Last chapter!! This has been one of my favorite things to write, it's been fun and challenging and different, so thanks for giving me the opportunity to mess around with it. You all have made this happen with your reviews, comments, and encouragement. I hope you've been entertained! I actually have thought of turning this into a sort of three-part series, as there are two more characters in POTC I would love to be able to address as personally. Thank you again, so SO much!! This is dedicated to all of my dear readers, with much love and many grateful hugs.
Ch. 10. Morning in the Bayou.
They used to gather and mingle in the little cracks of time that had never got filled. The old ones, the ones men called 'gods', hardly comprehending anymore what they meant by the word. These were the heroes and histories, the dreams of children and the dread of the aged. Calypso remembered time out of mind when she had pulled Davy Jones into that world and then been pulled and irretrievably bound into his.
She had shared the ocean then. Nethuns had been there with laughter like a wreaking gale that broke the fragile earth they tread upon. There was the unseen one, He she had fed with offcasts of destruction… Aita, her first lover. And there had been Vanth, choosing her servants from among the children of men, Calypso's slithering half-sister, the only one she'd seen since the earth changed and the ships began taming the sea. Selvans, her long enemy, and Laran the wild one. The sky had been another color in those days—beasts had been fiercer and men (though few) had been stronger, emanating golden light in heat, clever and unafraid.
In secret moments to herself, Calypso believed that Jack had slipped through one of the last cracks of time from those days.
The others she could not speak to any longer. Where had they gone? Been buried and worn away, perhaps caught at last (like she) by lesser men, torn apart and sucked clean for their power? The earth had grown tired; the sea, complacent. There was so little left these days—so little beauty, so little courage. Calypso knew it wouldn't be long before the bayou too, (aye, even the Bayou) would be overrun and broken down. Its secrets would pitter out, the esoteric length of the river would be bent and reformed and the ships would keep coming.
Would she be there at the end, a withered old woman shrunk into the shadows, a relic of bygone days to puzzle new inhabitants? Would she escape somehow, escape her own labyrinth of despair to haunt new waters and scheme afresh? Or would her long and cautious plans tip destiny at the right moment and give her back her former realm?
Calypso fingered a sheer shred of gauze in her hands. She held it to her candle and watched it smolder and gleam, its peeling layers fast consumed until ashes blew hotly across the table where she sat. The hut was unbearably warm—set fire, in some way, by the cleansing fever that catapulted through Jack's blood after months of infection. These were the thoughts that spun tiredly in her head now, now that Jack looked toward the door with increasing determination. It wouldn't be long.
"Is it the fever what saps me strength and keeps me from escaping, or is it ye?" his mild gruffness belied the anger that grew day by day, hour by hour. He was fading without the sea. He was dissolving into his bitterness, allayed only by the breeze that pronounced a coming farewell.
Calypso said, "Revenge is de reward of de patient."
"Ye keep telling yerself that, Dalma."
The hateful zephyr tossed the curtains aside and ruffled Jack's shirt where he sat. Calypso slid two identical objects across the table. Jack's bloodshot eyes latched onto them, skeptical. "Dese are de bullets dat come out of yer chest, Jack. From yer pistol."
One of Jack's long fingers drummed on the wood absently. "Impossible, Dalma. There was one bullet in that pistol. Barbossa—"
"Knew ye didn't die easy and gave ye two," Calypso finished. She tossed him one of the bullets. "But I know dat he die easy so I only give ye one. And if ye must, kill him near de water."
"Who says I'm going to kill him?" Jack retorted, wondering that something so small could have nearly spelt his end. It struck him that the object was beautiful. It had such smooth, clean lines, such precise color.
"I say so. Ye don't want to make de mistake of becoming a good man, eh?"
Jack tilted his head back, licked his lips. "I am so very wicked, Dalma, if ye only knew…" that sinning sensuous mouth sent a quiver down Calypso's thighs. "Ye'd think twice about playin' me as ye do." He stood, pasting an indifferent face on the pain it caused him, and slunk toward her.
