Chapter Text
For as long as Harry Hook could remember, his father watched the sea.
It wasn't all he did; James Hook also sharpened blades and played the organ and captained a crew of bloodthirsty pirates.
A crew that did not sail.
That was why he watched the sea. He watched the sea like people watched television: passively, and raptly, and any moment he could.
When he was very small, Harry overheard someone at the market say that Old Hook worshiped the sea.
And when he asked his father about it, the captain replied, "All sailors worship the sea."
Even as a wee lad, Harry knew what it was to worship. Of course he did; there were gods, on the Isle. There were plenty of people who worshipped Hades, or Chernabog. Some- like Frollo -worshiped deities who were not seen walking the island.
If anyone had cared to ask him, Young Harry would have said that he worshiped the sea, too. Just not the way his father did. He couldn't sit at a window or stand at a boat railing and watch the distant waves. That was the king's sea, not his. The only sea he knew was the brown water at the docks that delivered him gifts sometimes: scraps of burlap, dead jellyfish, a shoelace tip, a broken piece of a pocket watch chain...
The day he plucked a glass bottle from the frothy water and blew into its mouth to make a musical note was also the day he learned that the sea could give gifts that didn't come from inside the water.
That was the day Ursula's daughter scurried up to him, saying, "Not like that."
She might have been slightly taller than him, at that time. Or maybe she was wearing shoes and he wasn't. He didn't look down to check. (If she had shoes, she'd stolen them herself; Ursula didn't bother herself much with leg-things. It was why Uma was one of the last of the girls to start wearing pants, apart from nobility types like the Evil Queen's daughter and the Tremaines.) Dressed in something plain gray, sleeveless, and knee-length, with a rope around her waist to serve as a belt, she'd approached him and taken the bottle from his hands like it was her natural right.
And he'd let her. A pirate's son- and one with two sisters, at that! -he'd just let her pull something from his hand, without a moment's resistance.
"Do it like this," she said, and blew into the bottle herself.
The way her air sang against the glass rim was as magical as a thing could be, on the Isle. A clear, round note. She slowly fed it all of her breath, while he watched her face: the long, dark lashes of her eyes, as she looked down at the bottle, and the controlled purse of her lips. The way her hair- a downpour of teal plaits -fell just long enough to brush the brown skin of her shoulders.
The note shook at the end, as she ran out of wind.
She handed him back the bottle, dark eyes meeting his. "See? Like that."
He didn't get to look at her long before a purple-haired faerie girl dragged her away. He watched them scamper from the docks and out of his line of sight, while he stood planted.
In the next few years, he would put aside his worship of the sea.
He never forgot it. But what he'd found, in that momentary encounter, was something worth watching in the way his father watched the distant waves. In the same way Old Hook knew high tide from low tide without thinking, so Harry knew what time the daughter of Ursula dumped off the Chip Shoppe's kitchen rubbish bin each morning, and collected back a bucket of seawater to boil.
He offered to help her carry her bucket.
She gave him a narrow look. "What for?"
His face grew hot, with her attention. He thought about what his father would say, to a question like that. "A sea witch's blessing," he answered confidently.
A grim laugh. "You don't wanna meet my mom."
"Not her. You."
She thought about that, then smacked him in the forehead. "There. You're blessed."
He felt it. Every time. He could feel it right down to the marrow of his bones.
There was someone on the Isle who was more blessed than he was: Maleficent's daughter. She spent every day with Ursula's daughter, running the streets and playing and laughing- all things that Harry quite literally dreamed about.
But the faerie girl squandered her blessing, so badly that Harry couldn't even be properly thankful for her loss.
The day Ursula's daughter ran back to the Chip Shoppe in tears, with rotten shrimp soaking her hair and shoulders, was the first time Harry spoke her name aloud.
"Uma!" he called from the docks, from the same spot where he'd first met her.
She looked back at him for the smallest piece of a second, with tears fracturing the light across her eyes. Then she fled inside.
Harry's eyes flashed red. It was something that normally happened when he was angry, but what he felt then wasn't an erratic swell of temper. No, it was something stronger and steadier. It was purpose. It was...evil. He felt evil.
He went back to the place where everyone was still laughing at the sea witch's girl for being "put in her place". Maleficent's daughter was no longer there, but he wasn't too disappointed. There was one particular pair of men who were guffawing loudly at each other. And there were bricks all over the ground.
If there was one thing he wished, it was that his arms were stronger.
He meant to throw the brick high, to hit the closest man right in the temple and knock him out- at least. But it fell short, hitting his jaw and making him spit out blood and teeth. Harry didn't get to throw many more bricks before he had to run, but it was a start.
Her tears were repaid in blood, as they should be.
A sacrament, like Frollo's communion.
Later that evening, he would collect the first brick he'd thrown from the ground where it had been left, and he'd rinse it in the brown water beneath the docks, as if sharing his blood sacrifice with the very sea that had washed him into Uma's path. Then he took the brick home.
And as he grew, he traded it for steel.