Comment_fic Master Post: Pirates of the Caribbean
I will be updating this as I find more, but. Um. Pirates of the Caribbean is actually one of my favorite fandoms to write in. I think it's because of the mythos is so complex and GORGEOUS and. I love the ocean a lot, and everything associated with it, and it opens up the best metaphors ever.
Also, it fits short-form delightfully. (Though I need to write more Elizabeth, she's badass. Someone prompt me?)
I suppose, honestly, that all of these can take place in the same universe. In fact, maybe someday I will weave them together so that they work even better. But for now!
Those drabbles mainly concerned with JACK:
He couldn't really feel his legs anymore by the time it occurred to him to send a letter. It wouldn't be easy - he'd have to charm the jailer, first, and probably mix up some ink from whatever he could find lying about - blood, mostly, he reasoned, wincing as the built-wound in his side twinged again. But he had the paper that was sewn into the lining of his hat, and they hadn't dared take his hat away from him.
He wrote Dear and then paused, frowning, flicking his eyes left and right in thought. There were half a dozen wretches he knew in Tortuga, but it wasn't wretches he needed to get out of jail, no, it was half-decent pirates and those were getting farther and farther between. In fact, there wasn't a single name he could pull off the top of his head, so he settled for a half-decent wretch of a pirate instead, remembering laughing eyes and a slap that could snap the neck of a dock-chicken in a single blow.
Anamaria, he continued, and paused again. She was a lovely girl at that, and he was really bloody tired of being in jail. With a quick dab of his tongue to the homemade quill, he set pen to paper once again. You are my sun, my moon, my starlit sky. Without you I dwell in darkness. Am in jail. Please help. Signed, yours forever, Capt. Jack Sparrow.
And that was that, which was just as well because he was running out of paper that wasn't stained with seawater and whatever else that he didn't want to look too closely at. He gave a sweet smile to the jailer and held out the paper.
She arrived the next day, marching up to the bars unimpressed, dark eyes flashing. "Jack Sparrow." She scowled at him, hands on hips.
He sauntered up to the bars (his legs were working again, thankfully) and threaded his hands through. "Anamaria." He greeted, face grave, and then flashed her his brightest smile. "You wouldn't happen to have a ship I could...borrow?"
**
Norrington slams a hand down on his desk, nearly upending his inkwell. Impossible. The man is truly impossible.
He has reports here from the farthest corners of the Empire, from the far East, from the savage northland colonies. Letters and letters and letters claiming that they'd found him, that they'd caught him, that they had chained and barred and broken Jack Sparrow and that there was no way he could ever escape.
They date back years. And they are each and every one of them lies.
He has wondered, for a long time, how he'd done it. Had he a friend in every town, then, to get him out? Had he so many weapons, so much steel that he fought like the very teeth of hell were closing in? But when the Commodore's men had searched the place where he was supposed to be, when they confronted the empty-handed villagers, they hadn't been dead. For almost every case there was no bloodshed at all, no sign of violence. Rather than a trail of tears Sparrow left a wake of bafflement.
He had even suspected the man of witchcraft, and even now that has not been ruled out. But having stood face to face with him, having seen his eye and his lip, having closed his hands on his throat and found only air, Norrington wonders. Is it witchcraft to have a tongue that silver? Is it witchcraft that makes his voice sinks into your soul, that he talks you out of your ship and your hat and your love, and you find yourself shaking hands with the man over the deal?
Is it witchcraft, or skill?
He wants more than anything to be the one to catch him, wants to be the one to tear out his silver tongue and leave him bleeding and defeated. He wants to see Jack Sparrow powerless, see him dead.
But at the same time there is something in him that admires the man, wonders what it would be to sail with him, to watch him work his spell on others, to be on the right end of that sharp, exhilarating grin. There is a part of him that yearns for the freedom that Sparrow embodies.
He smooths his papers, dips his pen, and does his best to drown that part in the dull dust of politics.
**
"The sea is a mirror," someone had told Jack once, or maybe he'd told someone that. It didn't matter. Conversations were like that, he remembered, a back-and-forth sally of bullets where you didn't really want to kill the other person, only make them stare at the smoking hole next to their head and respect your skill. It was hard to tell whose gun was whose, after all this time, whose thought whose and what voice belonged to what face.
The sea was a mirror now, though, in a thousand ways that he was certain he hadn't meant when he'd said, or heard, or thought it.
The sea reflected the sunrise. It was always sunrise, here, at the easternmost end of the world. The sun circled him like a buzzard, waiting for him to run out of water, to run out of patience, to run out of luck.
He had poured the last drops down his throat what might have been today, what might have been yesterday. Perhaps it was even tomorrow. And his hands hurt, the blisters from the oars splitting and drying and festering, and he'd talked himself mad out of impatience long ago. But luck?
He was Captain Jack Sparrow, and there was land in sight.
The sea was a mirror, slick and horrible and silvered as he tried desperately to cross it. His oars were bloodstained, his map tied to his knees, his compass to his hat, dangling in front of his eyes like a carrot in front of an ass.
The sea was a mirror. He lay at its edge and stared, drowning in his own reflection. He was tired and he was starving and he was dying, but there was sand under his knees and trees against the sky.
Hands lifted him and carried him and set him down again. Water was pressed into his mouth, and the sweetness of it shocked his eyes open.
There was nothing above him but trees, nothing below him but sand. His throat was whetted but his stomach empty. he blinked the salt from his eyes and pushed himself shakily to his feet.
Before him lay a pool of water, surrounded by rocks of green and gold. They shone in the perpetual sunrise. The water itself was inky black, and no reflection peered up from its surface. Jack stumbled to its edge, and heard its singing. He dipped his hands in its water and it was cold, too cold for comfort, too cold for fear. It was less a pool and more a hole, and in its depths Jack saw something stir, a great, terrible intelligence, larger than his mind could comprehend.
The sea was a mirror. The Fountain of Youth was an eye.
Those drabbles mainly concerned with BARBOSSA:
He taps his pistol against his knee, waiting.
