AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: sevvisev@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Ask first. Really.
FEEDBACK: Pretty please? Pretty as Jack Sparrow?
SUMMARY: "What the Black Pearl really is..."
NOTE: Written in ten minutes; the grammar's screwy but please forgive. Not my original idea, but .. you know how Jack Sparrow manipulates things. ^^ Enjoy. Or at least be decently confused by my senseless ramblings.
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"Who is she?"
Jack turned from his thoughtless scrutiny of the waves breaking ahead of the Interceptor and cast a glance toward the rail. There dark eyes bore down on him, and he met Will's gaze until the other man -- boy, really -- looked away, found comfort in the gentling passivity of too-blue waves. Jack had found that, when Will did not have any metal to craft, he spent the majority of his time -- three hours of swordplay notwithstanding -- talking. His looks weren't the only part about him that could have marked him as a girl. "She?"
"You have the look of a man in love," Will blundered on, looking to him again with all the bumbling, misguided earnestness of a dog. Jack was reminded -- not for the first time in several days -- why he avoided pets and sailing with righteous boys on quests of love. "You're in love with someone. I can see it -- something in your eyes."
"It's called kohl--"
"I can see it in your eyes," Will pressed on determinedly, "when you look out to sea, and something there.." He watched, rather fascinated, as the boy tried to wax poetic, and he mused that the celebrated Miss Swann might actually be more impressed by Will's metalsmithing talents than by his dubious verbal intellect. "..reflects?"
"That would be the sun, usually," Jack supplied, but once again Will plowed forward.
"And you talk about her. To yourself."
That brought Jack up short. "Have you been listening in on my private conversations, boy?"
Something like apprehension crossed Will's face; something that checked the lines of poetry undoubtedly to come that would most likely drive Jack the rest of the way into madness were he forced to bear witness to them. "Should I not have?"
Jack looked at and past Will for long moments, and presently he began to laugh.
Barbossa may have lived for the apple -- apples -- of his eye, but Jack lived for his freedom, lived for black sails and gold horizons, lived for his stolen Pearl. And on occasion, weather permitting, he whispered his secrets to the Black Pearl across untold distances over the waters; he let the wind carry his promises and his heart and soul to his faithless, wayward lover, and he let the sea carry him sometimes closer to her, sometimes farther.
His laughter slowed, at length, and subsided completely, only to wash back over him with the relentless drag of tide.
"You're mad," Will said.
"So they tell me," Jack said when he could again, and turned away to look across the sea again. He waited until Will had started his descent from the deck, and only then did his lips move in silent prayer to his vagrant goddess; to his fickle, seaborne mistress; to his iniquitous, treacherous Pearl.