Fic: Crossing the Bar (7/?)
Author: Honorat
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Pintel and Ragetti! Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, the crew of the Black Pearl
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria if you squint.
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: Just how did Ragetti and Pintel end up back on the Black Pearl? This one’s for you sparky_darky!
Every once in awhile, I have to write some raving sailing. Norrington has finally got the Black Pearl trapped. Jack is bound to do something crazy, but will it be the last thing he does?
Thanks to geek_mama_2 for the beta help.
1 Ambush
2 No Regrets
3 The Judgment of the Sea
4 The Sea Pays Homage
5 Risking All That Is Mortal and Unsure
6 Troubles Come Not Single Spies
* * * * *
7 To Dare Do All That May Become a Man
The first man in that race for the swinging spar, Anamaria noted with disdain, was one of those wretches who’d mutinied and left Jack to die-Ragetti, the disgusting little creep. If anyone were going to get swept off into the sea, she would be satisfied if it were him. Pintel and Ragetti were the two exceptions to her unceasing care for Jack’s crew. As far as she was concerned, accidental death for those two could not occur too soon.
Anamaria had never agreed with Jack Sparrow’s decision to sign on his former crew members. As far a she was concerned, those bloody mutineers should have been hanged from the highest yardarm and thrown to the sharks. For weeks after he’d done what she considered one of the stupidest things in a long and varied career of stupid things, they’d argued violently, far into the nights with predictable results. Anamaria would whip herself into a frothing, screaming fury, while Jack would grow progressively more sarcastic and evasive, playing the fool to the limits of his abilities and her endurance. Nothing he said made any sense, but he could always slip past her logic like a greased pig. He was Captain Jack Sparrow, and apparently that conferred immortality and invulnerability upon him.
Finally, the captain had tired of the amusement. The next time they crossed blades on the subject, she found the fool had evaporated, leaving pure acid Jack Sparrow.
“Anamaria,” he said succinctly, his eyes like dark stone walls through which no light could shine, “I’m the captain on this ship and so my word is the one that goes here. Pintel and Ragetti are staying until I say otherwise. I’m not asking you to like them. I’m not even asking you to trust them. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. But you have a choice. Either you can accept that I want them on this ship and we’ll have no more discussion about it, or you can turn this into a war that we both lose.”
In the end, Anamaria, who had never developed a talent for backing down from a fight, resigned her sword in this one. It nearly broke her neck to bow it, but she nodded stiffly and left without a word. A dispute with Captain Sparrow about two such snake’s bellies as Pintel and Ragetti was not worth the price. She could see the fragile, newly-woven trust that hovered between them unraveling before her eyes. If there was one thing that could freeze Jack Sparrow to ice, it was a first mate who couldn’t follow his orders. There were not yet enough new memories to eclipse that dark past. She did not know if there ever would be.
And so she barely tolerated the presence of those irritating living flotsam. If she occasionally had a few conversations with the Pearl on the advantages of losing a couple of crewmen, well, what Jack didn’t know, he couldn’t bring down on her head. So far the ship hadn’t seemed to pay her opinions any more attention than the captain had.
At least Jack displayed some prudence in handling his former shipmates. He never assigned them to boarding parties until all threats of violence had passed. When Anamaria mentioned this omission, Jack frowned and explained, “They have the wrong instincts. I can’t trust them to know when not to kill.”
For her part, Anamaria kept a suspicious eye on all their activities. If they went ashore, she had her spies accompany them with instructions to place no hindrance on any attempts to desert. She always assigned them to crews with firmly loyal men. And whenever she could, she kept them separated. Work them too hard to give them time to plot-that was her theory. Ragetti was the follower, so she watched Pintel more closely. The stocky pirate was far more prone to violence and underhanded behaviour-but whatever Pintel did, Ragetti did too. While the one-eyed pirate was a well-read man, he was too intelligent to have any earthly smarts, as Gibbs had snorted. For this reason Ragetti depended on Pintel to navigate the day-to-day realities of life. Unfortunately Pintel wasn’t any too smart himself, so they were constantly getting themselves into mingle-mangles that defied description. They made Jack laugh-the only use she could see for the two of them.
It occurred to her that Pintel and Ragetti had known Jack Sparrow long before anyone else on the ship. They were the only ones who remembered, with Jack, the glory days of the Black Pearl, when she and her captain were both unscarred by curses or betrayals. Sometimes of a gentle summer’s night, when the Pearl sailed free, and rum and music flowed, Pintel would tell stories of those days, wild tales, side-splitting tales, mysterious ones-the stuff of legends. Ragetti would interject comments and echoes and prompts only to be summarily whacked by the indignant storyteller. At those times, Anamaria would see Jack in the shadows just outside the ring of lantern light, listening, unreadable expressions chasing themselves across his face like clouds scudding before the wind.
Once when Pintel began his story, “I mind the time Bootstrap put the iguana in ol’ Hector’s bed . . .” Jack rose hastily and vanished in the direction of the stern. It was a calm evening, luminous with stars, fragrant with the breath of the sea. But apparently the Black Pearl could not sail another instant without her captain at her helm. He’d stayed there through all the watches of that night. Anamaria had held another one-sided conversation with the Pearl the next morning.
Now she stood holding her breath, torn between her desire to see the ship safe again and her smouldering, hidden desire to be rid of these men who had hurt Jack Sparrow, who still had the power to do so. Would this be the day the Black Pearl answered her prayer?
* * * * *
Ragetti had been impossibly young when the mutiny had taken place.
Jack Sparrow had made him nervous, a mercurial, young, devil-may-care captain who had seemed so much less competent than the hard-bitten, experienced and determined Hector Barbossa. Ragetti had always needed someone to follow. He would never have risked speaking out against his crewmates as Bootstrap had done. He’d thought he’d made the right choice, the safest choice, the choice that would give him the best chance of survival.
That had been a monumental, epic piece of bad judgment in retrospect.
The immortal torment of the curse had taught him one thing above all else: there were things far worse than death to fear. Ragetti had quickly learnt to shrug off his terror-to take out his own anguish on his victims. He had found some satisfaction in becoming what he had always most dreaded. But he’d never ceased to be afraid of people. Their sudden storms of emotions, their endlessly critical judgments, their bottomless ability to cause each other pain-these things constantly paralyzed him. No matter how often he sought approval, he met with contempt. He didn’t dare seek out the intimacy of friendship, but the loneliness numbed him beyond what cursed gold could ever do.
Pintel had been the only man to show any concern or affection for the gangly, awkward youth, and for that reason Ragetti clung to that harsh, abrasive relationship. Pintel let him follow, made the tough decisions, ground the sharp edges off his isolation.
Which was why he found himself on the Black Pearl now, crew again to the man he had betrayed. As Pintel had said, this ship was home. She had a mysterious hold on every man who ever sailed her-as though no matter how far they ran from her, she would always draw them back, whether they willed or no-as though she owned them, and they must serve her.
The Black Pearl called men. The only man who called her was Captain Jack Sparrow.