Around him, the usual chaos of the Tortuga waterfront rages on, a whirling storm of colors and sound. Winking barmaids slam tankards down in front of surly deckhands. Laughing sailors pour wine down the busts of indignant ladies. And everywhere there is dancing, a fiddler fiddling, swirling and stomping feet in sprays of brine and beer. Fists and lips collide, but Barbossa sits alone.
His eyes flicker cold, his feet settled calm before him on the table. His wine is untouched. He is waiting.
Amid the laughing and shouting and cursing around him there is a sort of thread of coherency, a whispered tale told by a thousand unrelated voices. A word here and a word there, the story is spun: The Black Pearl has been seen off the coast.
Barbossa lifts his gun to his lips, tap-taps it. He dreams of the wheel in his hands. He can feel the spokes now, the wood veined like skin, her bosom stretched tight against the waves. The finest ship, he said, they said, the finest ship you ever laid eyes on.
And the Captain...The Captain is a tale of his own.
A ripple through the crowds, and that must be him, sliding through the dance. Silence follows in his wake like thread to a needle, not spreading outward but lying shining in the faces of those he touches. And he touches everyone - a casual hand on a shoulder, a gentle shove out of the way. A tip of the hat to a lady, and a smile at a lad no taller than his knee. He walks like he's been at sea his whole life, the rolling, prancing gait of one who expects the world to shift under him, suit his needs one moment and drown him the next.
He's younger than Barbossa expected - younger than Barbossa himself - and devilishly handsome. He slides up to Barbossa's table, his face almost furtive, as if he thought perhaps he had made it here unnoticed. Barbossa almost snorts at him, but there's a strange sort of sincerity to it, and so he waits.
Captain Jack Sparrow looks him over, eyes narrowed, and then widens them again, quickly, like the opposite of blinking. "Barbossa." He names, and Barbossa meets his eyes, dropping the hand with the pistol so that it's tap-tap-tapping against his knee once more.
Sparrow's quick, dark eyes don't miss the fact that this leaves the muzzle pointed at him, but simply arches a curious brow. "I hear you want a place aboard my ship."
Barbossa smiles. It isn't until they've shaken hands, until he's followed Sparrow through Tortuga's dank streets, 'til he's set foot aboard her at last, that he stops smiling. For his wait isn't over - it's just redefined. He watches the rest of the crew board, wonders what shape his words need to be to slide in through their ears and unlock their hearts.
His eyes flicker cold. His wine is untouched. His feet are propped up calm against the galley table.
Pistol snug at his side, Barbossa is waiting.
**
The door to the cabin swung open on loose hinges, their silence far more ominous than any eerie groan would have been. Ships creak - they're wood and metal, stretched taught against the power of the waves, it's natural for them to complain. But the Black Pearl slid soundlessly over the furious seas, unnerving even its Captain.
Barbossa crossed to his table, the spread of food upon it now mostly rot and decay. Once he would have turned up his nose at it, screamed for his deckhands to clear it away. But now he couldn't bring himself to care.
There was a note at his place, atop the tarnished sliver plate. It was written in a scrawling, skeletal hand (he had no doubt it was a skeletal hand which wrote it). Full of misspellings and grammatical errors, it told a tale that would have broken any human heart. A tale of a quest for immortality, of that quest's end, of victory embittered by a curse. It was a story so familiar he barely knew whether he was reading the words or just remembering them, reciting them in his head.
The parchment cracked and flaked into ash as Barbossa crushes it in his fist. More of his crew had abandoned him - simply walked over the side of the ship to try and find somewhere to exist - he hesitated to call it "living". They always failed. They always came back, their feet churning up the sandy bottom of the sea until it gathered like their sorrow in clouds around their heads.
Barbossa sat in his grand chair, his Captain's chair, and listened to his remaining crew grumble and squabble, moan and wail into the night. He put his head in his hands (bone only he feels where there should be flesh and hair, things to tear and sob with, but his fingers slip and slide) and regrets.
**
It rattles up through his newly-whole lungs like the first pebble of an avalanche, rasping and sweet and cold. He has a weightless sort of moment where he forgets what to do with it - hold it in between his lips until it grows stale, let it out immediately without assurance that there'll be another - and then he's gasping and coughing and choking on blood and seawater and strange, thick potion. There's a slim hand behind his head and - he struggles to make his eyes focus - someone bending over him, raising his up so that he can spit. Jack, he thinks for a wild, desperate moment, but then his head clears and he sees a pretty face, pin-pricked with ink. He's seen her before - in the restless, painful dreams of the dead.
"Calypso." He breathes, and she smiles a smiles too white. "Tia Dalma." She corrects, and then, "Wellllcome back, Captain Barbossa."
A thing I should definitely, definitely lengthen and finish (Future!Fics):
True North
He's waited a long time for this. He's watched the world shrink until he could fit it into the pocket of his greatcoat, the people line themselves up in neat rows like numbers, like writing. He's learned to write, to read, to type, to steal and beg and borrow in ways he'd never have dreamed of in the days when the sea was big enough to lose yourself in. Most of all he's learned to wait, to watch, to fade back and keep his eyes on the dial of the compass.
And now at last it comes 'round again to true north.
Now at last is the Second Age of Piracy.
The trappings are a bit different, he admits, as he walks the deck. Below him computers hum and flash, deckhands - ensigns, he reminds himself, ensigns - scurry from station to station. They call clipped instructions to one another, not insults and filthy jokes. He raises a hand to a young lad who reminds him ever so much of...who?
He pauses. So, so long ago.
He calls down to the boy. "Ahoy there, lad, now hang on a minute." The boy pauses, about to press a button on the panel at his side. "What's your name?"
The ensign salutes. "Turner, sir!"
Jack's eyes warm. "Knock off the saluting, lad. We're not the Navy. Now. Open 'er up, Will."
He presses the button, and then ascends to the bridge next to Jack and ventures, "...Sir?"
"Yes?"
