Truths, Lies, and Legends: The Return of the Flying Dutchman
A shoreline ceremony leads to several returns from the dead.
Can be read on its own or as a late sequel to my Truths and Lies stories.
Characters: Will (narrating at last!), Jack, Bootstrap, Elizabeth, Teague
Rating: PG-13
Author: p0wdermonkey
Disclaimer: Not mine. I do not profit. Quite the opposite.
Beta reading and expert comma logistics: viva_gloria
For those who’ve read Truths and Lies, a word about (in)consistency:
This story goes with the Truths and Lies series that I wrote before AWE, but it tries to incorporate AWE canon as well. This is not actually possible unless you do one of the following:
Truths, Lies, and Legends: The Return of the Flying Dutchman
So many things I wanted to ask my father, but I never found an opportune moment. Perhaps we’re not opportune people, we William Turners.
Hard questions. Did it pain him to leave my mother on her own? Did he miss her? Did he mind barely knowing what I looked like? That I grew up scarcely knowing him? Or was he glad to escape to the deep blue sea and the eager embrace of Jack Sparrow?
Hard questions hung all over the Dutchman. I was afraid any mention of the past might bring them clattering down on our heads. I never even asked why they called him Bootstrap.
Perhaps if I’d known how short our time together would be… I doubt it, though. I didn’t ask Jack many questions, did I? Not after the first eager inquiry earned me an answer I didn’t like. Some things are best let lie.
Funny, that. I may not know much about my father, but I can sound like him.
Elizabeth was braver, of course-bold and sharp as a stop thrust even before I taught her to use a blade. It was she, not I, a lifetime ago, on the way to Jack’s hanging, who peppered him with questions like the inquisitive child she still was. Or perhaps like a woman smart enough to know when a man needs distracting.
“Why’d they call him Bootstrap?” Jack had mimicked, wide-eyed through the stout bars of the brig. (No half-pin barrel hinges on the Dauntless.) “I have no idea, Lizzie. None whatsoever. Conceivably somebody must’ve had a reason once, but it was long forgotten by the time I met him. I do know he didn’t care for it, though. Never called him by it meself. Stupid name, anyway. Pour us another, luv.”
Elizabeth gave him a reproving look (which he ignored), but she tipped the last of the rum into the cup he held out through the bars. He drank it straight off and slouched back against the bulkhead, closed his eyes. Rum gone: conversation over. I glanced at Elizabeth, hating to see Jack like this, hating Norrington and Governor Swann, but too unsure of her feelings about them-or myself-to speak out. As usual, I was waiting for a more opportune moment.
“Wonder if the dead have names…” Jack opened his eyes suddenly. “What? You two got nothin’ better to do than stand round breathin’ up all the air? Bugger off and mope on deck! Go on! Scoot!”
~
With his usual mix of distraction and persistence, Jack took up the conversation again many months later, the morning after his revelation that he and my father had been lovers. By then, he was safe-thanks to my having seized the last possible opportune moment to rescue him from the gallows-and clandestinely returned to Port Royal. (Not that he ever acknowledged the rescue as such. Apparently Captain Jack Sparrow contrives his own miraculous escapes without the need for passing blacksmiths.)
“Now, what you should have asked me, me dears, was why I called him William,” he said, apparently out of the blue and around a grotesquely large mouthful of toast and marmalade. “Lovely name, innit? Rolls off the tongue like a kiss. You know that, eh, Lizbeth?”
The way he made eyes at Elizabeth made my fists clench. But (as he’d surely calculated) I couldn’t very well object to the implication that she loved me as fondly as he claimed to have loved my father. In any case, hitting Jack at that point would have meant getting sprayed with chewed toast.
“Never going to do on a pirate ship, however,” he continued, suddenly brisk. “He was Bill there. But he could write his own name and I noticed he always wrote William when he put his name to anything-Articles, IOUs, letters... So I used it too. Became like a sign between us. That we were special to each other.”
He busied himself with more toast and a generous dollop of spread, his casual air spoiled by his failure to see that he was using mustard instead of marmalade.
“Worked the other way too. Any time we needed to be just mates-that visit to you an’ your Mam for instance-I’d call him Bill. Clearer that way, eh, Liz an’ Will?” He looked at us expectantly.
