PotC Crackfic: The Captain's Vessel (1/3?)

[erinya]

Title: The Captain's Vessel
Fandom: PotC
Disclaimer: Property of Disney, appropriated without permission for my own horrible ends, which do not, however, include profit. Not least because I doubt anyone would pay me for this. (They might pay me to stop, actually...can I get sued for those earnings?)
Rating: R
Warning: There are lots of reasons to hate this fic. See "Note" below.
Pairings: Jack/Will. Jack/Bootstrap alluded to. Jack/Elizabeth. Non-sexual Will/Elizabeth. Elizabeth/Barbossa suggested in later parts.
Summary: What if Jack Sparrow were Will Turner's one true love?
Note: It's never the fic I mean to finish that gets written first. It's usually the fic I swore I wouldn't write that does. If ever there was such a fic, this is it. It's not intended to offend anyone, but it may nonetheless offend you in a variety of ways, including but not limited to: irreverent tweaking of your favorite tropes (and most of mine), graphic language and descriptions of pregnancy, turning AWE upside down and shaking it to see what comes out (i.e. AU), slightly skewed characterization, het in your slash, slash in your het, angst in your crack, crack in your serious bzns, ill-concealed meta-commentary, and several flavors of genderfuck. Oh, and I almost forgot: m-preg. OH YES.
Feedback: I will philosophically accept any complaints and have reserved a spot in the handbasket-direct to the Special Hell. In my defense, crack isn't nearly as much fun when you don't share it.



The Captain's Vessel

First Trimester

The sun had long since set, the first stars beginning to prick through the twilit sky, and still Jack Sparrow stood alone at the tideline, little waves washing over his bare feet, staring thoughtfully at an empty horizon.

"Bit of an anti-climax, innit?" he said, to no one in particular. His shoulder-devils and the rest of the all-Jack crew seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving him quite alone, although he suspected they were still listening. And watching. He always had been an attentive voyeur.

He had not yet shaken off the sense that he had somehow wound up in a story that had been meant for someone else entirely. For Elizabeth, perhaps; but she didn't seem to miss it, being preoccupied with the diversions of a sudden rise to monarchy, not the least of which was the excessive number of fortune's gentlemen at her beck and call. Not to mention at her feet. Which were lovely, as Jack remembered them. Although he had no call to be thinking about her feet or any other lovely parts of her, as he'd sworn an oath and given his word and done a number of things that were not quite like him, among which he vaguely recalled a promise to be faithful and true for ten long years so that a certain Will Turner could return to the land of the living at the end of them.

And really, who would have guessed that he'd turn out to be the One True Love of the Flying Dutchman's Captain?

Certainly not Jack. He had always thought of himself as the central character of a legend that was his and his alone, one that he'd taken great care to cultivate. But here he was, standing on a beach in his shirtsleeves, still basking in the afterglow of a very good fucking or ten (surprisingly good; what the lad had lacked in experience, he made up for several times over in enthusiasm and stamina, and Jack had taken back every eunuch crack he'd ever made and then some with only a little persuasion) and blinking away the afterimage of the legendary Green Flash.

Being unexpectedly caught up in young William's destiny was not so bad as all that, he reflected. Even if it did mean forsaking immortality. And an embargo on pleasurable company for a minimum of ten years. But he'd been willing to do that anyway, and at least this way he got to have rum all the time.

Yes, all in all, not too bad, this beloved object business. Didn't require much effort or strategy. One could lie around on this nice beach all night and day for the interim and get raging drunk, and the story would still end just as happily as before, provided one didn't drown by accident or get eaten by natives or something silly like that.

Although it had begun to occur to him that the day's activities meant he would be more than a little sore, come morning.

There was an uneasy, hollow sensation somewhere in the region of his breastbone, too, which he was trying his best to ignore. It had to do with Will, and the length of ten years, and other things he'd rather not think on because they led to thoughts such as the one about how he may as well have cut out his heart, too, and put it in that damnable chest beside the other, for all the good it seemed inclined to do him.