"We are the Navy."
Jack looks down at his hastily-pinned Captain's insignia, looks around at the men who work like clockwork around him, in their grey uniform - well, uniforms. He widens his eyes. "Right. Yes, of course we are, Will." He pats the boy's shoulder awkwardly and turns away, making a face. Too close. He's getting too hasty.
"I, uh. Captain?"
He turns back to Will.
"How did you know my name?"
Jack grins, his gold teeth glinting. They were nearly all gold, now. He has more gold than most of the Earth Confederacy, but no one needs to know that. "Call it luck. It isn't, but that's simpler to say and far easier to understand."
The huge shields slide open, and Captain Jack looks out over a sea of stars, each one a promise and a threat. Here and there great ships move like whales in the deep. They're still close to port, too close for Jack's liking, but it will take them a bit to realize how he'd stolen the ship and who he'd stolen with it.
His hand slides to the flask at his hip, feels it thrumming with life. He has time. He always has time.
Beside him, Will murmurs, "It's beautiful."
Jack lays a decorated hand on his shoulder. "Oh, aye." He can feel the boy's heartbeat under his hand, feel him alive. Such things get easier as time moves past and leaves you untouched. He leans in close, watching his face as the ensign stares out at the unknown. "Are you scared?"
Will tears his face away from the view. "What? No! Of course not."
Jack raises his eyebrows. "Really? I'm terrified." He sways up the stairs to his chair, leaping up onto it and raising a hand. "Onward, you lazy bunch of scallywags! We'll have company soon enough!"
He feels the ship speed up under him, humming, and smiles. Will has followed him and stands at the base of his throne-like chair, looking at him like he's mad.
Things truly have gone back to normal.
"What do you mean you're terrified?" Will asks, and Jack brings a finger to his lips, sliding so that he's sitting in the chair. Will lowers his voice, leaning over the edge of the chair. "What kind of Captain is scared of space - "
"The kind of Captain who intends to survive, of course." Jack hisses back. "How much do you know about the ocean, boy?"
"Um." Will frowns. "Which ocean?"
Jack winces. "How the mighty have fallen." He leans closer, his eyes darting around the deck. "The ocean, boy, is a terrible and a beautiful thing, fickle and traitorous as a hard-faced woman. And this..." He waved a hand at the panels of glass above, at the stars beyond. "This is just another ocean, full of strange magicks ot yet explored."
He steps off his dais again. He needs to be moving, thinking. Will trails him, at a loss. "Now, the first I'll need is a ship."
"...You have a ship."
Jack sneers. "No, no, no. This is not a ship. This is a barge, a boat. I need something light and fast, like..." His eyes catch on a shadow in the sky. "There."
He gestures, and the shadow is highlighted on the viewscreens of the crew. "Men," He says, loud enough that the crew can hear, "Pull along this vessel."
They begin to turn and rise through space, the tapping of keys growing louder on the quiet deck. Jack smiles. "Now, we'll need a crew, but not from here, no, EarthPort is full of puppies and lapdogs, I need...I need pirates."
Will is staring at him, wide-eyed. "Sir...sir, why are you telling me all of this?"
Jack grins at him, fierce. "Because you're coming with me."
He spins and runs down off the bridge, across the deck and down the hallways to the airlocks. He pulls a breather on and throws one at Will, who trotted after him. "Why me?" He asks, and Jack notes the lack of "sir". He hits the button to open the airlock. "What have I - "
Jack shoves the breather over his head and pulls him out into space.
They land on the top of the other ship, just as their shields open so that the Captain can go through inspection. Jack slams a suction-clamp down against the glass and grins at the terrified crew below. "Hello." He says, his voice sliding down his arm and through the glass. "I'm Captain Jack Sparrow."
Will is floundering in space next to him, and Jack pulls him down and in, keeping his eyes on the people below. "Welcome to the age of Space Piracy, kid." He drew his pistol. "Keep your head down."
Will looks at him questioningly. "What - "
The shields slam closed, right above them, just as Jack shoots through the glass and they fall to the deck below.
**
Glass rained down around them as Jack landed gracefully on his feet, pistol in hand. Beside him, Will landed and stumbled and caught himself, making small noises of surprise and pain. Jack winced in sympathy but let him get himself up, striding instead up the ramp to the bridge.
He expected the crew to be in shock, to be so surprised by his audacity that he could just stride up and take what he wanted, jettison them to crawl to safety aboard the Navy vessel he'd just left. But they moved immediately, lithe, strange forms, surrounding him in silence. He spun in the center of a ring of blades, cold eyes following his movements.
He held up his hands. "Gentleman." He greeted them, thinking fast. One of them reached forward and took the pistol from his hands, another brought a struggling Will forward and threw him into the center of the circle. Jack's fingers twitched toward his gun as the cold-eyed man stuck it in his belt. "There, now - " he said, but the man grabbed his jaw, examining.
"We don't kindly to people trying to steal our ship." The man growled, and there was something familiar in his accent, something ancient. He smelled of salt and smoke, things Jack hadn't realized he missed since he'd joined this world of glass and plastic.
He tried a smile. "Such a lovely thing, how could I resist?" He asked.
The man smiled back, teeth crooked. "Hhh." It was something close to a laugh but nothing close to humor. "Take him to the Captain, boys."
Jack was shoved off the bridge and down a corridor, Will at his side. "These," he said to the boy, "Now these are pirates."
Will glared at one of the men, pulling his sleeve out of his grip. "Really, sir? I hadn't noticed."
Jack rolled his eyes at him and sped up. "Yes, alright, I'm going." He said to the pirates shuffling him along. "I'd love to meet your Cap - "
He stopped. They'd come to a door. It wasn't a grey, featureless slab like the rest. There was no push-button release, no comm-system. It was wooden and molding and so old it made Jack's teeth hurt.
He'd seen it before. He slid his palm over the grain of it. It was damp. Green things grew along its cracks. Something in its edges, he was sure, had just moved.
He pushed it open.
