The Fifth Brethren Court
Title: The Fifth Brethren Court
Author: bellbubble
Pairing/characters: Jack, Elizabeth, Liam, an assortment of OCs... Light Sparrabeth.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Thirty - perhaps forty - years after AWE, the Brethren is once again summoned...
Disclaimer: All characters to the half-naked, very cute, little mouse. Not copyright stolen, commandeered or privateered, I'm just borrowing without permission...
Author's notes: Written to prompt #63 - Jack at age 70. Thanks to my sweet sister for the beta!
The Fifth Brethren Court
Irony was one filthy, damnable bitch.
Eight figures stood in the Hall of the Brethren quarreling, another eighty behind them, nodding and making faces. From his secluded corner by the candles, from the very corner his father had watched him nigh thirty - maybe forty - years prior, Jack Sparrow had to agree with the old goat; the Brethren was one pathetic little excuse of a pirate organisation. Nothing but a bunch of grandchildren (now great-grandchildren, he presumed) of legendary pirates long dead.
“What are you saying?” exclaimed a Frenchman, his accent raspy as his appearance. “There is no defeating them!”
“That was what our fathers did!” said a Spaniard with one hand on his pistol and the other on his cutlass.
“You’re all barking mad!” another said, and shouting overcame his next statement.
Jack shrugged, giving up trying to understand whatever conclusion they were trying to draw from that mess. He did not really know what the problem was this time; likely some Crown unfriendly to Elizabeth’s was bearing in on them again, or some disaster of the sort, urgent enough for that dreadful song to be sang once again.
Speaking of Elizabeth, she was there too, sitting just in front of him at the head of the long table, the Code open and neglected upon it. King of the newly independent Kingdom of Shipwreck Island, she seemed not to be interested in the least in the discussion taking place along the rest of the table. Her eyes travelled between him, the door and Liam.
“But we have the Flying Dutchman on our side!” squeaked the Lady of the Indian Sea. “Won’t she help us?”
“Unlikely,” Liam said matter-of-factly from his chair by his mother’s side. “Why would Captain Turner help us?”
“For one thing, he’s your bloody father!” Helena Barbossa, sitting opposite to him, said accusatively. A prick like her father, Jack thought, may the devil be with him.
“So?”
More shouting ensued. No, the Ship of the Dead would help in naught but in ferrying the ones who fell in battle - if there was a battle at all, which the Lord of the Atlantic considered insane. The Lord of the Black Sea agreed and the Lady of the North China Sea wanted, like Ching had before her, to stay in the fortress and do absolutely nothing. Liam rolled his eyes and drew his chair closer to his mother’s.
“You’re the King, can’t you do something?” he said rubbing his eyes. He was worried about Marianne, Jack thought, it was not right to leave the baby girl alone at night with the nurse, she was just too young.
“You’re Lord of the South China Sea and the Prince,” Elizabeth yawned. “If you can’t do something, I don’t think I can.”
Liam looked at Jack, but did not even get a chance to open his mouth. “I’m your humble Keeper of the Code, Prince Liam, and as much as I’d love to shoot them all so I can finally sleep, I can’t.”
“I thought you were Captain Jack Sparrow!” Liam smiled, so much like Will it still spooked Jack after thirty - or forty - years.
“Aye, so I am,” he said as an involuntary hand reached for his father’s old guitar leaning on the wall. “And I’m also seventy, boy; do give a retired pirate the right to remain silent.”
He was no longer a boy, Jack knew as he heard Elizabeth laughing, but calling him so was a habit he did seem to drop. Liam was well past his thirties, captain of his own ship, a reflection of Will but for the hair and nose - those were Lizzie’s, he insisted -, a respectable pirate, widowed by the misfortune of the laboured birth of Marianne, named after her mother and now two years old, and the future King of Pirates. Barely anything left of the boy who would climb the rigging of the Pearl to drive his mother insane.
Jack was strumming “The Spanish Ladies” before realising he actually knew the song. Liam breathed deeply before getting up and going back to the quarrelling party without much hope of sorting anything out. Also tired, Elizabeth turned her chair to the source of music and smiled lightly.
“She’ll come,” she told him reassuringly. “I’m sure she will.”
He noted, not for the first time, as she reached to pat his shoulder, that she had three golden teeth and that her hands were the only indicators of her real age. She was still so pretty, some wrinkles round the eyes and by her lip-corners, but she was no less beautiful than before, when she would stand on the bowsprit like a siren on the rocks, tanned under the sun on the beach and naked by the firelight of their cabin. Not an inch less beautiful.
“’Course she will,” Jack resonated, the song not wavering for a second. “Never said she wouldn’t.”
She chuckled. “You’re worried.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Wish I wasn’t,” she looked back at the door, still closed and without any inclination to opening, then to Liam and back to Jack. “How can they be so different? Liam and her?”
“They’re of different sexes,” Jack pointed out, eyes travelling the same way hers had. “And different ages. She’s much younger, you know.”
“Young and carefree.” She sighed, the small smile never leaving her lips as she moved to sit by his side. “Does it have a cure, I wonder?”
“Don’t know ‘bout you, love, but I’m as young and carefree as I’ve always been. Don’t reckon it’ll ever pass.”
“I’m the young one here, not you!”
She gave him a playful slap on the shoulder and he stopped playing. True, he was older, but not that much wrinkled as Teague had been. And not nearly as skeletal, which was not saying he was fat either. He still had a decent belly, strong back and arms, just his legs sometimes failed him, his charming swagger having gained him the need of a walking stick. Stupid legs aside, his hair was still black (and henna was the best substance ever to be brought to Shipwreck Cove) and he only had four more golden teeth than when he had met her (and the remaining teeth were perfectly fine!).
