Title: There's More Than One Way to Live Forever
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Rating: PG
Genre/Pairing: gen featuring Jack Sparrow, Turners, and OCs
Word Count: 4,498
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of PotC: At World's End. Also: original characters, although the focus on the story is Jack
Summary: So you want to live forever…
Disclaimer: PotC and most of these characters do not belong to me; I'm just playing in their universe.
There's More Than One Way to Live Forever
The thing about the Aqua de Vida was that no one ever told Jack how it worked.
It was small. A spring, bubbling up from the earth, with water clearer than any Jack had ever seen before, pooling down towards the shoreline of the tiny island. The only intruder in centuries snapped the compass shut, pulled his dinghy up on land to beach it, and stumbled almost drunkenly over to the spring, staring at it as if he couldn't quite believe his eyes, before a lazy smirk overtook him.
Immortality at last. He leaned down and dipped one hand into the water, starting slightly at its cold temperature. This was it, the Fountain of Youth, the Aqua de Vida, miles off the coast of Florida, somehow overlooked despite all of the shipping routes that went right by it. Jack would never have found it without help from a certain compass; standing there in front of it, he had a feeling that no man was ever meant to find it at all.
Of course, that didn't matter to him, and as he knelt and drank from it gustily without ceremony, he noted that it didn't taste much different from ordinary water. There was no feeling of omnipotence as it hit his stomach, no sinking feeling like with alcohol, and Jack vaguely wondered if he would ever know if it truly had worked. He wasn't sure, but he laughed anyway – he was cheating death. He would never be stuck in the Locker again, that barren sea-less landscape, his stranded Pearl beside him. He had all the time in the world to reclaim the Pearl now, to find Barbossa and make him pay for his betrayal (again), and he had plenty of time to sail the seas.
If he was immortal, even the Royal Navy couldn't touch him. He grinned at that thought, heading back to the dinghy to get the empty rum bottles that littered its floor. He filled each of them to the brim in the spring, humming to himself as he did so, and corked them tight. There were eight in all, and he stowed them carefully back aboard the dinghy, calculating in his head the profit he could make if he were to sell them.
There was one person in particular he had in mind.
He stood by the spring one final time, ready to start his long sail back to Tortuga, and that was when his eye caught on the stone tablet, half-buried in the sand next to the spring. Long, limber fingers picked it up out of the beach, dusted it off. The words were in archaic Spanish, but Jack had learned Spanish long ago, and roughly translated, they said something that made his stomach start to sink.
He who drinks from the Spring of Youth will forever remain unchanged as Time spirals onwards - but he is also Cursed, for he shall see History in its making. Be forewarned, he who seeks Immortality – the Spring of Youth only grants the gifts of Ageless life; it does not protect from the Death that should befall one via Calamity or Acts of God. May God give you strength, and with Luck you will never see His face.
Jack shivered. He could still die; it was the last thing he wanted to hear.
An adventurous man had to think then, what to do.
Give up freedom to protect his life? Or live the life he always wanted, and risk the Locker every day?
It took him five months to track down the Pirate King, and when he found her, she had only settled in one place to give birth to Will's whelp of a son. Young William Turner lay in an elegantly carved cradle in his mother's sitting room as she attended to her kingdom, and when Jack walked through the door, the Pirate King's eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"Jack," she said cautiously, her gaze flickering briefly to her son. "I figured I'd never see you again." There were so many things unspoken between them, so many unforgivable betrayals that they'd never had time to discuss before life took that inevitable turn that changed their lives forever. Elizabeth without Will was like one half of a whole, and Jack wryly thought that the Pirate King without her Queen at her side was a sorry sight indeed.
No doubt Will and Elizabeth would have both yelled at him for thinking that, had they known, and Jack took comfort in small favors that no one had yet discovered a Spring of Mind Reading.
"I thought long and hard," he said, swaying slightly on his entry into her decorative parlor. "About what I was about to do, offerin' something valuable as this to the woman who killed me." She was confused – she still hadn't spotted the rum bottle in his hand, holding the precious water. "I'm not doin' it for you, love," he said quietly, looking almost downcast. "I'm doin' it because you should be able to be with him longer than five days in your life." He held up the bottle and she focused on it intensely before turning that sharp gaze back on him.