The room inside was wood-paneled and old-fashioned, with a great oaken desk and a chest banded with iron. The desk was strewn with ancient parchments and star-charts alike, the ceiling glass and showing the stars outside. There was a globe sitting in one corner, a model of the solar system and the three around it in the other. The walls were covered in writings, in languages that Jack had spent years learning, had spent centuries. The floor was stained with blood and ink and bilge.
A man sat at the desk, a glass of golden Sunwine in his hand. He was dressed in an old ruffled white shirt and the tight grey pants of a navy uniform. He had a tricorn hat on his head, and the hilt of a laser pistol sticking out from his belt. His hair was long and dark blond, and a scruff of a beard adorned his chin. He looked up as Jack was shoved in his door.
They stared at each other a moment. "Will?" Jack breathed.
"Yes?" Asked Ensign Will.
"Jack?" Asked Captain Will, standing up. He was gaping, and Jack could feel himself doing the same. "Then - then you found it!"
Jack blinked, then frowned. "Found what?"
"The Fountain!" Will answered. He was beaming now, and coming around his desk with open arms.
"Oh, right!" Jack exclaimed. "Of course I did, dear boy, old news." He clasped his old (so, so old) friend tight, feeling Will's heartbeat against his own. He breathed in the smell of him and felt a wave of loneliness, a delayed sort of reaction to a thousand years of solitude. He could feel Will trembling against him and felt...guilty.
It wasn't a feeling he was used to. He decided he didn't like it. He released his friend from the embrace but kept him close, hands on his hips. Will made no move to get away. "What about you?" Jack asked. "What are you doing in the great depths of space."
Will shrugged. "So the sea got a little bigger. The Dutchman still needs a Captain, Jack." He looked down. "So you've been...alive, all this time, and you never...you never thought to look for me?"
Jack floundered. "Uh. I - "
"Excuse me, um, sir? What's going on?"
He spun to look at the ensign, grateful. "Oh, yes, right. Um. Ensign Will..." He gestured to the boy, "Meet your..." He flicked his fingers at Captain Will. "...Great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great - " He took a breath, "Great-great-great...etcetera, etcetera...grandfather."
Both Wills stared at him, and then at each other. Captain Will raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and then shrugged and held out a hand. Ensign Will blinked once, twice, and then turned to Jack. "You're kidding me. I could never be related to a pirate."
Jack cast a sidelong glance at Will, coincidentally meeting Will's sidelong glance at him. Then, by unspoken writ, they both burst out laughing.
Will gaped at them. "What's so funny?"
Captain Will bit his lip, controlling his mirth. "Oh, kid. You have no idea."
**
Those drabbles mainly concerned with WILL
She's dressed like Elizabeth was, that monumental, fateful day when everything turned upside down, the beginning of a journey that Will would never finish, except that rather than gold and white she wore a purple so deep it was almost black. The stuff of kings.
Her hair is the starless sky, her eyes like Tia Dalma's, and she beckons to him from the shore.
"I can't," he says, gestures to the ship around him (it should be creaking, creaking, all the little comfort noises of a healthy vessel, but it slides silent through the waves, why so silent?). "I can't touch ground except once every ten years, and it hasn't been three yet since the last time I saw her."
She smiles a smile like she has stolen too much joy and stored it inside, and it slips out bright-white between her black-painted lips. "It's alright," she says. "You're dreaming, and my brother doesn't like to break curses. Says it makes him feel too much like a god."
He blinks at her, and then he's standing on the sand. He can feel the sun rising behind him. The ground is gritty beneath his boots (worn so thin he can feel each grain of sand, worn so thin he can walk the length of a rigging-wire, balanced and poised and perfect). She extends an impossibly pale hand to him and he takes it, because the light is golden and the world is green and this is all a dream, anyway.
"I thought it was time we met." She says, still smiling, amused and joyful, and leads him along the beach. "Since it looks like I won't be seeing you the normal way, not for a while yet."
"Normal way?" He asks, because that's the easiest of the questions he has. And then, because there's an answer in her eyes, if not in her voice, he asks, "How long is a while? How long do I get?"
Do I get to see my son again? Do I see Jack again? Does he find it, the Fountain? What of the Dutchman?
Her smile grows. "Everyone gets a lifetime, of course," she says. "Yours might be longer than most, but a lifetime it is, while you live it."
They round a curve in the headland, and Will stops, because there is the house, proud and shining, and there is Elizabeth, as golden and beautiful as he remembers her. She is not alone.
There is a man with her, standing huge and hulking, and Will recognizes her stance. Defiance is writ in her posture, and one hand is at the small of her back, where her pistol hangs beneath her bustle. They are arguing.
"Elizabeth - " He breathes, and steps forward, but the vision of death's hand is tight like irons around his wrist. "She cannot hear you," she says sadly. "I will not keep you here, but I thought you might like to see..."
Will's eyes are glued to his wife. He feels frozen, watches as the man takes a step forward, as a knife flashes silver in the sunrise. "See what?"
Death pulls him away, and he floats after her over the ground as if she were tugging him through waves. His heart is left behind on the balcony, an anchor. "She died like a pirate," Death says, and Will clutched her hand so hard that if her fingers were real, they would have snapped.
"Why?" He says, and Death turns to him, questioning. "Why show me this?"
"She died as she lived," Death says, calmly, and points out to sea. "As did he."
Will squints against the sun. There's a speck of darkness in the water that flashes forward, a shape, a boat. In its bottom he lies, Jack Sparrow, beaten and broken and bloody. Will drops next to him on the sand, presses desperate kisses to his lips, breathes desperate air into his lungs. His mouth tastes of rum and death, and Will chokes back a mad sort of laugh.
"They lived lifetimes, Will Turner," she says. "I am merely telling you...live yours out 'til its end. Do not lose yourself in sea and sorrow." She smiled again, and suddenly he finds himself smiling back, as if she is a charming guest at a party. "I'll see you again."
He wakes to the comforting rock of his ship below him.
