Author's Note: this is just a little drabble that I came up with while working on 'Caught by the Past' – it's either going to be a one shot deal, or I'll add other one shots to it in the future.  I don't know, I haven't planned that far ahead yet.  Read, enjoy, and review if the fancy strikes you.

Sarah

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Pirates have always fascinated me.

   A strange admission for a naval officer, I know.  But I wasn't always a petty officer in His Majesty's Royal Navy.  I used to be a small lad in Dover, a boy who used to watch the ships come in and who used to sit at his great-uncle's knee and beg for tales from the great sea battles between the Portuguese and the British.  And soon after that, I was begging for tales of Barbary pirates and devious smugglers.  Having grown up on the coast, Robin Hood and the tales of ancient monarchies had never interested me.  How could they when all I had to do was look out the nearest window or door and see the ever changing colors and temperament of the sea?  How could bloody tales of the Tower of London take my attention when there were plenty of old seamen around to tell ghastly tales of ghost ships, crews who had died when their ships had been dashed against the rocks, of pirates swearing revenge on those who executed them.  The sea had been in my ears when I was born and it stayed in my blood as I grew.

   I was perhaps eight or nine when my mother allowed me to go to the execution of one of these pirates.  I don't know what I had been expecting – storms of curses, valiant last struggles for freedom, the shadow of the devil himself – but what I saw was anything but that.  What I watched that day were men in patched and ragged clothes being one by one led to the gallows and shoved into the great beyond.  Some did fight, but it was with the desperation of fear, not with the strength of courage.  For a time it seemed as if the tales I had constructed were nothing more than that – tales.  But then they reached the last man, the captain they said.  He was different than those who had come before him.  He didn't struggle, he didn't curse, but he wasn't meek either.  He faced the noose with the air of one paying a debt that he had known would be collected sooner or later, and was determined to pay it with the attitude befitting a man of fortune.  He was the type of man who I had based my stories around, and all of a sudden, it seemed as if I had been wrong to make such tales; as if in doing so, I had lessened his dignity and that of his death somehow.  I stayed that day and watched the pirates and their captain hang, and then I went home, told my father I meant to enter the navy, and stopped telling to storied of pirates I had made.  But I never forgot them or lost my interest in the pirates themselves.

   Instead, I read.  I read anything I could get my hand on about pirates, or sailing, or naval warfare, and when I turned sixteen I enlisted in the Navy.  For several years I did nothing more than the most basic, the most backbreaking work onboard a frigate.  Several years later, sometime after my nineteenth summer, an opportunity opened for me however, to sail to the Caribbean with a new ship under a respected captain.  There was no holding me back.  I kissed my mother good-bye, tossed my youngest sister up into the air one last time – for luck – and shook hands with my father.  And then I set sails for Jamaica.

   That was ever so many years ago now – eight to be exact.  And I have enjoyed those years.  The sea, a ship, a crew are all things that have become integral to my life.  I get along with my fellow crewmen, I like my superior officers (of which there are less than there used to be now that I'm a lieutenant), and I respect Commodore Norrington.  He's stiff at times, and isn't sure how to relate to the men who serve under him, but he's a decent chap.  Even if he does distain all pirates without partiality.  Which is why I am certain he won't like my news.  "Commodore!"

   My commanding officer raises his eyeglass and surveys the frantic Gillette and the two men aboard the Dauntless.  "Rash, Turner, too rash.  He is without doubt the worst pirate I've ever seen."  I'm not sure if he means the love-struck blacksmith or the pirate directing him in raising the sails – something near impossible with a single man who knows what he's doing.  Impossible with someone who's spent most of his life on land.  Still, the old admiration wells up in me again at the sight of such a daring and reckless plan.

   Coming along side the Dauntless, we board her.  "Search every cabin, every hold, down to the bilges."  As the men follow his orders, the two men they seek swing over to the Interceptor – their intent becoming clear an instant too late.  Why steal a ship that's not prepared to sail even if it is the most powerful in these waters?  Better to take the fastest.  "Sailor!  Back to the Interceptor! Now!"  Too late, they are sailing out of range and Sparrow managed to disable ours before sneaking off.  Despite the Commodore's best efforts, a pirate has made a fool of him.

   "Thank you, Commodore, for getting us ready to make way. We'd have a hard time of it by ourselves," comes the cry from the other ship.  The man at the helm holds out his hat in one hand in a effusive gesture of thanks, his other hand on the wheel, apparently unconcerned that musket balls are flying dangerously close to his figure.

   Under normal circumstances, I would share the embarrassment felt by my superior, but what shame is there in being outwitted by someone worthy of matching wits with you?  And Jack Sparrow, as the pirates went, though he didn't seem to be any more than a bumbling fool with amazing luck, was such a person.  "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen."

   "So it would seem."

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As you may be able to guess, this drabble was inspired by the scene where Norrington and his subordinate are watching Jack and Will sail away with the Interceptor.  Something about that guy always struck me as interesting – instead of being upset about the fact that a pirate had just stolen a ship belonging to the navy, he's showing a bit of admiration.  So, this is what you get from that one little line and my rather scrambled brain.

Happy Thanksgiving and PotC release date (in five days!!!)