Elizabeth watched the crewmen around her with some wariness as she went through the duties she was trained for, largely pulling buckets of seawater up and swabbing the deck, but she found herself mostly ignored as she was put to work. The task was numbing to the mind and hard on her knees, but she was surrounded by sea and sky and there was little else to comment on. Pintel and Ragetti were near enough, also scrubbing sea water into the boards and muttering and laughing to each other as they entertained each other with their antics. As she studied them from the corner of her eye, the monsters that had stolen her from the governor's mansion continued to fall apart and reveal two men of easy, if a bit simple, manner. Their behavior was rough and their language vulgar to her ear, but there was a sort of softness to them that many of the cursed crew seemed to lack. They were still pirates, and certainly dangerous, but Elizabeth found that her fear had long since faded as they toiled under the same sun.
Bosun was a different tale, with his eyes dark and dangerous as they surveyed her. It seemed to her that he frequently knocked her bucket or turned his lip up in a sneer when her eye wandered from the boards beneath her, but he didn't further act against her even when Barbossa had gone to his quarters to rest for the first time since she'd been stolen from Port Royal. It had been a sting to her trained manners to realize that she'd committed her own theft, barring Barbossa from his quarters, but it was forgivable against his crimes as far as she could determine. If God and Will could forgive her for stealing his name as hers, the word was certainly made of greys rather than stark black and white.
She hadn't survived so long without some trust in herself and brashness to cover her deficits, so it was with self-assurance that Elizabeth allowed her brush to let her wander closer towards the pirate she'd so recently chastised before their captain.
"How did you come to the service of the captain?" was the first question that escaped her lips and, judging by the identical looks of shock and confusion that graced both Ragetti and Pintel's faces, it was an inquiry that was unanticipated. Or, Elizabeth reasoned in the moment of silence that followed, it was more unlikely that they'd expected her to speak at all.
"Met him years ago, we did," Ragetti said at last after Pintel failed to do more than peer at Elizabeth with doubt. "Took us on as crewman on the Cobra. 'E saved ma life half a 'hundred times, I reckon."
"Repaid that debt, we did, when we pulled 'im from the sea," Pintel added, voice low and eyes furtive as he glanced about the deck as if expecting the captain to appear and reprimand him for speaking of such ancient truths. "When the Cobra was sunk, it was us that grabbed 'im. It was us that spoke 'fore the pirate lords, and the captain's been a good man to remember as much."
"So that's why you sided with him against Sparrow?"
That had been a foolish question. Elizabeth knew that as soon as the words had been spoken, and the realization was reinforced when Pintel and Ragetti both took a sharp intake of breath, hissing as if burned by the mere mention of the mutiny. Ragetti, the stronger coward of the two, seemed to entirely collapse on himself at the inquiry, but Pintel's shoulders were squared as his downcast eyes threatened to burn a hole in the boards beneath him.
"And cursed for it, too. Acting against the Code always promised trouble, but nothing like this," he muttered before a vicious sort of smile spread across his lips, making him more closely resemble the monster that had stolen her away. "No more trouble like that, now. Not since Bootstrap Bill. Cap'n tell ya what was done to him, has he? See, Bootstrap was Jack's man, called hisself honorable."
"Stupid blighter," Ragetti murmured, scrubbing at the boards with a new fervor as Pintel told the grim tale.
"Didn't agree with what we done to Jack, said we deserved to be cursed for it, and remain cursed. So he took a piece of the treasure, sent it to his boy. That didn't sit well with the cap'n, of course. So what 'e did was strap a cannon to Bootstraps' bootstraps. Last we saw him, he was sinking to the black oblivion."
Barbossa's words of the curse flitted to the surface of her thoughts and Elizabeth shivered.
To starve will kill a man, aye, but we don't truly starve. Just as we thirst, but never die of it.
To drown would kill a man, so would he still be awake, alive somewhere beneath the waves after all this time? Surrounding by the crushing pressure of it, unable to move or breath or sleep but unable to die was fearful enough that even Elizabeth couldn't resist the despair that reached her. Will's father—a man who'd according to what she'd heard been at least half-decent a man—couldn't have done ill enough to deserve such a fate in a dozen lifetimes. That he'd earned such punishment for speaking against a mutiny…
Barbossa had told Elizabeth truly that he walked a fine line with the crew. If they'd stayed cursed so long, unable to give up Bootstraps' blood thanks to their captain's punishment, it was neither a surprise nor was it an undeserved hardship.
With her eyes drifting towards the closed door of the captain's quarters, it was Elizabeth's only hope that the captain's temper had been settled some by the years he'd weathered since banishing Bootstrap to the depths. Her freedom, and now Will's as well, depended on it.
When Barbossa emerged from his quarters, Bosun had regrettably accepted the quality of her work and shifted her to the charge of Jacoby. While it was a change that might have been welcome enough to Elizabeth, it was all well and good that the captain's heart was already dead or it might have missed a beat to see the girl clinging to the rigging at the mainmast just beneath the topsail.
