Introduction to Curly & Hook:
CHARACTER
Name: Name of the character you’re applying for. Curly
Face Claim: Remember to check here first. Robert Sheehan
Alignment: The alignment system is a great way to take a quick but thorough look at your character’s driving motivations. Unsure what we mean when we ask for alignment? You can learn more about your choices here. True Neutral
Headcanons: Write a minimum of four meaty headcanons. Really dig deep into their history, personality, mannerism, etc. You can also let us know here if you’d like to take on any of our writers' wanted connections.
– troublemaker. That’s the only word that Curly remembers from the Other Place. They used to chant it at him, droves of mindless, faceless nothings. It did the opposite of what they wanted it to: it made him push further, just to see how far he could go. In the Other Place, Curly remembers smiling faces only when they were twisted. He cannot remember an adult that he trusted, he knew that they were all selfish. They wanted him to be something that he could never be. In the Other Place, there was nothing. They told him as such, that someone like him could never be anything, so he made his own fate. He had no parents that he knew of, they had abandoned him long ago, and any other adult that tried to take their place deemed Curly too unruly to save. He was far too gone for anyone to put in the effort to turn him back around. He was always running away, wanting to put everything in his past and make it stay there. But even now, he has nightmares of one particular adult that would stop at nothing to make Curly something he could never be.
– His memories are like shattered glass, scattered all over the floor. He knows that if he were to try and make sense of it, to put the pieces back together, they would only shatter more–or cut into his skin. There are tiny little boxes sitting in his mind of bad memories, locked away forever and never to be opened. But sometimes when he is asleep, they leak into his consciousness. A rotund man with piercing blue eyes and gnarled hair stands above him. He feels like a giant to Curly, standing so tall that it hurts to look up at him. Curly’s face stings with the pain of human contact, never good enough for anyone. He is either failing or falling, he can never remember which. He rarely fights back, even if the man screams at him to do it–just do something! They say that there are two reactions to a stressful situation: fight or flight, but Curly has always forgotten. He takes the memory, puts it in a little box, and shoves it in the parts of his mind that are too deep to ever find again.
– Eventually the man grows tired of Curly doing nothing, and Curly gets tired of it too. He stands there as still as a rock, waiting for the man to lose interest. But as the days go by, his patience for this little game wains. Eventually, Curly finds a new game to play. This time, he reacts sarcastically. He does all of the things that adults hate about teenagers: he rolls his eyes, cracks his knuckles, and only responds in two-bit jokes. They’re usually bad, but on the rare occasion, Curly gets a laugh out of the man. This almost always turns the whole situation around. Curly becomes less of a rock waiting for the tide to roll back out and more of a comedian in a room full of hecklers. He may not say the jokes on his setlist, and sometimes someone ends up throwing a punch, but he always makes them laugh. And that becomes a core part of who Curly is. As long as he can keep them laughing, then everything works out in the end. At least for a little while.
– Neverland feels like a fever dream more than anything. Something that Curly is certain he is going to wake up from at any moment. In the beginning, he truly felt as though he was carving something for himself. He finally found a group of people who weren’t interested in being some other thing–they were simply who they were at that moment and didn’t care to change it. But then there were the Darlings. They were unlike anything Curly had met before, or since. They did not see Neverland as a dream, as something that they could revel in. Wendy in particular fell for so many of Peter’s cruel games that Curly was sure that she would not survive it. But in the end, somehow she did. Through resilience or sheer luck, Wendy managed to convince Peter to let her return to where she came. To make matters worse, most of The Lost Boys agreed to return with her. But Curly knew better. He understood that this was a game, and just like countless of Peter’s games, there was always a catch. A trick. One did not get what they asked for, especially not in Neverland. Curly tried to convince the others not to go, that going against Peter was never a good idea even if he said that it was okay. Peter would lead anyone into a swamp of crocodiles if it meant he could keep his own hand. But they left him all the same, like everyone else in Curly’s life.
– When they all left, Neverland turned into a frozen tundra. The moment that the air turned cold, Curly knew that this was the punishment for their departure. He knew that Peter did not like to lose and this was the result of it. He could have died. He should have. But Curly is resourceful to a fault, after spending so much time having to survive on his own. Even before this, before Peter spit nothing but vitriol to the only one who stayed, Curly had been through the worst that life could throw. This was just another step in the never-ending swamp. He retreated into himself, putting his whole self inside of a box, and only acted on instinct. Hunting, foraging, finding shelter, sleeping: these were his new normal. If he told Peter of his success, Peter would destroy it all. After one incident where Peter found his shelter and destroyed it, Curly stopped talking altogether. He spent the entire winter simply surviving. But something happened inside, something that never happened before. Curly changed. He no longer wanted to cling to the arms of another–anyone who would give him attention. He knew that when they returned, he would return to the stage and become the comedian once again. But it was all to survive, to keep them away from his heart. It had become as frozen as the whole of Neverland.
– And Peter’s Games? Well, Curly knew how to play them. He knew that in order to survive, as long as he kept coming up with new things to entertain Peter, he would be able to continue on living. One mistake could end in death–or worse, exile. He knew better than to go against a raging storm. He learned how to simply weather it. Because no matter what, Curly knew that he couldn’t go back to the Other Place. The glimpses of his life that he remembers tells a very dark tale, one that he has no intent on finishing.