Ragetti had been terrified when Pintel had dragged them to Captain Sparrow to offer themselves as crew again. Now that the curse was lifted, the fear had flooded back into the vacuum left by the suffering. He had relearned what it was like to hear the footsteps of his own mortality stealthy in the dark behind him. He and Pintel had participated in the attempted murder of this man. Surely their former captain would simply kill them as he had Barbossa. Pintel was mad, Ragetti had decided. But he couldn’t strike out on his own-the idea was unbearable.
The events of that day had seared themselves into his memory forever.
* * * * *
Ragetti’s fears were confirmed when Captain Sparrow refused to speak to them together. He called Ragetti into his cabin, the one where they’d attacked him on the night of the mutiny, the one where the persistent stains of Sparrow’s blood had never come out of the deck. Ragetti stepped trembling over the threshold, feeling like a sacrificial animal, unable to take his eyes from the elaborate carpet that now covered that old scar of betrayal.
Captain Sparrow watched him, dark eyes drilling holes in Ragetti’s black soul until the ichor of his guilt dripped invisibly from his hands like the sweat that visibly beaded his brow and stung his one good eye. Ragetti stood, tongue turned as wooden as his false eye, swallowing until his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork on a tempest-tossed sea. Why had Pintel insisted that they approach this man who had proved in the end to be the match for the most evil man they’d ever known, whose mortal strength had brought down an immortal foe?
He nearly pissed himself when Captain Sparrow drew a dagger, slender and sharp as treachery. His blood would join the captain’s on the floor of that cabin-an atonement of sorts-Ragetti was certain.
Then Sparrow spoke, his voice oddly light and unemotional. “I’m curious, Ragetti. Just why do you think I’d consider accepting you on my ship when you mutinied against me the last time you signed on to my articles?
Ragetti couldn’t speak around the dead lump of his tongue, didn’t know what he would have said if he could have answered. Why, indeed? No reason at all, as he’d told Pintel in uncharacteristic forthrightness when the subject had first come up. And so he stood there, head hanging, shoulders drooping, waiting fatalistically for the end, for the blow he’d been expecting.
“Get your head up, Ragetti. Straighten up, man. Look at me!” Captain Sparrow snapped. His voice lowered, intense with menace. “Look me in the eyes.”
Instinctively, Ragetti obeyed, his spine jerking straight, his eye flying to the captain’s strangely-outlined, somber ones. He couldn’t read the expression in them. This was not a Jack Sparrow he recognized. There was none of the flamboyance, the irreverent humour, the half-flash, half-foolish mannerisms. This was the stillness of a predator, wary and dangerous-more so than he’d ever seen Barbossa.
The captain seemed to be reading something in Ragetti’s face, for he remained silent for a long moment watching the trembling man. Then he shrugged, relaxing slightly into a more familiar manifestation. Gold glinted as he bared his teeth. The expression sent a chill through Ragetti. A shark might smile so at injured prey.
With a movement as swift as the wing-pivot of his namesake, Sparrow reversed the dagger, held it by the tip and offered the hilt to Ragetti.
“Take it,” he commanded. “I’m not going to run my ship always looking over my shoulder, suspecting plots in the shadows. I don’t like turning my back on traitors-makes my shoulder blades itch. So if you’re going to stab me in the back, now’s your chance.”
Bewildered, Ragetti involuntarily closed his hand around the hilt and found himself armed, while the weaponless Jack Sparrow shed his coat and turned his back on his former crewman.
“Do try to get that between the correct ribs, Ragetti. I hate a botched assassination,” Sparrow ordered. “I don’t think anything between us calls for my protracted suffering.”
The two men stood in a frozen tableau for what seemed an aeon. Ragetti stared from the deadly glint of the knife in his hand to the straight defiant back of Captain Sparrow.
Finally, the captain bounced on the balls of his feet. “I’m waiting, Ragetti. What seems to be the problem?”
“I-I-I can’t,” Ragetti stammered.
“Course you can!” Sparrow encouraged. “It’s really quite simple.” His words took a downward twist of disgust. “I’m sure you’ve stabbed men before-in the back, in the dark, men and women, and probably children, too. It’s not that different.”
“I-I-I mean I don’t want to!” Ragetti cried in frustration, letting the dagger clatter to the deck plates.
Like a tiger, Jack Sparrow whirled smoothly around, crouched to sweep up the knife, and still in one liquid motion, grabbed Ragetti by the worn collar of his coat, pinning him, one handed, up against the bulkhead. The tip of the knife riveted Ragetti’s attention at the juncture of his throat and jaw.
“Don’t want to, Mister? Or are you too afraid to?” Sparrow spat through clenched teeth.
Ragetti shivered under the lash of that contempt, more painful to him than the threat of any knife.
Captain Sparrow’s narrow, perilous face hovered far too near him, revealing no remnant of the softness Barbossa had always insisted was Jack Sparrow’s fatal flaw. “Do you know what I dislike about you, Ragetti?” he asked.
“N-n-no, sir,” the frightened man managed.
“You’re a coward, Ragetti.” The captain thumped Ragetti’s back into the bulkhead with the sharp pain of clashing teeth. “You terrorize those who are weaker than you to make yourself feel better about being afraid.”
“Y-y-yes, sir. I know, s-s-sir,” Ragetti was babbling now. He hated himself for the waver in his voice.
“Do you know what the problem with a coward is?”
Shaking his head in a frantic negative, Ragetti tried to shrink even further away from his tormenter; however, the bulkhead refused to accommodate him.
“The problem with a coward is not that he can be made to fear you, but that he can be just as easily made to fear your enemies. You were afraid of Barbossa, weren’t you?”
Having long since given himself up for a dead man, Ragetti whimpered softly. He had been afraid of Hector Barbossa, and he was now terrified of Jack Sparrow. “I’m sorry, sir,” he begged hopelessly.
“Pah!” Captain Sparrow grimaced in distaste. “You make me sick.” He abruptly let go of Ragetti, and the man folded to the deck as though he had no bones in his legs. The captain paced across the room, then turned suddenly.
“Why did you decide to ask for a berth again on the Black Pearl?” he demanded. “You’re an intelligent man, Ragetti. You had to have known it was unlikely in the extreme that I’d take a traitor like you back.”
“I did know, sir,” Ragetti closed his eyes, feeling the despicable tell-tale damp at the edges of his lashes. “But Pintel said . . .”
“Belay that, Mister,” Captain Sparrow snapped. “I haven’t the slightest interest in why Pintel wants to be on my ship. He’ll be telling me that, himself, shortly, I’m sure. Now, I’m offering you one last chance to square with me. If you tell me the truth, I may let you walk off my ship with your remaining eye and all of your limbs intact.”
Ragetti felt the first faint stirrings of a hope more agonizing than despair. He opened his mouth.
“No.” Captain Sparrow forestalled him with a word. “Think carefully about your answer. I have no doubt you’re such a stranger to the truth that you wouldn’t recognize it if it came up and bit you!” He stared down at his cowering former crew member. Then, more gently, he spoke, “Take your time, lad.”