It had gotten him into this mess, to begin with.

* * *

He rowed back to the Black Pearl in the fading light, where Elizabeth and Barbossa left off glaring at one another long enough to glance from Jack's face to the chest he held. And clock the meaning of both, by their expressions, which he found too alike for comfort.

"Well," he said irritably, after a furtive self-inspection in case he had neglected to refasten his breeches properly, "what are you all staring at?"

"Nothing," the other two Captains said, as one.

"Is that really-" Ragetti began, goggling, but Pintel elbowed him in the ribs and he jumped, single eye wide. "Sorry."

"Your ship, as promised," said Elizabeth to Jack, somewhat ungraciously.

"My ship," Barbossa corrected her, with his shark's grin, and she sighed.

"Both you fools' bloody, twice-cursed ship, then," she snapped, "and don't make me play Solomon, or I'll have her chopped in two and you can both swim home. Gentlemen;" she bowed, haughtier than a Governor's daughter in her battle regalia, "I wash my hands of you. Good day."

Jack frowned; he hated it when she stole his lines. "Elizabeth," he said, but she didn't pause as she stalked toward the longboat where her new lieutenant, Tai Huang, waited impassively. "Majesty?"

She halted, but did not turn. "Yes?"

He followed her, circling around her until he could see her face, which he couldn't read anyway. "It would never have-"

"Worked out between us?" There she went again. She shook her head at him, smiling, and for just a second he saw the girl-child she had been, long ago on a fortress wall in Port Royal. "Just keep telling yourself that, Jack Sparrow. And no," she added, more sharply, "I shall not kiss you. You're to be true, remember?"

He drew back as if slapped. Bugger. The next ten years were going to be hard, indeed. All too hard. "Jealous, Your Nibs?"

"Of that?" A pointed, almost pitying look at the chest he still held, the key that hung 'round his neck. "Oh, Jack. You poor bastard. No." Her voice softened, if only a little. "Will Turner is-was-my dearest friend in this world. But in the end, I count myself lucky it was you he loved, and not me, after all."

With that, she stepped around him, and swept away to her waiting chariot.

It was some kind of forgiveness, he supposed, if any such sentiment had meaning between them, after everything.

Far more than Will had found in his for her, even now, for sending Jack to Davy Jones' Locker.

* * *

"Four of you have tried to kill me in the past. And one of you succeeded."

Elizabeth's gaze had dropped guiltily to the coarse white sand, but it was Will's expression that Jack found more interesting: white-lipped and wide-eyed. Shock and the fury of betrayal; it matched Jack's own. The lad's glance darted from his distressing damsel to Jack, a silent question-is it true? Jack nodded, watching the scales fall away, and saw how Will's hand slipped to the hilt of his sword as he looked back at Elizabeth; she raised her head and glared back at both of them, defiant.

"So she hasn't told you, then?" Jack went on, with a fierce sort of joy, for something had shifted inside him when Will's eyes met his. Something that he thought had died with the rest of him, something he'd shot and stabbed and screamed at in his madness. "Good! You'll have plenty to talk about while you're here."

He spun away, grandly, striding toward the Pearl; but that same something leaped and sung in his heart when he heard Will say his name.

"Jack! Wait!"

Jack forced himself to saunter to a stop with as much nonchalance as he could muster, and Will came to his side. They stood some small distance away from the others, and looked at each other.

"I saw her kiss you," Will said softly, at last. "It looked as if-I thought-"

"You thought I wanted her," Jack said. He tried to keep his voice light, but his throat had gone suddenly dry, and the words seemed to catch there a bit and roughen before they made their way out to hang between them.

"I didn't know what to think," Will said; indeed, he appeared quite bewildered. "At first I thought I must be jealous of you. But it was Elizabeth I was angry with-and then I realized-"

"It's all right, love," Jack said, and Will's head jerked up at the endearment. "Sometimes we don't miss what we have 'til it's gone, aye?"