Seven years later and he scrambles ashore, swirls his wife into his arms. She breathes against him, heart beating wildly in his ears, and shows him their beautiful son.
Also, it fits short-form delightfully. (Though I need to write more Elizabeth, she's badass. Someone prompt me?)
I suppose, honestly, that all of these can take place in the same universe. In fact, maybe someday I will weave them together so that they work even better. But for now!
Those drabbles mainly concerned with JACK:
He couldn't really feel his legs anymore by the time it occurred to him to send a letter. It wouldn't be easy - he'd have to charm the jailer, first, and probably mix up some ink from whatever he could find lying about - blood, mostly, he reasoned, wincing as the built-wound in his side twinged again. But he had the paper that was sewn into the lining of his hat, and they hadn't dared take his hat away from him.
He wrote Dear and then paused, frowning, flicking his eyes left and right in thought. There were half a dozen wretches he knew in Tortuga, but it wasn't wretches he needed to get out of jail, no, it was half-decent pirates and those were getting farther and farther between. In fact, there wasn't a single name he could pull off the top of his head, so he settled for a half-decent wretch of a pirate instead, remembering laughing eyes and a slap that could snap the neck of a dock-chicken in a single blow.
Anamaria, he continued, and paused again. She was a lovely girl at that, and he was really bloody tired of being in jail. With a quick dab of his tongue to the homemade quill, he set pen to paper once again. You are my sun, my moon, my starlit sky. Without you I dwell in darkness. Am in jail. Please help. Signed, yours forever, Capt. Jack Sparrow.
And that was that, which was just as well because he was running out of paper that wasn't stained with seawater and whatever else that he didn't want to look too closely at. He gave a sweet smile to the jailer and held out the paper.
She arrived the next day, marching up to the bars unimpressed, dark eyes flashing. "Jack Sparrow." She scowled at him, hands on hips.
He sauntered up to the bars (his legs were working again, thankfully) and threaded his hands through. "Anamaria." He greeted, face grave, and then flashed her his brightest smile. "You wouldn't happen to have a ship I could...borrow?"
**
Norrington slams a hand down on his desk, nearly upending his inkwell. Impossible. The man is truly impossible.
He has reports here from the farthest corners of the Empire, from the far East, from the savage northland colonies. Letters and letters and letters claiming that they'd found him, that they'd caught him, that they had chained and barred and broken Jack Sparrow and that there was no way he could ever escape.
They date back years. And they are each and every one of them lies.
He has wondered, for a long time, how he'd done it. Had he a friend in every town, then, to get him out? Had he so many weapons, so much steel that he fought like the very teeth of hell were closing in? But when the Commodore's men had searched the place where he was supposed to be, when they confronted the empty-handed villagers, they hadn't been dead. For almost every case there was no bloodshed at all, no sign of violence. Rather than a trail of tears Sparrow left a wake of bafflement.
He had even suspected the man of witchcraft, and even now that has not been ruled out. But having stood face to face with him, having seen his eye and his lip, having closed his hands on his throat and found only air, Norrington wonders. Is it witchcraft to have a tongue that silver? Is it witchcraft that makes his voice sinks into your soul, that he talks you out of your ship and your hat and your love, and you find yourself shaking hands with the man over the deal?
Is it witchcraft, or skill?
He wants more than anything to be the one to catch him, wants to be the one to tear out his silver tongue and leave him bleeding and defeated. He wants to see Jack Sparrow powerless, see him dead.
But at the same time there is something in him that admires the man, wonders what it would be to sail with him, to watch him work his spell on others, to be on the right end of that sharp, exhilarating grin. There is a part of him that yearns for the freedom that Sparrow embodies.
He smooths his papers, dips his pen, and does his best to drown that part in the dull dust of politics.
**
"The sea is a mirror," someone had told Jack once, or maybe he'd told someone that. It didn't matter. Conversations were like that, he remembered, a back-and-forth sally of bullets where you didn't really want to kill the other person, only make them stare at the smoking hole next to their head and respect your skill. It was hard to tell whose gun was whose, after all this time, whose thought whose and what voice belonged to what face.
The sea was a mirror now, though, in a thousand ways that he was certain he hadn't meant when he'd said, or heard, or thought it.
The sea reflected the sunrise. It was always sunrise, here, at the easternmost end of the world. The sun circled him like a buzzard, waiting for him to run out of water, to run out of patience, to run out of luck.
He had poured the last drops down his throat what might have been today, what might have been yesterday. Perhaps it was even tomorrow. And his hands hurt, the blisters from the oars splitting and drying and festering, and he'd talked himself mad out of impatience long ago. But luck?
He was Captain Jack Sparrow, and there was land in sight.
The sea was a mirror, slick and horrible and silvered as he tried desperately to cross it. His oars were bloodstained, his map tied to his knees, his compass to his hat, dangling in front of his eyes like a carrot in front of an ass.
The sea was a mirror. He lay at its edge and stared, drowning in his own reflection. He was tired and he was starving and he was dying, but there was sand under his knees and trees against the sky.
Hands lifted him and carried him and set him down again. Water was pressed into his mouth, and the sweetness of it shocked his eyes open.
There was nothing above him but trees, nothing below him but sand. His throat was whetted but his stomach empty. he blinked the salt from his eyes and pushed himself shakily to his feet.
Before him lay a pool of water, surrounded by rocks of green and gold. They shone in the perpetual sunrise. The water itself was inky black, and no reflection peered up from its surface. Jack stumbled to its edge, and heard its singing. He dipped his hands in its water and it was cold, too cold for comfort, too cold for fear. It was less a pool and more a hole, and in its depths Jack saw something stir, a great, terrible intelligence, larger than his mind could comprehend.
The sea was a mirror. The Fountain of Youth was an eye.
Those drabbles mainly concerned with BARBOSSA:
He taps his pistol against his knee, waiting.