That tiniest hint of kindness in the captain’s words nearly undid Ragetti. He was even less used to kindness than he was to truth. The question was a test, he realized, and the only right answer was the answer he already knew-somewhere deep inside him. Why did he want this berth? For he knew that he had wanted it. Still did, in spite of the fact that he was petrified by this unfathomable Captain Sparrow. Ragetti’s eyes remained closed, but he could hear the man pacing, could still picture him with every line of his body singing tense, his eyes dark with the bloodstained memories that lay like a sword between them.
The steps echoed on the deck. Heel to toe, heel to toe, pivot, and repeat. As though, Ragetti realized with a flash of enlightenment, the brutal, cold, impervious façade were just a mask, as though this interview disturbed the captain more deeply than he’d let on, as though he also were vulnerable. Ragetti had had enough of invulnerable captains to last him a lifetime, he decided. Those restless steps stilled something frantic in his own thoughts.
Carefully, as though thinking aloud, he attempted to explain. “I came here because this seemed to be the only place that felt right-the only place where I belonged. I wanted to stay with Pintel. He’s always been my only friend. And he was right when he said this ship is our home. She’s . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . but she’s not just any ship.” He raised his eye to Captain Sparrow. The man had stopped across the room and was staring at him as though he’d never seen him before.
Emboldened, Ragetti exclaimed impulsively, “You know. I had to come back to the Black Pearl. She doesn’t let you go.”
The captain’s face gentled in a way Ragetti had never before observed. “I do know,” he said softly.
The two men stared silently, measuringly at each other for long minutes. Finally, Captain Sparrow sighed. “All right, Mr. Ragetti. I will take you aboard the Black Pearl as crewman for a trial period of six months subsequent to you signing the articles and subsequent to you giving me your word on whatever it is you hold sacred that I will always be able to turn my back on you. You have a problem with me, you bring it to my face. If my shoulder blades start to itch, you’re overboard as fast as you can say Robert’s your uncle, savvy?”
Ragetti felt limp with relief, suffused with an unfamiliar feeling he finally identified as a nascent happiness. “Aye, Captain,” he breathed, and it was like a gift to be able to address a worthy man by that title, to have a place to belong and a purpose once again. “Thank you, sir.”
Then he found Captain Sparrow had extended his incongruously elegant hand. Shyly, Ragetti held out his own bony awkward one. They shook hands solemnly. Sparrow’s sailor’s calluses met Ragetti’s own.
“We have an accord,” his captain announced. Then he pulled Ragetti to his feet. “C’mon. As soon as you’ve signed, I’ll get Gibbs to show you where to stow your things.
* * * * *
He’d been with the Black Pearl and Captain Sparrow for over a year now. Pintel, too-although his friend had never spoken about what had passed between himself and Jack Sparrow in his own private interview. Certainly it had been something different than had happened to Ragetti. Pintel had emerged looking like he’d been in a first rate mill, one eye swollen shut, a broken nose, several ribs cracked, and a shoulder dislocated. It hadn’t been a one-sided beating, however. The captain had sported a colourful swelling on one sharp cheekbone and had favoured a leg for several days. Whatever the circumstance of that fight, it had seemed to clear the air between the two of them, for Pintel was far more at ease with Sparrow than Ragetti was even yet.
Ragetti still felt like an outsider amongst the Pearl’s crew. His role in the mutiny against Jack Sparrow might have been branded on his forehead. The fortunate men free of that stigma despised those who had committed the crime. The first mate, who held a grudge until it died of old age and achieved immortality, particularly seemed to go out of her way to make Jack’s former crew members aware of the depths of their expendable status. Her attitude didn’t bother Pintel. After his initial horror at not only finding a woman aboard the ship but one giving orders, he’d admitted, with a certain amount of admiration, that he’d never served under a first mate with more vitriol in her tongue than Anamaria, nor, more grudgingly, one with a better grasp of what needed to be done on a ship.
But Anamaria simply scared Ragetti. He avoided her when possible and did his best to do his work so that it never came under her scrutiny. The scorch of her regard could send him up the terrifying ratlines faster than flames to the soles of his feet ever had when he’d first been pressed as a sailor.
Now he found himself on his mettle in this hour of his ship’s most desperate need. It seemed a man could simply become exhausted from terror. The ordeal had sapped him of all ability to react to further disasters. He’d been absolutely convinced that he would die the death by drowning that had haunted his nightmares ever since he’d set foot on the unwieldy decks of sea-going vessels. But then the great-hearted Black Pearl had pulled them all from that watery grave. Never had there been such a ship-not the Argo, not one of the fleet of Odysseus, not the dragon-headed Viking raiders, nor any other of the storied ships on history’s purple pages. Ragetti was living in a legend.
Which simply meant he’d been brought to the point where he had nothing left to give. Had the members of the Argosy ever felt so? He was down to his last dregs of fear, of strength, of courage. He’d reached the place where he actually wanted to lapse into the oblivion of the sea, but his frenzied desire for approval and his fear of disgracing himself in front of the other men drove him on. Even now, he and his mates were climbing towards a catastrophe that would surely claim one or more of their lives.
The wind pried at his body like the hand of the devil. Screaming and shrieking, it drowned all sound, turning his shipmates’ shouts into silent moving lips. The blisters on his hands burst and burned like fire as he fought to ride out the wrenching oscillations of the mast between sea and sky. The taste of danger was dry in his mouth. Far below him the marauding waves swallowed the Black Pearl until only her raised poop and forecastle decks showed above the abstract swirls of sea and windblown foam. Raindrops drove against his face like blinding missiles until he had to duck his head to breathe.
Above his head, the lethal spar shipped violently back and forth so close he could feel the wind of its passage in his hair. Ragetti gave a small whimper of fear that he couldn’t even hear himself. Still, he inched out on the plunging footropes of the mizzen topsail yard. The next time the topgallant yard lunged by him, Ragetti threw himself in desperate terror up out of the ropes, supported only by his thighs braced against the yard and the wind pressing heavy against his back, and cast a bowline at the flying topgallant yard.
Without knowing whether he had succeeded in flinging the loop over the end or not, he leapt for the mast and whipped the standing end of his line around it. The sudden wrench as the runaway yard brought up tore into his shoulders and back with breath-taking pain. But somehow, he hung on, absorbing the jolt as it swung to leeward. He almost slipped off the yard, swaying on the edge of the chasm above the storm-swept sea, but one of his mates reached him in time and grasped his ragged shirt, towing him back.
The danger was not past, but his actions had reduced the motion of the yard enough for the others to heave themselves onto it and tie it off, lashing it securely to the topgallant mast and shrouds. It was all Ragetti could do to hang on and wait for the task to be accomplished. Then someone-he couldn’t focus on who-helped him climb down, shoulders ablaze, muscles quivering from strain.
