[POTC holiday fic] - KINGDOMS OF THE SWAN companion vignette - "Gold for the King" - 1/3 - PG-13
A/N: Ok guys, first off, this little beast is not beta’d, as it’s Christmas Eve and God knows no one would want to spent their evening editing. Please forgive typos and a certain lack of my usual syntactic flare, as I plunked this baby out, literally, in four hours at the office. It is also important to note that this story exists within my post-AWE universe, currently unfolding in “Kingdoms of the Swan” (KotS), but it can be taken as a standalone - which it is, of a sort. I’ve chosen to play with the idea of the Magi a bit, thinking of their Eastern roots and exotic gifts as I write. As far as their gifts are concerned, I’ve quite taken to the metaphorical and symbolic meanings of the items: gold symbolizes virtue in many cultures (and it’s a kind of a pirate thing as well, innit?), frankincense symbolize prayer, and myrrh symbolizes suffering.
Series tie-in: A standalone vignette set in the Kingdoms of the Swan universe.
Installment: 1/3
Segment Title: “Gold for the King”
Timeframe: Post AWE
Pairing: J/E, shades of W/E
Rating: PG-13 for language and some small innuendo. Future chapters will progress in rating.
Word Count: 4,463
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended. All rights belong to Disney, etc.
Summary: Elizabeth has taken up residence on an island very near to Shipwreck Cove. Jack has come to live with her, platonically, through a series of circumstances to be revealed in KotS. This chapter touches on “Gold” - a piratical sort of symbol for virtue.
Gold for the King
Jack scanned the room for Elizabeth, sorting her from the din of clinking glasses and flickering light not by sight but by sound. Her familiar shuffle scraped to a halt behind his left shoulder, and he turned in time to see her wipe a sprinkling of sweat from her brow.
Fetching as ever, Elizabeth smiled like the Devil herself. She handed Jack a tankard of rum before leaning back to brace her back, her arms somewhat akimbo. Tapping the shoulder of one of Cheng’s crew, he tilted his head towards his resplendently-pregnant, remarkably-seatless companion, making sure to offer his most menacing grin.
The man stood, grumbling as he scuttled away. Raising his mug, Jack motioned to the bench offhandedly, and he didn’t bother to look up as she plopped beside him, sighing. He dipped his nose to the lip of the cup, inhaling deeply.
A whiff of bloody, damnable cinnamon greeted him.
“Spiced rum?” He cocked a brow, his lip twitching. “They had nothing else?”
“Not a drop.”
“Not even from the Dutch bloke with the moustache and the moth-bit shirt?” He offered his most downtrodden pout.
“Jack Sparrow,” her voice held that shrill, needle-sharp quality he so despised.
Dammit, Jack. Now you’ve gone and fanned the fire.
“Of the two of us, which is 8 months pregnant and big as a house, hmmm Captain?”
He shifted, scanning the room for unobstructed exits.
Not a one.
Bugger.
“Hmmm? What?” Feigning innocence, he chewed on his lip, batting his lashes for good measure. Elizabeth squinted, her nostrils almost flaring.
He shrugged and took a swig from the bottle.
Dammit all.
It was rum, he reminded himself - somewhere beneath the barrage of spices.
Not good. Scrunching his nose, he held the tankard at arm’s length in order to better inspect it.
“Jack?” Elizabeth’s voice jostled him from his revelries, and he started, wiping a dribble of so-called rum from his chin.
“What?” He made a show of looking over each shoulder. “Yes?”
She sighed, repositioning herself on the bench before hoisting her feet from the ground to drop them unceremoniously into his lap. “Did you hear a word I said?”
“I heard ‘Jack Sparrow’ - and then was so overcome by self-admiration that, well love, I somewhat - slightly - involuntarily tuned you out.” He pulled her slack-calved boots from her legs - paying no mind to the impropriety of said action, let alone the strangeness of their company, himself included - and began kneading her swollen arches, his thumbs working in practiced loops from ball to heel.