Around him, the usual chaos of the Tortuga waterfront rages on, a whirling storm of colors and sound. Winking barmaids slam tankards down in front of surly deckhands. Laughing sailors pour wine down the busts of indignant ladies. And everywhere there is dancing, a fiddler fiddling, swirling and stomping feet in sprays of brine and beer. Fists and lips collide, but Barbossa sits alone.
His eyes flicker cold, his feet settled calm before him on the table. His wine is untouched. He is waiting.
Amid the laughing and shouting and cursing around him there is a sort of thread of coherency, a whispered tale told by a thousand unrelated voices. A word here and a word there, the story is spun: The Black Pearl has been seen off the coast.
Barbossa lifts his gun to his lips, tap-taps it. He dreams of the wheel in his hands. He can feel the spokes now, the wood veined like skin, her bosom stretched tight against the waves. The finest ship, he said, they said, the finest ship you ever laid eyes on.
And the Captain...The Captain is a tale of his own.
A ripple through the crowds, and that must be him, sliding through the dance. Silence follows in his wake like thread to a needle, not spreading outward but lying shining in the faces of those he touches. And he touches everyone - a casual hand on a shoulder, a gentle shove out of the way. A tip of the hat to a lady, and a smile at a lad no taller than his knee. He walks like he's been at sea his whole life, the rolling, prancing gait of one who expects the world to shift under him, suit his needs one moment and drown him the next.
He's younger than Barbossa expected - younger than Barbossa himself - and devilishly handsome. He slides up to Barbossa's table, his face almost furtive, as if he thought perhaps he had made it here unnoticed. Barbossa almost snorts at him, but there's a strange sort of sincerity to it, and so he waits.
Captain Jack Sparrow looks him over, eyes narrowed, and then widens them again, quickly, like the opposite of blinking. "Barbossa." He names, and Barbossa meets his eyes, dropping the hand with the pistol so that it's tap-tap-tapping against his knee once more.
Sparrow's quick, dark eyes don't miss the fact that this leaves the muzzle pointed at him, but simply arches a curious brow. "I hear you want a place aboard my ship."
Barbossa smiles. It isn't until they've shaken hands, until he's followed Sparrow through Tortuga's dank streets, 'til he's set foot aboard her at last, that he stops smiling. For his wait isn't over - it's just redefined. He watches the rest of the crew board, wonders what shape his words need to be to slide in through their ears and unlock their hearts.
His eyes flicker cold. His wine is untouched. His feet are propped up calm against the galley table.
Pistol snug at his side, Barbossa is waiting.
**
The door to the cabin swung open on loose hinges, their silence far more ominous than any eerie groan would have been. Ships creak - they're wood and metal, stretched taught against the power of the waves, it's natural for them to complain. But the Black Pearl slid soundlessly over the furious seas, unnerving even its Captain.
Barbossa crossed to his table, the spread of food upon it now mostly rot and decay. Once he would have turned up his nose at it, screamed for his deckhands to clear it away. But now he couldn't bring himself to care.
There was a note at his place, atop the tarnished sliver plate. It was written in a scrawling, skeletal hand (he had no doubt it was a skeletal hand which wrote it). Full of misspellings and grammatical errors, it told a tale that would have broken any human heart. A tale of a quest for immortality, of that quest's end, of victory embittered by a curse. It was a story so familiar he barely knew whether he was reading the words or just remembering them, reciting them in his head.
The parchment cracked and flaked into ash as Barbossa crushes it in his fist. More of his crew had abandoned him - simply walked over the side of the ship to try and find somewhere to exist - he hesitated to call it "living". They always failed. They always came back, their feet churning up the sandy bottom of the sea until it gathered like their sorrow in clouds around their heads.
Barbossa sat in his grand chair, his Captain's chair, and listened to his remaining crew grumble and squabble, moan and wail into the night. He put his head in his hands (bone only he feels where there should be flesh and hair, things to tear and sob with, but his fingers slip and slide) and regrets.
**
It rattles up through his newly-whole lungs like the first pebble of an avalanche, rasping and sweet and cold. He has a weightless sort of moment where he forgets what to do with it - hold it in between his lips until it grows stale, let it out immediately without assurance that there'll be another - and then he's gasping and coughing and choking on blood and seawater and strange, thick potion. There's a slim hand behind his head and - he struggles to make his eyes focus - someone bending over him, raising his up so that he can spit. Jack, he thinks for a wild, desperate moment, but then his head clears and he sees a pretty face, pin-pricked with ink. He's seen her before - in the restless, painful dreams of the dead.
"Calypso." He breathes, and she smiles a smiles too white. "Tia Dalma." She corrects, and then, "Wellllcome back, Captain Barbossa."
A thing I should definitely, definitely lengthen and finish (Future!Fics):
True North
He's waited a long time for this. He's watched the world shrink until he could fit it into the pocket of his greatcoat, the people line themselves up in neat rows like numbers, like writing. He's learned to write, to read, to type, to steal and beg and borrow in ways he'd never have dreamed of in the days when the sea was big enough to lose yourself in. Most of all he's learned to wait, to watch, to fade back and keep his eyes on the dial of the compass.
And now at last it comes 'round again to true north.
Now at last is the Second Age of Piracy.
The trappings are a bit different, he admits, as he walks the deck. Below him computers hum and flash, deckhands - ensigns, he reminds himself, ensigns - scurry from station to station. They call clipped instructions to one another, not insults and filthy jokes. He raises a hand to a young lad who reminds him ever so much of...who?
He pauses. So, so long ago.
He calls down to the boy. "Ahoy there, lad, now hang on a minute." The boy pauses, about to press a button on the panel at his side. "What's your name?"
The ensign salutes. "Turner, sir!"
Jack's eyes warm. "Knock off the saluting, lad. We're not the Navy. Now. Open 'er up, Will."
He presses the button, and then ascends to the bridge next to Jack and ventures, "...Sir?"
"Yes?"
"We are the Navy."
