(no subject)
The battle raged on as a storm unleashed its fury overhead, blinding everyone on deck. Elizabeth squinted, soaked to the bone. She had seen several of their friends go down, ship after ship, filled with wailing men had gone to the depths under the fire of the Dutchman’s triple guns.
Elizabeth had to admit she had never seen such terror-inducing weapons in her life.
Ship after ship fell, sunk beneath the waves. She knew this was the way it would be, that they didn’t stand a chance, but still some part of her was filled with rage and disappointment. The maelstrom overhead would not let up. Jinx saw it before anyone.
“Move! Get back from the edge!” he cried. Elizabeth didn’t know what he was talking about, but then looked forward to see a great whirlpool in the water. Worse than she’d ever seen, it was positively a hurricane beneath the waves.
“Take down the sails!” she cried, only to see the Pearl plunge ahead onto the edge of the whirlpool.
“What are they thinking?” Jinx asked.
She smiled. “Barbossa won’t quit. He’s quite mad”, she said, grinning from ear to ear.
“We have to go back, Captain”, Jinx insisted. “This is a lost cause now. We’re going to get caught in this if we don’t go back now.”
Elizabeth watched as the Pearl held her own beneath the terrible onslaught of the Dutchman’s guns.
“We have to help somehow”, she insisted. Will stood at her side watching the Pearl and the Dutchman, caught in a never-ending spiral, like two angry dogs circling each other.
Suddenly an enormous boom and crack filled the air. Elizabeth closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the Dutchman’s triple guns rotating. The guns had fired once and were about to fire again. The mast had been snapped in two and the Empress’s impressive sails fluttered to the deck like huge white birds shot from the sky.
The guns boomed again, blowing a hole in the side of Empress. The Empress was slowly sucked into the rotation of the whirlpool. Elizabeth stared down into its dark center, as if looking into the mouth of hell itself.
“We can’t get out of this”, Will said. Elizabeth ran to the lifeboats, hoping to save as many as possible.
They heard the crack as the Dutchman’s guns fired again and the heart-breaking sound of wood splitting.
“Elizabeth!” Will bellowed.
It was the last thing she heard as they were all pitched into the roaring and violent sea.
Elizabeth’s head broke the surface and she sucked in a breath desperately. Pieces of what used to be the Empress swirled around them.
The Pearl had seen what had happened and the Crew was plucking as many survivors from the raging sea as they could. She smiled as she saw Will and Jinx clinging to the side of the Pearl and the Crew pulling them onboard.
Elizabeth herself was a couple of hundred feet out from the ship.
“Elizabeth!” Will cried, pointing to her out in the water.
Barbossa could barely believe his eyes as he watched Jack tie one end of a rope around the ship’s rail and the other end around his waist, and then drive cleanly over the side.
He surfaced near her.
“C’mon then, luv, nobody bloody else I’d do anything this crazy for. Twice!” he said.
She put her arms around him and Barbossa pulled them both, arm over arm, back to the ship.
The Crew pulled them both onto the deck, sopping.
Elizabeth sucked in breath after breath. “See, I told you you’d get curious”, she said.
“About what?” Jack said, spitting out water.
“You’d want to know what it was like to be a good man. You’re a hero, Jack!” She threw her arms around him.
“Don’t let it get around, luv,” Jack said with a grimace.
Will rushed over to her. “Elizabeth, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” But she’d spoken too soon. The Dutchman’s guns roared again As the two ships passed each other again, the Crew of the Dutchman threw grappling hooks over the railing of the Pearl. The sharp hooks bit into the wood and stuck hard.
Sea creatures were leaping onto the deck from every direction. Barbossa dropped the rope and picked up his sword. He sliced open a man with a fish for a head as fish, barnacles, and water sprayed out of him.
Will stood, pulling Elizabeth to her feet. He tossed her a sword and they both joined in the fray. Elizabeth looked back to see how Jack fared, but Jack was gone.
When James opened his eyes, he was face down on the deck of the Dutchman, rain pounding down on his raw back. With great pain, he pushed himself to feet.
The Crew of the Dutchman was aboard the Pearl, hacking their way through Elizabeth’s Crew members who were ill-prepared to stand steady as a fleet of ominous sea creatures attacked.
