The night was perfectly calm. There were crickets somewhere further out in the trees, and small, shadowed thing pushing themselves along the beach with primordial forelimbs. The ocean was calm and lapped vacantly at the sands.

There ought to have been a storm.

For the skies to be so calm, for the earth to just keep sleeping and snoring quietly in the dark, was the worst sort of blasphemy Smee had ever seen. There should have been a storm. The ocean should have churned outward, in ripples from a stone, and smashed against the cliffs of Neverland with shrieking liquid howls. The sky should have rolled in on itself and the serpent in the heavens turned. There should have been rain. There should have been slanting, slicing rain that blinded and numbed and made you feel you were bleeding from every inch of skin.

There weren't even clouds. Surely fate had been planning a more worthy death than this for James Hook. Surely this wasn't its intention.

Feeling cold over every inch of his body, Smee looked down to assess the damage. There was sand stuck to the brine on his skin. Dark patches on his knees in the moonlight had to be blood; he'd scraped them crawling up from the water. They didn't hurt. Nothing hurt, really, though he thought that it ought to. Something ought to hurt.

Hook was dead. Something had to hurt.

A dark shape on the water, the Jolly Roger hadn't changed its sails, but neither had the Lost Boys flown away from it. It floated like a dead bird out there. It was a corpse. It was an abomination.

Hook was dead.

And it didn't hurt.

He didn't know who was to blame, Peter Pan or that crocodile. He'd seen her swim away as he'd dragged his body to the shore, he'd seen her leave the Jolly Roger of her own volition for the first time since she'd tasted Hook's flesh. She had him in his belly, he was sure of it. Some thoroughly smothered part of Smee's mind that was babbling in hysteria wanted him to go after her and kill her too, or maybe, let her kill him. Obscene poetics, nothing more, nothing to worry himself over. Sheer filth.

Hook was dead.

Jesus, he really had to be dead, didn't he, every piece of bone was purring it to him in dark caverns. There wasn't any way he was alive. He'd never seen Peter so determined to slaughter, not since the day he'd taken Hook's hand.

_you are the crocodile._ something lowly cooed at him, something from a muffled hysterical bubble in his mind. He was disjointed, he thought, and little pieces of him would fall off on the sand if he moved.

_YOU ARE the crocodile!_

He lowered himself until his head hit the sand and stared at the silent stars, his breath coming in trembling strands past his tongue.

_The crocodile, waiting always in the water, waiting for a weakness, preying on a weakness, having tasted him and wanted MORE, having._

_You ARE the crocodile!_

_...fed of a piece of him tossed carelessly away, found him to be beautiful, found him to be dark and weak, and waiting for that weakness, LIVING for that weakness._

_You are the crocodile._

_...waiting for those terrible nights Hook would have welcomed anything, even death, even him, waiting for that weakness, waiting for--_

"YOU ARE THE CROCODILE!" He shrieked out hoarsely to the sky, and the dark things on the sand scooted by him, oblivious. The bubble pressed tight against the back of his eyes. He couldn't move, his joints weren't together, if he moved he'd fall to pieces.

He moved. He sat up, and stared once more at that ship. They'd taken down the flag. Jesus, when had they taken down the flag?

Why did he care?

She was out there, somewhere, curling to sleep on a stone or slipping lazing through the water, Hook's trademark piercing pinpricks in her belly. The crocodile, his only competition in this world, the only thing that could make the darkness leave the captain. She was out there somewhere, a great glittering mass, a body that was now no longer her but something of the two of them, something that would keep tearing at the world, a sort of balance restored.

She had gotten to him first.

Smee let his breath out in a rush and the bubble exploded against the back of his eyes, leaking ice water and it's terrible, hysterical nothings down the crevasses of his brain. He wasn't aware he'd gotten to his feet until his hands were fumbling his sodden sash for the guard of Johnny Corkscrew; he knew he had it on him, he'd bruised his ribs against the butt in the water. There. Carelessness caused a gash in his thigh as he tore it out and weighed it thoughtlessly in the moonlight.

Somewhere out there, the crocodile was living. Somewhere out there Hook scurried low on his belly in the body of the detestable wretch.

Smee tore his eyes from the Jolly Roger and walked stiffly down the beach. One way or another, by the time the sun came up, it would all be right again.

He was the crocodile.

And he wouldn't let it end this way.