"I never HAD you, you idiot," said Will, with a note of exasperation that Jack, listening carefully, would almost have characterized as fond.

"Well, that can be easily remedied," Jack rejoined, and was rewarded with the charming sight of William Turner the Second's virginal blush. "Although your lovely murderess might object, I fear."

"Jack, I-" Will glanced over his shoulder at Elizabeth, whose suspicious frown indicated that she, at least, was a bit faster on the uptake than her fiancé. "I didn't know she'd killed you," he finished, on a desperate half-whisper. "I don't know what I would have done if I had."

"So you did miss me, eh?" Jack said loudly. He intended to enjoy this as much as possible.

Suddenly, Will looked uncomfortable. "We all missed you," he said, and then, in a rush: "But I also need the Pearl. She's the only ship that can match the Dutchman for speed."

Jack stared at him, a weight building again in his chest, gold into lead. "I should have known," he said. "Not the damsel this time, then. You want to rescue Daddy."

"Of course I do," Will said. "And shouldn't you? You were his friend once, weren't you?"

"Of course," but Jack couldn't prevent an edge of bitter sarcasm from sharpening the words.

He wondered when, if ever, would be the appropriate time to tell young Will that Bill Turner had been more than just a friend; why his part in Barbossa's mutiny had stung so cruelly. Betrayal upon betrayal upon betrayal. He and Bill's son had already begun that cycle over. He looked at the beautiful young man standing before him, the familiar set of that jaw, the challenging gaze-brown but not dark, both like and unlike his father's once-clear blue eyes-already grown guarded and weary, and wondered, too, if such a cycle could be broken.

* * *

Jack frowned into the depths of his bottle. The rum, it seemed, was gone, as usual.

He had only had but an inkling, of course, that day on the other shore: of what the cost might be to break that cycle, for both of them. For all of them. And when he did know-standing transfixed and unheeding on the deck of the Black Pearl while Elizabeth cried out to her own father, raged in vain against death and the dark, as the dreadful pattern fell into place in his mind like the tumblers of a turning lock-he vowed to himself that it would be his price to pay, and not the lad's.

As the Fates would have it, he paid his price after all, but not the way he'd planned.

He'd never forget the sound of the sword Will had forged sliding cruel as destiny into the boy's chest, nor the suspended moment in which Will's gaze had sought Jack's across that deck dark-slicked with blood and water, Jack blinking furiously against the rain that blurred his vision like tears.

He'd done the only thing there was left to do; and in so doing, had lost Will as surely as if he had really died. As surely as if Jack himself had stabbed the scabrous thing that Davy Jones called his heart, and without the consolation of immortality to sweeten the pot.

Barely more than a month had passed since that day, and he had already begun to feel distinctly out of sorts. It seemed that bloody Elizabeth was bloody right. One day in ten years was a poor pittance indeed.

A sudden deep nausea seized him at the thought. He rose, swaying, and stumbled out of the Great Cabin to drape himself over the rail in the kind of miserable state he vaguely remembered from boyhood; after which activity, all the rum he had consumed over the last hour or so was very decisively gone.

"Sodding hell," he moaned. "Not again."

* * *

When the Black Pearl and her two captains arrived at Shipwreck Cove some five months later, the King of the Pirates did not appear entirely happy to see them. In fact, she was demonstrably annoyed; which may have had much to do with the fact that neither Captain would leave the Pearl, and had sent Ragetti to fetch her down to her own audience.

"What now?" she demanded, waving off Barbossa's mockingly sycophantic bow. "Have you been mutinying again, Hector? I thought I dealt with this little dispute last time we parleyed. Really, I've known three-year-olds who could share better than you two do."

"Yourself not being counted among those angelic babes, I imagine," grinned Barbossa, earning a grudging inclination of her head in acknowledgment of a point scored. "But you'll find it's not me who's come seeking your favor this time, Captain Swann. Look to the other Captain if ye wish to know the reason for our…detour."

