Jan 10, 2007 00:48
Challenge: Write a scene for each of the words below using characters from Pirates of the Caribbean.
1)spine
2)song
3)smoke
4)gold
5)box
6)flee
7)snake
8) memories
9)henna
10)eyes
Three down, seven to go. I think I need a beta as I’ve got a feeling I never edit these as ravenously as I could. Anywho, here’s hoping for your enjoyment!
Only wisps of his mother’s rituals survive, but he finds comfort in moving with a purpose. Jack works slowly, attempting reverence as he smoothes silk to table, stubborn creases betraying years folded in a trunk. Silks he had bought for her - not for dresses or sashes or coats - but because they were intricate and delicate and blue as her Caribbean seas. Indian fabrics bought in Singapore. She’d laughed at him as he haggled, whispering that he could just steal them if he wanted, and that she would never use them, and that he was only buying them for himself and his love of textiles. He’d never explained to her that he bought them for their colors so like the turquoise off Port Royal, for their messy tangle of silver-spun geometry. Real silver and gold thread, thin as strands of hair but bristle beneath the hand. He runs his fingers across the tiny pearls sewn in neat rows and tries to forget the unspoken metaphor there. He’d assumed she understood. Now, he’s uncertain she realized the art there. But it’s not the time to question her. Not anymore.
He sifts black sand into the brass bowl she relieved for him in Turkey nearly a decade ago. Shores of the undead resting in this cup of hers, a pocket of world’s end that he’s carried with him as a reminder of consequence. If she paces that sand now, he imagines her corseted and cursing him.
He adds a pinch of tobacco and a few herbs. There’s paprika in the mix - a proper vermillion - and the remnants of sage he combed from the galley, their velvet curls snowy against brown leaves. A few beads of Malabar pepper complete the picture, and Jack sets the lantern and bottle of rum behind the dish.
Next comes the locket with her portrait, not much bigger than a thimble but square and cold and dotted with red stones. It takes some cursing and flailing, but he manages to loosen the knot of leather cord with his teeth and fingers, the tiny box glinting in the lamplight. She had given it to him on some unmarked holiday years ago. Four maybe, but he cannot be certain. They’d sailed from the Barbary Coast, the specific port escaping him, but he remembers waking to midday sunlight, Elizabeth gone on deck to take her watch, her salty fragrance clinging to his moustache and the locket jabbing his wrist awkwardly. He’d sat up and leaned into the light to inspect it, miniature and golden and dappled lavender-red with rubies, a swan’s image etched in spare, delicate lines. Gentling it open with a dull snap, he’d seen a portrait not of his pirate doll but of a fine lady with loose curls and coy eyes. When the time had come to change watches, he’d kissed her temple and called her a minx for decorating him in slumber. She’d lifted an eyebrow in amusement when he’d asked how she’d found time to have it made, but never provided an answer. He’d known then that she was untethered. From that day she’d lived in worlds beyond him, in gestures he could not touch.
His fingertips graze that swan and he nods a soft goodbye.
Jack surveys the altar. It will do. A motley offering, but the best he can patch together a fortnight from port. He feels the sudden weight of sobriety and takes a swig of rum despite his prior resolution to be painfully clearheaded for the affair.
In simpler days, he would have had Tia Dalma’s magic, would have huddled over her claws and dirt and made a proper calling. But if he’s honest, he knows he’s not summoning Elizabeth. He liberated himself of such notions weeks ago. Months maybe. Time passes unmarked now. There is absence, and there is what he can do, and there is beneath every motion the need to liberate her ghost. In some corner of himself, he realizes she will not return.
His compass lays shut on the bed, and though he will not open it, he places it on the table and completes the picture. When he’d awoken to the cool of an empty bed that day in Tortuga, he’d seen the compass and wondered at her intent. But if she’d cared to be discovered by it, he’d cared not to recover her in magic. Days of questing had left a hollow ache, and when he’d opened the compass to seek her, thinking her absence some elaborate game, the needle had pointed only towards himself.
His motions are a loose sketch of prayer as he kneels, dips his fingers in the paprika, and touches it to his forehead and lips. For his father’s memory, he makes a brisk sign of the cross before reaching for the rum. Giving the bottle a gentle turn to his fingers, he swipes a rum-wet thumb over her portrait, smudging curl into eye into brow. Lighting his bit of herb and sand with a sliver of cedar dipped in tallow, he speaks her name and kneels, waiting. There’s a crackling as the pepper catches. He should sing, he thinks, or cobble together a prayer in the patchwork of languages she loved, but the stillness is caramel and he remains mute.
