AN: Written for the weekly drabble prompt at the Broken Compass forum, "mask." It started me thinking about the different kinds of faces the characters wear and somehow my mind drifted to Scarlett and Giselle's heavily-applied makeup and how it might represent the professional 'mask' that prostitutes wear. Then suddenly I realized why it was that they keep slapping Jack.
He does tend to watch people and read them accurately, and a pirate never pays for what he can steal, does he? So maybe what happened was that Jack saw past the mask, found their weaknesses, took advantage of those weaknesses to get under their skirts for free, and then continued on to the next woman.
(Though I'm not a Sparrabeth shipper, I am pretty sure he considers Elizabeth to fall under his definition of a diamond. Just one of those bits of idea that slipped in around the edges but didn't make it into the final piece.)
Anyway, it's not as polished as I'd like it to be, but this is the first time I've actually taken up the challenge of responding to a prompt and I'm posting it now before I chicken out. Any thoughts and/or criticisms are welcome.
Captain Jack Sparrow sat in a corner table at the pub and surveyed the painted and perfumed beauties it had to offer as he savored the taste of the fine aged rum he'd managed to coax out of the barman. It was a selection to please any pirate, and there was much of the pirate in his dark, glinting eyes, for he was deciding which one of those jewels he was going to steal.
The trick was to wait until they looked away from the men they were talking to, turned away to gather their courage or tug their necklines a little bit lower before throwing themselves into the maelstrom of drunks once more. The masks they wore slipped then, the simpering, inviting look of the practiced doxy shifting to reveal the woman beneath—tired, conflicted, and vulnerable, as many-faceted as precious stones.
Patiently he waited for the moment he could see past that armor—here, a piece of amber, honey-smooth and flecked with light, growing warm from the touch of heated flesh, there a star sapphire, a clear, ocean-tinted soul made dazzling by the flaw that pierced its center. As with real gems, it was the diamonds that were the rarest and hardest to obtain by guile. The souls made unbreakably hard by the weight and pressure that could not crush them, those were the ones who took the light and shattered it, shining clear and nigh untouchable in their strength. He would not take on the challenge of a diamond tonight; such a theft required days of careful planning and observation. As he'd be leaving this port on the morrow, he would satisfy his thirst with lesser gems.
His men thought it foolish, a waste of time, seducing whores when they could be had easily for a bit of coin or a trifle. They didn't understand, and he didn't bother telling them of the sheer, sinfully intense pleasure of pairing the practiced expertise of a whore with the freely given passion of a woman. They'd never have the patience or subtlety to discover it for themselves, so they would assume he was exaggerating, embellishing his sexual conquests with the same inventiveness with which he retold his other achievements. But he did not try to explain, and the crew dismissed this penchant for seducing strumpets as a peculiarity of the Captain's.
Though he supposed one could argue that he was truly a romantic at heart, for finding little satisfaction in bought, emotionless lovemaking, he suspected that he was just so much of a pirate at heart that he despised the idea of paying for what he could have for free, and too much of a hedonist at heart to resist the deeper pleasures offered by a woman who was not merely willing but eager. His conquests were often angry afterwards, when they found out that their charming Captain Sparrow had charmed dozens of other women in dozens of other ports with the exact same result, but he considered the generous attentions they had lavished on other parts of his body well worth a slap or two to the face when they next met.
He wasn't sure why they were always so surprised by his fickleness. It wasn't as if he'd declared true love or given promises of faith. Perhaps he'd implied some things that were less than true, but it was hardly his fault if they'd let themselves take more meaning from his words than he'd said outright. He'd never pretended to be anything other than what he was—a pirate.