Jack, who'd been hovering in the background, found two hawklike gazes trained upon him. "Erm," he said.

"What's wrong with you?" Elizabeth said, frowning at him.

"Nothing," he said quickly, conscious of his audience. "Nothing whatsoever. The very picture of glowing and masculine health, me."

"Yes, I'd noticed the glowing part," she said, looking him over more closely this time. "It's very odd. Are you sure you're all right?"

Jack glanced furtively around them before grabbing her arm and pulling her away from the others. "Help me," he said, in a hoarse whisper.

Judging by her expression, she thought he'd truly gone round the bend this time. And well she might. For all he knew, he had. "Help you--? With what? Jack, what is the matter?"

There was nothing for it; he'd have to tell her. Unwillingly, he cast about for the right words. "Well, you see, it seems I find myself, finding, incapacitorily, in a--what do you call it--a 'delicate condition'. If you will."

"Jack," she said, as if speaking to a very small child--Jack winced-- "I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about."

"It would appear," Jack said, enunciating carefully, "that I am, as they say, expecting."

"Expecting what?"

"Just...expecting." He waved his hands in the air, a bit wildly. "You know."

"No, I'm afraid I don't."

"Parturiant." She shook her head, blank-faced; he went on, exasperated, "Gravid. Fecund. With child," on a desperate hiss.

She stared at him. "Pardon? I could have sworn you just said--"

He leaned heavily against the door of the Great Cabin. His feet hurt. So did his back, a nagging ache at the base of his spine. "I did say."

"You're mad," she said, with considerable decision.

"That's as may be," he said, "but--oh, bugger it. Come here. I'll show you."

He threw open the door, yanking her with him into the gloom of his cabin. She gave a little gasp, and then, when he threw off his jacket and began to struggle out of his shirt, said sharply, "Jack--!" And then fell abruptly silent, eyes wide with shock, as he threw the shirt aside and fixed her with a challenging look.

She saw, well enough. Even in that dim light, the signs were apparent: the swell of his belly, the way his aureoles had widened, his nipples darkened and enlarged. He'd been quite thrilled about the latter developments, at first, until he'd discovered how painfully tender they were.

"Dear God in Heaven," she breathed. "Jack, you're ill. We must get you to a doctor as quickly as possible. Maybe there's something that can be done--"

"No, Elizabeth," he said. "Believe me, I only wish you were right. Not that I didn't think the same, particularly for those two months I spent spewin' my guts out into the sea each morning. The lads started to say I couldn't hold me rum anymore."

"That must have been terrible," she murmured absently; but she reached for the doorjamb to support herself.

"It was," he agreed, grimacing in reminiscence. "Steady on, dearie. You're looking a bit pale, and I know it ain't a pretty sight. But it's not exactly something I can confide to old Hector, and the crew would have me off the ship in seconds as a Jonah."

"And you trusted me?" she said, with an odd look. "I'm...honored, I suppose." She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself, but it seemed her infamous curiosity had gotten the better of her, because she stepped towards him. "So you're really--but Jack, how do you know? I mean, it's not as if you've been skipping your courses." She paused. "Have you?"

"Don't be flippant, Lizzie. It's unkind."

"Well, I had to ask!"

"No, you didn't. But for your information, my monthly courses have remained unchanged. Meaning that I don't have any, before you ask."

"Then how can you be sure?"

"Like this," he said, and without further ceremony grasped her wrist, pressing her palm flat against the taut curve of his stomach; and, obligingly, the thing inside him shifted, a flutter he felt in his bones and in their joined hands. After a moment, in which it seemed neither one of them breathed, she raised her gaze to his. He read disbelief there, still, but wonder too, and something else he couldn't quite name.

"It's Will's, isn't it?"

He gave a short, choked laugh. "Well, it certainly isn't yours, love."

She laughed a little, too. "One never knows," she said. "I would have thought it to be just as likely."

