RED SKY
The seas had been calm leading up to Port Royal, so deathly calm.
Elizabeth had spent most of time out, and on decks, in the warm sunlight and the cool evenings. Jack had been through enough, and she wanted to offer him the privacy of the captain's quarters to sort things out on his own accord. However, the captain preferred to sulk in the bowels of the sloop. So long as Elizabeth stayed up top, she wouldn't have to face him, to face what she'd done to Jack.
Somehow, she felt closer to Barbossa than the woman could have ever imagined. When he had called her up to the ship's wheel, Elizabeth went obediently and curiously. The man had stood there, for a moment, comparing Jack's compass to their bearings, keeping an eye on just where the magically enhanced needle pointed. It took a moment for Barbossa to even acknowledge the woman he had summoned to his side. Elizabeth had sighed and almost walked away entirely.
However, it was at that moment, that Barbossa glanced to Gibbs. "Keep the headin'. Should put us to port by nightfall." The captain looked to Elizabeth. "Would ye join me, Miss Swann, for supper?"
"I do not think that would be too proper," the woman breathed, turning and staring off the port rail.
Barbossa drew close, dropping his voice so very low that even Elizabeth had trouble hearing him. "We need t' talk, ye and I." Her eyes went wide, but the woman just held herself in place, not wanting to tip her hand to the rest of the crew. "Y'know what about." She looked to him fearfully for a moment. "In private."
Elizabeth followed him down and into the captain's quarters. They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Barbossa let out a sigh and studied the charts laid out upon the desk there. He took a ruler and marked their course to Port Royal and their progress based off of the compass's bearings. Elizabeth wrung her hands as she waited for the captain to finally address her. He let out a heavy sigh, closed the compass and put up his tools.
"Miss Swann, our guest is gettin' a bit... restless," the man breathed.
Elizabeth made damned sure the newly fixed door was soundly locked and thanked her fiance mentally for fixing the hinges. "I am very aware of that."
"What d'ye plan t' do should he remember?" the captain asked pointedly.
The woman began to absently read the titles of all the books and journals upon the shelves flanking the door way. "I had not yet decided upon that." She turned and looked accusingly to Barbossa. "And I don't think it is any of your business, for that matter."
"I am none too keen on him lurking down in the dark." The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "He's back from the dead, but I d'nay think he's all back. I don't like it one bit."
"Jack can do as he pleases," Elizabeth replied before reasserting, "It's his business, and his alone."
"It is," Barbossa flatly argued. "It's always my business when it affects m'crew."
Elizabeth shook her head. "Jack's not your crew, and he'll never be."
"Aye," the captain admitted. "But ye and yer fiance are."
Those words were upon her mind as soon as the tiny speck of Port Royal dawned on the horizon. She looked to Will, standing at Barbossa's side at the wheel. They had fallen so quickly into line under the man they had sworn to destroy not too terribly long ago. How could she have turned her back so swiftly on Jack?
No wonder he hid in the dark of the ship.
"Cap'n! Ships ho!" the man at the crow's nest cried out.
Barbossa peered through his spy glass, looking upon the horizon. Sure enough, that damned brigantine that had been tailing them, was out there. She lay moored off to the side of those cliffs. Barbossa gave a slight nod to the hanged pirates strung out there before glancing beyond them and trying to catch sight of the name of that ship. The Herald Mark. If he did anything, he'd make sure to sink the brigantine if it was the last thing he did before Hel reclaimed her contract.
Cannon fire sounded from the brigantine with puffs of smoke. Barbossa watched, following the line of the fire to the second ship, deeper in the cove. The Flying Dutchman.
He looked to Will. "Ready the men."
"ALL HANDS!"
xxxx
Jack had rather been enjoying the weight of the woman upon him when Will's voice cracked through the ship. The men rushed about, their feet pounding on the decks overhead. He listened intently to the familiar sounds of cannons being readied, portholes opened, and the gun gallery manned. It felt like it had been ages since he'd been with a woman, but it also felt like it'd been ages since Jack had been involved in a good battle. It distracted him.
The cannon retorts from so far away were distinctive. Every cannon gallery and firing crew had their own styles and timing, giving each ship it's own, unique sound. Jack, having been on the receiving end of so much cannon fire, had grown quite accustomed to the acoustic identity of each gunnery crew. One set was new, completely different than anything he'd ever heard. The other set could be none other than the crew of the Flying Dutchman, after hundreds of years of practice having grown to be the most skilled and swift gunners ever to sail the Caribbean.
"Are ye ready, love? Are ye ready to face all hell." The mask turned to one side, like an animal cocking its head to one side curiously. Jack just grinned from ear to ear. "Davy Jones is knockin' on our door."
Sygne returned her steady gaze to the pirate beneath her. "I have been ready."