“Much clearer,” I agreed.
Jack’s magnetic-no doubt about that-but the sooner he went back to pirating and left Elizabeth and I to get on with our lives in peace, the happier I’d be. Or so I told myself at the time.
“Much.” Elizabeth smothered her own toast in marmalade. “Except there’s only one way to say Jack.”
“Don’t matter, do it?” He waved his toast for emphasis. “I’m not the one endeavourin’ to maintain a façade of respectability. Not my reputation we have to worry about, savvy? Thank you, luv.” (Elizabeth had gently removed the mustardy toast and replaced it with her marmaladey one.) “Though you might want to call me Captain Sparrow-leastways, in public. Highly respectable name, that is. Highly priced to prove it.”
There followed a moment of relative peace while Jack munched and Elizabeth spread another slice-thinly-for herself.
As I said: a lifetime ago. Of the four of us-Jack, Elizabeth, my father, and myself-Elizabeth is the only one who’s not since died, albeit some of us lived to tell the tale.
~
Some two years later, after Jack had died and returned, and I’d left the world of the living, Elizabeth-thin and pale, but very much alive-stood on the shore of Shipwreck Island. Salt water darkened the hem of her skirt, but she didn’t wade into the breakers because of the baby that she held out to face the sea, to face me.
He opened his eyes round and wide, stretched out his arms, and said, “Urk!”
There was no connection, not then. His gaze was on the ship, not on me, and, though I’d believed the letters that said he was mine, I felt only that Elizabeth was showing me some strange new pet. Much later, I wondered whether this was because my heart was locked in a box, or whether my father’d felt the same without supernatural pretext.
At the time, I had other concerns. We were there to give the pet-my son-a gift so he’d have at least a token to show he wasn’t altogether fatherless.
“Let’s hope this works better than sending him a cursed medallion,” I’d muttered when the plan was first discussed. My father’d frowned, and looked down at his hands.
“Aye, lad,” he rumbled at last, “I know it were but poor trade for what I should’ve given, but ye kept it, eh? All those years. It must’ve meant something.”
“It meant a lot,” I assured him. “I used to look at it all the time.”
And tell myself how I’d meet him in the Caribbean one day; he’d know me by the coin around my neck; I’d sign on his clean, trim, honest merchant ship, where he’d teach me rope work, carpentry, and sword fighting. I didn’t tell him that part although, in a strange, depth-distorted way, some of it had come true.
“This’ll be better,” he said. “He’ll know his pa’s a man who makes fine things. Later, maybe, if he comes to visit, ye can teach him to use it. Or how to make one.”
People laugh when I say my father was an optimist. But what else can you call a man who imagines a living child can visit Death’s Ferryman as a lad on shore goes to his father in barracks? Who sends gifts and gold halfway round the world in hopes some of it will arrive? A man who can go to sea with Jack Sparrow and still talk of coming home?
Anyway, this was how I came to be out behind the breakers, watching my once-lost father stumble and stutter as he tried to bestow Commodore Norrington’s sword upon a baby. After several bungled attempts, Elizabeth settled the child on one hip, gripped the sword with her free hand, pulled it from the scabbard, and flourished it. The baby made a grab for the shiny thing, and Elizabeth nearly fell over swinging it out of the way before it could take his fingers off.
Deciding at last that sharp swords and babies are both safer on dry land (the whole reason my father was doing this instead of me), they finally set off up the shore to where Captain Teague and an entourage of brightly-dressed ladies waited under an awning.
I suppose the old lecher had come along to impart an air of ceremony to the proceedings, or to chronicle the King’s son’s first steps into piracy. I’d like to think at least a few of the women were there to assist Elizabeth, though I noticed none of them stepped out of the shade to help with the sword-receiving.
Whatever they’d all come for, it certainly wasn’t what happened next.
As my father crossed the tide line, there was a green flash, followed by a rumble of thunder and a sound like a million crabs poured into a metal bucket. (You’d think a sea goddess would be less predictable, but the mortals seemed quite impressed.)