“I’m not old,” he pouted. “I don’t look old.”
Elizabeth stared at him for a good minute before cracking a smile and then a fit of giggles. Jack was so utterly adorable when he pouted.
“No, you’re not, of course you’re not,” she said laughingly. “You just happen to be seventy years old, that’s all.”
“You talk as if you were all that young…” He put the guitar aside and crossed his arms. “You’re over fifty!”
“Jack,” she looked at him serious, perhaps disappointed. “I’m forty-nine.”
“Same thing!”
“No, it’s not!”
Elizabeth had been about to say he had no right to tell her she looked old (she had, after all, been through two pregnancies, which made any woman look much worse than she should, age-wise, she thought), when Liam’s voice, coming from the middle of the Pirate Lords’ quarrel, caught their attention.
“Now that is insane,” he said loudly to the Lord of the Atlantic. “That is an alternative I’m not allowing!”
“Who are you not to allow me to present an alternative?” the Lord raged.
“I’m the bloody Prince!”
“He’s right!” Helena Barbossa said. She taking a side, Jack snorted in Elizabeth’s ear, no good can come of that.
“Just because that was what your father undid, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t redo!” the Lord of the Black Sea interfered against them.
“I’ll agree with Bahari,” said the Lady of the North China Sea. “We should bind Calypso back in her bones so we can rule again!”
Jack would have shot the girl had Elizabeth not stopped him. They wanted to do what?!
“I’m with them,” said the Spaniard. “With the seas for us again, we have a chance!”
“Well, I’m not!” the Frenchman sided with Liam and Helena.
“You’re all mad!” the Lady of the Indian Sea squeaked. “We can’t bind the Sea Goddess!”
“The votes are clear, then,” Liam said, coming to the end of the table opposite to which his mother sat with Jack. “Four against four. May this be left for the King to decide?”
“There’s nothing in the Code about draws,” Elizabeth declared rising from her throne. “As you all remember, there are nine Pirate Lords; draws are not possible.”
“What do you command, then, Majesty?” Ching’s daughter sneered, clearly annoyed. “That we wait until Jacqueline decides to come?”
“That better be the case,” came a cheerful voice from the door, all heads turning to see its owner. “’Cause I’d love to be heard ‘bout that. And Yuu,” the woman pushed through the crowd to get to the table, “it is Captain Jackie Sparrow to you!”
Jack smiled, letting out an audible sigh of relief, and went back to strumming his father’s favourite song. The one to arrive was a skinny woman, no older than twenty, blond and freckled despite her tanned skin, dressed in boy’s clothes and with many necklaces and rings, a tricorne hat tilted back and her father’s unmistakable deep brown eyes and characteristic sway. She had a smug smile for the other lords and a warm hug to Liam.
“Last I checked I was entitled to a vote.” She said sitting down merrily by her brother. “Am I still?”
“Thank the Code, yes,” Liam smiled. “What do you say, Jackie, do we bind Calypso to her bones so the sea be ours and by the powers where we will we'll row?”
“Now, ain’t that the silliest thing I’ve ever heard!” she chuckled. “You can’t be serious…”
“By majority of votes, Captain Turner’s argument wins,” Elizabeth declared with authority and a relieved smile to her daughter. Jackie winked.
Yuu grumped something in Chinese which Elizabeth understood to be a very low swearword. New quarrels rose, ensued and were overcome by one of Jackie’s sarcastic, well-thought commentaries - “Mind quick as bird, that girl’s”, Jack observed proudly. The meeting dragged on until Liam rose to his feet and paced around the table making an inspiring speech about how they were to honour their fathers’ achievements and the Code by making a stand against the enemy ships out there, as there were less than half there were last time, and they had a pretty good chance. Jackie boldly clapped when he was finished and Yuu and Bahari were the only ones to vote against.
As all pirates exited the Hall, Liam fell exhausted on a chair. “I hope this never evolves to a Parliament,” he grunted. “I’d become an absolutist and dissolve it!”
“They’d raise the revolution against you!” Jackie joked coming closer to the end of table. “Your Majesty, my apologies for being late!” she said bowing with a flourish of her hat. “But, you know, Mum, don’t you? When the rum calls you can’t just turn it away…”
“Oh, Jackie,” Elizabeth embraced her despite the disapproval in her tone.
“It’s fine, Mum, t’was just a bottle this time, in fact, not a full one, it was-”
“You don’t smell like rum,” Liam pointed out. “Well, no more than usual.”
“Oh, shut it, William!”
“Children,” Jack slurred as a warning; very fatherly, he praised himself in thought, nice fatherly thing to do.
“Oh, hi, Dad!” Jackie floated his way cheerfully and gave him a tight hug and a smacked kiss on the cheek. “Long time no see! Boy, you look so tired! Has Mum been taking good care of you?”
“Of course I have,” Elizabeth said in her defence before Jack could say she had been heartlessly keeping him from his rum.
“And, Liam,” Jackie turned back to her brother. “Where’s my tweedy niece?”
“In her room, I expect…”
“Were you this hyperactively cheerful when you were her age?” Elizabeth whispered to him as Liam and Jackie left the Hall.
Jack curled his lips in a knowing smile and ran one arm around her frame. “Only when I was hiding something, say, pleasurable company I wanted to keep to me self.”
“Oh,” she smiled. “I wonder who ‘rum’ is, then.”
“Likely some Governor’s son she kidnapped in order to run away from the Royal Navy, then had to rescue him from cursed pirates and they ended up in a tiny island with a lot of rum, where they fell in love. Escaped on the back of sea turtles, and that’s why she was late.”
Elizabeth was about to start laughing when Jackie’s head appeared on the doorframe, blushed and with furrowed eyebrows.
“How’d you know?”