Finally, miraculously, he was on the deck of the ship again, his legs shaking so he could barely stand. Bewildered and dizzy, he felt the captain’s arm about his shoulders, supporting him. The captain’s! Jack Sparrow’s jubilant smile flashed like a glimpse of the sun, chasing away the bone-chilling cold of wind and rain. Suddenly Ragetti could no longer feel the intense ache in his arms nor the sharp daggers slicing his back.
“Well done, Ragetti!” the captain exclaimed. “Good work, mate.”
Ragetti would never forget those words or that smile. He basked in the unfamiliar warmth of a human touch that was not a blow. For once, the grin he returned to the captain was neither apologetic nor cringing. It spread over his face in pure happiness.
As he raised his head in euphoric courage, Ragetti’s eye snagged on Anamaria’s dark gaze. For the first time since he had come aboard the Black Pearl over a year ago, the first mate was actually looking at him as though he were really there, as though he might be something human after all.
* * * * *
The runaway yard was contained. Even now Jack’s men were at work with desperate haste to re-rig it and reattach it. Others were hauling the long bundles of sails on deck, tons of already wet canvas that they would somehow have to raise up to the empty yards. Out on those spars still more men ran aloft the gantlines for drawing up those sails, bending them onto the yards. The fury of the sea was subsiding as the Black Pearl drew away from the mouth of the harbour into the ordinary swell of the storm.
Time had run out.
The Navy brig was almost upon them.
Captain Sparrow gave the orders for his helmsmen to let the Pearl run free. Their brief respite was at an end. The decks were a flurry of frantic motion as men trimmed her few sails to the ideal angles, seeking to give the Pearl her best speed. In flight lay her only chance.
The captain paced along the windward rail by the break in the poop, his glass fixed on the oncoming vessel. He could see her gun crews readied on her main deck, her sharpshooters climbing to her foretop. In a matter of moments the Pearl would be coming under her fire.
Lowering the glass, Jack surveyed his ship. Lovingly he followed the perfect sweep of her decks, the elegant lift of her bow. He was struck again, with a force that nearly staggered him, how infinitely beautiful she was. The sweet run of her lines, her delicately penciled masts and gracefully tapering spars entranced him anew.
His ship. His Black Pearl.
Jack Sparrow had belonged to her, body and soul, from the moment he’d first set eyes on her. She spoke to him in his dreams and sang to him every waking hour of his life. She had set him free. The entire world had spread out before them, an azure carpet fit for royal adventure. But he had failed her twelve years before-lost her to that bastard Barbossa, abandoned her to cursed madness, left her a slave to violence and greed. He had sworn, when he got her back, that he would never be parted from her again. They would sail together beyond the fire-kissed sunsets, they would wash in the all the baths of southern stars and dance soul-free under swirling northern lights, and they would chase the glowing dawn down the horizon. But now he did not know whether he could save her, or whether he had already failed her once more.
Reaching out to her, he brushed the backs of two fingers along her rail, a gesture fierce and tender, as though he touched the cheek of a lover.
“I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
* * * * *
Anamaria found him there by the rail, again assessing the approach of their adversary.
Jack pocketed the glass and turned to her. “Anamaria.”
She raised an inquiring brow at him.
To her surprise, he did not say anything for a moment, just held her eyes with that seriousness he usually buried so deep it was always a shock to see it. Finally he spoke, so she could barely hear him above the noise of the ship, “This is not a good situation.”
Anamaria eyed him incredulously. “You tellin’ me somethin’ I don’t bloody know?” she scoffed.
But Jack was having no more banter. “Ana.” His earnestness froze her.
“What?” she snapped. She did not want to hear whatever it was that brought that tone to Jack Sparrow’s voice.
“I have a request to make.” He moved towards her. She noticed he was trailing his hand along the ship’s rail again. Turning away, he gazed out to the ragged horizon, beyond the Navy ships, before he replied. “If the worst should happen . . .”
“Jack.” Anamaria tried to stop him, tried to keep him from putting into words her fears, as if somehow that would make them more real. But of course she failed. Jack could get more words in edgewise when a body wanted him to shut up than anyone else she knew.
“I’m just sayin’,” he shrugged, still not looking at her. “If there’s any reason I can’t do it, you have to take the Black Pearl. Get her out of here, Ana.”
“Nothin’s goin’ t’ happen t’ you,” Anamaria retorted angrily.
But Jack was already shaking his head ruefully, a half laugh in his voice. “Now lass, y’ know I’m the one the Navy is really after. Those marines in Norrington’s tops’ll be out for my blood. An’ I’m not particularly inconspicuous.”
“Damn it, Jack Sparrow! You shut the hell up!” She hated it when he dismissed his life so casually.
Jack turned back to her, holding up his free hand placatingly. “All right. I’ll say no more. But promise me you’ll take care of my ship if . . .” he broke off at the look in her eyes. Finally, he simply held out his hand to her. “Please.”
Not trusting herself to say anything, Anamaria stared at his hand as though memorizing every grimy callus and broken nail. In spite of being the captain, Jack had a fo’c’sle hellion’s hands. Couldn’t give up working his ship any more than he could give up commanding her. Except-he just had. Offered her the command of the Black Pearl. It wasn’t the normal way the captaincy passed in a pirate crew-but then nothing had ever approached normal about Jack and his ship. Every man had signed to this crew knowing that a man voted with his feet on the Black Pearl. This ship had one captain, and if a crewman didn’t approve of him, he could jump ship at the next port. Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl were not two separate entities.
Frankly, Anamaria didn’t think the ship would even be manageable without her captain. Anamaria had had enough of trying to sail the Pearl without Jack the one time she had tried it. But Jack was looking at her with a naked desperation she had never seen in him before. She really sincerely hoped he would never ask her to sell her soul to the devil. One look in that man’s eyes when he dropped all his masks and she was lost every time.
And so, against her better judgment, she nodded silently and took his hand. His grip tightened once.
“Thank you, love,” he said softly.
Illustration
* * * * *
The awful, eternal moment, just before battle, had struck. The Black Pearl was racing towards her intersection with the Navy brig, her peace almost at an end.
Captain Jack Sparrow stood at the helm of his ship. He wasn’t actually handling the wheel; Cotton was managing it fine. But he needed to touch her.
“Raise her colours, lad.” Jack nodded to Jip without glancing at him. His eyes never left the approaching warship.
Unnaturally solemn, Jip carried the dark bundle to the line up which it would be run. For a minute, all work on the Pearl ceased, and men watched with a sense of ceremony. The only sounds on the ship were those she made herself and the violent caresses of the wind and the sea.
Above the snarl of wind, the knocking of blocks, and the thunder of flailing canvas being bent on too late, Jack heard the valiant snap of the black flag as it rose in defiance. The Royal Navy captains would see in that spectral grin and crossed sabers the Black Pearl's refusal to ask for quarter. This was their commitment, the mark of their courage, fidelity and love, the sign of their determination to defend their ship to the last extremity and to lay down their lives in preference to shameful surrender.
They sailed under the banner of King Death this day not because they were willing to kill for their prize-but because they were willing to die for it.