My father was staring at his hands, patting his clothes and hair, shaking his head in disbelief. To those on the shore, the change must have been clear, for they were all goggling at him, but it took me a moment to perceive what was obvious to the living. Red blood pulsed beneath his skin, bringing back colour I remembered dimly from long ago; the breeze fluttered his hair. He was dry. He was restored.
I’m proud to record that Elizabeth turned to me first for an explanation. However, as I could only shrug and look puzzled, she turned to Teague who had, after all, set himself up as something of an authority on ancient sea lore. He shuffled and cleared his throat.
“Tis written,” he began, fingers twitching to leaf the pages of dusty tomes left behind at the Cove, “that the crew of the Flying Dutchman are dead. They may come ashore on the Captain’s orders, but they have no place in the world of the living and cannot remain there once their task is done.”
“Written, no doubt, on the self-same putrid scrap of goat-hide where it says you can’t escape from Davy Jones’ Locker, an’ pirates should obey laws-an’ that callin’ a nursing mother ‘King’ is less silly than havin’ a Pirate Queen.”
I’d not seen Jack till he spoke. He must have been keeping an uncharacteristically low profile among Teague’s companions. He was in full cry now, however, fingers weaving patterns in the air as he flounced across the beach to Elizabeth, twirling and bowing low on the word “Queen”. His audience tittered, caught between the desire to sparkle and the fear of offending Teague.
“Hear me out, boy, before ye impugn what you can’t comprehend. There’s but one way to leave the Dutchman alive, and it holds for cap’n and crew alike.” He turned to his colourful retinue and swept off his hat in an ironic bow of his own. “Hard though it be to credit that any of these lovely wenches is old enough to have stayed true to Bill Turner here for ten years-even had they nothin’ better to do with the time.”
A ripple of appreciation for this witticism ran round the gaggle of females, especially the more elderly ones. I fancied I could hear Elizabeth sigh from two hundred paces over the sound of the surf.
“Step forward, my faithful lovely,” continued Teague, “and claim your prize.” He waved a hand to indicate my father, but nobody moved. “Come on! I’ll not hold youthful indiscretions against anyone. Indeed, I’ll throw in a satin gown and a cask of Madeira for the happy couple.”
“I’m better in silk than satin.” That voice could only belong to Jack Sparrow. “More clingy. Sets off a man’s muscles. Furthermore, I should specify that the term ‘true’, in this context, has evidently been somewhat generously redefined by Calypso (a goddess whose flexible approach to paperwork, by the way, I heartily condone and commend).” He paused for breath, and to direct a round of applause in the general direction of the ocean. “But I’m always happy to accept Madeira.”
“Ye’ll drink no more of mine!” thundered Teague.
I tried to look anywhere but at Jack or my father, and especially not at Jack’s father.
Elizabeth threw me a despairing glance, clutched the baby to her chest, and hurried across the sand to take Teague by the arm. Somehow, she drew him away from the shore, the women straggling behind them, flinching as Teague turned, brandishing his pistol.
“I don’t know you, boy, but I always suspected you were none of mine. You’re the spit of your mother: nothing but a poxy whore.” Turning away with a Jack-like flourish that undermined his point, Teague lurched away up the dunes.
Jack blew invisible dust off his own pistol and tucked it back into his sash.
“Well,” he said brightly, “now we’ve established the precise nature of my role in all this, I’d like to take the opportunity to say…”
“Jack,” said my father. “They’ve all gone. There’s only us.”
“Ah,” said Jack, and went very still.
You’d think they’d have fallen into one another’s arms or something. I’d pictured this moment so often for Elizabeth and myself. I’d seen it many ways-dreams and nightmares, both-but never this, this shyness, or pain, or whatever it was. It looked almost like fear. I turned away to give them some privacy, but I couldn’t help hearing.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Sawright, William,” came Jack’s voice, very soft, “I won’t try nothin’ to keep you. Never again, I swear.”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
My father’s voice caught just the way it does when he talks about leaving me and my mother.
“Aye. So’m I.”
If it wasn’t Jack Sparrow, I’d swear he was holding back tears. But then his voice turned brisk again.
“Well, go on then! We’re none of us getting any younger, you know. Call the boy back while he can still hear you!”
I couldn’t imagine what wild conclusion Jack had leapt to, but I felt it best to keep walking and wait for my father to say more. I found myself having to walk very slowly.
