Disclaimer: Don't own Disney; therefore, I do not own Pirates of the Caribbean.
AN: I'm experiencing major writer's block with How My Perfect Life Was Inverted, so in the mean time I wrote this. Hope it doesn't disappoint. The Quack Act has already been completed, so I can confidently assure you that this will be updated regularly. Anyway, this is a sort-of sequel to The Legacy of Pandora's Box; what if that story hadn't been a dreamed-up world, but was in fact an alternate universe that Jack and Pearl had somehow both tapped into? This is what their life would have been like…
The Quack Act
Part I: Lord Rochester's Ball
"Damn the ducks!" the man known as Lord Livingstone shouted, splashing the quacking birds away whilst his daughter squeaked and immediately drew away from the pond, taking her beau with her. "Damn all the ducks!"
And to think, when Lady Livingstone was preening herself earlier that evening, she had thought that Rochester's ball was going to be exceptionally dull. Flicking open her lace-trimmed fan, she grinned in amusement under the pretence of cooling herself on the sultry summer's night, and quietly called to the dark-haired girl looking distrustfully at her soaked father and clinging tightly to the teenaged boy whose handsome presence had caused all the trouble. Isabelle released Beaufort's manicured hand and scurried over to hide behind her mother, clinging tightly to the woman's corseted waist as she peered fearfully over her shoulder.
"You should know better than to sneak off with Paul, Pearl," the mother chastised with a gentle tap of her fan.
"I didn't think Papa will notice," Pearl ruefully admitted as they both watched Paul, younger son of the Duke of Beaufort, stand rooted to the spot as a now thoroughly soaked Nathaniel Livingstone clumsily clambered out of the pond, advanced threateningly towards the young aristocrat whilst groping for his sword, realise his dear wife had confiscated the weapon in case such an embarrassing scenario should occur, and yelled something no man should ever say about his wife, even in private. "I saw that he was drinking, and—"
"You should know by now not to go sneaking around with a boy when your father's been drinking," the lady reprimanded. "What did I tell you the last time Jack caught you alone and unchaperoned with Paul?"
Isabelle lowered her coiffed head in shame. "I was to tell you that I wanted privacy," she admitted sullenly, "and then you would distract Papa so that—"
The two women were unfortunately interrupted as Paul came hurtling towards them, screaming as the man previously known as Jack Sparrow came barrelling close behind, brandishing a stick. Sierra rolled her eyes, allowed Paul to pass, and deliberately stepped into Jack's way, her hands reaching out to pry the stick from Jack's fingers. "Darling," she said sweetly, throwing the stick to the side and reaching up to grab her husband's arms firmly, "aren't you overreacting just a tad?"
The man ceased his drunken struggling, looked blearily down at the woman in something akin to astonishment, and asked, "Haven't we had this conversation before?"
"Yes," Sierra replied, "at least five times."
Jack nodded his dark head which, though free of its various dreadlocks and trinkets, had not sunk so deeply into the webs of fashion to allow itself to be covered by a powdered wig, and slurred, "Just asking," before pushing his wife aside the better to strangle Paul Beaufort.
"J—Nate!" Lady Livingstone cried as he waved a drunken fist in Paul's general direction. The man paused at hearing the distress in his spouse's voice, and frowned, wondering what could have occurred to put his wife into such a state of agitation. Suddenly, it dawned on him, and he sighed in exasperation, took a few steps to the left, bent over, and retrieved his stick.
"There!" he snapped at her. "Happy now? I got me a stick."
Sierra closed her eyes, massaging her temples in exasperation. "That wasn't quite what I meant…" she informed him, reaching out to grab his wet coat to prevent him from following the rather fast boy.
"But he's getting away…" Jack whined, for some reason unable to escape from his wife's weaker grip. Pouting, he let the stick fall to the grass and turned to look forlornly at Sierra's relieved face.
"You can't honestly expect to get away with the assault of the Duke of Beaufort's son, can you?"
Jack rolled his drunken eyes at his wife's dimness. "'Twas never my intention to get away with assault of the Duke of Beaufort's son," he slowly explained to her, lest she become more confused. "I originally planned to get away with the murder of the Duke of Beaufort's son. There is a slight but remarkably significant difference between the two charges."
Sierra's only response was to hit him over the head with her closed fan.
"How much have you had to drink?" she asked him as he shook his head, sending tendrils of wet hair flying and splashing his wife's face. "No matter; here," and she pulled a handkerchief from her emerald sleeve, gently wiping his sulking face. "Better?" she asked the way a mother might ask a child who had grazed his knee.
Jack shook his head in the negative. "No," he snapped, his temper flaring again as he pushed the handkerchief away. "Never! Not until I wring young Beaufort's neck!"
"Jack!" the wife pleaded again, grabbing his shoulders and all but forcing herself onto him.
Personally, Jack was still surprised that the woman could still be so forward after all these years. "Not now," he growled. "Have you no shame, woman?"
Sierra's brow furrowed at this. "What are you talking about?" she asked, tightening her grip and wrinkling her nose as she realised that the pond water Jack was covered in was wreaking havoc on the brocade of her dress. "Oh, look at you—that waistcoat is ruined."