* * * * *
TBC
8 Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
Rating: PG-13 for language
Characters: Pintel and Ragetti! Jack Sparrow, Anamaria, the crew of the Black Pearl
Pairing: Jack/Anamaria if you squint.
Disclaimer: The characters of PotC! She’s taken them! Get after her, you feckless pack of ingrates!
Summary: Just how did Ragetti and Pintel end up back on the Black Pearl? This one’s for you sparky_darky!
Every once in awhile, I have to write some raving sailing. Norrington has finally got the Black Pearl trapped. Jack is bound to do something crazy, but will it be the last thing he does?
Thanks to geek_mama_2 for the beta help.
1 Ambush
2 No Regrets
3 The Judgment of the Sea
4 The Sea Pays Homage
5 Risking All That Is Mortal and Unsure
6 Troubles Come Not Single Spies
* * * * *
7 To Dare Do All That May Become a Man
The first man in that race for the swinging spar, Anamaria noted with disdain, was one of those wretches who’d mutinied and left Jack to die-Ragetti, the disgusting little creep. If anyone were going to get swept off into the sea, she would be satisfied if it were him. Pintel and Ragetti were the two exceptions to her unceasing care for Jack’s crew. As far as she was concerned, accidental death for those two could not occur too soon.
Anamaria had never agreed with Jack Sparrow’s decision to sign on his former crew members. As far a she was concerned, those bloody mutineers should have been hanged from the highest yardarm and thrown to the sharks. For weeks after he’d done what she considered one of the stupidest things in a long and varied career of stupid things, they’d argued violently, far into the nights with predictable results. Anamaria would whip herself into a frothing, screaming fury, while Jack would grow progressively more sarcastic and evasive, playing the fool to the limits of his abilities and her endurance. Nothing he said made any sense, but he could always slip past her logic like a greased pig. He was Captain Jack Sparrow, and apparently that conferred immortality and invulnerability upon him.
Finally, the captain had tired of the amusement. The next time they crossed blades on the subject, she found the fool had evaporated, leaving pure acid Jack Sparrow.
“Anamaria,” he said succinctly, his eyes like dark stone walls through which no light could shine, “I’m the captain on this ship and so my word is the one that goes here. Pintel and Ragetti are staying until I say otherwise. I’m not asking you to like them. I’m not even asking you to trust them. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t. But you have a choice. Either you can accept that I want them on this ship and we’ll have no more discussion about it, or you can turn this into a war that we both lose.”
In the end, Anamaria, who had never developed a talent for backing down from a fight, resigned her sword in this one. It nearly broke her neck to bow it, but she nodded stiffly and left without a word. A dispute with Captain Sparrow about two such snake’s bellies as Pintel and Ragetti was not worth the price. She could see the fragile, newly-woven trust that hovered between them unraveling before her eyes. If there was one thing that could freeze Jack Sparrow to ice, it was a first mate who couldn’t follow his orders. There were not yet enough new memories to eclipse that dark past. She did not know if there ever would be.
And so she barely tolerated the presence of those irritating living flotsam. If she occasionally had a few conversations with the Pearl on the advantages of losing a couple of crewmen, well, what Jack didn’t know, he couldn’t bring down on her head. So far the ship hadn’t seemed to pay her opinions any more attention than the captain had.
At least Jack displayed some prudence in handling his former shipmates. He never assigned them to boarding parties until all threats of violence had passed. When Anamaria mentioned this omission, Jack frowned and explained, “They have the wrong instincts. I can’t trust them to know when not to kill.”
For her part, Anamaria kept a suspicious eye on all their activities. If they went ashore, she had her spies accompany them with instructions to place no hindrance on any attempts to desert. She always assigned them to crews with firmly loyal men. And whenever she could, she kept them separated. Work them too hard to give them time to plot-that was her theory. Ragetti was the follower, so she watched Pintel more closely. The stocky pirate was far more prone to violence and underhanded behaviour-but whatever Pintel did, Ragetti did too. While the one-eyed pirate was a well-read man, he was too intelligent to have any earthly smarts, as Gibbs had snorted. For this reason Ragetti depended on Pintel to navigate the day-to-day realities of life. Unfortunately Pintel wasn’t any too smart himself, so they were constantly getting themselves into mingle-mangles that defied description. They made Jack laugh-the only use she could see for the two of them.
It occurred to her that Pintel and Ragetti had known Jack Sparrow long before anyone else on the ship. They were the only ones who remembered, with Jack, the glory days of the Black Pearl, when she and her captain were both unscarred by curses or betrayals. Sometimes of a gentle summer’s night, when the Pearl sailed free, and rum and music flowed, Pintel would tell stories of those days, wild tales, side-splitting tales, mysterious ones-the stuff of legends. Ragetti would interject comments and echoes and prompts only to be summarily whacked by the indignant storyteller. At those times, Anamaria would see Jack in the shadows just outside the ring of lantern light, listening, unreadable expressions chasing themselves across his face like clouds scudding before the wind.
Once when Pintel began his story, “I mind the time Bootstrap put the iguana in ol’ Hector’s bed . . .” Jack rose hastily and vanished in the direction of the stern. It was a calm evening, luminous with stars, fragrant with the breath of the sea. But apparently the Black Pearl could not sail another instant without her captain at her helm. He’d stayed there through all the watches of that night. Anamaria had held another one-sided conversation with the Pearl the next morning.
Now she stood holding her breath, torn between her desire to see the ship safe again and her smouldering, hidden desire to be rid of these men who had hurt Jack Sparrow, who still had the power to do so. Would this be the day the Black Pearl answered her prayer?
* * * * *
Ragetti had been impossibly young when the mutiny had taken place.
Jack Sparrow had made him nervous, a mercurial, young, devil-may-care captain who had seemed so much less competent than the hard-bitten, experienced and determined Hector Barbossa. Ragetti had always needed someone to follow. He would never have risked speaking out against his crewmates as Bootstrap had done. He’d thought he’d made the right choice, the safest choice, the choice that would give him the best chance of survival.
That had been a monumental, epic piece of bad judgment in retrospect.
The immortal torment of the curse had taught him one thing above all else: there were things far worse than death to fear. Ragetti had quickly learnt to shrug off his terror-to take out his own anguish on his victims. He had found some satisfaction in becoming what he had always most dreaded. But he’d never ceased to be afraid of people. Their sudden storms of emotions, their endlessly critical judgments, their bottomless ability to cause each other pain-these things constantly paralyzed him. No matter how often he sought approval, he met with contempt. He didn’t dare seek out the intimacy of friendship, but the loneliness numbed him beyond what cursed gold could ever do.
Pintel had been the only man to show any concern or affection for the gangly, awkward youth, and for that reason Ragetti clung to that harsh, abrasive relationship. Pintel let him follow, made the tough decisions, ground the sharp edges off his isolation.
Which was why he found himself on the Black Pearl now, crew again to the man he had betrayed. As Pintel had said, this ship was home. She had a mysterious hold on every man who ever sailed her-as though no matter how far they ran from her, she would always draw them back, whether they willed or no-as though she owned them, and they must serve her.