"What is it?" she asked imperiously. Jack briefly thought on how much she'd changed, since he'd first been convinced to rescue her by young William, years before. She was used to being obeyed now – it was obvious in the way she carried herself and the way her voice rang out. The Pirate King acted as royal as any monarch, and it had only been ten months since she'd assumed her throne. He shuddered at how she'd be in ten years. Poor William.
"The secret to eternal life," he told her with a swagger, grinning. "The Fountain of Youth. The Aqua de Vida."
"I don't want it," she said immediately. He was startled.
"You're not afraid to die?" he asked, swaying closer to her. It was unfathomable; death was horrible, a fate beyond reckoning. He was not going back there – how could Elizabeth want to die? But she turned and looked at him with that intensity that'd made her the Pirate King in the first place, and he felt a shiver despite himself.
"How could I possibly fear death?" she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. "He's the man I love." Jack paused a moment.
"Only if you die at sea," he reminded her at last.
Elizabeth responded with typical stubbornness. "Then I guess I shall have to do so," she told him elegantly. "I am the king of the pirates, it's not as though such things don't happen." They both turned and looked at small Will, sleeping peacefully.
"You'd have to leave him behind," Jack said again. He shook the bottle at her. "You could live forever instead. See William every ten years, raise your great-great-great-grandchildren, watch the world change…" He lifted his eyebrows enticingly, but she didn't even glance away from the cradle to look at him.
"And watch my children grow old and die?" she said quietly. "No, Jack. When my time comes, I'll die at sea, and Will will take me home." She smiled at him anyway. "Thank you, though."
There was something empty in his heart, that he hadn't quiet acknowledged until that moment, and a hope died – a hope of anyone else sharing the burden that suddenly sprang before him, boundless and empty.
The water of the fountain of youth should have been a successful bribe. Keyword: should.
"You'll live forever!" he insisted, pushing the bottle into familiar hands. It was 1815, and he and the Pearl had been overtaken by a ship in the British Navy, his favorite nemesis. "Or at least, you won't age." A familiar-looking face had been a lieutenant on board, with a long mouth and piercing eyes, and Jack hadn't been in the least surprised to discover that he was a Norrington. He'd met several, over the years – who'd have known that the Admiral had come from such a large family? – and every time, it unnerved him.
Meeting Turners unnerved him as well, for young William's children were grown and pirating in their grandmother's legacy. Elizabeth Swann Turner, the last king of the pirates, had walked the plank of her own ship at the age of forty-five, cunning to the last as she secretly engineered the mutiny against her rule that had ended her life. Jack assumed she was with William now, somewhere in the waters that lay beyond, but nearly 75 years had passed and he still had no desire to die and sail those waters himself.
Of course, if the young Lieutenant Norrington didn't accept his bribe and join him in the pursuit of eternity, it was possible he'd be traveling those waters very soon, but his luck had held out for nearly three-quarters of a century and he was beginning to feel truly immortal.
Through the years, he'd tried to get others to drink the waters of the spring, assuming that many men would want to remain ageless, but surprisingly, none had taken him up on the offer. Even Barbossa, when they'd finally been reunited, had laughed in his face, but Barbossa was very old by then, and who wanted to live forever with arthritis?
"Death isn't something to be feared, Jack," Barbossa had drawled at him, and Jack had left angrily, wondering why he and Hector were always destined to be at odds and why in the end he'd thought he had wanted Hector around for eternity anyway.
Young Norrington looked just as disinterested as everyone else and Jack was starting to think that the water carried a curse that made it unappetizing to anyone who didn't find it in its natural habitat. "There's no such thing," he scoffed. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I knew your great-uncle," Jack said conversationally. "Difficult fellow. Seriously in need of a drink and some pleasurable company. Stole a heart from me, once." The Norrington in front of him looked at him in disgust and shoved him into the brig, taking the rum bottle filled with water from him as he left. "Give it a swig! If there's no such thing, it can't hurt!" Jack called after him.
Three days later, he'd engineered one of his usual mad escape attempts and was aboard a small boat, rowing calmly towards where his compass said the Pearl was located. He was feeling decidedly cheerful. He'd made up a fake pirate identity and cheerfully lied to the Navy, and he was pretty sure young Norrington had at least sniffed the water. He supposed he'd run across someone who drank the water eventually, if it was in the hands of the British navy. Unless they dumped it overboard.
The possibility was horrifying.