"Ah, Jack de Sparrow, Jack de Pirate…"
He deftly scoured her bare shoulders, the skin she had bathed and oiled for him. Familiar territory. "I don't know how I can both need ye and hate ye, Dalma," as he bent to her ankles, swept up her legs. He knew her so well. "Part of me wants to kill ye, part of me wants to worship ye."
"As it should be, Jack." Calypso was glad they were on the floor now, and not the bed. Glad that Jack would rather plunder her for the pleasure she provided than kill her for his own satisfaction. For kill her he could, she had decided—she was mortal with him, exposed.
"When I leave, things will never be the same," he said, his caresses turning harsh, brutal. His weight was on her now, fiercely. "I know what ye wanted from me, Dalma. But I'll never free ye now. How do ye like that for revenge? I'm Pirate Lord and I'll see ye bound another century."
They were moving together, Jack and Calypso and the subtle black eyes at the windows, the whole bayou in unison. They were all in the rhythm of violent lovemaking; unable to tell whether lust or survival drove them on, deeper in until their skin grew together like old tree bark.
"That's not what I wanted from ye, witty Jack," Calypso hated the words that cluttered her mouth, hated the breath she wasted that way. "Not what I wanted from de first." Their tongues wrestled a moment, their hearts struggled to keep up with their furious motion, "Wit ye, I never wanted to be goddess." She had wanted to be woman, human, at peace and free in the midst of all other circumstances… wanted his perilous beauty and bird-like soul to make captivity worthwhile. It hadn't. Nights in the bayou cloyed and stung with passion and yet they flitted away, leaving a wiser morning in their place.
"I know. I know ye Dalma," Jack breathed.
"Ye don't know, Jack, and ye never did."
"Neither of us is sorry, I think," he returned. The sun still hid in every curve and twist of his skin, even after months beneath the bayou's canopy. She had wiled away days braiding his hair, pretending alternately that he was her son and her husband, knowing he was nothing but her prisoner. But now the braids fell over her and smothered her, a choking vine. Twelve months to the night had passed since she fired the pistol.
Teague felt the habitual curl of muscles tighten in his back the further he leaned in, nearing the table and the spread of charts, sweat dribbling onto the scattered candles. The cove (well-nigh deserted this time of the year) clouded about him in ominous silence. He was thinking about Jack; thinking in a way he seldom allowed himself to think— rum and all. He'd heard nothing of the boy since Jack's dramatic exit more than a year hence… no hints or rumors of the treasure seekers, not when he'd listened to sailors at the cups, not when he'd paid an old curmudgeon to seek out word, not even when he'd sent two of his own men along the fabled path in search of them. Jack's precious Pearl still sailed, he knew now, but Jack did not.
"Fool lad," Teague said to the empty room for the twentieth time. "Were yer own fault if ye're dead." But remembering those challenging, demon-black eyes, Teague shuddered. A world with the boy Jack had felt wilder and more fascinating, the line between fantasy and reality skewed and nearly erased. Setting sail had always meant an adventure. Now life marched on doggedly, and flatly. The Misty Lady gathered algae and sat longer and longer in harbor. Teague had gotten old in the interim. He knew that in his patched over skin and the way his body clutched and staggered with new aches every morning.
"Fool lad," Teague kicked at the table leg and the candles leaked their wax across the old charts.
"Do ye blame him for yer bitterness, dear Captain?"
"I ain't Captain anymore," Teague said, taking care to pronounce the words so as not to sound drunk. "I'm keeper."
"Ah, yes," Earthy, sonorous laughter filled the room.
Teague suddenly recalled that the room had been empty before, and looked up. Calypso lounged with indolent ease against the doorframe, reeking of smoke and sex and the seducing mud of the bayou. She had grown since Teague last knew her; surety and riotous doom hung over her coffee-black skin. Younger, too, she seemed: energetically inhuman. His aches vanished, just looking at her. His back straightened and his heavy brows, so often stooped, drew back for a clearer view.
Calypso said, "Hello," and all her poise melted into the room.
Desperation, Teague thought, that's what was lurking behind her façade. "Calypso."
"Ye didn't answer my question, Teague," she said "Teague" instead of his given name, a slender barrier between their former dealings and the present.
Teague's fingers formed the shape of a minor chord against his thigh, out of habit. "It isn't seemly to speak of th' dead."