The Black Pearl called men. The only man who called her was Captain Jack Sparrow.
Ragetti had been terrified when Pintel had dragged them to Captain Sparrow to offer themselves as crew again. Now that the curse was lifted, the fear had flooded back into the vacuum left by the suffering. He had relearned what it was like to hear the footsteps of his own mortality stealthy in the dark behind him. He and Pintel had participated in the attempted murder of this man. Surely their former captain would simply kill them as he had Barbossa. Pintel was mad, Ragetti had decided. But he couldn’t strike out on his own-the idea was unbearable.
The events of that day had seared themselves into his memory forever.
* * * * *
Ragetti’s fears were confirmed when Captain Sparrow refused to speak to them together. He called Ragetti into his cabin, the one where they’d attacked him on the night of the mutiny, the one where the persistent stains of Sparrow’s blood had never come out of the deck. Ragetti stepped trembling over the threshold, feeling like a sacrificial animal, unable to take his eyes from the elaborate carpet that now covered that old scar of betrayal.
Captain Sparrow watched him, dark eyes drilling holes in Ragetti’s black soul until the ichor of his guilt dripped invisibly from his hands like the sweat that visibly beaded his brow and stung his one good eye. Ragetti stood, tongue turned as wooden as his false eye, swallowing until his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork on a tempest-tossed sea. Why had Pintel insisted that they approach this man who had proved in the end to be the match for the most evil man they’d ever known, whose mortal strength had brought down an immortal foe?
He nearly pissed himself when Captain Sparrow drew a dagger, slender and sharp as treachery. His blood would join the captain’s on the floor of that cabin-an atonement of sorts-Ragetti was certain.
Then Sparrow spoke, his voice oddly light and unemotional. “I’m curious, Ragetti. Just why do you think I’d consider accepting you on my ship when you mutinied against me the last time you signed on to my articles?
Ragetti couldn’t speak around the dead lump of his tongue, didn’t know what he would have said if he could have answered. Why, indeed? No reason at all, as he’d told Pintel in uncharacteristic forthrightness when the subject had first come up. And so he stood there, head hanging, shoulders drooping, waiting fatalistically for the end, for the blow he’d been expecting.
“Get your head up, Ragetti. Straighten up, man. Look at me!” Captain Sparrow snapped. His voice lowered, intense with menace. “Look me in the eyes.”
Instinctively, Ragetti obeyed, his spine jerking straight, his eye flying to the captain’s strangely-outlined, somber ones. He couldn’t read the expression in them. This was not a Jack Sparrow he recognized. There was none of the flamboyance, the irreverent humour, the half-flash, half-foolish mannerisms. This was the stillness of a predator, wary and dangerous-more so than he’d ever seen Barbossa.
The captain seemed to be reading something in Ragetti’s face, for he remained silent for a long moment watching the trembling man. Then he shrugged, relaxing slightly into a more familiar manifestation. Gold glinted as he bared his teeth. The expression sent a chill through Ragetti. A shark might smile so at injured prey.
With a movement as swift as the wing-pivot of his namesake, Sparrow reversed the dagger, held it by the tip and offered the hilt to Ragetti.
“Take it,” he commanded. “I’m not going to run my ship always looking over my shoulder, suspecting plots in the shadows. I don’t like turning my back on traitors-makes my shoulder blades itch. So if you’re going to stab me in the back, now’s your chance.”
Bewildered, Ragetti involuntarily closed his hand around the hilt and found himself armed, while the weaponless Jack Sparrow shed his coat and turned his back on his former crewman.
“Do try to get that between the correct ribs, Ragetti. I hate a botched assassination,” Sparrow ordered. “I don’t think anything between us calls for my protracted suffering.”
The two men stood in a frozen tableau for what seemed an aeon. Ragetti stared from the deadly glint of the knife in his hand to the straight defiant back of Captain Sparrow.
Finally, the captain bounced on the balls of his feet. “I’m waiting, Ragetti. What seems to be the problem?”
“I-I-I can’t,” Ragetti stammered.
“Course you can!” Sparrow encouraged. “It’s really quite simple.” His words took a downward twist of disgust. “I’m sure you’ve stabbed men before-in the back, in the dark, men and women, and probably children, too. It’s not that different.”
“I-I-I mean I don’t want to!” Ragetti cried in frustration, letting the dagger clatter to the deck plates.
Like a tiger, Jack Sparrow whirled smoothly around, crouched to sweep up the knife, and still in one liquid motion, grabbed Ragetti by the worn collar of his coat, pinning him, one handed, up against the bulkhead. The tip of the knife riveted Ragetti’s attention at the juncture of his throat and jaw.
“Don’t want to, Mister? Or are you too afraid to?” Sparrow spat through clenched teeth.
Ragetti shivered under the lash of that contempt, more painful to him than the threat of any knife.
Captain Sparrow’s narrow, perilous face hovered far too near him, revealing no remnant of the softness Barbossa had always insisted was Jack Sparrow’s fatal flaw. “Do you know what I dislike about you, Ragetti?” he asked.
“N-n-no, sir,” the frightened man managed.
“You’re a coward, Ragetti.” The captain thumped Ragetti’s back into the bulkhead with the sharp pain of clashing teeth. “You terrorize those who are weaker than you to make yourself feel better about being afraid.”
“Y-y-yes, sir. I know, s-s-sir,” Ragetti was babbling now. He hated himself for the waver in his voice.
“Do you know what the problem with a coward is?”
Shaking his head in a frantic negative, Ragetti tried to shrink even further away from his tormenter; however, the bulkhead refused to accommodate him.
“The problem with a coward is not that he can be made to fear you, but that he can be just as easily made to fear your enemies. You were afraid of Barbossa, weren’t you?”
Having long since given himself up for a dead man, Ragetti whimpered softly. He had been afraid of Hector Barbossa, and he was now terrified of Jack Sparrow. “I’m sorry, sir,” he begged hopelessly.
“Pah!” Captain Sparrow grimaced in distaste. “You make me sick.” He abruptly let go of Ragetti, and the man folded to the deck as though he had no bones in his legs. The captain paced across the room, then turned suddenly.
“Why did you decide to ask for a berth again on the Black Pearl?” he demanded. “You’re an intelligent man, Ragetti. You had to have known it was unlikely in the extreme that I’d take a traitor like you back.”
“I did know, sir,” Ragetti closed his eyes, feeling the despicable tell-tale damp at the edges of his lashes. “But Pintel said . . .”
“Belay that, Mister,” Captain Sparrow snapped. “I haven’t the slightest interest in why Pintel wants to be on my ship. He’ll be telling me that, himself, shortly, I’m sure. Now, I’m offering you one last chance to square with me. If you tell me the truth, I may let you walk off my ship with your remaining eye and all of your limbs intact.”
Ragetti felt the first faint stirrings of a hope more agonizing than despair. He opened his mouth.
“No.” Captain Sparrow forestalled him with a word. “Think carefully about your answer. I have no doubt you’re such a stranger to the truth that you wouldn’t recognize it if it came up and bit you!” He stared down at his cowering former crew member. Then, more gently, he spoke, “Take your time, lad.”
