DISCLAIMER: Let us examine that claim for a moment, shall we? Who was it that, at the very moment James had a notorious pirate safely behind bars, saw fit to free said pirate and force him to allow the fugitive pirate a day's head-start, eh? Who destroyed his ship in a hurricane and put out a warrant for his arrest? So whose fault is it *really* that he ended up becoming a drunk and a traitor? Is that really a responsible way to treat your characters? And couldn't such careless behavior be considered forfeiting the right to said character in the first place?
Thanks to MorganBonny, without whose input this chapter would have been longer, stranger, and uncomfortably OOC, and to Nytd, for beta-ing and making sure Jack sounded like Jack.
"I found the cure to growing older
... and I am sorry my conscience called in sick again
And I've got arrogance down to a science,
And I've got arrogance down to a science." - Fall Out Boy, I Slept...
Elizabeth was just about ready to scream. Apparently it wasn't possible for a person to walk even from one end of Tortuga's docks to the other without being constantly propositioned by prostitutes assuming she was a boy, men assuming that she was a prostitute, and even once by someone who wanted her to consider the opportunities prostitution might offer such a pretty young lad. A group of dirty children had swarmed her and managed to pick two of her pockets before she could fight them off, and a passing drunk had stumbled into her and come quite close to vomiting on her boots. All in all, she was beginning to understand why Commodore Norrington had always spoken of Tortuga with such extreme distaste. (Though he wasn't a Commodore any more, was he? He'd resigned from his position and gone back to England, as rumor had it.)
She found the Black Pearl only after passing it once without noticing in the dim twilight. Its signature black sails stood out a good deal less in a harbor where the majority of sails were not white, but a dingy brownish-gray. To her relief, the man on watch duty recognized her and lowered the gangplank so she could come aboard. He also managed to procure, with much grumbling protest, some water that was only slightly less foul than the contents of the bilges to wash her face and hands with. She accepted it gratefully; she'd allowed her face to become unspeakably filthy during the voyage from Port Royal to better disguise the femininity of her features. Though there was no mirror aboard the ship, she felt much better with all that grease, sweat, and dust off of her face. Then she went to the captain's cabin and made herself comfortable in one of the chairs.
She waited several hours. There was a book on the table; she tried to read it, but found that it was in Spanish. She looked at the maps, but found nothing noticeably out of the ordinary about them. She tugged at a loose thread in her waistcoat until half the hem had come undone. She found a rat in the chamber pot, which stared at her as if daring her to do anything, and then sauntered off to resume whatever rat business had brought it there in the first place. She unbraided, and then re-braided her hair. She snooped around some more. She picked up the Spanish book again and tried to puzzle out what it said. Something about an ingenious knight who had a lot of books, though that was about all she could translate of it. She put the book back down. She tried to get the tar out from under her fingernails, and then gave up. When she finally heard the captain's voice approaching, she propped her feet up casually on the table, quickly smoothing her hair and clothing and pasting a disinterested look on her face. He opened the hatch and froze there in the hatchway, staring at her with a puzzled look on his face.
"Why, Jack… I wasn't expecting you to turn up until morning. " She gave him a languid, unimpressed head-to-toe glance.
"And what are you doing here?" he asked her, matching her casual tone of voice.
"I'm looking for my fiancé." Jack raised an eyebrow, though she thought she saw something uneasy briefly flit across his face.
"Your dear William is not in here, I'm afraid. This is the captain's cabin, not the missing fiancé's cabin."
"Yes, I know he's not in your cabin, obviously. I was waiting until you showed up. We need to talk."
"Well, I've missed you too, Lizzie, but isn't—"
"You know where he is," she interrupted firmly. "You'll tell me and help me find a ship that will take me there, and then your part in this whole affair will be over."
"Well… not exactly," Jack hedged, holding up his forefingers. "I do indeed know where he may be found, but there are unfortunately complications preventing the immediate retrieval ofsaid fiancé from said location, though you needn't fear him going anywhere in the meantime, mind you."
