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"We were only ever just playing at being scoundrels," her whisper is barely audible in the sterile room with the carton of stale coffee in the corner and flickering lights.
But Susan hears it anyhow because it feels like something her heart rebels against when she says it ... only this sounds true the way that we were only ever just playing at being kings and queens always feels like a lie.
She looks up for the first time, the conversation around the new participant already buzzing in a new direction, glancing off Susan's peripheral like static in a storm. She looks up and studies the people around her for the first time in four months it'll be good for you, susan her doctor told her, you aren't the only one who lost something in the war, and sees sad, pathetic people with blood-shot, red-rimmed eyes and pouched bellies. People did lose something in the war - everyone loses something, eventually - not everyone loses everything and everyone.
The scoundrel, is different.
Not at first - at first she's just... small, innocuous, a little like a child in outdated clothing borrowed from her grandmother.
And then.
Wendy smiles at the queen across the room. It's the smile she saved for Hook, for Pan - when they were alone, for the mermaids - when she was so deep under the water only they could see, for Tiger Lily - when they were covered in mud and blood and sweat and tears and felt each other's lips for the first time. It's the only real smile she has left, and her face hasn't felt it's crease in the longest time.
It says: i want to eat you i want to devour your i want to swallow you whole i want to swallow the world until there's only us left and then we'll fight to the death like our hearts belong to a foreign god in a long-lost land and there's nothing tying us to this place anymore, it says too much - it says it all.
It's just a smile from a pirate to a queen in a land neither belongs and it's everything coming back together again.
And then the girl smiles.
And it is feral.
Stranger, even, then the faces that would dance with her sister in the moonlight as if she belonged to them (Lucy did) (that was the trouble) (Susan didn't belong anywhere). Stranger, even -blasephemy- than the constellation that evoked a smile on Aslan's face when he told her not to come back.
The girl, when she smiles her feral, terrifying smile, reveals something not exactly extraordinary, but something Susan hasn't felt in a long, long while.
After, when Wendy kisses Susan's bare shoulder after a long, wintry night, it doesn't feel like a pirate consort begging favor from her queen. It doesn't feel - either - like two lost girls in a world they don't belong to, clutching each other during long, snowy nights when they were promised sunshine and moonshine and adventures and songs.
It just feels like a kiss.
And that only makes her more hungry.
"You're like me," Susan says abruptly, interrupting the gaggle of voices in the room. Her voice, rough from un-use and dry from the bad coffee, sounds less like a queen's command and more like a cry for help - but that's alright.
The feral girl quirks an eyebrow.
And that's all the answer they need.