Disclaimer: All characters are Disney's. I lay claim only on the idea.
Author's Note: This is intended as an experiment analyzing the character of Captain Hector Barbossa from a different POV then his after watching Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequel in short order and remembering a previous fascination with the character. In my imagination, this is something of an interlude during Elizabeth's span of captivity among Captain Barbossa's crew. I surmise she spent at least three days and nights on the Black Pearl since I am unaware that the distance to Isla de Muerta was ever mentioned.
I will say this now: I am not a sailor. I did what I thought to be appropriate ship research for the terms I use but if anything is incorrect or in the wrong place, it is the fault of the author entirely. Please, correct me.
Rating: PG simply for thematic elements.
Genre: Drama
Summary: A midnight conversation. Moonlight. And the ever-present sea…
Force Majeure
Darkness sucked all the air out of her lungs. For moments, Elizabeth lay unable to breathe, her eyes flickering around the unfamiliar room of drafty shadows and cuts of moonlight. Memory gradually filtered back into her mind and she sat up with a gasp. She had left the nightmares of her dreaming world behind and entered the ones of her living. Uncurling stiffly from the floorboards, she took a few deep breaths to calm the thudding of her heart which had not left her throat since her meeting with the Captain.
She held still and listened, thinking she'd heard the door creak. The timbers of deck and keel, of wall and room moaned around her, tormented with their own misery, haunted by the "living" spirits of their dreadful crew. Nightly the Pearl vomited cries of her greed and unsated desire into the thick and breathless air, shrieking herself hoarse when only loneliness and despair loomed out on the vast horizon.
But nothing else stirred.
Standing took several attempts for the shakes had seized her cramped up muscles. She tested a steadying step or two cringing when pins and needles shot up her ankles. She wouldn't be so unsteady and chill if she had bothered to sleep in the bed—but she didn't want to think who the previous occupant of this room might have been nor how she had become the next one. She stayed far away from the elegant, moth-eaten bed, which lay in the shadowed corner beyond the window.
No, what she craved now was much more refreshing than sleep—and needed more.
The air was humid up on deck, clammy and hot like the inside of a fresh corpse's skin but even the faintest stir of it was more welcome than the stifling closeness of the fear-stricken cabin she'd left behind. Elizabeth shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, bare feet slapping on the slick mossy deck. The Caribbean breeze folded her damp hair around her neck and shoulder. Careful of splinters, she picked her way towards the bow, evading coils of rope, shards of a broken bottle and Ragetti's wooden eye that some mischievous crewman had let roll in the swells of the deck. The yard-arm's rigging flapped like silent bat's wings above her head as she skirted the fo'c's'le mast.
A semblance of calm settled around the ship at night. She wasn't sure if the undead pirates slept but they kept themselves quiet—save for the steersman—until dawn. Which gave her free roam of the ship in her restless hours. She was a captive and as such confined to her cabin for long stretches of time alone until one of the crew brought her her next meal. The captain, after the first night, had not spoken to her again and she had had no desire to inflict his company on herself no matter how desperate she became.
As she climbed the four long wooden stairs that led up to the bow, however she realized the ship was not as empty abovedecks as she'd hoped.
Over the grimacing figurehead stood a tall, ominous figure looking out onto the dark water. The winged shape of a fluttering feathered hat perched on his head was all she needed to identify him. And she nearly turned back. Nightmares or no, her lonely and fearful quarters suddenly seemed much more welcome.
She jolted, a cry flying from her startled lips, as a ringing screech punctured the silence like a pistol shot. She spun around, cursing the monkey who chattered irritably at her swinging on the foremast extension line sixteen feet above her head. He bared sharp little white teeth at her, hissing, then sprang and with a squeak landed nimbly on the padded shoulder of the figure who had not once suggested movement. Nor did he acknowledge her now though she knew he knew she stood there in her bare feet and white chemise, startled and sweating.
A languid hand rose and stroked the monkey's head with yellow, parting fingernails.
Elizabeth glanced back along the ship's deck. The walk back seemed so long and so desperately dark that she turned back and went reluctantly to the bow, leaning her elbows on the rail and determinedly not looking at him. Instead, she watched the waves lapping stroke after stroke against the ship's sides. But it was dead as a quagmire. A viscous soup of grey sludge. Not even the moonlight sparkled off its oily surface for a deep shroud of grey hung overhead. Yet, the black ship still glided through the airless seas, driven relentlessly by the obsessive thought of her dark master.
Elizabeth sighed and dared a sideways glance at him.
The bare wind as it sagged in the useless shredded sails didn't stir his limp grey hair. His dim, shadowed eyes gazed dully out to sea as though he saw something she couldn't, something beyond the rocking greasy swells.
"I had a dream." she said and nearly started to hear herself speak. She didn't why she opened her mouth, she just did. Maybe it was because she had no one else to talk to or because talking to herself teetered dangerously on the brink of madness and she'd been too close to that of late. But if she had started at hearing herself speak it was nothing to what she felt when he did.