When he located the Pearl, all her treasure and crew gone and floating aimlessly on the calm sea near Spain, he wondered if he really would be wandering the world forever by himself.
Eventually there were steamboats, and sailing ships went out of style. Jack didn't like it. The Pearl had somehow never rotted or been destroyed, and he wondered if it had to do with the fact that he'd spilled Aqua de Vida on her deck when he'd first commandeered her from Barbossa, over a century before, but she was becoming obsolete regardless.
He was still determinedly sailing the seas, avoiding Her Majesty's Royal Navy (as usual) and hoping for a glimpse of a familiar face. The latest generation of Turners had ended up smugglers except for one black sheep, who had joined the American Navy and disowned his family. Jack had spotted him once, from a distance, and he had been the spitting image of his many-greats-grandfather.
His current crew was mostly immigrants from America, a good portion of them Irishmen, and while they worked hard and kept the Pearl in top condition, their captain was a lonely man, indulging in rum and women and staying carefully out of history's reach.
It was in the midst of a long winter in 1886 when a familiar ship pulled up alongside the Pearl. Jack almost didn't recognize her – it'd been 150 years since he'd last laid eyes on her – but there was no forgetting the man who was at her helm, nor the woman who hung from the rigging.
"William?" he asked. "Elizabeth?" They looked happy and healthy, and the Dutchman looked as good as ever, now that it wasn't creepy and covered with seaweed and the like. There were other crewmembers scurrying about, a few keeping watch, and Jack assumed that they were dead men with nowhere else to go.
A sinking fear occurred to him. What if they were there for him? "I can't die. I drank from the Spring of Youth."
Elizabeth laughed, a sound he'd not heard in over a century. "We're not here for you." Will nodded, smiling, but the reunion that should have been comforting ended up being nothing but awkward. Elizabeth vaulted on board, smiling happily in her breeches and long-sleeved shirt. "You have a man sick in the hold."
He'd come down with cholera. There was nothing to be done; they'd barricaded him in a sick room and stayed clear, hoping to reach land before the whole ship came down with it. It was no matter to Jack - he had discovered long ago that the Aqua de Vida protected him from disease, and that discovery was no small comfort. "Yes. O'Riley."
"We're here for him," Elizabeth told him cheerfully. "Will finally caught up with the backlog caused by Davy Jones, and now we come to you."
"We're modernizing," Will shouted from the Dutchman. "Essential in times like these."
"Of course," Jack said, although he thought they were both quite mad. But that also wasn't anything new, now that he thought about it. Their inability to act intelligently when in proximity to one another had always amused him, after all, and it looked like little had changed.
Elizabeth disappeared into the hold and came out with O'Riley, but he was looking oddly blurry, like he wasn't really there. O'Riley swung over to the Dutchman with ease, using one of the ropes on the Pearl, but Elizabeth paused before she did the same and turned to face Jack.
"Jack," she said quietly. "Are you awfully lonely?"
"No," he said stiffly. "'Course not. I have rum. And life. Living forever, it's worth it." The words sounded flat even to his own ears.
"Will!" Elizabeth shouted over. Will was talking to O'Riley, but he paused in his conversation to glance at his wife. "Let's have dinner with Jack tonight!"
"You eat?" Jack asked, raising an eyebrow. "I wasn't aware that the dead could do that."
"Will's not technically dead," Elizabeth reminded him. "Our descendants still keep the heart safe, don't they?" Apparently she hadn't been keeping track as well as Jack had.
"It's safe and sound in that fortress they keep near Shipwreck Island," Jack told her magnanimously. "You should be proud to know that one of your fine brood has recently entered the American Navy. The rest of 'em refuse to admit he was ever born." Elizabeth laughed.
Dinner was the first time in decades that Jack had not felt weary.
"I know the tale of the Aqua de Vida," Will said, biting into a chicken drumstick. "You can still die of unnatural causes. How have you managed to stay alive this long?"
"I'm Captain Jack Sparrow," Jack said, holding out his arms in the usual gesture, but his heart wasn't truly in it. "And I'm never planning on dying, mate, so stop hoping I'll join your bonny crew."
Will laughed. "If you do die at sea, we'll be here for you," he said seriously.
"I'm not going to die," Jack told him stubbornly. "I've been to the Locker, and I'm never going back." The Locker was just a dim memory after all that time, vague feelings of emptiness and solitude, and it held little of the terror that had once consumed him, but he still carried in himself the conviction to never return.