That tiniest hint of kindness in the captain’s words nearly undid Ragetti. He was even less used to kindness than he was to truth. The question was a test, he realized, and the only right answer was the answer he already knew-somewhere deep inside him. Why did he want this berth? For he knew that he had wanted it. Still did, in spite of the fact that he was petrified by this unfathomable Captain Sparrow. Ragetti’s eyes remained closed, but he could hear the man pacing, could still picture him with every line of his body singing tense, his eyes dark with the bloodstained memories that lay like a sword between them.
The steps echoed on the deck. Heel to toe, heel to toe, pivot, and repeat. As though, Ragetti realized with a flash of enlightenment, the brutal, cold, impervious façade were just a mask, as though this interview disturbed the captain more deeply than he’d let on, as though he also were vulnerable. Ragetti had had enough of invulnerable captains to last him a lifetime, he decided. Those restless steps stilled something frantic in his own thoughts.
Carefully, as though thinking aloud, he attempted to explain. “I came here because this seemed to be the only place that felt right-the only place where I belonged. I wanted to stay with Pintel. He’s always been my only friend. And he was right when he said this ship is our home. She’s . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . but she’s not just any ship.” He raised his eye to Captain Sparrow. The man had stopped across the room and was staring at him as though he’d never seen him before.
Emboldened, Ragetti exclaimed impulsively, “You know. I had to come back to the Black Pearl. She doesn’t let you go.”
The captain’s face gentled in a way Ragetti had never before observed. “I do know,” he said softly.
The two men stared silently, measuringly at each other for long minutes. Finally, Captain Sparrow sighed. “All right, Mr. Ragetti. I will take you aboard the Black Pearl as crewman for a trial period of six months subsequent to you signing the articles and subsequent to you giving me your word on whatever it is you hold sacred that I will always be able to turn my back on you. You have a problem with me, you bring it to my face. If my shoulder blades start to itch, you’re overboard as fast as you can say Robert’s your uncle, savvy?”
Ragetti felt limp with relief, suffused with an unfamiliar feeling he finally identified as a nascent happiness. “Aye, Captain,” he breathed, and it was like a gift to be able to address a worthy man by that title, to have a place to belong and a purpose once again. “Thank you, sir.”
Then he found Captain Sparrow had extended his incongruously elegant hand. Shyly, Ragetti held out his own bony awkward one. They shook hands solemnly. Sparrow’s sailor’s calluses met Ragetti’s own.
“We have an accord,” his captain announced. Then he pulled Ragetti to his feet. “C’mon. As soon as you’ve signed, I’ll get Gibbs to show you where to stow your things.
* * * * *
He’d been with the Black Pearl and Captain Sparrow for over a year now. Pintel, too-although his friend had never spoken about what had passed between himself and Jack Sparrow in his own private interview. Certainly it had been something different than had happened to Ragetti. Pintel had emerged looking like he’d been in a first rate mill, one eye swollen shut, a broken nose, several ribs cracked, and a shoulder dislocated. It hadn’t been a one-sided beating, however. The captain had sported a colourful swelling on one sharp cheekbone and had favoured a leg for several days. Whatever the circumstance of that fight, it had seemed to clear the air between the two of them, for Pintel was far more at ease with Sparrow than Ragetti was even yet.
Ragetti still felt like an outsider amongst the Pearl’s crew. His role in the mutiny against Jack Sparrow might have been branded on his forehead. The fortunate men free of that stigma despised those who had committed the crime. The first mate, who held a grudge until it died of old age and achieved immortality, particularly seemed to go out of her way to make Jack’s former crew members aware of the depths of their expendable status. Her attitude didn’t bother Pintel. After his initial horror at not only finding a woman aboard the ship but one giving orders, he’d admitted, with a certain amount of admiration, that he’d never served under a first mate with more vitriol in her tongue than Anamaria, nor, more grudgingly, one with a better grasp of what needed to be done on a ship.
But Anamaria simply scared Ragetti. He avoided her when possible and did his best to do his work so that it never came under her scrutiny. The scorch of her regard could send him up the terrifying ratlines faster than flames to the soles of his feet ever had when he’d first been pressed as a sailor.
Now he found himself on his mettle in this hour of his ship’s most desperate need. It seemed a man could simply become exhausted from terror. The ordeal had sapped him of all ability to react to further disasters. He’d been absolutely convinced that he would die the death by drowning that had haunted his nightmares ever since he’d set foot on the unwieldy decks of sea-going vessels. But then the great-hearted Black Pearl had pulled them all from that watery grave. Never had there been such a ship-not the Argo, not one of the fleet of Odysseus, not the dragon-headed Viking raiders, nor any other of the storied ships on history’s purple pages. Ragetti was living in a legend.
Which simply meant he’d been brought to the point where he had nothing left to give. Had the members of the Argosy ever felt so? He was down to his last dregs of fear, of strength, of courage. He’d reached the place where he actually wanted to lapse into the oblivion of the sea, but his frenzied desire for approval and his fear of disgracing himself in front of the other men drove him on. Even now, he and his mates were climbing towards a catastrophe that would surely claim one or more of their lives.
The wind pried at his body like the hand of the devil. Screaming and shrieking, it drowned all sound, turning his shipmates’ shouts into silent moving lips. The blisters on his hands burst and burned like fire as he fought to ride out the wrenching oscillations of the mast between sea and sky. The taste of danger was dry in his mouth. Far below him the marauding waves swallowed the Black Pearl until only her raised poop and forecastle decks showed above the abstract swirls of sea and windblown foam. Raindrops drove against his face like blinding missiles until he had to duck his head to breathe.
Above his head, the lethal spar shipped violently back and forth so close he could feel the wind of its passage in his hair. Ragetti gave a small whimper of fear that he couldn’t even hear himself. Still, he inched out on the plunging footropes of the mizzen topsail yard. The next time the topgallant yard lunged by him, Ragetti threw himself in desperate terror up out of the ropes, supported only by his thighs braced against the yard and the wind pressing heavy against his back, and cast a bowline at the flying topgallant yard.
Without knowing whether he had succeeded in flinging the loop over the end or not, he leapt for the mast and whipped the standing end of his line around it. The sudden wrench as the runaway yard brought up tore into his shoulders and back with breath-taking pain. But somehow, he hung on, absorbing the jolt as it swung to leeward. He almost slipped off the yard, swaying on the edge of the chasm above the storm-swept sea, but one of his mates reached him in time and grasped his ragged shirt, towing him back.
The danger was not past, but his actions had reduced the motion of the yard enough for the others to heave themselves onto it and tie it off, lashing it securely to the topgallant mast and shrouds. It was all Ragetti could do to hang on and wait for the task to be accomplished. Then someone-he couldn’t focus on who-helped him climb down, shoulders ablaze, muscles quivering from strain.