Only two ships remained. The Empress was gone. But what of her Captain, he thought wildly, Where was Elizabeth?
The heart.
James turned to hunt down the heart, but walked directly into Jack Sparrow.
“Davy Jones”, Jack said, in a calm, even voice.
Jones turned and growled. “Sparrow.”
Jones grabbed Elizabeth and held a sword to her throat. “Trade yourself for the lass, Sparrow, or I swear I’ll cut her throat.”
“No!” James cried.
Jones looked between Will and James, seeing the same expression on their faces. “Ah love, why break one heart when I can break two?”
With that, he lifted his sword to kill Elizabeth.
James released a primal scream, grabbed Jack’s sword from his hand, and leapt the short distance between the two ships.
James sliced off one of Jones’s arms. He stood firmly in front of Elizabeth, pushing her behind him. In rage, Jones lifted his sword and it came down with the force of a hammer. Jones ran his sword through to the hilt. James waited for the pain. But it didn’t come. Instead he was cold and felt nothing as his life blood seeped into a puddle on the deck.
“No!” Elizabeth spat, “No!” She covered James with her body, looking up at Jones. “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him!”
Jones lifted his claw and knocked Elizabeth out of the way. She crumbled to the deck a few feet away.
“Do you fear death?” Jones growled into James’s ear.
Jack watched, perplexed. This hadn’t been what he’d intended. He had something in his hand, something that as Beckett would say, was valuable.
Will stood up to face Jones, only to be knocked aside himself.
Elizabeth crawled across the deck, toward James.
“Baby”, she whispered, “Can you hear me? Say “yes”, darling, just say “yes”, and you’ll live.”
“I don’t want to live without you”, he said. Elizabeth sobbed. She had never sobbed that hard, when her mother had died, when they left everything she knew for Jamaica, she had never felt this before.
Jack grabbed a rope and swung over to the Pearl. “Say you’re scared, mate”, Jack said. “Say it, Norrington.”
James looked up at Jack from the deck of the Pearl. As last looks went, the Sparrow creature wasn’t exactly his first choice.
“Say it.”
James had never trusted any pirate, and certainly not Sparrow, the man who had cost him everything he had ever wanted in life. But there was something about the way the man said it.
Elizabeth seized James’s hand. “Say it, say it, please.” He could never deny her anything.
“I don’t want to die”, he said.
A wide smile broke out on Jones’s face.
He bent down beside James and growled in his ear again. “A hundred years before the mast. Welcome to the Crew.”
Jack smiled, but then looked at Elizabeth, nearly dead with grief.
“It’s okay, luv, you’ll have the old Commodore back. You could have had me, but there’s no accounting for taste I always say”, Jack said with delight.
James felt himself changing. He felt the need for water rather than air and felt his hands changing into claws.
“There you go again, Sparrow, making promises you can’t keep”, Jones said. “All of you will be either dead or a part of my Crew. You may think you know what your answer will be, but until you feel your own life leaving you, you cannot say.”
“I keep my promises”, Jack said, “For instance, right now I have a little secret. A little something behind my back. I’ll give you three guesses, but it goes “thump, thump.””
He lifted the beating heart of Davy Jones above his head.
Jones growled with anger and terror. “Give me that, Sparrow, give me that now”, he said.
“Not a chance”, Jack said. Jack took a small blade from his pocket.
“No!” Jones screamed.
Jack plunged the knife deep into the heart, a look of no regret on his face.
Jones clutched the place where his heart should have been and fell to the deck, dead as a stone.
“Jack!” Elizabeth cried.
“Had to do it, luv, can’t stand to see you looking like that”, Jack said, tossing the blade to Will. “Do the honors will you?”
Will looked reluctant.
“Come on now, dear William. It’s a simple matter of carving out a man’s heart.” Jack, for once, had the dignity to look terrified as Will sunk the blade into his chest and pulled the still beating heart of Jack Sparrow from his chest.
Will wrapped it carefully.
The wound closed immediately.
“I don’t feel any different. Barbossa, dear Hector, I know you always wanted to, shoot me”, he said.