WANTED CONNECTION I’D LIKE TO FILL:
AWAY FROM THE OPEN JAWS / LOST BOYS ONLY: The tenth or eleventh night Lucy stayed in Neverland, Lucy walked in her sleep through the forest. This was the first and, hopefully, only time that Lucy slept-walked to the edge of the Crocodile Pond. It just so happened that a Lost One roused from sleep not long after, finally finding her at the edge, and pulled her away by her nightgown just as the crocodile was about to snap its jaws at the sleep-walking Lucy.
– Once the Winter-that-Ruined was over, Curly was prepared for the worst. But what would happen next was something he could have never predicted. Instead of building things back from the ground up, Peter wanted to replace how things used to be. He brought another girl. Another Wendy. And another. And another. Most of them would not survive. At first, Peter would play with them. He would gather nice things for them, doing everything he could to make them happy. But they could never be the real Wendy. Eventually, he would grow tired of the game and want to discard his toy. Curly doesn’t know if it was an accident or Peter’s doing, he only knows that he stopped Lucy from falling into the jaws of a crocodile. To this day, he questions if what he did was right, always teetering on the line of good and bad. One thing is for certain: if Peter found out, Curly would be a dead man walking.
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CHARACTER
Name: Name of the character you’re applying for. Hook
Face Claim: Remember to check here first. Regé-Jean Page
Alignment: The alignment system is a great way to take a quick but thorough look at your character’s driving motivations. Unsure what we mean when we ask for alignment? You can learn more about your choices here. Chaotic Neutral
Headcanons: Write a minimum of four meaty headcanons. Really dig deep into their history, personality, mannerism, etc. You can also let us know here if you’d like to take on any of our writers' wanted connections.
– Hook was the first of the Lost. Most of what they follow now was created by him and Peter. Back then, the world of Neverland did not have all of its complications. There were no rules, as long as one followed whatever Peter wanted them to. They were meant to take care of each other, to look out for one another, and above all, to never leave.
– Unlike most of the Lost, Hook remembers more of his time in the Other Place. Hook would love to pretend that his life was any different than now, but that would be a lie–one he tells on occasion. Peter loves a good down-trodden story. If one of the Lost does not have a reason to stay in Neverland, then they were turned away. That was a rule-that-wasn’t-a-rule. Their life back in the Other Place had to have nothing to want to return to in it. Otherwise they would become homesick and want to go back. Then Peter would have no one to play with. So Hook made up a story about his life, one that Peter would believe. Hook’s make-believe life was that he was an orphan, left on the streets to fend for himself. No one cared about him, despite how much he begged for a home. He was shoved aside and forgotten.
– In truth, Hook led a life of his own making. He did not follow the rules set by society. Most men were chasing down a good family name to tie themselves to. Hook was doing everything but. He spent his days gambling and his nights whoring around. He went to the opera to visit the women there, flirting and making them think that he cared about them. But he never did. He became much like his father was, a man who had nothing to tie him down. Hook’s family didn’t die, like he had told Peter countless times, they simply did not exist to Hook. They were too insignificant to include in the story of his life.
– When Peter brought him to Neverland, Hook decided that this could be how he masters his own fate. Together, they could build whatever world they wanted to and there would be no one to tell them otherwise. They would be the rule makers. If the rules became too much, too boring, too easy, then they could be changed. Hook could allow the darkness that he held in between his ribs to be released in one breath, and no one could say anything about it. He got pleasure from the pain that he caused others, especially when Peter told him to do it. Pirate raids became his favorite. Hook loved to instill fear into the heart of every pirate that they came across, renouncing them his enemies-for-life.
– He did not, however, beat them just because he could. He did it because he was told to, but also because he believed in what Peter was telling him. The game was Lost Ones versus Pirates and those Lost always won. He never dueled someone before he was told to, but once he did, he gathered a sick sort of pleasure from it. They were the enemy and Hook was the vengeance. He became obsessed with the role that Peter had given him of seeking revenge for something that never even happened. If Peter told him to jump, Hook asked how high.
– Until Charlie. He was a damn child when he was brought to Neverland, something that Hook thought Peter had said would never happen. He was certain that the age was to be a boy–not yet a man–but never a child. Hook never agreed with the boy’s presence but he was there all the same. And then there was Sally. She wasn’t even supposed to be here, just like Charlie. None of them were supposed to be there. It was Peter who had brought them all here, one by one. He was the one pulling the strings. The rest were mere puppets in his game. The caveat was supposed to be that Peter only brought those who were in desperation. He was not to bring anyone who came from a happy family, those who were able to fend for themselves. Somehow, both Charlie and Sally gave Hook the courage to stand up against Peter. He would no longer stand idly by and watch as Peter quickly grew tired of his play things. Instead of discarding them, Peter sought to kill them. He couldn’t stand looking at his failures every day, so he did everything to get rid of them.
– Hook spent his time digging grave after grave, burying one play thing after the other. It became clear to him that eventually, he would find himself in the gravesite himself. That eventually, Peter would grow tired of him as he does with all of his play things. For the first time, Hook found something that had eluded him in his own life: he found someone worth fighting for. But it was all for nothing. Peter would never allow for his play things to escape. He would never allow them to have minds of their own either. It was that you either played Peter’s games or faced the consequences. Hook had to watch as those he had grown to care for slowly died at the hands of Peter. It had all come to a fever pitch, but when Hook tried to fight off Peter himself he learned that as long as Peter feeds the island with the blood of those who won’t play his games, Peter is invincible.
– In the end, Hook was punished in the same way that he had punished those before him. Just as he had done to countless others before him, Hook had his right hand cut off and fed to the crocodiles. He was cursed to stay in Neverland forever, to never grow up, and to always be Peter’s favorite play thing.
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