"A dream is naught but that."
A ripple of silver flitted over the water. Her breath caught at a glimpse of eternally grinning teeth, skin so wrinkled and dry it looked like burning parchment in the shadows. The human mask pulled over it again as clouds hastily skirted across the light as though chastening themselves for the fright they'd caused her. But Elizabeth had ceased to jump at the moonlight's grisly revelations though her heart still throbbed in a permanently dry mouth.
"I had a nightmare then," she clarified, a trifle defensively, as though he had insulted her dignity. Though, upon reflection, he had done so over the last days, just not in the last few minutes.
"Ah," Those loathsome, frightening eyes turned from the unquiet sea to settle on her, his gaze at once paternal and patronizing. "Ghosts, p'rhaps?"
She remembered being enamored as a child of the ventures of pirates and sea-folk—going out to the quays with her governess to stare over the relentlessly rolling water that surged to the shore, carrying news and deeds of far-off places. Reality sat cold beside it.
With nothing better to do she had watched his crew and he. And even if she was blind and deaf, she would have noticed this. He was tired. Tired of never eating, never drinking. Tired of holding one-sided conversations with the unlearned, for, indeed, she suspected him a learned man at least in part though many years of sanguinary-natured pursuits had scoured away much of that polish.
He circled something in his right hand, the lurid green skin of which rolled on the bones of his fingers. The apple, unlike everything else on board, had not withered. Fresh, succulent, filled with all the temptation of promise, it had not yet died.
"I was in a corridor. There were no lights and it was close. I felt as though darkness had jumped down my throat. I swallowed it but it swallowed me too." She didn't tell him she had been wading through gold treasure piled ankle-high all bearing the grinning, heaving skull of the Aztec piece hanging now at his belt. Nor of the jeering voice that had echoed into waking I'm curious as to what you're plannin' on doin' next?
Captain Barbossa said nothing, either finding something as trivial as a nightmare on board a haunted ship too tedious to remark on or lost in thoughts of his own, but she felt the better for having confided it though she couldn't have said why. Instead, the young governor's daughter watched the apple stem rotate into view over his filth-crusted fingers then sink again into the palm of his hand. The monkey fretted restlessly on his shoulder, peering over the feathered hat with liquid black eyes.
"It's not the darkness ye be fearing, missy—but what's in it."
Moonlight washed over the deck once more as though determined to gild the grimy surface with something more than filth. A hint of grayish white poked through the ruined finery of his left hand sleeve, spindly fleshless fingers biting into the wood brace, blue light glinting off wet, empty ribs. Captain Barbossa reached up desiccated joints creaking and brittle and angled his hat down so that his face lost itself in shadow.
His eyes luminous and fretful in the receding moonlight stared down into hers. He never blinked. And neither did she. Oddly and perhaps madly she found a little comfort in the quiet forbidding presence of the pirate Captain. Her fate would be kinder than his. At least, when she died, she would die in truth. In peace.
Little Jack took the apple from his master's hand and turned it around in his small paws. Squeaking, he gave it a few hopeless licks then abruptly tossed it overboard. Elizabeth watched the momentary flash of green before it plunked into the ocean and bobbed out of view, lost underneath the keel.
Surprised at her own daring, she looked him full in the face, reckless, knowing she wouldn't die yet. "Do you dream, Captain Barbossa?"
Abruptly, he turned his back on the rail, leaving the monkey chittering discontentedly, paused and then wordlessly offered her his arm.
She declined. He chuckled at her refusal though she followed at his shoulder as they made their way down the spray-slippery stairs and passed underneath the skeletal yard-arms again. His boots thudded dully on the wooden planks while the hem of her chemise swished behind her.
"In this corridor, do ye be having any light at all? Any way out?" His question surprised her. She hadn't really expected him to say anything.
The answer escaped her before she meant it to. "No, there was nothing. Except walls."
"A cage then, 'stead of a corridor."
"Perhaps." Her heel suddenly skidded on a particularly wet patch of deck.
His arm shot out and stilled her fall with a jolting jerk. Curling her arm resolutely above his elbow, he leered a little. Silently she let her hand fall limp and cold around his arm.
He left her at her cabin door. "I bid ye a better night then, miss."
"As an officer and a gentleman, Captain Barbossa, you didn't answer my question," she reminded him, now safe behind her door.
With a sly smile, he doffed his hat lightly to her and turned away. She saw him pause at the head of the stairs, a black silhouette against the lighter sky, his hand outstretched, fingertips flighty on the railing baluster. It might have been the creak of the stern or restless water against the ship's sides but she thought she heard a low whisper.
"I don't dream, Miss Turner."
Fin
Author's Note: Force Majeure-- French: "an irresistible compulsion." Lit: "superior force"