Title: Horizons
Rating: PG
Characters: Jack/Black Pearl, Bootstrap Bill, Barbossa
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Gore Verbinski, Ted Elliot, and Terry Rossio, various studios including but not limited to First Mate Productions Inc., Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and Walt Disney Pictures. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
AN: Written in a mixture of prose and verse. And Ociwen? You have no idea how grateful I am for the beta. Love you dearly.
Horizons
He was born the son of a cartographer, childhood equally as extraordinary as the rest of his life.
"What's that one?"
The guttering lamplight left the edges of the room in shifting darkness, but it did not obscure the spark of amusement that fired from his father's eyes.
"Y' know what it is."
Jack grinned and hauled himself up on the table. "Jamaica."
"Aye. And that one?"
"The Ivory Coast."
"And those?"
"The Philippine Islands."
"And that?"
"Borneo."
"Very good, lad. Still want to be a sailor, I take it?"
"I want to go back to Jamaica. Why can't we go?"
"My work needs me here. Y' know that."
Jack snorted. "I know that you hate your work. You called your contractor a 'black-souled bastard' the other night."
His father winced and ran a hand roughly through his hair. It was starting to grey at the roots. "Y' should stop following me to the tavern. Your schooling--"
"I don't go, and you know it."
"Your mother--"
"Would want to go home!"
A frown passed over his father's face. "She's not happy."
Jack was silent; his mother had been silently dying for the past year. Oh, she was perfectly healthy, but her eyes -- her eyes were flat and her skin was pale and her hair was scraped back against her skull. She wore tight dresses and shoes that clicked when she walked. She wasn't the sun-dancing, rum-drinking mother he had grown up with in Jamaica, the mother who would roll down sand dunes and run bare-footed through the surf, the mother whose eyes reflected the sea.
Suddenly, his father slammed his hand down on the table. Jack looked up at him in time to see a scowl twist his lips. "How many hours till sunrise?"
"Three."
"Three hours to finish this bloody thing."
Jack glanced at the expansive roll of parchment. Graceful quill-strokes completed Europe and parts of Asia; chalk lines lightly sketched out more than two thirds of the map as incomplete.
He slid off the table and chanced a grin. "Or three hours to pack."
Silence.
"Dad?"
Slow smile, lamplight glinting off teeth. "Wake your mother; we're going home."
She was born from a dream
Freedom, tendrils of smoke-ideas
Then sketches scrawled onto parchment
Secreted away
And then boards
And canvas
And the blackest, most fathomless pitch.
"You can draw?"
"'Course I can draw. Told you my father was a cartographer."
"But I've never seen--"
"Only because I've been careful. It wouldn't do to show everyone my designs for the most wondrous pirate ship in the Spanish Main, now, would it? Everyone would want a piece of her."
Disbelief furrowed Bill's brow. "The most…wondrous pirate ship in the Spanish Main?"
Jack laughed and swung an arm around his shoulders. "Aye! I'll get it commissioned and then…" He reached out towards the setting sun. The sea looked like a rippling sheet of gold that evening. "Horizon, mate."
Bill smiled. "Aye. Horizon."
He loved her like no one else.
"Jack, you've had too much rum."
"Never! Never too much, dear William."
"But you just said--"
"That I love her. I love her."
There was that dark light in Jack's eyes, the very same that had possessed him when the seemingly ridiculous notion of commissioning his own ship had started. Ridiculous right up to the point Bill had stepped, stunned, on to the Black Pearl and Jack had laughed and told him that the best view was from the crow's nest.
She loved him the only way she knew how:
Fiercely and forever.
Deafening, roaring water pounding the hull of the Pearl. Bill thought he was going to die. Honest to God, he thought he would never see Annie and Will again, thought that a ship couldn't possibly plough straight through a Caribbean storm. Lightning weirdly illuminated Jack, casting him in flickering silver as he struggled with the helm, and Bill thought that he was going to die, too, and he had never thought that death could ever keep up with Jack Sparrow.
When he spluttered all of this to Jack over the din of the storm, his friend laughed, looking as mad as his legend, and shouted, "Have a little faith, William!"
Bill did have faith, lots of it, so he prayed to God, he prayed to the saints and, in a hiss that he hoped would never reach God's ears, he prayed to the Pearl. "That's more like it!" laughed Jack, teeth bared. "Your God isn't helping any right now." Bill winced at his irreverence and sent a brief apology heavenwards on his friend's behalf, half expecting to be struck down by lightning where he stood.