Somewhere near that Dutch fellow’s booth, another round of caroling began. Jack imagined his sister shuttered in her little shop, preparing the requested array of Christmas delectables even as he drank.
Should feel guilty, I should. Ah well, I’ll make it up to her tomorrow.
He and Elizabeth had traveled to the Cove that evening under the auspices of celebrating the holiday with several recently-docked crews - most notably those of Cheng and the Corsair - but truth be told, Jack had also agreed to accompany Elizabeth, on Christmas Eve nonetheless, because she could hardly manage to row for more than a minute without disturbing the babe. Whatever his reputation as a scoundrel, he retained enough of a conscience to feel compelled to oblige her. Besides, he’d have a chance to try his hand at being a brother, an uncle, and perhaps even a son, once more.
Not an ideal situation, but it suited nevertheless.
Jack leaned back, the knuckles of his right hand kneading Elizabeth’s soles as he sipped his dreadful, cinnamon-saturated rum.
~
The last place Jack imagined he’d be after three hours of rowing to, drinking at and otherwise placating Elizabeth in Shipwreck City was rowing away from said city. Elizabeth’s spirits had been high when they’d landed three hours prior, and Jack hadn’t expected to make a return trip for several days - so much so that he’d asked Sara to prepare a Christmas feast of tharavu varathathu, dosai, chana masala, and rose-scented achappam for desert. He’d even rushed to tidy his old quarters in the hopes of an extended stay. But, shortly after he’d settled into a cozy corner of the soiree, mug in hand, Elizabeth had pleaded with him to return to their lonely little island (and it was their island, wasn’t it - despite every mental note that he might make to think of it as her island). Thus, somewhat unsurprisingly, Jack found himself rowing a teetering, rickety longboat - nearly crammed to toppling with foodstuffs, rum, and one very pregnant King - across the narrow channel between the Cove and their Kingsland while Elizabeth dozed, most infuriatingly, between his legs. He couldn’t help but snicker at the sheer absurdity of his current circumstances. There was Elizabeth pillowed on his thigh, hands folded over her belly, legs stretched atop their lunch-duck’s cage, mouth agape and breath ghosting gently across his britches - and snoring loud as a deckhand on Twelfth Night - and he, Jack bloody Sparrow, could do nothing but row.
He was trapped in a new, disturbingly delicious sort of purgatory.
Well, mate, at least you’ve more for company than yourself and some crabs.
“Damnable woman,” he grumbled to himself, pulling hard on the oars.
Jack was, just perhaps, more drunk than he ought to be.
And so he rowed, reeling in more ways than one, for what felt like an eternity. However, no matter how stiff-backed he sat, and no matter how hard he tried to think of anything but Elizabeth’s head rocking against his groin - and no matter how much ire he tried to muster - Jack could not help but think, for more than a fleeting moment, that there was no place in the whole of the world that he’d rather be.
The stars winked bright-eyed in the dark loam of evening, and the moon beamed its golden slip of a smile, keeping vigil as he hummed in time with the tuck and splosh of the oars.
It was a lullaby for his king and her princelet.
~
It was nearly midnight by the time Jack finished unloading the wealth of goods piled high in the longboat. Elizabeth had clung to Jack’s arm as she trudged up the stairs carved in the cliff-face. She’d wobbled and grunted and clutched at her belly - and then she’d offered to help tote some of their bounty. He’d sent her to bed with a squeeze of the hand, a roll of his eyes, and a promise to join her once he’d emptied her chariot. The duck, crates of vegetables, and barrel of wine had been the most cumbersome to haul up the sheer wall, his calves burning the whole of the way, but it was the still-piping tiffin boxes and banana leaf packets sent by his sister that proved the most difficult to lug up the flaking, bloody jagged shale incline. Halfway up the cliff he’d paused, setting down the armful of food and whipping off his coat to bundle the goods within. Slinging the makeshift sack over his shoulder, he’d continued to the house, and bursting through the kitchen door, he’d heaved his coat-satchel to the floor with a grunt.