Jack looks down at his hastily-pinned Captain's insignia, looks around at the men who work like clockwork around him, in their grey uniform - well, uniforms. He widens his eyes. "Right. Yes, of course we are, Will." He pats the boy's shoulder awkwardly and turns away, making a face. Too close. He's getting too hasty.
"I, uh. Captain?"
He turns back to Will.
"How did you know my name?"
Jack grins, his gold teeth glinting. They were nearly all gold, now. He has more gold than most of the Earth Confederacy, but no one needs to know that. "Call it luck. It isn't, but that's simpler to say and far easier to understand."
The huge shields slide open, and Captain Jack looks out over a sea of stars, each one a promise and a threat. Here and there great ships move like whales in the deep. They're still close to port, too close for Jack's liking, but it will take them a bit to realize how he'd stolen the ship and who he'd stolen with it.
His hand slides to the flask at his hip, feels it thrumming with life. He has time. He always has time.
Beside him, Will murmurs, "It's beautiful."
Jack lays a decorated hand on his shoulder. "Oh, aye." He can feel the boy's heartbeat under his hand, feel him alive. Such things get easier as time moves past and leaves you untouched. He leans in close, watching his face as the ensign stares out at the unknown. "Are you scared?"
Will tears his face away from the view. "What? No! Of course not."
Jack raises his eyebrows. "Really? I'm terrified." He sways up the stairs to his chair, leaping up onto it and raising a hand. "Onward, you lazy bunch of scallywags! We'll have company soon enough!"
He feels the ship speed up under him, humming, and smiles. Will has followed him and stands at the base of his throne-like chair, looking at him like he's mad.
Things truly have gone back to normal.
"What do you mean you're terrified?" Will asks, and Jack brings a finger to his lips, sliding so that he's sitting in the chair. Will lowers his voice, leaning over the edge of the chair. "What kind of Captain is scared of space - "
"The kind of Captain who intends to survive, of course." Jack hisses back. "How much do you know about the ocean, boy?"
"Um." Will frowns. "Which ocean?"
Jack winces. "How the mighty have fallen." He leans closer, his eyes darting around the deck. "The ocean, boy, is a terrible and a beautiful thing, fickle and traitorous as a hard-faced woman. And this..." He waved a hand at the panels of glass above, at the stars beyond. "This is just another ocean, full of strange magicks ot yet explored."
He steps off his dais again. He needs to be moving, thinking. Will trails him, at a loss. "Now, the first I'll need is a ship."
"...You have a ship."
Jack sneers. "No, no, no. This is not a ship. This is a barge, a boat. I need something light and fast, like..." His eyes catch on a shadow in the sky. "There."
He gestures, and the shadow is highlighted on the viewscreens of the crew. "Men," He says, loud enough that the crew can hear, "Pull along this vessel."
They begin to turn and rise through space, the tapping of keys growing louder on the quiet deck. Jack smiles. "Now, we'll need a crew, but not from here, no, EarthPort is full of puppies and lapdogs, I need...I need pirates."
Will is staring at him, wide-eyed. "Sir...sir, why are you telling me all of this?"
Jack grins at him, fierce. "Because you're coming with me."
He spins and runs down off the bridge, across the deck and down the hallways to the airlocks. He pulls a breather on and throws one at Will, who trotted after him. "Why me?" He asks, and Jack notes the lack of "sir". He hits the button to open the airlock. "What have I - "
Jack shoves the breather over his head and pulls him out into space.
They land on the top of the other ship, just as their shields open so that the Captain can go through inspection. Jack slams a suction-clamp down against the glass and grins at the terrified crew below. "Hello." He says, his voice sliding down his arm and through the glass. "I'm Captain Jack Sparrow."
Will is floundering in space next to him, and Jack pulls him down and in, keeping his eyes on the people below. "Welcome to the age of Space Piracy, kid." He drew his pistol. "Keep your head down."
Will looks at him questioningly. "What - "
The shields slam closed, right above them, just as Jack shoots through the glass and they fall to the deck below.
**
Glass rained down around them as Jack landed gracefully on his feet, pistol in hand. Beside him, Will landed and stumbled and caught himself, making small noises of surprise and pain. Jack winced in sympathy but let him get himself up, striding instead up the ramp to the bridge.
He expected the crew to be in shock, to be so surprised by his audacity that he could just stride up and take what he wanted, jettison them to crawl to safety aboard the Navy vessel he'd just left. But they moved immediately, lithe, strange forms, surrounding him in silence. He spun in the center of a ring of blades, cold eyes following his movements.
He held up his hands. "Gentleman." He greeted them, thinking fast. One of them reached forward and took the pistol from his hands, another brought a struggling Will forward and threw him into the center of the circle. Jack's fingers twitched toward his gun as the cold-eyed man stuck it in his belt. "There, now - " he said, but the man grabbed his jaw, examining.
"We don't kindly to people trying to steal our ship." The man growled, and there was something familiar in his accent, something ancient. He smelled of salt and smoke, things Jack hadn't realized he missed since he'd joined this world of glass and plastic.
He tried a smile. "Such a lovely thing, how could I resist?" He asked.
The man smiled back, teeth crooked. "Hhh." It was something close to a laugh but nothing close to humor. "Take him to the Captain, boys."
Jack was shoved off the bridge and down a corridor, Will at his side. "These," he said to the boy, "Now these are pirates."
Will glared at one of the men, pulling his sleeve out of his grip. "Really, sir? I hadn't noticed."
Jack rolled his eyes at him and sped up. "Yes, alright, I'm going." He said to the pirates shuffling him along. "I'd love to meet your Cap - "
He stopped. They'd come to a door. It wasn't a grey, featureless slab like the rest. There was no push-button release, no comm-system. It was wooden and molding and so old it made Jack's teeth hurt.
He'd seen it before. He slid his palm over the grain of it. It was damp. Green things grew along its cracks. Something in its edges, he was sure, had just moved.
He pushed it open.