But the storm did pass and, unbelievably, all of the crew survived. "That was fantastic, love," murmured Jack, bestowing a kiss on the Pearl's bulwark. "We showed Bill, eh?"
Bill never did doubt the Pearl after that night. So long as she had Jack and Jack had her, their path would be true.
When he lost her, the world tilted once more and he couldn't breathe. Everything changed. And he had to change with it.
Samuel wasn't a bad man. He paid his taxes on time, went to church every Sabbath and came from a good, strong family. The rum running was nothing terrible: a little side venture, if you like, a favour to a friend who had long run out of luck. It brought in good money and kept his children out of trouble.
But when they found a lone man sitting on their island, he wondered if he should have stayed at home that day. The men were easily -- too easily -- swayed by the stranger's glittering charm. It wasn't the only thing that glittered: his grin was probably worth more than their entire cache.
But they loved him, loved his stories, and they fell asleep listening to them. Samuel stayed alert, watching the man approach him. He was tanned and too thin, resembling the scraggly street urchins back at home.
"What's your name?"
The man sat down heavily next to him and sighed. "Doesn't matter what my name is, does it?"
Samuel nodded to scars revealed by his rolled up sleeves. "You on the run?"
The other man snorted. "Wouldn't be the most sensible of hideaways, would it? Nowhere to hide and nothing to eat. Though I can't complain about the libation."
He was mad. Completely out of his head. And not even speaking proper English. Old Sarah used to say that you could spy on a man's soul through his eyes, and what Samuel saw was madness. Madness was unpredictable and born of desperation and this man was full of it. He crossed himself.
The man laughed, a horrible, empty sound that made Samuel wince. "'M not the devil, mate. Y' don't need to call on God."
Samuel wasn't so sure. The man's eyes were sin-dark and fathomless, his hair sparkling in the moonlight with beads and coins and bone. If Satan were to ever take a human form, he suspected that this would be it. This could be it.
That night, he swore not to fall asleep, but it swept over him as inevitably as the tides, and when he awoke it was to the sound of Thomas screaming curses over the ocean towards the stranger, who was sailing their sloop over the horizon and away.
When she lost him she was furious and feral
Keening into the wind
Hating those who tarnished her boards.
"Cap'n, do something!"
Barbossa clenched his hands into fists to stop himself from lashing out at the nearest unfortunate sailor. He was doing something, couldn't they see? He was fighting with the Pearl, turning the helm, but she refused to move with him. She was in mourning and when her timbers moaned they fair echoed to the ends of the earth.
"Having trouble, Captain?"
Bootstrap was standing next to him, grinning. Ever since Jack Sparrow had been marooned, he had been saying the title of captain as a mockery, never quite seriously. He had been unusually bitter since then, the guilt undoubtedly gnawing at his innards. And as for the Pearl, she had refused to settle, never mind the week passed.
"There's a reef straight up ahead," Bootstrap added, calm as could be.
"Do ye want us to be smashed to pieces, fool?" Barbossa snarled, frantically leaning his weight on the helm. Bootstrap said nothing, but his grin was reckless enough that Barbossa swore to be rid of the man as soon as was possible. The notion came to him in a burst of energy that had his pistol at Bootstrap's head in a heartbeat.
There was a moment of silence as the Pearl's sails hung as despondently as they had for the past week, and then they filled again as she lurched to starboard, turning, finally turning, until the reef was behind them.
"You bastard, Barbossa!" Bootstrap was struggling, but Barbossa lifted the pistol and swung it, hard, against his temple. The other man dropped soundlessly to the floor, a kick to the ribs ensuring he was unconscious.
Barbossa smiled. The Pearl was quite calm underneath his feet, not a scrap of fight left in her. She may have been an uncommonly clever creature, but so was he, and he always could manipulate with the best of them. He looked down at Bootstrap's limp form crumpled at his feet. And he had leverage.
When he was returned to her the skies were blue, the sun was shining, and his heart was singing.
She was humming beneath him, sails trembling with laughter. Jack didn't look back at Port Royal as they skimmed through the waves, but he would remember (he always remembered) and he would never let pass the favour owed.
Because he had her back and he felt whole again, really whole. Shadows chased away, Barbossa a smudge receding into the past, gone. The curse had stripped her of some of her magnificent beauty, but most of it she still retained. The sails would have to be replaced, the deck scrubbed, the hull repaired, but she had forgiven him for leaving her, and he had forgiven her for leaving him, and so all was well.
When she was returned to him
She shivered
She trembled
All the way down to her hull
And she felt.
I felt.