"Aye," he said. "We're off the edge of the map, here, aren't we? Or I am, I should say. But no, the timing's not right. I know that much, at least. And that, my dear, is more or less the limit of my erudition on such matters."

"Oh, Jack," she said, and hugged him suddenly, and kissed his cheek, which startled him exceedingly. He found himself dropping his head on her shoulder, inhaling the sharp sea-sweetness of her hair, and was alarmed to feel a catch in his throat like a sob, a welling-up of gratitude for the comfort offered by her touch.

Oh, no. No, no, no. He was not going to weep, whatever other indignities were in store for him. He was still a man, not some ruined, hysterical maiden, and he knew the hazards of her charms. He hoped. He pulled back from her embrace and turned away, breathing hard.

"So what are you going to do?" she said.

"That depends," he said grimly. "Do you know how to get rid of it?"

"Get rid of it--? No!" She sounded shocked. "And even if I did….Jack, that's Will Turner's child. I don't know how it got there, and I must say I don't really want to know, but now that it's there, could you really destroy it? You loved him--love him--don't you?"

Sodding, bloody Turners, always getting him into these messes. Literally sodding, too. He should have known better by now. "I don't see what that's got to do with it," he growled, ignoring the rush of protective emotion her words had evoked. There really was something wrong with him. Besides the obvious.

"It's all you've got left of him. All we've got left." Her voice softened. "And it is 'we,' Jack. I love him too, you know."

"Then why couldn't it be you having his bloody whelp?"

"You're the one who shagged him," Elizabeth said, rather abruptly unsympathetic. "You should have made him pull out."

"I would have thought that was his responsibility," he grumbled. "Besides, that doesn't always work."

"Oh, it's never the man's responsibility," she said airily; he scowled, and she added, as if it were an afterthought, "Except in this case, and it amounts to the same thing."

"It does not."

"It might as well, since you'll be the one to bear all the consequences." There was a--no, damn it, not a pregnant pause. "And what do you mean it doesn't always work? That's not what you told me before."

"Before--" But no, he didn't want to think about before. It wasn't as if he could go back to it. "Elizabeth, I think we've veered a bit off topic here."

She folded her arms. "Have we? I thought we were talking about responsibility."

"I thought we were talking about babies."

She tilted her head at him. "Indeed."

"But it's not natural!"

Elizabeth gave him a Look.

"Undead monkeys," she said. "Hearts in chests--wooden ones, that is. A man with a squid for a face. A woman--sorry, a goddess--made of crabs. What were you saying again?"

"When you put it that way," Jack said, "this has 'Calypso' written all over it. And I wouldn't be surprised if you were the one put her up to it," he added, with a baleful glance at Elizabeth.

She looked the very picture of affronted innocence, but then again this was Elizabeth. "As if I could make Calypso do anything! Really, Jack. You're letting your imagination run away with you."

"You two seemed thick as thieves on the way back from World's End," Jack pointed out. "Bosom friends, as they say. How am I to know what you were plotting?"

"She was the only other woman on the ship," Elizabeth said. "Of course we were friendly. And we weren't. Plotting, that is."

"A likely story," sniffed Jack.

"Jack," she said seriously, "I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. And you're not."

"Aren't I?"

"Not as long as you don't do anything to that child," she said.

"If it is a child," Jack said darkly. "What if it's-" he waggled his fingers descriptively, like tentacles-"some squiddy monstrosity?"

"Even so," and her tone brooked no further argument.

"Then what-" he began, and broke off as the door swung open. "Oh, bloody stinking hell."

"Cap'n? Your pardon, but the other Cap'n sends his respects, and says he'd be obliged to know when we'd be getting under way."

"Goddamn you, you-you cretinous homunculus," Jack cried, scrabbling for his shirt and clutching it to his exposed chest and belly. But it was too late.

Ragetti stood in the doorway, his mouth dropping open and his good eye popping like a blowfish, his arm jerking upwards as if pulled by strings to point a bony finger at Jack.