Finally, miraculously, he was on the deck of the ship again, his legs shaking so he could barely stand. Bewildered and dizzy, he felt the captain’s arm about his shoulders, supporting him. The captain’s! Jack Sparrow’s jubilant smile flashed like a glimpse of the sun, chasing away the bone-chilling cold of wind and rain. Suddenly Ragetti could no longer feel the intense ache in his arms nor the sharp daggers slicing his back.
“Well done, Ragetti!” the captain exclaimed. “Good work, mate.”
Ragetti would never forget those words or that smile. He basked in the unfamiliar warmth of a human touch that was not a blow. For once, the grin he returned to the captain was neither apologetic nor cringing. It spread over his face in pure happiness.
As he raised his head in euphoric courage, Ragetti’s eye snagged on Anamaria’s dark gaze. For the first time since he had come aboard the Black Pearl over a year ago, the first mate was actually looking at him as though he were really there, as though he might be something human after all.
* * * * *
The runaway yard was contained. Even now Jack’s men were at work with desperate haste to re-rig it and reattach it. Others were hauling the long bundles of sails on deck, tons of already wet canvas that they would somehow have to raise up to the empty yards. Out on those spars still more men ran aloft the gantlines for drawing up those sails, bending them onto the yards. The fury of the sea was subsiding as the Black Pearl drew away from the mouth of the harbour into the ordinary swell of the storm.
Time had run out.
The Navy brig was almost upon them.
Captain Sparrow gave the orders for his helmsmen to let the Pearl run free. Their brief respite was at an end. The decks were a flurry of frantic motion as men trimmed her few sails to the ideal angles, seeking to give the Pearl her best speed. In flight lay her only chance.
The captain paced along the windward rail by the break in the poop, his glass fixed on the oncoming vessel. He could see her gun crews readied on her main deck, her sharpshooters climbing to her foretop. In a matter of moments the Pearl would be coming under her fire.
Lowering the glass, Jack surveyed his ship. Lovingly he followed the perfect sweep of her decks, the elegant lift of her bow. He was struck again, with a force that nearly staggered him, how infinitely beautiful she was. The sweet run of her lines, her delicately penciled masts and gracefully tapering spars entranced him anew.
His ship. His Black Pearl.
Jack Sparrow had belonged to her, body and soul, from the moment he’d first set eyes on her. She spoke to him in his dreams and sang to him every waking hour of his life. She had set him free. The entire world had spread out before them, an azure carpet fit for royal adventure. But he had failed her twelve years before-lost her to that bastard Barbossa, abandoned her to cursed madness, left her a slave to violence and greed. He had sworn, when he got her back, that he would never be parted from her again. They would sail together beyond the fire-kissed sunsets, they would wash in the all the baths of southern stars and dance soul-free under swirling northern lights, and they would chase the glowing dawn down the horizon. But now he did not know whether he could save her, or whether he had already failed her once more.
Reaching out to her, he brushed the backs of two fingers along her rail, a gesture fierce and tender, as though he touched the cheek of a lover.
“I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
* * * * *
Anamaria found him there by the rail, again assessing the approach of their adversary.
Jack pocketed the glass and turned to her. “Anamaria.”
She raised an inquiring brow at him.
To her surprise, he did not say anything for a moment, just held her eyes with that seriousness he usually buried so deep it was always a shock to see it. Finally he spoke, so she could barely hear him above the noise of the ship, “This is not a good situation.”
Anamaria eyed him incredulously. “You tellin’ me somethin’ I don’t bloody know?” she scoffed.
But Jack was having no more banter. “Ana.” His earnestness froze her.
“What?” she snapped. She did not want to hear whatever it was that brought that tone to Jack Sparrow’s voice.
“I have a request to make.” He moved towards her. She noticed he was trailing his hand along the ship’s rail again. Turning away, he gazed out to the ragged horizon, beyond the Navy ships, before he replied. “If the worst should happen . . .”
“Jack.” Anamaria tried to stop him, tried to keep him from putting into words her fears, as if somehow that would make them more real. But of course she failed. Jack could get more words in edgewise when a body wanted him to shut up than anyone else she knew.
“I’m just sayin’,” he shrugged, still not looking at her. “If there’s any reason I can’t do it, you have to take the Black Pearl. Get her out of here, Ana.”
“Nothin’s goin’ t’ happen t’ you,” Anamaria retorted angrily.
But Jack was already shaking his head ruefully, a half laugh in his voice. “Now lass, y’ know I’m the one the Navy is really after. Those marines in Norrington’s tops’ll be out for my blood. An’ I’m not particularly inconspicuous.”
“Damn it, Jack Sparrow! You shut the hell up!” She hated it when he dismissed his life so casually.
Jack turned back to her, holding up his free hand placatingly. “All right. I’ll say no more. But promise me you’ll take care of my ship if . . .” he broke off at the look in her eyes. Finally, he simply held out his hand to her. “Please.”
Not trusting herself to say anything, Anamaria stared at his hand as though memorizing every grimy callus and broken nail. In spite of being the captain, Jack had a fo’c’sle hellion’s hands. Couldn’t give up working his ship any more than he could give up commanding her. Except-he just had. Offered her the command of the Black Pearl. It wasn’t the normal way the captaincy passed in a pirate crew-but then nothing had ever approached normal about Jack and his ship. Every man had signed to this crew knowing that a man voted with his feet on the Black Pearl. This ship had one captain, and if a crewman didn’t approve of him, he could jump ship at the next port. Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl were not two separate entities.
Frankly, Anamaria didn’t think the ship would even be manageable without her captain. Anamaria had had enough of trying to sail the Pearl without Jack the one time she had tried it. But Jack was looking at her with a naked desperation she had never seen in him before. She really sincerely hoped he would never ask her to sell her soul to the devil. One look in that man’s eyes when he dropped all his masks and she was lost every time.
And so, against her better judgment, she nodded silently and took his hand. His grip tightened once.
“Thank you, love,” he said softly.
Illustration
* * * * *
The awful, eternal moment, just before battle, had struck. The Black Pearl was racing towards her intersection with the Navy brig, her peace almost at an end.
Captain Jack Sparrow stood at the helm of his ship. He wasn’t actually handling the wheel; Cotton was managing it fine. But he needed to touch her.
“Raise her colours, lad.” Jack nodded to Jip without glancing at him. His eyes never left the approaching warship.
Unnaturally solemn, Jip carried the dark bundle to the line up which it would be run. For a minute, all work on the Pearl ceased, and men watched with a sense of ceremony. The only sounds on the ship were those she made herself and the violent caresses of the wind and the sea.
Above the snarl of wind, the knocking of blocks, and the thunder of flailing canvas being bent on too late, Jack heard the valiant snap of the black flag as it rose in defiance. The Royal Navy captains would see in that spectral grin and crossed sabers the Black Pearl's refusal to ask for quarter. This was their commitment, the mark of their courage, fidelity and love, the sign of their determination to defend their ship to the last extremity and to lay down their lives in preference to shameful surrender.
They sailed under the banner of King Death this day not because they were willing to kill for their prize-but because they were willing to die for it.
* * * * *
TBC
8 Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here