"Aye, but do you have the courage and fortitude to follow yer orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?" He chuckled. "To stay true in the face of the mouth of Hell its self?"
"I serve Hel," she quipped. "And Hel is far more merciful than I."
The warrior rolled off of him and began up, to the steps; Jack stopped her by calling out. "What do ye plan to do?"
"My plan..." The warrior looked down under her golden mask as the cannons boomed in the gallery overhead, shooting off the first warning shots. She drew her spear, the long, golden weapon, from where the woman had been concealed for so long. "My plan is to reclaim the heart of Davy Jones for my lady, Hel, just as I have been instructed by her holiness."
And, with that, Sygne rushed up the steps, with Jack hot on her heels. He chased her, just out of reach of her long tresses of ebony fur. She moved so swiftly, so elegantly. Jack laughed as her chased her amid the chaos of the gun gallery. He could almost reach out and grab her spear.
"I gotcha!"
She tucked up and leapt up, like a cat, grabbing hold of a stocky beam and swinging herself up upon it before launching herself out an open porthole. Her fur tucked out of sight as the warrior jerked hard to the left just outside.
"Spry bugger." Jack kept running, up the steps and to the main deck. "More 'an one way to skin a cat..."
He glanced about, this way and that, looking for her, searching for the warrior, however, she had disappeared. The crew hadn't seemed to notice anything. Not a thing. Jack hurled himself to the port side, to where Sygne had thrown herself out the narrow opening in the gun gallery, but the warrior had vanished.
"Where is she?" the pirate growled.
Elizabeth answered. "Who?"
"Sygne..." he barked back, still scouring the port side of El Cazador, looking for her.
The noblewoman sounded doubtful. "Jack... we left her behind..."
"No!" He screamed. "She was here. I saw 'er!"
"Jack!" Will cried out. "What's wrong?"
The pirate whirled around, and saw his friends, or, supposedly, his friends, standing there beside Barbossa. They seemed so at home there. And he, Jack Sparrow, he had become their undead prisoner. Their eyes, all of the eyes of the entire crew, fell upon him, accusingly and untrusting. They had betrayed him, all of them. And Sygne? Who knew where she'd gotten off to, who knew if she'd actually be there at all, for that matter.
Jack's head shook frantically. "No, no, no, no, no. She was here. I saw..."
The cannons fired again, off to other side. Jack glanced off to the starboard, to the brigantine as it swung about the rocks, returning fire.
"Look out!"
xxxx
"I've got to... I've got to..." Governor Swann panted.
After years of lethargy, his legs and muscles had atrophied terribly. His limbs burned from the effort to bolt down the narrow lanes and roads of Port Royal and make it to whomever needed his aid. A political life was never easy and especially not on the body. The body wasted away, in seemed, by a life of signing papers and overseeing port matters.
He rounded a corner and his eyes widened in horror as the sight came into view. A girl, trapped beneath a burning timber. Trapped beneath beneath the heavy foot of a man. No, not a man. It took a few moments for Governor Swann's mind to make sense of a cobbled shapes making up this creature of the deep. And, once his brain understood, Swann almost wished he hadn't tried so hard to figure out what the devil this beast was.
"Demon..."
For that was the only word to describe it. The creature, a man, it seemed, leaned close and sneered in the girl's face, delighting in her torture. His teeth were jagged, uneven, and pointed. His head forked into a t-shape, that of a hammerhead shark. His eyes stared out from the ends of the "t," dark and liquid seeming spheres.
The beast leaned close. "Scream for me. Scream for Maccus, now."
Swann glanced around. There had to be something, anything, he could use as a weapon.This was a town, for Christ's sake. There were so many weapons there on any given day; there had to be one somewhere nearby. He ignored the snide chuckles of the beast, who had been entirely engrossed by the girl under his foot, and looked this way and that. There, propped against a stone wall, rested a large, long piece of firewood, perhaps three feet long, and stocky. He snatched it up and felt the weight of it.
The beast, Maccus, snared at the girl. "Cap'n's orders are fer no survivors." He raised his cutlass. "Sorry, love."
"NO!" Swann rushed him, swinging the club as hard as he could at the same time, striking Maccus hard on the side of his t-ed heard. He threw himself between the girl and the monster. "Not in my town!"
Maccus grit his shark like teeth. "Your town? Last I heard, this was the Cap'n's town!"
The beast rushed towards him, tucking his head down and swaying with it left and right as if a shark in the water. Swann stepped forward, remembering his fencing, dodging the lumbering man with a quick side-step. Maccus, with his great mass and complete lack of real weapon's training, could never recover and spin about fast enough to keep up with Swann. The governor gave another quick lash with his hefty club, catching Maccus on his left eye soundly.
Maccus stopped and swirled around, his left eye shut to keep the thin trickle of blood above his brow from running into that dark orb. "Y'jus' made the biggest mistake of yer miserable life!"