Peter groaned. His entire body felt sore, as if something had picked him up and wrung him out. But what was more distressing were the thoughts and emotions coming into his mind. He tried to open his eyes, but waves of guilt and nausea kept pressing in on him. He squeezed them shut again and shook his head.
"Wonderful, you're awake," came a sterile voice behind him. "We can finally get this over with."
Peter pushed against the thoughts swirling in his head and squinted out at his surroundings. He was in the Imagination Tower, strapped to a chair by thick cables. He peered through the glass that encased the creation lab and saw that it was night, even though the last thing he remembered it had been early morning. The Crocodile appeared before him, staring at him intently. She was wearing that awful purple dress and hideous, scaly boots.
"What's going on?" He slurred, aware that he still didn't have complete control of his body.
"I tranquilized you," the Crocodile responded. "I had considered just killing you there in the cavern, especially since all of my previous attempts have failed, but I wanted to make an example of you," she explained coolly. "I don't want the other boys to get any ideas." She walked forward and stroked his hair, an odd gleam in her eye. "Plus, I thought you at least deserved an explanation. You were the first, you know. Sometimes it felt as if you were my own son."
Peter coughed. "Most mother's don't kill their children." A sensation surged inside his head, another twist of guilt. Mother. He remembered his mother. He gasped and shook his head again, trying to rid himself of the feelings, the images.
The Crocodile laughed. "No Peter, they do not. And I would add that most children don't kill their mothers. But that does not seem to be true in your case."
Peter began to shake. The faces, the facts, the memories pounded in his brain, growing clearer every second.
"You should thank me for taking away those painful recollections," said the Crocodile, pulling a flask from her pocket. "This solution, the "medicine" as you call it, is one of my most brilliant inventions." She shook the flask in his face tauntingly. "The engineered microbes in this liquid temporarily destroy the declarative memory while keeping the procedural memory intact. This was crucial, you see, so that you all could have access to those brilliant ideas in your heads without being distracted by sentimentality, or in your case, grief. As long as everyone took this solution every day, their explicit memory would be constantly disabled. Of course, every once in a while someone would miss a dose, and those memories would return, as you're experiencing now."
Peter strained against his cords, wanting to throttle the woman in front of him, but as much as he tried to direct his pain towards her, he knew that his guilt was all self inflicted.
A strange calm overtook him as he allowed the memories to seep back into his subconscious. He saw them. His parents. Laughing, smiling, playing with him. His mother holding him close and dancing with him, his father teaching him games. They held his hand, embraced him, looked at him with pure love in their eyes.
Then there was the fire. He had only been seven. He had been dismantling a remote controlled car, and it had exploded. The curtains had caught fire, and he ran to tell his mother about it. But on the way to her room, he had noticed a strange bird out of the window. His attention diverted, he ran outside to look for the creature, momentarily forgetting about the curtains. Just seconds after he had made it down the front steps, the entire house erupted in flames. He tried to run back in to find his parents, but the neighbors and the police had restrained him. His parents were dead, and it was all because of him.
"Ah, yes," the Crocodile whispered, searching his face, "your memories are perhaps the most painful of all. I found you shortly after that fire. I saw how brilliant you were, and I brought you to Neverland."
Peter remembered. He remembered the woman coming to see him in the children's home, soothing him, giving him exciting gadgets to distract him. She had come one night and told him she was going to take him to a magical place, where he could forget about his past, where he could do anything and be anything he wanted to be.
"Of course, back then, Neverland was little more than a pit in the ground with a few robots and trees. But it sparked your imagination. As our resources grew, you helped me build it into so much more. Then others came. Children with minds just like yours, and you all kept building and inventing and designing, and you had a family again."
"So you stole the other boys too?" Peter asked bitterly.
"Stole? No, no. Saved. These boys were all orphans. Abandoned. Unwanted. Unloved. I brought them here where they could use their extraordinary gifts. Where they could reach their full potential."
"And the pirates? Were they orphans too?"
The Crocodile furrowed her brow. "No. The pirates, as you surely must have noticed, are not quite as intelligent as you are. Many of them came here by their own choice. As petty criminals, they needed somewhere to hide. It was a perfect set up. They needed to disappear, and I needed people to give you boys some competition, to spur your imaginations and keep your minds sharp and producing."