"You don't necessarily have to go to the Locker," Will mused. "You could join my crew, like you suggested."
"Not interested," Jack said. "It'd ruin my image, taking orders from you."
They left after dinner, just as the sun was setting beneath the horizon, and even though Jack looked desperately for the green flash as the Dutchman went under, it never appeared.
He was navigating the crowded streets of 1920s New York when he ran into a familiar face.
"You!" the man shouted. "I've been looking for you for over a century! This is all your fault!" Jack did what any sensible man would do and ran, almost making it back to the seaport and his pretty little steamboat that had finally replaced the Pearl, but young Lieutenant Norrington had longer legs and overtook him easily.
"You drank the water," Jack said disbelievingly when he realized he was trapped.
"I drank the water," Norrington snapped in annoyance. "I drank the water, and then ten years later I realized I hadn't aged a day. I watched my wife and children die before my very eyes, and there was nothing I could do." Jack couldn't really feel pity for him; he'd been smart enough to avoid getting attached. Apparently this Norrington was not as intelligent as his adversary of old.
"I don't even know your name, lad," Jack said pleadingly. He could barely remember the circumstances of their last meeting, and wondered how on earth Norrington had remembered his face. "I was just trying to get free of a bad situation."
"It's Norrington," the man stressed.
"Well yes, I know that part," Jack muttered. "What's the rest?" He'd forgotten how much he'd enjoyed annoying the Commodore – wait, he'd been an Admiral when he'd disappeared. His young relative was equally fun, bristling in that proper British way. His face was not quite the same as his great-uncle's, but they were alike enough that the resemblance was unsettling.
"Edward," Norrington finally admitted. "Edward Norrington."
"What are you doing in fine New York, Eddie?" Jack asked him grandly, and watched as he scowled at the nickname. "Do you have anywhere to go, any obligations that will have to be ended?" Edward looked puzzled.
"What do you mean?"
"You're coming with me, that's what I mean," Jack told him. "I've got a bit of a crew on my ship, but we could use more."
"I haven't been to sea in years," Edward muttered stiffly. "I left the Navy after becoming a commander, and the only time since was coming to America." That event must have been recent; he still retained the accent that marked him as British, although Jack supposed after speaking a certain way for decades, one didn't much change. New York and Florida had been his two ports of call since the middle of the 19th century, and he'd still retained the accent of his youth.
"You're a man of the sea though," Jack observed sharply, watching with amusement as Edward's eyes widened slightly. "Sail with my ship. You won't regret it."
There were three of them now – in 1956, Edward and Jack had stumbled across a young woman drunk on a street corner wailing about how she never aged. As it was New York, Edward said to just ignore her, everyone was crazy anyway, but Jack sat next to her and asked her the year of her birth, and shivered slightly when she'd told him, "1768."
Her name was Charlotte Kennedy and she'd been a tavern wench in the colonies at the end of the 18th century. They finally deduced (once she was sober and coherent) that she'd drunk from one of Jack's rum bottles after he'd left it in her tavern, angry that the latest man he'd tried to sell the water to had refused it on sight. Water was water and Charlotte had ended up with the bottle after cleaning up for the night, and fifteen years later she had realized she was never going to age.
"I've had nearly two hundred years to improve my life," she told them, "and I'm still a waitress at a dive bar near the seaport. It's hopeless."
"I'm a pirate," Jack had told her, and it hadn't taken much more for her to tag along on the good ship Immortality. She was dreamier than the men and taken up with the idea of "seeing history", something Jack had never really cared for. She made them sail to far off places and she tried to witness as many important events as she could, scanning the newspapers they acquired in a desperate hope to live through as many life-altering moments as possible.
She was the one who insisted that Jack cash in on some of his treasure and buy an airplane. He and Edward were uncomfortable with the idea (although he quite enjoyed cars, and had a handsome Ford), but she'd thrown caution into the wind and earned her pilot's license in 1975, and they'd all shifted home base down to Florida, near where the Pearl still stood beached on a lonely shore. The plane and the cars and the big house on the sea were in all of their names, but the pleasure yacht roped to the dock was Jack's alone.
"We have no source of income," Edward was arguing, a familiar tune. "Piracy is even more obsolete than it was twenty years ago, and grand larceny is not a strong suit for any of us."
