Author's Note: This isn't romance or angsty or an adventure-ish type thing. It's a simple story on a girl's family history.
Summary: A woman and her young daughter, who are desendants of Jack Sparrow, find something far more interesting than black and white photos in an old chest.
Disclaimer: I wrote this for your (and my) entertainment because I was bored. I don't own PotC whatnot and I don't own Barbie Dolls either...
Sparrow Blood
Constance, Connie to the ones close to her, was an easily entertained child. She was easily distracted, though, like so many other seven-year- old childen, I suppose. So only fifteen minutes after she picked them up, her Barbie Dolls were quickly forgotten about and hastily dropped to the floor. Connie then stood up and began her search around the house for her mother.
Sandra was sitting in her living room going through an old chest that literally looked centuries old. She would pick up old pictures, smile nostalgically, and then gently put them to the side before looking at a new photograph. Some pictures were of her mother and her side of the family. All of them had that Sparrow blood running through their veins.
"Mommy! Mommy!" A young female voice squeaked. It was Connie. Sandra sighed as she remembered only minutes ago she set Connie up with Barbies and a dollhouse. The young dark-haired girl stopped directly in front of her similiar-looking mother and stared at her with her innocent, brown eyes.
"Mo-mmy, I'm bored." Connie cooed. "Can I help you look at pi'chers?"
Sandra ignored Connie's request for the moment. "Honey, what happened to your dolls? Did one break again?" She looked at her daughter curiously. She wouldn't really be upset if another had been broken. Those damn, cheap dolls are always breaking, Sandra thought to herself.
"No, Mommy, I just didn't wanna play anymore. I wanna stay with you." Connie plopped down on the living room floor with her mother and began rumaging through the pictures her mother had put aside for the moment.
"I guess I have no say in this, huh?" Sandra asked with a chuckle. She sighed and slowly took the pictures away from her daughter and put then on a table. "You have to be careful with these, Connie. They're very old and delicate."
Connie scooted closer to her mother and peered into the chest. "Mo-mmy, who is this?" Connie asked as she grabbed a small picture of a man and a woman holding hands in a park.
Sandra looked at it and grinned. "Why, that's your grandma and grandpa. My parents. That's a very old picture. See, it's black and white." she pointed out to Connie.
"Wow." Connie said in awe, "They don't look old. Is this... daddy?" Connie said to her mother in disbelief as she held up a picture of a brown- haired man standing near a tree laughing.
Connie's father, Joseph, had died only two years before and Connie, being only five, didn't have such a perfect memory of him. His sudden death didn't really effect her seriously, although she did miss him.
Sandra stared at the picture, knowing that it had been taken shortly before Connie was born. Sandra held her tears back.
She didn't say a word as Connie put the picture down carefully in a small pile she was forming. She looked in the box again and this time she began digging through the old photographs.
"Honey, no! Be careful! I haven't been in this chest in years. I have no idea how old some of these pictures are." Sandra yelped. She was sure her daughter would tear a few pictures in her exploration of the chest.
Connie stopped digging abruptly and Sandra stared at her strangely. The young girl was just staring down into the chest and she seemed to be reaching for something. "Mommy, this is heavy. Can you help me?" The young girl was straining to pick up whatever it was she had.
Sandra moved to the chest, sat beside Connie, and looked in right along with her. "Sweetheart, I need you to move for a minute. I don't want to hit you with this." Sandra said as she lifted up a large portrait from the bottom of the chest. Connie did as she was told.
Sandra leaned the picture frame up against the side of the chest and she and Connie stared at the large portrait in wonder.
"My God..." Sandra whispered, "Why did I never see this before?"
The portrait was large. The solid-oak frame was about one foot wide and two feet high. In the center of the picture stood a man at the helm of a ship. He had shoulder-length, almost black hair and beads and coins hung every which way from it. He wore an old dirty tricorn hat and his old clothes seemed to be the same. He had a proud but strangely jovial and drunk look on his face and his brown eyes seemed to be staring off into the distance. In one hand he held a compass and the other hand had a tight grasp on the wheel of the ship, which was falling into disrepair along with the rest of what would probably be considered a floating hunk of wood. Behind him was a beautiful sunset that held all the colors of the rainbow. The canvas that this picture had been painted on was still strong, although slightly dirty.