“You are going to give it to him… aren’t you?”
“He’s my son, Jack.”
The sadness in his voice settled it. Whatever they were discussing, I didn’t want it.
“I noticed. Also rapidly disappearing.”
“Aye,” said my father. “But I figure, since I’m givin’ him the lifetime regained, he won’t begrudge me the one day on land.”
There was a long, not entirely silent, pause. All right, a kiss. The kind of kiss you can hear from a good distance away with your back turned and trying really, really hard not to listen.
“Ah!” said Jack after much too long, breathless and somewhat muffled. “In that case, I know a spot just past those rocks…”
At last, I was out of earshot. Luckily, blushing doesn’t really work without a heartbeat.
~
Back in the wordless cool under water, I began to make sense of what I’d heard. Jack had been true for ten years and earned my father’s release from the ocean. And my father was giving it to me. I’d be with Elizabeth and the baby!
It was petty of me, I know, but my first impulse was to punch them both for making me wait even one day, even one moment. So it was just as well I couldn’t get near them, either for that or for my second impulse, which was to hug them hard and fierce.
I’d like to say my third impulse was to do the noble thing and refuse the gift. I had faith Elizabeth would wait the rest of the ten years for my release (especially if Calypso was as lenient a second time). I’d probably have another chance at this. My father and Jack, on the other hand…
Well, I’d like to say I thought of turning it down, but the truth is I never gave it a thought, not until all was safely finished and fixed. Unlike some, I’ve never found it hard to know my own wants. All my life, I’ve known exactly what I wanted-and learned shortly afterwards that it was destined for someone else. If my father was offering me a chance to see my dreams come true, he wouldn’t have to ask me twice.
I headed back to spend my last night on the Flying Dutchman. I’d steered that ship and her rag-bag crew through waters living and dead, storms natural and unnatural. I knew them better than I knew my own family. Come dawn, I’d bid them farewell forever.
The sun couldn’t rise soon enough.
~
The next story-from Jack’s point of view-is Jack the Hero.
Can be read on its own or as a late sequel to my Truths and Lies stories.
Characters: Will (narrating at last!), Jack, Bootstrap, Elizabeth, Teague
Rating: PG-13
Author: p0wdermonkey
Disclaimer: Not mine. I do not profit. Quite the opposite.
Beta reading and expert comma logistics: viva_gloria
For those who’ve read Truths and Lies, a word about (in)consistency:
This story goes with the Truths and Lies series that I wrote before AWE, but it tries to incorporate AWE canon as well. This is not actually possible unless you do one of the following:
- Willingly suspend awareness of contradictions. Who cares? Just go with the story.
- Download and install the Truths and Lies AWE Compliance Patch.
Truths, Lies, and Legends: The Return of the Flying Dutchman
So many things I wanted to ask my father, but I never found an opportune moment. Perhaps we’re not opportune people, we William Turners.
Hard questions. Did it pain him to leave my mother on her own? Did he miss her? Did he mind barely knowing what I looked like? That I grew up scarcely knowing him? Or was he glad to escape to the deep blue sea and the eager embrace of Jack Sparrow?
Hard questions hung all over the Dutchman. I was afraid any mention of the past might bring them clattering down on our heads. I never even asked why they called him Bootstrap.
Perhaps if I’d known how short our time together would be… I doubt it, though. I didn’t ask Jack many questions, did I? Not after the first eager inquiry earned me an answer I didn’t like. Some things are best let lie.
Funny, that. I may not know much about my father, but I can sound like him.
Elizabeth was braver, of course-bold and sharp as a stop thrust even before I taught her to use a blade. It was she, not I, a lifetime ago, on the way to Jack’s hanging, who peppered him with questions like the inquisitive child she still was. Or perhaps like a woman smart enough to know when a man needs distracting.
“Why’d they call him Bootstrap?” Jack had mimicked, wide-eyed through the stout bars of the brig. (No half-pin barrel hinges on the Dauntless.) “I have no idea, Lizzie. None whatsoever. Conceivably somebody must’ve had a reason once, but it was long forgotten by the time I met him. I do know he didn’t care for it, though. Never called him by it meself. Stupid name, anyway. Pour us another, luv.”
