Author's Note: Don't ask where this came from. Maybe the apple-lover in me. I still kind of like it, though.
Summary: Jack muses on the expression "with a cherry on top."
Cherries
When he was little, he once heard the expression "with a cherry on top." He thought it was his brother, long dead now, who'd said it, and it was used bitterly, ironically, miserably.
If it was used with irony, then Jack would have a treasure trove of stories involving "a cherry on top."
He'd worked for a man that had once been his friend but was now a bastard, had done the right thing and refused to sell slaves, and, as a reward, got his ship burned down. The cherry on top of such a fantastic ordeal was that he ended up selling his soul to get said ship back.
Ruddy Beckett.
Then, a little while later, he decided to go after the treasure of Cortez. His crew warranted his suspicion, his first mate even more, but he set out, all to get some adventure and some treasure. Then the mutiny took place. The cherry on top of this story? He lost his ship again, and so he was robbed of having his ship, the thing he'd bought with pretty much his life, for ten years out of the eleven or so remaining of the deal he'd made with Jones. There was another cherry with that story, though; the one man that had ended up standing up for Jack, Bootstrap Bill Turner, ended up on the bottom of the ocean with cannon strapped to his boots.
Ruddy Jones. Ruddy Barbossa.
He'd finally found Bootstrap's son, Will and, by extension, Elizabeth Swann. He'd found Barbossa and had exacted his revenge on both him and his old crew. He'd gotten the Black Pearl back. He'd escaped the hangman's noose thanks to Will and Elizabeth. He escaped with only a cut, and that was by his own design. This time the cherry was minor, at least at the time: he met the woman who would literally be the end of him (once, at least, because he came back from the dead; Lizzie dearie had the grace to go and get him back with – this was good – Barbossa).
Ruddy meant red. Red like blood. Or cherries.
Judgment Day came. He'd gone to an old lover for help, traded Will over to Jones (in his defense, he meant to get him back, he really did – the fact that he didn't get a hundred souls was just another incentive to get the Heart), fought in a giant waterwheel, all to try to NOT end up as another decoration on the Flying Dutchman or to be devoured by a giant cephalopod. Didn't work out. There were two cherries: he'd almost escaped, but had come back, thanks to Elizabeth's pep talk. Then she'd chained him to a mast to be eaten by the Kraken, just when he'd begun to think of her as more than Will's bonnie lass (and a rum burner), too, and to perhaps give this love and monogamy thing a go. The only silver lining was that he'd gone out in style, sword drawn and teeth bared, leaping into the jaws of the monster.
Ruddy Kraken.
Forget cherries, he mused. He was sick of cherries. He always did prefer apples, anyway.