The room inside was wood-paneled and old-fashioned, with a great oaken desk and a chest banded with iron. The desk was strewn with ancient parchments and star-charts alike, the ceiling glass and showing the stars outside. There was a globe sitting in one corner, a model of the solar system and the three around it in the other. The walls were covered in writings, in languages that Jack had spent years learning, had spent centuries. The floor was stained with blood and ink and bilge.
A man sat at the desk, a glass of golden Sunwine in his hand. He was dressed in an old ruffled white shirt and the tight grey pants of a navy uniform. He had a tricorn hat on his head, and the hilt of a laser pistol sticking out from his belt. His hair was long and dark blond, and a scruff of a beard adorned his chin. He looked up as Jack was shoved in his door.
They stared at each other a moment. "Will?" Jack breathed.
"Yes?" Asked Ensign Will.
"Jack?" Asked Captain Will, standing up. He was gaping, and Jack could feel himself doing the same. "Then - then you found it!"
Jack blinked, then frowned. "Found what?"
"The Fountain!" Will answered. He was beaming now, and coming around his desk with open arms.
"Oh, right!" Jack exclaimed. "Of course I did, dear boy, old news." He clasped his old (so, so old) friend tight, feeling Will's heartbeat against his own. He breathed in the smell of him and felt a wave of loneliness, a delayed sort of reaction to a thousand years of solitude. He could feel Will trembling against him and felt...guilty.
It wasn't a feeling he was used to. He decided he didn't like it. He released his friend from the embrace but kept him close, hands on his hips. Will made no move to get away. "What about you?" Jack asked. "What are you doing in the great depths of space."
Will shrugged. "So the sea got a little bigger. The Dutchman still needs a Captain, Jack." He looked down. "So you've been...alive, all this time, and you never...you never thought to look for me?"
Jack floundered. "Uh. I - "
"Excuse me, um, sir? What's going on?"
He spun to look at the ensign, grateful. "Oh, yes, right. Um. Ensign Will..." He gestured to the boy, "Meet your..." He flicked his fingers at Captain Will. "...Great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great - " He took a breath, "Great-great-great...etcetera, etcetera...grandfather."
Both Wills stared at him, and then at each other. Captain Will raised his eyebrows, cocked his head, and then shrugged and held out a hand. Ensign Will blinked once, twice, and then turned to Jack. "You're kidding me. I could never be related to a pirate."
Jack cast a sidelong glance at Will, coincidentally meeting Will's sidelong glance at him. Then, by unspoken writ, they both burst out laughing.
Will gaped at them. "What's so funny?"
Captain Will bit his lip, controlling his mirth. "Oh, kid. You have no idea."
**
Those drabbles mainly concerned with WILL
She's dressed like Elizabeth was, that monumental, fateful day when everything turned upside down, the beginning of a journey that Will would never finish, except that rather than gold and white she wore a purple so deep it was almost black. The stuff of kings.
Her hair is the starless sky, her eyes like Tia Dalma's, and she beckons to him from the shore.
"I can't," he says, gestures to the ship around him (it should be creaking, creaking, all the little comfort noises of a healthy vessel, but it slides silent through the waves, why so silent?). "I can't touch ground except once every ten years, and it hasn't been three yet since the last time I saw her."
She smiles a smile like she has stolen too much joy and stored it inside, and it slips out bright-white between her black-painted lips. "It's alright," she says. "You're dreaming, and my brother doesn't like to break curses. Says it makes him feel too much like a god."
He blinks at her, and then he's standing on the sand. He can feel the sun rising behind him. The ground is gritty beneath his boots (worn so thin he can feel each grain of sand, worn so thin he can walk the length of a rigging-wire, balanced and poised and perfect). She extends an impossibly pale hand to him and he takes it, because the light is golden and the world is green and this is all a dream, anyway.
"I thought it was time we met." She says, still smiling, amused and joyful, and leads him along the beach. "Since it looks like I won't be seeing you the normal way, not for a while yet."
"Normal way?" He asks, because that's the easiest of the questions he has. And then, because there's an answer in her eyes, if not in her voice, he asks, "How long is a while? How long do I get?"
Do I get to see my son again? Do I see Jack again? Does he find it, the Fountain? What of the Dutchman?
Her smile grows. "Everyone gets a lifetime, of course," she says. "Yours might be longer than most, but a lifetime it is, while you live it."
They round a curve in the headland, and Will stops, because there is the house, proud and shining, and there is Elizabeth, as golden and beautiful as he remembers her. She is not alone.
There is a man with her, standing huge and hulking, and Will recognizes her stance. Defiance is writ in her posture, and one hand is at the small of her back, where her pistol hangs beneath her bustle. They are arguing.
"Elizabeth - " He breathes, and steps forward, but the vision of death's hand is tight like irons around his wrist. "She cannot hear you," she says sadly. "I will not keep you here, but I thought you might like to see..."
Will's eyes are glued to his wife. He feels frozen, watches as the man takes a step forward, as a knife flashes silver in the sunrise. "See what?"
Death pulls him away, and he floats after her over the ground as if she were tugging him through waves. His heart is left behind on the balcony, an anchor. "She died like a pirate," Death says, and Will clutched her hand so hard that if her fingers were real, they would have snapped.
"Why?" He says, and Death turns to him, questioning. "Why show me this?"
"She died as she lived," Death says, calmly, and points out to sea. "As did he."
Will squints against the sun. There's a speck of darkness in the water that flashes forward, a shape, a boat. In its bottom he lies, Jack Sparrow, beaten and broken and bloody. Will drops next to him on the sand, presses desperate kisses to his lips, breathes desperate air into his lungs. His mouth tastes of rum and death, and Will chokes back a mad sort of laugh.
"They lived lifetimes, Will Turner," she says. "I am merely telling you...live yours out 'til its end. Do not lose yourself in sea and sorrow." She smiled again, and suddenly he finds himself smiling back, as if she is a charming guest at a party. "I'll see you again."
He wakes to the comforting rock of his ship below him.
Seven years later and he scrambles ashore, swirls his wife into his arms. She breathes against him, heart beating wildly in his ears, and shows him their beautiful son.