation to, but she was here trying to dodge getting murdered and rewrite a classic into something “unique.”
“So,” she started, crossing her arms over her chest. “If we manage to kill Peter Pan instead of him killing you—feed the kid to the crocodile, does that count as unique?”
“No, that’s just called lazy writing. ‘Move Mordor closer to the Shire’ or ‘Make Midsummer Night’s Dream a Tragedy’ doesn’t do anything interesting, it just makes the book shorter, dear. ‘The villain wins, tragic ending’ isn’t unique for some genres.” A creak of wood, and she glanced over to see him get up from the bench of the instrument. He walked over to anothercabinet.
He was a foreboding figure, even dressed down and doing something mundane like opening up a cabinet reaching for an antique glass bottle. He made for a perfectly nightmarish but sharply beautiful Captain Hook.
And she couldn’t help but stare.
Vile-as-Hook took the glass bottle—she thought they might be called onion bottles—and uncorked it. Pouring a dark liquid into two thick crystal glasses, he popped the cork back into the neck.
“So an unexpected rewrite to the story isn’t unique enough?”
“I’m afraid not. You’ll need to do something more interesting than surface-level rewrites to satisfy the criteria.” Hook walked up to her, one goblet resting in the bend of his hook and the other in his flesh-and-blood hand. He extended his hand to her, offering her a drink.
She took it. Sniffing the drink revealed it to be brandy. Yeah. She could use a damn drink. “Is this real? Will it work?” She took a sip.
“If you want it to. That’s how fiction works, darling.” He took a sip of his own. His smile was all the more devilish with the trademark Captain Hook goatee. But he wore it very, very well, she decided.
Images flashed through her mind, unbidden, of him fisting her hair in his hand, wrenching her head back, threatening her with that jagged piece of metal—handsome and terrifying, powerful and seductive?—