Elizabeth, no longer in bed at all, turned from the cook-fire to watch him with infuriating cheer and goodwill.
“Why Jack,” she beamed, “you’re the very picture of Father Christmas!”
Jack, cringing as a tiffin box rolled from his coat and somewhat lost in thought, felt his right eyebrow rise absently as he searched for something pithy, something sardonic, something -
He startled at the brush of her lips against his cheek. Pursing his lips, he considered her from beneath furrowed brows.
“Jack, are you alright? You look as though I’d slapped you, not kissed you.” She wiped at his cheek with the flat of her fingertips, as if to brush away the sentiment.
“You know, Lizzie, for a woman with such a significant loaf in the oven, you move frighteningly fast. Scarred me halfway to the Locker.”
She did not answer but rather smiled one of those wide, open-mouthed smiles she generally reserved for talk of other men. Swiveling away from him, she braced her hand in the small of her back and waddled back to the kettle she’d been tending over the fire.
“Tea, Jack?”
He grunted by way of answer, hefting the sack of curries from the floor and to the table. He staggered backwards, his nose itching at the flurry of dust.
“Your sister gave me the recipe, actually. She said you’d enjoy it. She called it -now what did she call it?” Elizabeth rubbed at her forehead, chewing her lip for some moments. “Ah -” she brightened, turning back to the kettle, ”- chai. She called it chai, I believe.”
Figures, Jack thought. That’s my darling sister, meddling again.
Elizabeth cleared her throat impatiently, and Jack could make out the tip of her boot tapping beneath her frock. “Do you want any?”
“Your Majesticness, if you’d please excuse this poor supplicant, but unfortunately I am - now what was the phrase - ah, yes - I am disinclined to acquiesce myself to your gracious - and odiferous - offerings on account of the fact that me mind’s fixed on more spirited libations. If you catch my drift.” Unpacking the tiffin boxes and the dishearteningly compressed envelopes of rice and sambol, he scanned the room for the bottles of rum he’d hauled up earlier. “Pray tell, where is the rum, Elizabeth?”
“I’ve buttered it.”
“You’ve what?”
“Buttered it,” she enunciated slowly, as though Jack were either very young or very stupid. “You know - for Christmas.”
“Yes, but didn’t I just -“ he pivoted, head cocked to indicate the Cove. His fingers fluttered and he made a great show of gagging and flailing, “-with the spiced rum. That is to say, you know I don’t like- “
“I suppose I wasn’t thinking, alright.” She was defensive now, her eyes narrowing. “Poppa and James always used to drink buttered rum on Christmas Eve, and so I thought it would be nice to have some for ourselves. That’s all.”
“Four bloody bottles worth? You thought that four bloody bottles of aged Caribbean rum all required buttering.”
“Alright. So I made more than some. Happy now?”
“In point of fact,” he jabbed a finger in the air, chewing his lip, “I am most certainly not happy. And what the Devil do you mean you’ve buttered it, hmm?” Jack felt his jaw tighten, his fingers clenching into fists.
“Just what I said, Jack. It’s just some rum, cream, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter, and sugar dumped into a bloody pot! Even I can make that.” By the tone of her voice, she was straying beyond irritation into the land of blind fury - a familiar, treacherous terrain littered with lead shot and dagger points terrorizing him at every turn. Jack watched with equal parts amusement and trepidation as her shoulder blades tightened, her expectant-mother-slouch giving way to a straight-backed carriage more befitting a governor’s daughter. “Must you always make light of my cooking?”
“Well, historically- “
“Jack Sparrow, you are the most ungrateful, incorrigible, wretched-” the quiver in her voice - coupled with the look of raw anger plastered across her face - urged Jack backwards, towards the door, his hands splayed in front of him defensively.
“Now, now, Lizzie - let’s not have another episode.” But it was too late. The firelight danced across her face, illuminating her trembling lip just as she burst into a torrent of tears and hiccups.