"Aye?" Jack said, absently flicking a large clump of duckweed off of his coat. "And whose fault is that, eh? Bloody Beaufort!" And he tried once more to unsuccessfully escape from the lady's grasp.
"Beaufort is no longer here, Jack!" Sierra told him desperately. "If you still plan on murdering Paul, I think it fair to warn you that he's returned to the ballroom, which, incidentally enough, is full to the brim with aristocratic witnesses."
Jack just looked blearily down, trying to focus on one of the seven blurred faces swimming before him. "Why would that matter?" he asked her. "So what if they're aristocratic—"
"I somehow think you've missed the point of that sentence, Jack," Sierra said once more. Turning to the teenaged girl whose decidedly amorous nature had caused such incidents as this to occur more than once, she silently asked with a raised eyebrow for the daughter to say something to calm the drunken father.
Isabelle, usually as eloquent as her father, just gaped at the two of them. And then:
"Um, Papa? There's a duck on your head."
Sierra winced at this, whilst Jack frowned before looking up to see a bird looking down.
"Quack!" squawked the bird.
Jack's face darkened. "What did you just call me?"
"Quack!" the slightly suicidal bird said again. "Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!"
"You bastard!" Jack snapped at the duck, reaching up to wring the duck's neck whilst Sierra silently wondered why she never saw the creature before Pearl's proclamation. "Teach you to insult me so publicly in front of my family, I will! Where's me stick?" And he looked about himself in what seemed to be dazed confusion, his unfocused eyes unable to find the much-coveted strip of wood, and looking ready to tear as an unfortunate consequence. Looking down at his expensive buckled shoes in despair, those same eyes lit up with joy as he finally located his beloved twig, which in his desperate and inebriated state he had forgotten had been deposited at his feet all along. Sierra, suddenly sensing Jack's not entirely bright idea, literally put her foot down, and proceeded to coax the duck away from her husband whilst simultaneously informing Jack that the duck was decidedly not insulting him.
Jack, for his own part, found this statement rather difficult to digest.
"Of course it was bloody insulting me!" Jack bellowed, causing his daughter to flinch and slowly back away from the embarrassing couple. "Didn't you hear it? It called me a quack!"
Sierra, having kept a rather tight lid on her temper for most of the incident, finally cracked. "It's a duck!" she snapped at her husband as the bird in question began to flap its wings. "What else can it call you?"
"Aha!" Jack exclaimed in triumph. "So whilst you may still be refuting the fact that it called me a quack, you do in fact admit that it was calling me something."
"Wha—No!" Sierra denied as the duck finally took flight with a final quack, which, in Jack's current condition, was really a rather stupid thing to do. "All I'm saying is that it's—Jack? What are you doing?" she asked as he staggered somewhat out of her reach in the general direction of the flying duck.
"Jack!" she shrieked in frustration as she watched the man she thought she loved (but was beginning to have considerable doubts on that particular analysis) fumble for something in his coat's inner pocket.
"Oh God…" she groaned in vexation as he gleefully waved his pistol—one of the few remaining relics from his glory days as a pirate of the Spanish Main—in the air the way that only a drunkard could.
"Earlier, when I was chasing Beaufort," Jack giggled drunkenly, evidently rather pleased with himself, "I'd actually forgotten I'd had this; for I assure you, fair wife of mine—God, isn't that the most depressing three words to have ever been brought together in the history of the English language?—that had I remembered I had this, I would not, not, not—" he added one final time to escape the horrific complications that came of inadvertent double negatives, "have gone to all the trouble of losing a stick."
"Jack?" Sierra said evenly as he lovingly examined the pocket-sized weapon, "I want a divorce."
Jack either pretended not to notice or, less likely, really didn't notice Sierra's last comment; still grinning idiotically to himself, he clumsily fumbled with the hammer of the firearm, began humming a jolly sea shanty, and had just raised his head the better to spot the bird he intended to make his prey, when he caught the look on his wife's face, which, for some reason, didn't seem to share his joy at finding his trusty pistol so close at hand.
"Wha'?" he asked defensively as he took in her narrowed eyes and crossed arms.
"You told me," Sierra began rather slowly, more to ensure that he followed her words carefully than to patronise him, "that you left that locked in your desk. In your study. You know, at home."
Jack attempted to raise his eyebrow, and was glad to discover that he had succeeded in this most difficult of endeavours. "My dear wife," he drawled lazily, running his thumb over the inlaid silver in the same manner he ran his hands over his wife's body and, once upon a time, the wheel of his Black Pearl, "over the years, I have told you a good number of many things. Frankly, I'm beginning to doubt my initial assessment of your intelligence if you believed half of them."
"For God's sake," Sierra muttered, moving forwards in an attempt to disarm him. Jack brought the pistol close to his chest and turned away, effectively shielding it from the woman attempting to part the two of them and therefore leave honour unsatisfied. "Jack! Don't you dare move another inch, Pearl!" she added sharply to the teenager that had long ago begun her bid for freedom. "This is mostly your fault, and your pouting isn't going to help you get away so lightly this time!"