Peter shuddered. It was all a game. They were pawns. Happily and ignorantly playing into this woman's deranged, albeit, well funded, purposes.
"Why?" He croaked out, struggling to focus on anything but the memory of his dead parents. "Why are you doing this? How does it benefit you?"
She threw her head back and cackled. "My dear boy, do you have any idea how much these inventions are worth?" She pulled his shadow out of a nearby port. She must have taken it out of his pocket when he was unconscious. "I had a buyer for several of your designs," she said, inspecting the small game piece. "I was going to sell them to him and dispose of you later, but somehow this shadow made it back into your hands."
Peter frowned. He was struggling between his pride and sense of self preservation. "Why do you need to kill me?" He spat. "You could have just copied the files and left me alone."
"Yes, I could have. But the risk was too great. You're always cavorting back and forth from Neverland to the outside world, and there was a chance you would find out I'd stolen your designs and fight back. You have been very useful, but you've become unpredictable and cocky, and I'm willing to eliminate you for the good of Neverland."
Peter had some choice words for her, but suddenly the door behind him opened and Captain Hook shuffled in.
"James, finally!" The Crocodile said, extending her arms to the pirate. "Have you brought me my poison?"
"Yes, Matilda," Hook said miserably, handing her a small bottle. She took it to a desk and opened it, inserting a small strip of paper that gradually turned blue.
"Forgive me for not trusting you," she said with a forced smile, "It's just that you've already failed me so many times."
"So you've been trying to kill me, too?" Peter snapped, glaring at Hook.
"Believe me, my boy, I have tried to avoid it for as long as possible." He looked in Peter's direction but couldn't meet his eyes. "I may be a criminal, but I'm not a murderer."
"Then why are you helping her?"
"That is a very long story."
"I've got time."
"Actually, you don't," the Crocodile cut in, grinning evilly. "Your time is running very short, but if it would soothe your muddled conscience, James, I'll let you bore the boy with it. And I really do love hearing my husband recount his sad life."
"Husband?"
"Ex-husband," Hook corrected.
"It's open to interpretation," she remarked, turning away. Hook sighed and rubbed his temples. "Matilda and I met in prison," he began. "She had infiltrated the staff and was pretending to be a guard. I'll admit I was smitten with this cunning woman back then, she hadn't showed all of her colors to me just yet." The Crocodile snorted but Hook continued. "With her help, I was able to escape. We then carried out one of the biggest bank heists in history. It really was an incredible feat, with fake diamonds and contortionists and a camel..." he trailed off, his eyes glazing over. "That money helped to build Neverland. Unfortunately, by some accidental slip by Matilda, I was caught. I was sentenced to life in the most deplorable prison imaginable. Somehow Matilda broke me out, on the condition that I do her bidding."
"Why haven't you just killed her?" Peter asked.
"It has crossed my mind," Hook admitted. Minerva turned and sarcastically batted her eyelashes at him, "but as I mentioned before, I'm rather reluctant to become a murderer. Plus, she's rigged a system that would immediately alert the police to my whereabouts upon her death, and I simply cannot go back to that prison."
"You know, Tink could probably overwrite that system in a matter of minutes," Peter said. Captain Hook looked thoughtful, but the Crocodile quickly interceded.
"Ha! Tink is slowly dying as we speak! I've cut off her oxygen supply and she's trapped in central control! This is her punishment for saving you this morning."
Peter felt the fight go out of him and hung his head. He couldn't bear the thought of one more person dying because of him.
"But let's get on with it," the Crocodile said, waving her hand dismissively. "All this chit chat is getting dull." She drew out a syringe and filled it with the poison from the bottle. "Because I'm feeling generous," she sneered, "I'll let you take one last dose of your "medicine" before I kill you. That way you can die with only happy memories. Except, of course, the memory of me injecting you with a deadly liquid."
She brought a flask to his lips, and Peter immediately longed for it. Longed for the pain and the awful knowledge of his past to fade away. But he knew that would be cowardly, and decided instead to die with a clear knowledge of the truth.
"No thank you," he said in mock politeness, stiffening away from the flask.
"Fine," she replied. "But you should know, this is really going to hurt."
He strained against the cables as she inserted the needle into his wrist. He thought once more of Wendy, of the teasing way she had smiled at him, then closed his eyes and waited for death.