A bucket of Beckett, Chapter One.
Jack shook the bones in his closed hands and threw them into the pool, mumbling the incantation that had been written on the map. For six months he’d been looking for the Fountain of Youth, and now its waters were his, if only he could get the magic right. Tricky stuff, the supernatural-say a syllable or two wrong and you were liable to wind up with a face like Davey Jones.
He shut his eyes for the required nine seconds and looked into the pool. It didn’t seem any different, except for the mermaids’ knucklebones that had settled to its sandy bottom. He scooped up a bit of the water in his hand and drank-it didn’t taste any different, either. He sighed and flopped to the ground, pouting at the sky as if it would do him any good.
“Bugger,” he sighed.
“Jack, your language continues to be appalling.” The voice that was definitely coming from the pool sounded exactly like Beckett’s.
“What?” He scrambled back to his knees and knelt over the pool. Where his reflection should have been was Beckett’s face, shimmering in the water. “You’re dead,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“And your grasp of the obvious continues to astound me,” the reflection said, rolling its eyes. “Well? Are you going to pick me up or leave me here?”
“Ah, but this is clearly a hallucination brought on by either the water I just drank, or some strange tropical disease that’s floating around these parts,” he replied, grinning at the pool. “I expect I’ll be dead too, before much more time passes…”
“Ah, so you didn’t bring me back on purpose,” Beckett’s reflection sighed. “And I was beginning to think that you’d changed your mind about me.”
“This is the fountain of youth, am I correct?” Jack raised an eyebrow. “And I’m not dreaming?”
“It would have been if you’d pronounced the incantation differently, I’m certain,” the reflection replied, looking at him with disdain. “Look, I’m not really sure how this works, but do you have a bucket or something? There’s got to be a way to get me into a more corporeal form than this.”
“I do have a bucket,” Jack said, grinning. “If you’d care to explain how you got here.”
“You said the words, and a window opened up into the world of the living. What… oh, dear…” Beckett sighed as Jack scooped the water from the pool into the bucket, and the uncanny reflection along with it. “You have no tact.”
“I have no tact?” he snorted. “Would you look at that… he’s a puddle, and he says I have no tact…”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Yes. Step one, find the fountain of youth. Step two, do the enchantment. Step three, drink the water and become eternally gorgeous.” He flashed the bucket a grin. “Step four… hmm.” He shrugged. “Step five, profit!”
“Just shut up and take me back to your ship,” the reflection in the bucket sighed. Jack grinned-perhaps the journey wasn’t wasted after all.