Two years later, Jack joined the merry ranks of those who indulged in embezzlement.
It was inevitable, of course. Eventually, luck ran out, and during a pleasure cruise in the yacht in the late 1980s, the engine died unexpectedly.
"250 years old and you can't fix an engine?" Edward was drawling as Jack attempted desperately to remedy the problem before the yacht was torn apart by the reef they all knew was in the area. It was ironically near the location of the Aqua de Vida, in sudden shallows that housed dangerous coral right beneath the surface, and without the engine the yacht was headed straight there.
"The lass can try," Jack was starting to panic; he'd evaded death for so long, it was impossible that this moment was it. Charlotte was staring at the horizon, dressed in her swimsuit and a sarong, and that was when the men noticed the dark clouds brewing.
"A storm?" Edward stated the obvious. "We must get the engine working and return." They were several hours out yet, however, and it was unlikely they'd make it back before the storm. The yacht would survive the storm. The yacht could possibly survive the coral reef.
The yacht probably would not survive the reef and the storm together.
"We have life vests," Charlotte pointed out. "The water's warm this time of year. We'll probably be fine." Edward was at the cabinet that held the life vests; he pulled it open and frowned at finding it empty.
"Where are they?" he wondered.
The water began to grow choppier as they approached the reef, and Jack suddenly knew, in his heart, that it was Time.
"Oh, no!" Charlotte exclaimed. "I forgot, I put them on the rowboat for the boys." A pair of Turners had started visiting with their children, and there was nothing they enjoyed more than taking the rowboat out into the lagoon. Jack growled. Of course Turners would be his downfall. It was just his luck.
There was a loud crunch as the bottom of the yacht collided with the reef, but the thick build stayed firm and there wasn't even a leak.
"Maybe we'll be fine," Edward commented.
They weren't fine. Two hours in, the yacht sank beneath their feet. Edward and Charlotte clung to a lifesaver that had been packed into one of the cabinets, but their combined weight was bringing it down and in the harsh waves of the storm, it wasn't doing much good anyway. Jack was beginning to learn that a man can't tread water forever.
A familiar ship sailed out of the storm, and a familiar face was at the helm.
"Jack!" Will exclaimed. Jack was amused to note that the Dutchman looked the same as ever, an 18th century relic in a world that no longer cared for such things. A rope landed by him and he grabbed onto it desperately as Will pulled him out of the turbulent water and onto the deck. He looked for Will's other half and saw her hauling Charlotte and Edward on board. Elizabeth stopped cold when she saw Edward's face, then she laughed.
"A Norrington? How whimsical of you, Jack!"
The deck beneath Jack's feet shifted as though it was alive. He felt strangely fuzzy, like being drunk, but it was impossible since they'd also not brought rum along on their day-cruise, and then he realized he was dead.
"It's finally over," breathed Edward, leaning heavily against the edge of the ship.
"I wanted to see more," Charlotte was complaining to Elizabeth. "There's so much out there! Rumor had it that the Cold War was coming to an end, and now I'll never see it!" Jack rolled his eyes slightly – always on and on about History, even after she was dead. The girl was the most intelligent tavern wench he'd ever met.
"I'm not going back to the Locker, mate," he said to Will. Will looked at him and smiled slightly, showing a sense of maturity that Jack had never seen before.
"Of course not. You'll be joining my crew," he told him as though Jack should have known. "You suggested it yourself, a hundred years ago." Jack's memory of that visit was fuzzy, but it sounded vaguely familiar.
"There's a man who'll want to meet you!" Elizabeth told Edward with surprise, and then she was pulling him down into the hold with her usual enthusiasm and a complete lack of the stoicism that had marked her last few years among the living. Jack had a sinking feeling he knew who the man she spoke of would be, and to no great surprise, Edward and James Norrington came on deck together, speaking of family names long forgotten.
"Will you stay with us?" Will asked. "You'll never have to go to the Locker, and you can sail the seas for eternity, like you always wanted."
There was really no answer other than "yes".
Eventually, Edward moved on. Charlotte stayed on with the crew for a time, clinging to the life she once led, but then she, too, elected to pass further into the mists and brave what came next.
But Jack stayed. They sailed the seas, Captain Will Turner and his crew of dead men of the sea, picking up victims of shipwrecks and wars. The centuries turned.
One day, Jack Sparrow woke up and realized that being dead wasn't that bad at all.