Elizabeth gave him a reproving look (which he ignored), but she tipped the last of the rum into the cup he held out through the bars. He drank it straight off and slouched back against the bulkhead, closed his eyes. Rum gone: conversation over. I glanced at Elizabeth, hating to see Jack like this, hating Norrington and Governor Swann, but too unsure of her feelings about them-or myself-to speak out. As usual, I was waiting for a more opportune moment.
“Wonder if the dead have names…” Jack opened his eyes suddenly. “What? You two got nothin’ better to do than stand round breathin’ up all the air? Bugger off and mope on deck! Go on! Scoot!”
~
With his usual mix of distraction and persistence, Jack took up the conversation again many months later, the morning after his revelation that he and my father had been lovers. By then, he was safe-thanks to my having seized the last possible opportune moment to rescue him from the gallows-and clandestinely returned to Port Royal. (Not that he ever acknowledged the rescue as such. Apparently Captain Jack Sparrow contrives his own miraculous escapes without the need for passing blacksmiths.)
“Now, what you should have asked me, me dears, was why I called him William,” he said, apparently out of the blue and around a grotesquely large mouthful of toast and marmalade. “Lovely name, innit? Rolls off the tongue like a kiss. You know that, eh, Lizbeth?”
The way he made eyes at Elizabeth made my fists clench. But (as he’d surely calculated) I couldn’t very well object to the implication that she loved me as fondly as he claimed to have loved my father. In any case, hitting Jack at that point would have meant getting sprayed with chewed toast.
“Never going to do on a pirate ship, however,” he continued, suddenly brisk. “He was Bill there. But he could write his own name and I noticed he always wrote William when he put his name to anything-Articles, IOUs, letters... So I used it too. Became like a sign between us. That we were special to each other.”
He busied himself with more toast and a generous dollop of spread, his casual air spoiled by his failure to see that he was using mustard instead of marmalade.
“Worked the other way too. Any time we needed to be just mates-that visit to you an’ your Mam for instance-I’d call him Bill. Clearer that way, eh, Liz an’ Will?” He looked at us expectantly.
“Much clearer,” I agreed.
Jack’s magnetic-no doubt about that-but the sooner he went back to pirating and left Elizabeth and I to get on with our lives in peace, the happier I’d be. Or so I told myself at the time.
“Much.” Elizabeth smothered her own toast in marmalade. “Except there’s only one way to say Jack.”
“Don’t matter, do it?” He waved his toast for emphasis. “I’m not the one endeavourin’ to maintain a façade of respectability. Not my reputation we have to worry about, savvy? Thank you, luv.” (Elizabeth had gently removed the mustardy toast and replaced it with her marmaladey one.) “Though you might want to call me Captain Sparrow-leastways, in public. Highly respectable name, that is. Highly priced to prove it.”
There followed a moment of relative peace while Jack munched and Elizabeth spread another slice-thinly-for herself.
As I said: a lifetime ago. Of the four of us-Jack, Elizabeth, my father, and myself-Elizabeth is the only one who’s not since died, albeit some of us lived to tell the tale.
~
Some two years later, after Jack had died and returned, and I’d left the world of the living, Elizabeth-thin and pale, but very much alive-stood on the shore of Shipwreck Island. Salt water darkened the hem of her skirt, but she didn’t wade into the breakers because of the baby that she held out to face the sea, to face me.
He opened his eyes round and wide, stretched out his arms, and said, “Urk!”
There was no connection, not then. His gaze was on the ship, not on me, and, though I’d believed the letters that said he was mine, I felt only that Elizabeth was showing me some strange new pet. Much later, I wondered whether this was because my heart was locked in a box, or whether my father’d felt the same without supernatural pretext.
At the time, I had other concerns. We were there to give the pet-my son-a gift so he’d have at least a token to show he wasn’t altogether fatherless.
“Let’s hope this works better than sending him a cursed medallion,” I’d muttered when the plan was first discussed. My father’d frowned, and looked down at his hands.
“Aye, lad,” he rumbled at last, “I know it were but poor trade for what I should’ve given, but ye kept it, eh? All those years. It must’ve meant something.”