"Den we're well within bounds, cause Jack de Sparrow lives."
"Does he, now?" Teague betrayed not a flicker of emotion. He had learned long before not to trust a slant-eyed goddess on the hunt, nor a murky apparition come after too much drink.
"Aye, no thanks to me… or you."
"I raised 'im," Teague said hotly, forgetting his resolve. "I learned the boy everything I knew. It's all my doing he lived to see bread and life past that molding dock on Hispaniola."
"And drove him to him bargain with Jones, aye? Taught him dat life aint life without freedom, and taught him to make an idol out of him ship, till he sell his own soul for dis idea, freedom?"
Teague slumped, groped for a chair, sank into it. "Salt in me wounds, Calypso. Salt in me wounds. Did ye come to mock me, then?"
"No," she said softly. She hesitated for a moment. "I come to grieve wit ye. Cause alive or no, Jack is lost to both of us, Teague. He slipped through yer fingers and he's fast escapin' mine."
"Ye have him, then?" Teague suddenly looked every day of his sixty-eight years.
She nodded. "For a few more moments, perhaps." She slouched next to him in the chair, leaned her head on his shoulder. "He scorn me now, scorn my captivity, as ye once did."
Fingers went to an E chord. "Never scorned ye, Goddess. Simply couldn't set ye free, as ye wanted."
"Aye, he says the same." Her lips twisted wryly. "Though wit a bit more spirit."
Teague bristled a bit at that remark. "Ye'll find one, someday. Ye'll somehow get round our nets and escape. We've always known that."
"A risky way to live, eh?" her voice held no malice. "And who's to say I haven't found one already?"
He plucked one of her braids between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing the matted hair, feeling old desire. "It ain't yer time yet, love."
The spell cast by the birds found itself augmented by a dirge that morning—a dirge rising up from the stone-black faces of Calypso's subjects as they lurked, waist deep in the river, to see their savior's departure. Jack stood on the porch as the sun rose, obliviously polishing his pistol.
In the last moments Calypso was surprised to find herself struck by his purity—the youthful way his smile expanding to morning, the lighthearted gleam in his eyes. It was a strange kind of purity, she thought, an honest kind; unlike the cheap appeal of naïveté, Jack's was the purity of one who has journeyed long through many hells and come away with his soul intact. It would be a long time before she saw that truth embodied so completely in another human.
"I guess dis means goodbye, eh?"
Jack tilted his head, reminding her of that first day he had come tramping through the swamp with such captivating vigor. "For a very long time, I'm afraid." His grin deepened with threat. "I can't come back here, Dalma. Bad for me health, ye see."
"I suspected as much, though ye risk de wrath of a goddess."
He shook his head, a bit helpless, and turned his pistol (newly loaded) over and over in his hands. "I don't know how to say it. Feels like—"
"Destiny?"
He nodded slightly and stepped toward her, tracing the lines of her dusky skin. "Me first love will always be the sea."
"First… and only love?"
His black eyes glinted with restless, unsatisfied passions; adventures to be had; love to be found. His mouth tipped into an unknowable smile that Calypso found already faraway as the horizon. "That remains to be seen, doesn't it?"
A great frantic wind came through then, breaking the seclusion of the bayou and drenching everything with the smell of the sea. Jack let himself down the ladder, his breath coming quick and eager; heady. He was free.
Calypso watched him wade into the water, watched his muscles work, watched him forge a path through the river. She watched the way his back grew damp with effort and the way he put his hands on the trees as though saying goodbye. She watched his figure soften and evaporate into the morning. Aye, he was free now—free and gone.
The bayou shuffled and blinked, the water teemed up and chased after him. But Calypso nodded her head once to Old Man River, turned her back to the bayou, and went inside.
"That remains to be seen, doesn't it?" Yes, much remained to be seen. But for Calypso, the spell was broken. She knew with sudden glorious certainty she would escape. Watching Jack leave, she saw her own destiny. It would not be long. The day was coming—for all his promises he would be back, portending intrigue and danger, portending release. Calypso smiled to the bleached shells littering her table, smiled to the empty bed and the patient chipped mugs.
It was only a matter of time.
THE END.