“Come now, Elizabeth. Don’t take me so seriously. Cease. Desist.” He edged towards her slowly, his hands waving in front of as if pleading with her to stop.
“I’m just a hygiene-deficient scoundrel, remember? What would I know of culinary brilliance? I’ve seen wharf rats with a better sense of taste than meself.” His arms were around her then, and he cradled her head against the crook of his neck despite a niggling sense of foreboding. Jack felt her belly heave against his side in tandem with her sniffles, and something dangerous and blinding stirred beneath his annoyance as she gulped, her mouth opening and closing against his skin like a landed fish. He cursed himself mentally, a queer sort of tenderness washing over him as he sketched circles across her spine.
“There, there, love. Enough of that. You’ll make me curdle.” And he felt her smile against him then, her lips curling in a wet arch against his neck. For several moments he held her like that, his heart skipping like a stone across water.
Across the room, the tea bubbled, and when he chanced a look at the table, he saw the pot of “buttered” rum. A skin of lumps and spice-clots drifted across the surface.
“Lizzie, did you boil the milk and whatnots before you added the rum?”
She shook her head in the negative, rubbing a wet trail against his collarbone.
“Ah,” he bit back the snicker in his voice, backing away to hold her at arms length. “Well, it’s an easy remedy, then. We’ll just heat it up, hmmm?”
“I think it’s curdled,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes with angry flicks of her wrist.
“Well, then the tea will do just fine for later, won’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” she began to drift, as she was wont to do after these increasingly frequent episodes. “Yes, the tea will be fine.”
Her eyes were focused on some point beyond him, towards the ocean perhaps, and they were distant and glazed with what he imagined to be longing.
This, yet another familiar landmark in the strange landscape of Jack’s current circumstances.
He sighed, suddenly tired, and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He felt an itch in his palm for rum, and his fingers twitched, remembering the spokes of the Pearl’s wheel and the slim, elegant ropes of her rigging.
Funny, both of us standing here, wishing for the things we can no longer grasp, for escape when the hatch is bolted above us.
Slumping to lean against the table, Jack sighed, his hand massaging the knots at the back of his neck as he spoke. “Elizabeth, go get some sleep.” Her eyes found his, and then he was blinking and examining his rings so that he could better deny that which fluttered and danced between them in moments such as this. “Go to bed, Elizabeth. Go on. Scuttle off.” His voice rumbled, gravel down the cliff-face.
“Will you come as well?” A whisper brimming with something unspoken, something that the crackling, pounding, thunderous throb beneath his ribs muffled and on which his weary, aching head refused to ruminate.
“Let me just -“ his voice caught, hooked by the flicker of firelight glancing off her eyes, and so he motioned, flap-handed, towards the sprawl of food littering the table.
And though storing the remaining food took less than a quarter hour, it was several hours - and a mug or three of bitters later - before Jack ascended the stairs to claim his place beside Elizabeth.
He slipped into the room on thief’s feet, a bandit in a society girl’s mansion. As quietly as he could manage, he toed off his boots and slipped his jacket from his shoulders, unwinding his sash and, almost as an afterthought, removing his bandana. Her back was curled away from him, facing the window and the sea below, and as he slid in beside her, the cadence of Elizabeth’s breathing shifted - caught and released.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, pillowing his head on his arms and studying the beams above.
“No.”
And though he knew that even ‘the incident about the rum’ wasn’t actually about the rum, Jack was unable to face the niggling sense of displacement that chilled him to his marrow - and so he asked, as dryly as he could manage, “Still upset about the rum, are we?”
“I’m sorry that I made you come back. I know how much you were looking forward to Christmas with your family.”
He chuckled, a diversion. “What? The old goat and my sister?”
“And your nephew.”
“Nothing’s further from me mind,” he lied.
“I’m so sorry, Jack. I just - I just couldn’t bear to be there any longer. You should go back now, while the water’s calm.”