“It meant a lot,” I assured him. “I used to look at it all the time.”
And tell myself how I’d meet him in the Caribbean one day; he’d know me by the coin around my neck; I’d sign on his clean, trim, honest merchant ship, where he’d teach me rope work, carpentry, and sword fighting. I didn’t tell him that part although, in a strange, depth-distorted way, some of it had come true.
“This’ll be better,” he said. “He’ll know his pa’s a man who makes fine things. Later, maybe, if he comes to visit, ye can teach him to use it. Or how to make one.”
People laugh when I say my father was an optimist. But what else can you call a man who imagines a living child can visit Death’s Ferryman as a lad on shore goes to his father in barracks? Who sends gifts and gold halfway round the world in hopes some of it will arrive? A man who can go to sea with Jack Sparrow and still talk of coming home?
Anyway, this was how I came to be out behind the breakers, watching my once-lost father stumble and stutter as he tried to bestow Commodore Norrington’s sword upon a baby. After several bungled attempts, Elizabeth settled the child on one hip, gripped the sword with her free hand, pulled it from the scabbard, and flourished it. The baby made a grab for the shiny thing, and Elizabeth nearly fell over swinging it out of the way before it could take his fingers off.
Deciding at last that sharp swords and babies are both safer on dry land (the whole reason my father was doing this instead of me), they finally set off up the shore to where Captain Teague and an entourage of brightly-dressed ladies waited under an awning.
I suppose the old lecher had come along to impart an air of ceremony to the proceedings, or to chronicle the King’s son’s first steps into piracy. I’d like to think at least a few of the women were there to assist Elizabeth, though I noticed none of them stepped out of the shade to help with the sword-receiving.
Whatever they’d all come for, it certainly wasn’t what happened next.
As my father crossed the tide line, there was a green flash, followed by a rumble of thunder and a sound like a million crabs poured into a metal bucket. (You’d think a sea goddess would be less predictable, but the mortals seemed quite impressed.)
My father was staring at his hands, patting his clothes and hair, shaking his head in disbelief. To those on the shore, the change must have been clear, for they were all goggling at him, but it took me a moment to perceive what was obvious to the living. Red blood pulsed beneath his skin, bringing back colour I remembered dimly from long ago; the breeze fluttered his hair. He was dry. He was restored.
I’m proud to record that Elizabeth turned to me first for an explanation. However, as I could only shrug and look puzzled, she turned to Teague who had, after all, set himself up as something of an authority on ancient sea lore. He shuffled and cleared his throat.
“Tis written,” he began, fingers twitching to leaf the pages of dusty tomes left behind at the Cove, “that the crew of the Flying Dutchman are dead. They may come ashore on the Captain’s orders, but they have no place in the world of the living and cannot remain there once their task is done.”
“Written, no doubt, on the self-same putrid scrap of goat-hide where it says you can’t escape from Davy Jones’ Locker, an’ pirates should obey laws-an’ that callin’ a nursing mother ‘King’ is less silly than havin’ a Pirate Queen.”
I’d not seen Jack till he spoke. He must have been keeping an uncharacteristically low profile among Teague’s companions. He was in full cry now, however, fingers weaving patterns in the air as he flounced across the beach to Elizabeth, twirling and bowing low on the word “Queen”. His audience tittered, caught between the desire to sparkle and the fear of offending Teague.
“Hear me out, boy, before ye impugn what you can’t comprehend. There’s but one way to leave the Dutchman alive, and it holds for cap’n and crew alike.” He turned to his colourful retinue and swept off his hat in an ironic bow of his own. “Hard though it be to credit that any of these lovely wenches is old enough to have stayed true to Bill Turner here for ten years-even had they nothin’ better to do with the time.”
A ripple of appreciation for this witticism ran round the gaggle of females, especially the more elderly ones. I fancied I could hear Elizabeth sigh from two hundred paces over the sound of the surf.
“Step forward, my faithful lovely,” continued Teague, “and claim your prize.” He waved a hand to indicate my father, but nobody moved. “Come on! I’ll not hold youthful indiscretions against anyone. Indeed, I’ll throw in a satin gown and a cask of Madeira for the happy couple.”