Barbossa lifted his pistol and shot.
Jack looked down at the point of entry and laughed.
“I’m immortal and you’re not, I’m immortal and you’re not!” He did a jig around the deck and Barbossa rolled his eyes.
The Crew were shocked as they lost their horrible appendages, barnacles, scales, and starfish, one by one, leaving only men, confused men, but men.
Will rushed to his father, who was smiling as a bright orange starfish slid off his cheek.
Elizabeth was glad it was over, but she wasn’t looking at Barbossa, or Will, or even Jack.
James lay flat on the deck. “James, James”, she whispered to him. He lifted his head and looked at her, the same old look in his eyes, the one that told her that he was hers, whatever happened in the world, he was hers.
“It’s over”, she said. “Jack stabbed the heart, he’s the new Captain of the Dutchman and the Crew are free. You’re free.”
He moved his fingers. He felt like himself again.
“Your back”, she said, grimacing at the awful wounds he bore. “Don’t try to move.”
Against her wishes, he sat up.
“You’re all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine”, she said.
James looked at Will with his father. They were both smiling and laughing and clapping each other on the back.
“He’s fine”, James said. “Will is fine.”
“I know”, she answered and tipped James’s face up to hers. He had that look again, like a child. He swallowed hard.
“Marry me”, she said.
“What?!” he asked, but couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Maybe he really was dead, because suddenly, he was in heaven.
“Marry me”, she repeated.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be”, he said.
“If I can be a Captain and a Pirate King, then I can ask you to marry me”, she insisted.
“Fine, but only until I can ask you again. Properly.” As he said the words, she smiled. In many ways, James would never change. A part of him would always be concerned with what was proper, he would always be a gentleman. And he would always love her.
“I hate to point out the obvious”, she said, “But you still haven’t given me an answer. Unless you want to faint of course.”
He broke out into laughter and pulled her into his arms. He kissed her then, and this time the kiss was different. He knew she was his, and truly, she always had been.
“Does that answer your question?” he asked.
She kissed him back.
Jack watched with a warm smile on his face. Lizzy really had fallen in love.
"May I remind you", he said to James, "You are part of my Crew now. But I suppose if you promise to make our Lizzy happy, you can go."
"Thank you, Sparrow", James said, shaking his head in disbelief at the man, and Elizabeth laughed.
“There’s just one more thing”, James said, and then he and Jack said, “Beckett” at the same time.
Barbossa as Captain of the Pearl, and Jack as Captain of the Dutchman turned on the Endeavor, which had seen fit to sit out the battle and watch.
The triple guns of the Dutchman, were as usual, no match for any ship and they watched as the Endeavor sunk beneath the waves. Beckett went down with it and no one was sorry.
As they prepared to sail the Pearl back to Port Royal, Will came up to James and Elizabeth, who were sitting on the deck, gazing into each other’s eyes and not doing much else.
Will held out his hand. “I just want to congratulate you on your upcoming wedding.”
James shook his hand happily. “Where will you go? You’re certainly overqualified to be a blacksmith’s assistant now. If you want, I’m sure I can get you a respectable commission in the Navy.”
“I thought I might just float around for a bit”, Will said, “I never knew my father and now we have time all the time in the world.”
“Only if you attend the wedding first, as the best man”, James said. Elizabeth was shocked, Gillette would be hurt, but Elizabeth was his now, and he could afford to be generous.
“I would be glad to”, Will answered and left them with a smile.
“When did you first know you loved me?” she asked.
“When you walked down the stairs at your debut in that dress. That dress that had everyone talking”, he said. “But truly, I knew you were one of a kind when you were singing that song, when we first met, you remember that song, how does it go?”
Elizabeth smiled and kissed him.
On board the Dutchman, the Crew didn’t know what kind of Captain they had now, but he certainly couldn’t be any worse. The First Mate draped a coat over Jack’s shoulders. Jack flipped open his compass. He had always been a part of the sea and now the sea was his.
“Bring me that horizon”, he said and they immediately ran to do his bidding. He hummed Elizabeth’s tune.
“And really bad eggs. Drink up me, hearties, yo ho!” He snapped the compass closed.