No thunderclap sounds, but he senses something of her in the hollows of the cabin, in the fizz and sizzle of burning spice. He sweats. She’s curling away from him - not because of enchantment, but because he allows his body to become slack, and he sinks to the floor bonelessly, laying on his back. Grey-blue and curling, the smoke reaches in tendrils to the windows, to the sea. The Pearl sways a steady lullaby, water to wood in a throaty song. He’s cradled in that sloshing sound, as though pillowed in Elizabeth’s warmth. And something earlier, maybe. Something like his first days on the Pearlbefore the ravages of mutiny and time. He collects Elizabeth’s memory and feels her evaporate from him.
And suddenly she’s kneeling beside him, skin fish-silver, kissing his eyes asleep. Jack, cool and translucent as vapor, begins to dream.
He’s in that musty room in Tortuga, sunlight and breeze shuttered, dusting him in thin strips through plantation slats. He wakes groggily, feeling for the bend of her. But he’s alone. Without opening his eyes, he senses the emptiness of the room, its vacancy like an echo, and he knows she’s more than stepped out for fresh fruit and coffee.
It’s the sting of abandonment again. It’s mutiny and the Kraken’s kiss.
Jack opens one eye, then the other.
“Doom? Darlin’?”
Only the Caribbean breeze answers, thumping the shutters. The stale air catches in his throat, and he opens them cautiously.
“Elizabeth?” The room is not but 10’ by 2’, but he calls nonetheless in a vain attempt to avoid facing facts. Dropping to the bed, he takes a moment to collect himself. The sounds of the street below gather, hover around him but do not settle. Had she said a kernel of this to him? He strains, but the fog of a night’s worth of brandy and meager sleep is a wall.
The shadows seem to move. Vaguely, he remembers the tide rises and the Pearl is set to sail at its height. Sifting through a fortnight’s portion of memories, he comes up blank, nothing but isolated flashes of her: Elizabeth supine in a tangle of sheets. Elizabeth ablaze at noon, arguing their course in forced whispers. Elizabeth, pistol in hand, shooting barrels in the water as he reminds her to make bold adjustments on her windage. Elizabeth feeding Parrot biscuits and asking Jack to crack sugar for tea.
The shadows shorten. The street roars, and Jack shakes himself, awake and frantic as the mounting day. He thinks of grudges and debts and the bloody bastards of the East India Company, but there’s a neatness to the room that disassembles him.
Look where his clothes lay folded, not heaping on the floor. See his hat perched atop. He thinks of Will then - Will, banished from land nearly a decade now. Young Turner is no Davy Jones, but Jack knows he became as cold and indifferent as the rip tide when he accepted the position. But there’s not so much as a drop of seawater to the room, and not enough dust for a footprint.
“Jack,” and it’s her voice sure as the sunlight still hours away, rough and stormy from lack of use. Thinly, through the veil of sleep, he feels her hand slick and cold against his forehead.
She’s pacing the cabin. Dusk approaches and Gibbs guides the ship. They are dining alone at her request, and she’s left her fish stew to cool as she pummels him with questions.
“If it’s not the whores, then what is it Elizabeth?”
“Now you see fit to call me Elizabeth?”
“I’ll call you whatever I please on my ship, luv.” He’s acid and the bite of his words leaves a bitter taste.
“Your ship. Your bloody ship, Jack! I’ve had enough of your bleeding ship. Either you accept that I will have equal say in this ship’s course, or you’ll be sailing without my help!”
“You are crew, Miss Swan. Crew does not -“
“Crew! Nine years in this rotting cabin and I’m crew to you? Well if crew I am then crew I’ll be, but don’t think for one minute, Jack Sparrow, that I’ll be your crew on deck and your whore in bed. You’re not faithful to either.”
“Aha! It is the whores!”
“No, it’s your failure to appreciate what you have. I gave up my life for you, Jack Sparrow. I gave up every girlhood hope because you promised freedom. Freedom, Jack, not servitude.”
He’s feverish to remember it. There’s her scathing anger and the fear that he’d somehow stolen something from her, that they were both chained to the mast that day. But through the sleep he feels her impossible coolness beside him, and she’s soothing him into dreams.