“And leave you and the babe Turner to fend for yourselves with naught but your culinary skills and a pot of curdled rum? Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Instead of laughing as he expected, she reached behind her, groping until she found his hand. She clutched at his fingers for a moment, squeezing his palm before releasing him to rest her hand on her belly.
Jack burned from knuckle to wrist.
“I miss them, Jack.”
“My family? Well, we really shouldn’t have left if you-“
“No, no, I mean my family. My mother. My father. James and - and Will.” her whisper was an echo, something ringing in his ears.
He felt deafened by the silence that followed.
After several heartbeats she sighed a laden, defeated sort of sound and began speaking again. “I never thought my first Christmas as a wife would be so - so devoid of a husband.”
She turned into him, and his arm stretched toward her before he could think to still himself, and so she settled against him, drawn close by his own treacherous limb, his doom - and her child - fitting against him like missing pieces of a puzzle.
The same, perfidious limb that drew her close now bent at the wrist, his fingers stroking her hair.
“I just wish - oh Jack, I wish so many things could be different.” She sighed against him, her temple at the crook of his arm, her breath hot against his ribs. He felt her tremble, and Jack Sparrow cursed his damnable fingers again as they began to trace lazy path from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
“Perhaps we could pretend, Elizabeth.”
“Pretend?”
“Yes, you know, use the mind to -“
“Jack, I understand that much. Pretend at what, exactly?”
“I’ll play the part of your dutiful husband for the day - do all the things a husband would do except for, of course, the thing a husband would do. Must have boundaries, mustn’t we - and you’ll be happy for a few moments.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“I’ll be like Will - you know, dress neatly and pace incessantly and worship you thoroughly - and whatever else it is that he would do. You’ll have to instruct me on the finer points, but the gist is, Lizzie, that you can imagine you’ve a husband at your side, to love you as you’d like - barring the exception, of course.”
“And what, precisely, will you get out of this arrangement, Jack?”
He bristled. “Consider it my present to you, Elizabeth, a token for the use of your palace,” he gestured to the room with a flip of his free wrist, fingers poised mid-air as though clasping something delicate.
A few moments passed, the breeze stirring the curtains. Jack counted heartbeats, his pulse as mutinous as his arms.
One beat.
Two.
Twenty-five beats.
Finally, she spoke, her voice so low that he had to tilt into her to make out the sound. “Alright,” she exhaled.
“Splendid! Excellent, really.” He withdrew his arm from beneath her, propping himself on his elbows and tracing the lines of shadow sprawled across her face - cheekbone to earlobe, nostril to eye. “And what shall I call you, Elizabeth?”
She cocked an eyebrow. The arch was both sharp and graceful.
“Surely dear William must have had pet names for you? Is it to be ‘honey’ or ‘darling’ or ‘sugar lips’ or -“
“Actually, I don’t think he ever called me anything but Elizabeth or Miss Swan.”
“Hmmm,” he dropped back to the pillow, tucking her close again. “That won’t do.”
“You could call me ‘Lizzie.’ I think that would be fine.”
“No, no. - won’t do. I always call you Lizzie.”
“Well, I don’t mind it as much as I put on.”
“Of course you don’t. That’s not the point, though. It’s just - too close to home, isn’t it?” He tapped his chin, ticking off a list of possibilities. There was ‘Eliza’, but that particular name felt rather dry in the mouth, a bit too back-alley for his liking. “Darling’ would work as well as ‘Love’, and he imagined he could manage a ‘Honey’ or ‘Dearest’ if occasion required. But no, no, even those generic names lacked a certain he-wasn’t-sure-what. If he, Jack Sparrow, were to give Elizabeth a name, it would likely be something simple, evocative - something like ‘My Doom’ or ‘The Reaper’ - but if Jack was sure of one thing, it was that Will Turner would call her neither. He twirled a beard-braid, deep in thought.
“I don’t know, Jack. Why don’t you just call me Elizabeth if it’s -“
“What about Bess?”
“Bess?”
“Yes. Bess. Can you imagine it, your William dropping his mouth to crown of your head,” he followed suit, his lips grazing the silk of her hair, “and whispered, ‘Bess’ before he kissed you goodnight.”