When Barbossa finally managed to tear his eyes from the girl's frame, it was only to be met with surprise at Bosun's frown. For the man to be frowning wasn't unusual, but it was strange to see him frown without malice or menace and, if Barbossa wasn't blind as well as dead, it might have been a queer sort of confusion in Bosun's eyes.
"She took to the rigging well enough, then?" It was a request for information, but not sharp enough to pull Bosun's eyes to his captain's face. Barbossa wondered for a moment how long it had been since he'd last spoken to Bosun without threat or anger.
"The girl has an odd knowledge. Can't secure a line for her skin but knows a ship well enough. It's a shame she feels safe to speak. I've her in the rigging to keep her voice out of my ear." The report was polite enough that Barbossa actually laughed to hear it.
"And did Jacoby deserve such a treatment?" The man isn't who Barbossa would have first offered as a tutor to the lass—in fact, he might have preferred to keep the grenadier as far from the girl as the ship could allow—but the enmity between Bosun and the spitfire that was Jacoby was well known to all aboard the Pearl, largely due to a difference in opinion on how they preferred to butcher brave men. Jacoby, with his short sword arm, never could forgive Bosun's preferential treatment to those who cut down their opponents and Bosun, with his distaste for wasting words, never communicated that using explosives to kill every man was a shameful waste of good powder when a sword or axe did the job just as well.
"Aye, sir." And now there was amusement in the undertones of that deep voice and Bosun, with having so little cause to practice hiding such a thing couldn't disguise the first touches of humor he'd felt in days uncounted. Barbossa heard it with a smirk, and the shift in the air between them was enough to pull Bosun's eyes from Elizabeth's graceless climb on the ropes. "You intend to keep her on?"
"I've a mind to if the men can behave well enough. I'll wash me hands of the lad soon as the curse is broken, but the girl intends to steal herself from him."
"If the boy knows—" The risk was real that, if Will Turner knew his wife was so quick to leave him, the boy would cease to behave so meekly. At the day's end, though, the whelp was already locked in the brig with little hope for escape save to trust in his love's word. The curse would be broken and Turner would be in the wind, bereft of his beloved but with his life. As far as the Black Pearl and her crew were concerned, that was more than any man could hope for after such an encounter.
"If the whelp begins to strain 'gainst his chains, his life is forfeit as is her safety. I trust the young Mrs. Turner to act towards her own interest, and she knows the particulars of our accord well… Keep a man on her when she's brought below to the lad to be sure but take care to think of what life ye'll live after his blood is spilt."
Bosun nodded and turned away from Barbossa to make his way towards the stern to assess the progress of Ragetti and Pintel as they seemed to have forgotten that there were other decks to tend to. Letting the man leave without another word, Barbossa let his feet carry him to the upper deck, standing beside Twigg at the helm and staring at the brightness of the sun off the sea. It was easy to let his eyes wander towards where Elizabeth still scurried within the rigging from his post, and if Twigg thought the smile parting his lips was from the thought of the curse, soon to be broken, that was all the same to him.
Days away, Mr. Gibbs scowled to follow the course Jack had set for them, without even the use of his compass. The Interceptor was certainly a fine ship, one of the gems the Royal Navy had carefully polished, but Jack was a poor commodore to command a ship without being aboard. In the two scant days since they'd set from Tortuga with only vague direction and vaguer orders of be there, but not too soon or too late, Gibbs felt ill-prepared to keep the ship to task. He felt ill prepared to keep Annamaria—blast the woman that she was, skilled navigator or not—on track to carry out Jack's orders, especially with so uncommitted a crew. It was a dangerous thing to take on a wholly new crew from any port, especially one the likes of Tortuga. Men that were without common cause or purpose rarely worked together and Gibbs, loyal as he may be, was hard pressed to provide a motive capable of rallying the crew.
Still, the crew was new yet. Untested and unattached, mutiny was unlikely until inaction spurred impatience and irritation. While their aim wasn't known—and wasn't that another thorn in every man's side, Gibbs included—they had a heading and would sail towards that point till lack of riches inspired the braver men to complain against their absent captain.
"Best of luck to us both, cap'n," Gibbs murmured to himself, standing with little hope for aid on the quarterdeck of the Navy ship. With a deep swallow from his flask, Gibbs sent a silent prayer that Jack was meting better success and luck than he.
Days further still, Jack, sitting mulishly in the brig of the Dauntless, couldn't hear his first mate's prayer over the bustle of the tightly run crew, but the light wasn't extinguished from his eyes just yet despite the commodore's neglect.
The game had been set, but the match was not yet begun, not truly. The game wouldn't truly begin until the dread isle was in sight, and the Black Pearl once again within his grasp.
Posted 14:21, 7.25.22