"And why would that be?" Elizabeth asked in a deceptively sweet tone. Jack cringed inwardly.
"Look, I can explain."
"You'd better," Elizabeth said, casually picking up one of his pistols that was lying on the table and twirling it around on her finger.
"Do you even know how to use that thing?" Jack asked suspiciously.
"You point it at whatever you want to shoot and you pull the trigger," she replied with a shrug, bringing on another internal cringe.
"Put it down now." Guns in the hands of amateurs made him nervous. True, she'd probably miss if she tried to hit him, but he didn't want bullet-holes in his cabin's walls. Elizabeth gave him a dark look and put it down—in front of her on the table, within easy reach.
"William," he said, pulling up another chair and looking across the table at her, "'has been taken by Davy Jones. Literally," he added as he saw the stricken look in her eyes. "The lad's not dead or drowned, 'e's been, well, enslaved might be a word for it."
"Enslaved," Elizabeth repeated blankly.
"Yes, enslaved. And in order to save me—save him, that is, a debt of a hundred souls must be paid to Jones, of which I've already obtained some."
"Souls. He accepts payment in souls. I don't suppose he'd take anything else instead?" Elizabeth asked, looking thoughtful. "How many is some, anyhow?"
"Er… four, if you must know," Jack admitted unhappily. "And I really don't think Davy Jones accepts pounds sterling, love."
"Does all this have anything to do with the jar of dirt under your bed, or is that some bizarre pirate superstition?" she asked suddenly. He narrowed his eyes at her.
"What were you doing under me bed?"
"Nothing," Elizabeth replied airily. "Just looking around."
"And exactly why did you feel the need to poke around under me bed?"
"Oh, perhaps because I was sitting in here and waiting for you for hours with nothing to do but try to read some incomprehensible Spanish book!" she burst out, throwing her hands in the air and getting up to pace.
"Cervantes is incomprehensible?"
"Whoever he is, he's very incomprehensible if you don't know Spanish," Elizabeth retorted, and he sighed and shook his head at her.
"You grew up in a mansion, but know nothing of classic literature? Didn't you ever have a what-do-you-call-it, a governance, educator, government…"
"Governess?" Elizabeth supplied, looking amused.
"That's the word," Jack confirmed. "Didn't you have one?"
"Yes. She taught me things like embroidery, French, and poems about good children who obeyed their elders and went to heaven when they died," Elizabeth said dryly.
"Ugh."
"That just about describes it, yes."
Jack merely shrugged in response and took off his coat, tossing it onto a nail that stuck just far enough out of the wall to serve as a coat hook. Then he kicked off his boots and lay down on the bed with a wolfish smile, so as to subtly remind the lass that she was alone in a bedroom with a pirate.
The frustrating little chit merely removed her own boots and turned her chair around so that she could rest her feet on the bed, rather than the table. Spend one night on an island with a girl and leave her virtue intact, and suddenly she's strutting 'round your cabin like she owns the place…
"If you're looking for your rum, it's in that crate full of tasteless jewelry and rubbish over there," Elizabeth volunteered, and he realized he'd been glancing around the room and then back at her as he tried to figure out how to get her to show at least some small sign of realizing that she was confronting a dangerous and seductive man in his lair. He followed her gaze to the crate in the corner and sat up indignantly.
"Those happen to be items of mercantile value far too precious and/or illegal to go in the hold. Tasteless jewelry and rubbish, indeed!" He went over to the crate and patted it comfortingly, in case its contents had been offended.
"Valuable?" She arched one eyebrow at him, giving him a skeptical look.
"I will show you, though if you broke a single item in there, I will take it out of your hide, woman or not," Jack threatened as he began to carefully take things out. Elizabeth's curiosity got the better of her, and she came over to kneel beside him and watch.