Connie ran her little hand over the picture as her mother continued to stare. "Mommy, look at his hair and eyes. He looks just like you!"
Sandra snapped out of whatever daze she was in when she realized what this picture was all about. "Baby, that's Jack Sparrow." Her voice still held a slight tinge of disbelief.
"Who?"
"Jack Sparrow is a long dead relative of ours. He was a famous pirate that sailed the Caribbean on a ship known as the Black Pearl. Everybody knew who he was. One time he and an old friend's son... oh what was his name..." she paused for a moment before remembering, "oh yes, Will Turner. He and Will saved a young woman from certain death at the hands of evil pirates who stole the Black Pearl from him." Sandra smiled as she remember the tales her grandfather told her when she was a child, and how her grandmother would always yell at him saying it was only legend.
"So he was a pirate? Did he kill people" Connie asked.
"Yep, he sure was. He was a good pirate though, or so I was told. He probably killed people, sorry to say. But after he saved the young woman, he got his ship back and he sailed away." Sandra was already captured by her own story.
No wonder Sandra and Connie lived close to the sea, they were desendants of the great Jack Sparrow.
Connie, by now, had found something far more interesting than even the picture itself. "What's this, Mommy?" Connie held up a metal trinket that was the size of her hand. She had found it in a small velvet pouch that was connected to the back of the picture.
Sandra slowly took the metal object from her daughter. She knew exactly what it was. She looked at the picture and held up the trinket. She studied what Jack was holding in the portrait and then what she held in her own hand. Suddenly, her belief was confirmed and her eyes grew wide.
"So Mommy, what is it?"
"This is a compass, a very old compass, honey." Sandra opened the compass up and smiled as she realized that everything that her grandfather had told her was true. The compass didn't point north.
Connie might only be seven, but she knows a thing or two about the sea. She and her mother live on the Atlantic Coast of Florida and her mother owns a boat so they go fishing every weekend. So Connie knew a funky compass when she saw one. "Mommy, that compass isn't pointing that way." Connie said as she pointed north. "Why?"
Sandra was proud that her daughter knew a little something about the ocean and things of that sort. "Because it's not meant to point north. It's pointing in the direction of something far greater." Sandra knew exactly where it was pointing to.
"Then where's it pointing?" Connie said in a confused way as she looked at her mother strangely.
"It's pointing to a special place called the Isla de Muerta. It's an island that is said to hold lots of gold and an ancient chest that has hundreds of pieces of cursed gold." Sandra remembered that shortly before her grandfather died, he told her of a place with such a name. He said that the island was real and so was the curse. Grandmother said he was dillusional since he was on his deathbed in a cold hospital, but young Sandra knew he was telling the truth.
Perhaps Connie was too young to understand the signifcance of these findings, so she lost interest. "Mommy, I'm gonna go play with my dollies now. Ok?"
Sandra looked at her daughter. "Ok. I'm going to go on the dock for a minute or two, stay inside."
"Ok." And off Connie ran to her room.
Sandra slowly put the portrait back into the chest and closed the lid, but she still held the compass tightly in her hand. She stood up and walked out the back door, which led to a small dock just beyond the back yard... and beyond the dock was the Atlantic. The sun was setting and so the sky looked liked the sunset that was portrayed in the picture. Many different colors danced across the sky as Sandra sat at the edge of the dock and let her feet dangle over the side.
She sighed as she opened the compass and, strangely, it almost pointed directly ahead of her and off into the sunset. She smiled as she stared off into the horizon, knowing that somewhere out there was a special island that would never be found.
She longed for the sea, just like her mother had, just like her grandfather had, and just like her daughter soon will. It runs in the family. It runs in that Sparrow blood.
Author's Note: Well, it didn't turn out exactly how I had pictured it, but it's just as good! I told you this wasn't romance or angsty or adventure, it's a simple story of Jack desendants.