She really does sound like my mother, Isabelle thought to herself as she reluctantly shuffled back. How very annoying.
Sierra grabbed the girl's arm firmly and steered her towards Jack, who was teetering dangerously on the edge of the duck pond with the pistol hanging limply in his grasp even as he tried to aim at the duck. "I want you stay here," she told the daughter with a slight shove, "and ensure that your father doesn't… do anything that may cause one or all of us grief later on."
"Like shoot one of Rochester's prized ducks," Isabelle filled in, and Sierra nodded.
"Try to calm him, won't you?" she half-pleaded, half-commanded the girl. "I'll make our excuses to Lady Rochester, make amends with the Beauforts, and try to salvage this situation."
"It was all Papa's fault," Pearl scowled, looking distrustfully at the dark-haired man yelling for the duck to "come out and fight like a man."
"It's both your faults," Sierra corrected. "Honestly, sometimes I feel as though I'm the only member of this family with something akin to morals, which is a very depressing thought."
"Yes, considering how we all met in a Tortugan brothel," Pearl empathised. Sierra smiled at the matter-of-fact tone, gave Pearl's hand an encouraging squeeze, flicked open her fan, hurried up the garden path, climbed the wide stone stairs, and waltzed into the ballroom, the doors of which were flung wide open, and from where the faintest notes of music could be heard.
Pearl, in stark and deliberate contrast, simply approached her father with great caution.
"Papa?" she whispered fearfully. The voice was quiet, but Jack was drunk; he jumped at the unexpected address, dropped his pistol, and fell once more into the duck pond with a few choice oaths.
"Papa?" she squeaked worriedly as he sat up, causing the ducks to squawk once more, and shook his head free of water.
"Damn you!" he shouted, shaking a fistful of pondweed at the birds fluttering about him in a panicked frenzy. "Damn you all to the depths of hell! And you sir," he added on spotting a familiar feather. "I demand an apology."
"Quack!" said the bird once more, and Pearl was certain that the creature had a death wish. "Quack! Quack! Quack! Qua—"
A sudden bang followed by the cracking of clay (although it was the bang that was most noticeable) caused Pearl to squeak and jump away; her dear Papa had finally pulled the trigger, and was now looking frantically for the feathered body. Unfortunately for Jack, his inebriated state, combined with the dimness of night, meant that he had accidentally shot a flowerpot, therefore leaving all of the ducks relatively unharmed, if slightly panicked. The ducks had now taken to flapping about the drenched Livingstone sitting in the pond with fire in his eyes as he crossed his arms and scowled. And of course, they were all quacking quite excitedly now.
"Papa?" Isabelle tried again, edging as close to the pond as she dared. Jack drunkenly noted his daughter's voice, and turned to glance disdainfully at her with narrowed eyes.
"Can you shoot that duck for me?" he politely requested.
"You never taught me how to handle a pistol, Papa," Pearl reminded, gesturing that he climb out and come to her. Jack nodded at the truth of this, proceeded to make several attempts at standing, and simply fell back down into the pond each and every time with a splash louder than the last whilst Isabelle looked on in a mixture of embarrassment, amusement, and filial concern.
"My lord," came a familiar voice, and Isabelle turned to see their coachman for the evening, the trusty and ever so reliable Beckham, discreetly making his way towards them with a flickering lantern and what looked like a blanket flung over his arm. Isabelle wasn't certain of what Beckham actually was in their household; officially speaking, he was their butler, but he was occasionally given other tasks not befitting a man of that station; like tonight for example, when Lady Livingstone, knowing full well what her husband and daughter could get up to, had tactfully asked him to relieve the actual coachman of his duties. He was also the man that Jack and Sierra nearly always turned to whenever a matter concerning their more personal affairs arose, yet both assured their daughter that he was simply a trustworthy 'drudge.' Personally, Isabelle suspected that there was more to Beckham than either were willing to let on, but for now she was simply grateful that he was here.
"Did Mother send you?" Pearl guessed.
Beckham respectfully inclined his head, which was dressed in a dark periwig (as was the fashion which Lord Livingstone absolutely refused to follow) and deferentially asked her if she might hold the lantern and folded square of cloth for a moment. Then, with apparently little concern for the welfare of his clothing, he plunged into the pond with far more grace than his master had, slipped one arm around Lord Livingstone's shoulders, and carefully helped the soaking drunk to stand. Pearl scurried over to the two men and, without another word, flung the blanket about her Papa's shoulders, using the corners to dry his face and hair, which had pulled free of its black ribbon and now hung about his face in a dark, dripping mess.
"My lady requests that we return to St James' Square post-haste," Beckham informed the couple as he escorted a shivering and gibbering Livingstone firmly away from the duck pond.
"Yes, that's understandable," Pearl accepted without question, trotting beside the two men.
"My lady also requests that I lecture the both of you on your disgraceful behaviour whilst we wait for her in the carriage," Beckham added.
"Sod off, Beckham," Jack snapped. These were the last words he uttered before passing out.
TBC