“Y-yes,” she shivered, her eyes glassy, peering beyond him - no doubt to sea. He pressed a kiss to her forehead in one clipped, chaste motion.
And Jack cursed his bloody, galloping heart.
“Now, about that sleep you and babe Turner require…. How about a lullaby, hmm, my Bess?”
“I’d like that, Jack.”
“Will.”
“I can’t call you Will.”
“Then call me ‘Husband’.”
“I’d rather call you Jack.”
“If it won’t ruin the magic for you.”
“It won’t.”
“Alright then, what would you like to hear?”
“Anything. Something from your childhood.” She snuggled closer, and her belly pressed close enough for him to feel the child stir at his side.
“My childhood wouldn’t be your William’s childhood, so I’m afraid you’ll have to -“
“I don’t care.”
Strange, the numbness in his fingers, his lips. Stranger still, the stopping of his heart, the lack of air in his lungs.
Jack tried to remind himself that this was a game.
A gift.
A crucible of sorts.
“Anything for you, my darling wife.” He plucked her hand from his belly, bringing her fingers to his lips. He kissed each tip - every knuckle - reverently, a husband to her wife.
And then it happened - the shift in the room, the sunlight in the night, a golden thread weaving something Jack could not face.
Elizabeth slid her hand beneath the lapel of his shirt. It grazed his nipple before resting, palm-flat, above the perilous, deceitful, staccato thumping of his heart.
“You are my dearest friend. Do you know that?”
William, she speaks to William.
“Jack?”
“Hmmm? What?”
She swallowed. Her voice was distant, barely a sigh. “I love you, you know.”
And he was a drumbeat in crescendo, his ears filling with the hum of his rushing blood. He begged whatever gods he could conjure to muffle the breakneck racing of his heart.
Will, remember? The game’s afoot, you milksop.
He forced himself to answer, the pitch of his voice higher than he’d like. “And I’ve loved you since you - help me here, Lizzie - give me a timeframe.”
“Just make something up.”
“Well…. Alright. I’ve - I’ve loved you since you saved me from myself, Bess.”
Tapping her fingers on his chest, she nuzzled closer. “Sing me something from India, Jack.”
“If it’s really what you want.”
“It is.”
He sucked in a deep breath, closing his eyes against the images of his mother, of their garden in Cochin, his sister in his lap as Ammah sang.
You’re going to regret this, Jack Sparrow. Somewhere deep inside him, in a voice rather too similar to his mother’s, he was corrected.
Ranjit. You’re going to regret this, Ranjit.
Sucking in a lung’s worth of air, he ran over the short verses in his mind. Clearing his throat, he began, his accent warbling rather tryingly at first.
“Baroshekar aador meke,” the words and melody returned in flashes of light, the scent of Elizabeth’s hair like the sandalwood trees of their garden, and he struggled to tame his wavering, toneless voice. “Bheshe elam sagor theke….”
And so it was that Jahangir Ranjit Pakshi sang to his king and her babe on Christmas Eve. Inside, beneath the careful ruse of his stint as the Turner boy - so deep that he could barely feel the pain of it - some part of Ranjit or Jack or both was cleft in twain, plummeting with each word, a ship sinking into the deep.
It felt, just a little bit, like his drowning in himself.
** The song Jack sings to Elizabeth is a song from Nitin Sawhney’s album, Human, entitled “The Boatman.” I have included the lyrics below, along with a translation. If you’d like to hear the song, there’s a clip here: http://www.nitinsawhney.com/music/human.aspx
Baroshekar aador meke
Bheshe elam sagor theke
Baleer toteh notun disha
Adar theke alor mesha
Batash bhara bhalo basha
Ke kandare baicho toree aral theke
(Something) caressed with love,
I drifted ashore from the sea.
The sand shows a new way.
The light blends with the darkness.
The wind is full of love.
Who are you, boatman, who paddles this boat, whom I cannot see
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