She cries in the depth of that night, brutal, wrenching sobs, and he wraps himself around her despite her palm pushing him away. She’s huddled at bed’s edge. Startled at his touch as though he’s singed her, she eventually stops fighting and settles into him. He steadies her, breaks with her, and slowly she calms enough to speak.
“You’ve disassembled me, Jack.” She’s thin voiced, and he thinks the sound of fear is in it.
“Then let me repair it, Lizzie.”
“You can’t.” And more resolutely: “I’m going to begin sleeping below, with the crew.”
“Don’t be drastic, luv.” He touches his lips to that valley behind her ear, at the base of her jaw. “These are trifles. You’re swayin’ with the moon is all.”
“No. It will be better for a time.” Brave faced, she turns towards him fully. “I’ll still come to you some nights and we’ll share rooms at port.”
Seeing her determination, he remains silent, feeling peeled and stinky and wanting nothing more than the sleep that will not come. She makes no mention of children - never has - but in that dim room he determines that if she asks it of him, he will not deny her.
“That was two years ago, my bird.” Her hands smooth back his hair, and he wants to wake to see her, but sleep is delicious and mobile. He wants to tell her, "Yes, it’s dog’s years but I’m sorry - still sorry.” He feels her, but he cannot command his mouth to open to ask what he’d stolen from her. Why she’d gone. If he could part his lips, he’d ask if she is cozy now. Does she have a warm home, a better man, the bud of a child? Does she captain her own ship, taking lovers at sword point?
Is she dead?
But he cannot speak, and so he settles for feeling her - for the hazy brush of fingers and her weight as she settles on his cock. Pressing her chest to his, he notes with mild disdain that her skin feels silken and sharpened as though covered in scales. But she’s the sea lapping him and he’s awash in her, his pleasure like the tide.
Jack wakes with a start. Dawn’s pink fingers flex outside the windows, and the cabin air is thick from the evening’s ritual. Shirt sticky and clinging, he realizes he’s spent himself on his stomach. Vaguely, he remembers dreaming of Elizabeth - dreaming of past nights and something else, something urgent below the memories.
The cabin is humid. Suddenly, he is desperate for air, for open space.
Shoulder’s pinched from the hard floor, Jack stretches and rubs the sleep from his eyes. Standing, he makes his way above deck.
And it’s a glorious sight. His Pearl is bare and touched with morning, her sails scooping the wind and all around the water’s skin shimmers pink and gold. Most sunrises since she left, he’s come above deck to sit lotus-style and search for stillness.
But this morning Captain Jack Sparrow feels the wind at his back, buoyant and bobbing aboard his kingdom, and he thinks that this motion is the only constant, the only force worth savoring. Parrot lands on his shoulder, Cotton being early to rise as well, and he raises an eyebrow wordlessly.
The bird’s squawk slices the silence: “Hello, Poppet. Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Parrot nuzzles him, and though he damns the creature audibly, he smiles and allows him to remain perched.
Sauntering over to a worn-looking Gibbs, Jack’s all energy and swooping gesture, and he feels as though he could skip.
“I’ll take ‘er, Mister Gibbs.”
“Aye, Captain. You seem a might spirited.”
Patting him on the back, Jack takes the wheel, fingertips lingering at her spokes.
“I’ve the very Devil’s wind in my sails this morning, Gibbs.”
“Have we a new heading, Captain?”
And before Jack can muster a decent answer, Parrot stops preening, flexes his wings, and creaks in a high voice: “Bring the horizon, Poppet.”
Jack shakes his shoulder muttering something about a devil bird and wagging his finger at Parrot, but his mouth bends into a toothy grin nonetheless.
“Aye Gibbs, it’s as the bird tells it.”
And she’s still there in his periphery, an irritant to his eye if he tilts the wrong way, but the day is open and the horizon awaits.
Title: Smoke
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Spoilers: Post (my hypothetical) AWE
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth
Rating: a strong R (nudity, innuendo, some explicit language)
Word Count: 2,401
Summary: Written for a friend's ficlet challenge - the third of ten. Jack's performing a bit of a ritual, and he has some interesting dreams.
WARNING: there is angst here. Oh yeah. It's Angst!Jack. If you don't want to contemplate Elizabeth (someday) leaving, you probably want to stay away.
Disclaimer: I don't own POTC or any of the people in it. Would that I was that rich....
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