"All right, you see this?" he asked her, unwrapping a piece of canvas sacking to reveal something long, flat, metal, and adorned with bits of color and foreign-looking designs. "This is an Egyptian chest piece, made of electrum and inlaid with lapis and carnelian, stolen from the tomb of Seti the First—bought it off a professional grave robber on the Ivory Coast. This is a coyote skull inlaid with copper and turquoise containing the spirit of a mad shaman from one of the Native tribes of the New World." The skull was a beautiful atrocity of marbled brownish bone decorated with gaudy strips of beaten copper and seemingly randomly placed blue stones. Jack gave it a fond look, as if it were an old friend.
"No one knew his real name, so I just call him Ted. This tin contains teónanácatl, this one hashish, and this one a particularly strong variety of hemp bud, all used for vaguely questionable medicinal purposes in various parts of the world." He gestured to three dented syrup tins, but did not take them out. "The thing wrapped in paper at the bottom is a cake of opium, for which the same applies. The rum bottle there does not contain rum, but laudanum—you use it to drug people."
"Why do you have all that?" she wanted to know.
"Well, aside from the obvious purpose of drugging some bugger you need out of your way for a few hours, they're worth a good deal in the right places, and if a crew member's badly injured, they'll be right grateful for the laudanum. Dulls pain, helps you sleep, that manner of thing."
"Is this worn on a necklace?" Elizabeth asked, pulling an ornately carved jade ring from the crate that looked far too large for her fingers or Jack's.
"Ah... probably something like that," Jack said in an odd voice, taking it from her and putting it with the rest before quickly continuing. "This—" he lifted out a heavy, ornate crown trimmed with fur that had seen better days, "—was the crown used at the coronation of King Henry the Sixth. This is filled with uncut diamonds from a mine in Africa."
"They don't look like any diamonds I've seen!" Elizabeth accused, opening the small sack he handed her. "And this one's yellow."
"Even more valuable, the yellow ones. This is a prayer bowl from the Han dynasty," he explained. "Bronze worked by some of the finest craftsmen to ever lay a hand to the metal."
"Will would probably be interested," she said, her eyes growing wistful as she sighed. "I want to be married to him more than I've ever wanted anything in the world."
"And this is a —" He froze mid-sentence. "More than anything in the world, you said?"
"Yes," Elizabeth replied, then, "What?" when she saw the expression on his face.
"If," Jack said, obviously choosing his phrasing with care, "There was something that could be used to get your true love back—other than souls, that is—would that then mean that the thing you wanted most in the world was, in fact, the thing which would bring Will back into your loving arms all the quicker?" Elizabeth gave him a funny look.
"I suppose," she said slowly, and then was surprised when Jack quickly dumped the items back in the crate with more haste than caution and started rummaging around frantically in his clothing. "Jack?" He merely held up a hand before returning to his search and finally producing the compass, which he handed to her.
She took a step back.
"I'm not touching that! It was in your pants!"
"Was not," Jack argued.
"It was! You just took it out of your pants!"
"Lizzie… it was in a pocket, just take it, would you?" he pleaded. She reluctantly allowed him to put the compass in her hands.
"I've not been able to get it work meself lately, but you..."
"If it won't work for you, why should it work for me?" Elizabeth asked, confused. "Isn't it broken, anyway? It's not pointing north." She held the compass up questioningly.
Jack opened his mouth to speak, then froze as they both heard the sound of hastily muffled laughter. Both heads turned in the direction of the hatch. Jack gave a quiet sigh of aggravation, strode to the hatch, and flung it open, knocking Pintel, Ragetti, and a tall, bearded black man who Elizabeth didn't recognize backwards.
Jack rolled his eyes and turned to look over his shoulder at Elizabeth. "So what do you say?" he asked her pointedly. "Do you think you can use the compass to find something that may help us save Will?" The three eavesdroppers looked sheepish.
"Well, what ever did they think we were—" Elizabeth began, then blushed and gasped. "Of all the dirty-minded… disgusting… perverted…" she muttered angrily and stormed out of the captain's cabin, dropping the compass on the table as she went. "Bloody pirates!"
"'Ey, Poppet, yeh left yer boots in there," Pintel called after her with a snigger, but she didn't turn around.