“I’m better in silk than satin.” That voice could only belong to Jack Sparrow. “More clingy. Sets off a man’s muscles. Furthermore, I should specify that the term ‘true’, in this context, has evidently been somewhat generously redefined by Calypso (a goddess whose flexible approach to paperwork, by the way, I heartily condone and commend).” He paused for breath, and to direct a round of applause in the general direction of the ocean. “But I’m always happy to accept Madeira.”
“Ye’ll drink no more of mine!” thundered Teague.
I tried to look anywhere but at Jack or my father, and especially not at Jack’s father.
Elizabeth threw me a despairing glance, clutched the baby to her chest, and hurried across the sand to take Teague by the arm. Somehow, she drew him away from the shore, the women straggling behind them, flinching as Teague turned, brandishing his pistol.
“I don’t know you, boy, but I always suspected you were none of mine. You’re the spit of your mother: nothing but a poxy whore.” Turning away with a Jack-like flourish that undermined his point, Teague lurched away up the dunes.
Jack blew invisible dust off his own pistol and tucked it back into his sash.
“Well,” he said brightly, “now we’ve established the precise nature of my role in all this, I’d like to take the opportunity to say…”
“Jack,” said my father. “They’ve all gone. There’s only us.”
“Ah,” said Jack, and went very still.
You’d think they’d have fallen into one another’s arms or something. I’d pictured this moment so often for Elizabeth and myself. I’d seen it many ways-dreams and nightmares, both-but never this, this shyness, or pain, or whatever it was. It looked almost like fear. I turned away to give them some privacy, but I couldn’t help hearing.
“Hello, Jack.”
“Sawright, William,” came Jack’s voice, very soft, “I won’t try nothin’ to keep you. Never again, I swear.”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
My father’s voice caught just the way it does when he talks about leaving me and my mother.
“Aye. So’m I.”
If it wasn’t Jack Sparrow, I’d swear he was holding back tears. But then his voice turned brisk again.
“Well, go on then! We’re none of us getting any younger, you know. Call the boy back while he can still hear you!”
I couldn’t imagine what wild conclusion Jack had leapt to, but I felt it best to keep walking and wait for my father to say more. I found myself having to walk very slowly.
“You are going to give it to him… aren’t you?”
“He’s my son, Jack.”
The sadness in his voice settled it. Whatever they were discussing, I didn’t want it.
“I noticed. Also rapidly disappearing.”
“Aye,” said my father. “But I figure, since I’m givin’ him the lifetime regained, he won’t begrudge me the one day on land.”
There was a long, not entirely silent, pause. All right, a kiss. The kind of kiss you can hear from a good distance away with your back turned and trying really, really hard not to listen.
“Ah!” said Jack after much too long, breathless and somewhat muffled. “In that case, I know a spot just past those rocks…”
At last, I was out of earshot. Luckily, blushing doesn’t really work without a heartbeat.
~
Back in the wordless cool under water, I began to make sense of what I’d heard. Jack had been true for ten years and earned my father’s release from the ocean. And my father was giving it to me. I’d be with Elizabeth and the baby!
It was petty of me, I know, but my first impulse was to punch them both for making me wait even one day, even one moment. So it was just as well I couldn’t get near them, either for that or for my second impulse, which was to hug them hard and fierce.
I’d like to say my third impulse was to do the noble thing and refuse the gift. I had faith Elizabeth would wait the rest of the ten years for my release (especially if Calypso was as lenient a second time). I’d probably have another chance at this. My father and Jack, on the other hand…
Well, I’d like to say I thought of turning it down, but the truth is I never gave it a thought, not until all was safely finished and fixed. Unlike some, I’ve never found it hard to know my own wants. All my life, I’ve known exactly what I wanted-and learned shortly afterwards that it was destined for someone else. If my father was offering me a chance to see my dreams come true, he wouldn’t have to ask me twice.
I headed back to spend my last night on the Flying Dutchman. I’d steered that ship and her rag-bag crew through waters living and dead, storms natural and unnatural. I knew them better than I knew my own family. Come dawn, I’d bid them farewell forever.
The sun couldn’t rise soon enough.
~
The next story-from Jack’s point of view-is Jack the Hero.