DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Disney. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. Come on, if it were mine, do you honestly think we would have gotten all the way through the movie without ever seeing Jack shirtless?
Posted by: Elspeth (AKA Elspethdixon).
Author's Notes: Well, now I've seen PotC for a second time, so I can no longer blame any mistakes or poor characterization on lack familiarity. I'd still appreciate being told about any, though.
Ships: Will/Elizabeth, Jack/Elizabeth, eventual Jack/Will, eventual Norrington/OC. Probably a bit of unrequited Norrington/Elizabeth as well.
Warning: This story contains killing, stealing, lots of angst, an OC, and a non-evil Norrington. Sadly, it probably will not contain any hot, steamy sex scenes.
Chapter Ten: In Which Everyone But Norrington is Unhappy.
"Perhaps he's in some deep ocean drownèd,
or maybe on some battlefield slain.
Perhaps he's taken some fair girl to marry
and his face you'll never see again."
"My true love, he may be drownèd
or on some battlefield slain.
If he's taken some pretty girl to marry
I'll love the girl that marries him."
The effort of holding the Black Pearl's wheel in place against the weight of the water on the rudder made Anamaria's not-quite-healed collarbone ache, but she refused to let anyone else take the helm. Normally, Jack would have been the one steering her, bragging arrogantly about how his genius had gotten them clean away, how he'd had the whole thing planned out hours in advance--though she knew damn well that he pulled a good half of his schemes out of that battered hat of his at the last minute--and how the navy should have know better than to mess with "Captain Jack Sparrow." Then he'd have grinned ingratiatingly at her and added that victorious pirate captains deserved a drink, and would she be a love and go and fetch him one. And she'd have hit him. Or possibly fetched a bottle of rum and thrown it at him. Except that this time, he wasn't about to throw things at.
In those first few moments after the Pearl's crew had fired that last, desperate broadside and begun cutting themselves free of the Endeavour, no one had realized that the entire crew wasn't aboard. It was only later, after they had hacked through the ropes holding them close by the other ship with boarding axes, unfurled every last shred of sail to catch the stiff offshore breeze from Jamaica, and beaten the last of the sailors and marines now trapped aboard the Pearl into a defeated little huddle, that everyone noticed who was missing. Hopkins, Tearlach, Matelot. Will Turner. Jack.
Hopkins had been killed by a broadside; Matelot, skewered by a marine's saber. Tearlach had been thrown overboard in the struggle and had been crushed when the ships' hulls had ground together. Jack and Will were simply gone.
"Last I saw Blacksmith an' the Cap'n was over on the navy ship," McTaggart had said. He had been staring down dejectedly at the deck as he spoke, too miserable to look her in the eyes. "If I'd know they were still there…" he couldn't finish the sentence.
"You did fine, McTaggart," Anamaria had told him, trying to smile. "You kept to the code. Jack wouldn't have wanted us to wait around for him. We'd never have gotten away if we had." It was true; the Endeavour's rigging had been too damaged for her to catch the fleeing Pearl once she had a head start, but any delay would have lost them that advantage. Going back now would be throwing it away entirely. Still, the truth had done little to reassure McTaggart and nothing at all to quell the misery in Anamaria's heart.
The Endeavour and Jamaica were dwindling away on the western horizon now, and there was nothing to prevent the Black Pearl from reaching Tortuga in safety, though they would have to set men to working double shifts on the pumps the entire way. Normally, everyone would have been jubilant, smug at having slipped away from those superior navy bastards, though doing so had cost them a third of the Pearl's guns and several pieces of her hull. Instead, the ship felt as if she were once more under a curse.
She even looked a little like she had back then, with holes torn in her sails and knocked through her sides, and her rigging mangled. There was a sad, defeated feel to her, and deep inside Anamaria, the remnants of a little girl who had worked in the cane fields in Haiti and offered rum and tobacco to the loa to help her escape, and feathers and chicken blood to the guédé to punish the French overseers, wondered if perhaps the absence of the Black Pearl's captain had had as much to do with her former decay as the curse had. Without him, she was a ghost ship again.
Anamaria wrapped the fingers of her left hand a little more tightly around the spoke she was gripping and let go with her right hand for a moment to flex her sore shoulder. She was going to have to turn the helm over to Gibbs in a few minutes, but she didn't want to do it just yet. Standing here, with the polished wood of the Pearl's wheel in her hands, she almost felt as if Jack were beside her, hovering jealously as he tended to do whenever someone else handled his darling.
Standing here, she could almost pretend that Jack wasn't back on the Endeavour, either dead or in chains awaiting execution. He'd told her, one drunken night at Tortuga after Gibbs had announced that he wanted to die drunk, in bed with three beautiful women, at the age of ninety-eight, and she had confessed that she wanted to die rich and secure, owner of her own ship and her own home that no one could take away from her, that when his time came, he wanted to drown. To "sink down into the sea like yer fallin' into the arms of a beautiful woman an' never come out." Those first weeks after that thing with Barbossa, Jack had gone decidedly creepy on occasion. Especially at night.
Creepy or not, he didn't want to hang, and it made something inside her bleed to sail off and leave him to the noose.
"Sparrow, you bastard," she whispered, blinking hard, "when I told you to give me a ship, I didn't mean this one."
^_~
The first thing Jack became aware of was the crushing, debilitating pain in his head, boring viciously away at the base of his skull. The second thing was the fact that he wasn't aboard the Black Pearl, but on something larger, that swayed and rocked to a different rhythm. Awareness of the shackles on his wrists came as a final and distant third.
He drew one hand up to prod at his aching skull, and the other followed with it, linked to it by a short length of clinking chain. Lovely. At least they'd had the decency to chain his hands in front of him.
He dragged his eyes open to be confronted with nothing but darkness, and it was only the smell of mildewed canvass and damp rope--plus a faint whiff of bilgewater--that told him he had to be in somewhere in the ship's orlop, probably in a store room. All right. Why was he chained up in the orlop?
His abused brain belatedly provided an explanation in the form of a hazy memory of Commodore Norrington's sword hilt swinging toward his face, and a touch of the swelling bruise on his forehead--which produced a dull pulse of pain though his temple and eye socket--confirmed it. They'd been fighting a ship of the line, right? Scattered recollections of smoke and blood and the boom of ships' guns seemed to support this. They'd been fighting Norrington's ship, and Will had…
"Will!"
Jack sat up so quickly that the darkness tilted around him, then promptly fell back down onto the damp deck planking as the bones of his skull did their best to slid apart. The ghosts of a thousand hangovers rose from their graves to hammer on the inside of his head.
"Oh, God," he moaned, fighting the impulse to throw up. Okay, sitting up was bad. Moving was bad. Breathing was bad. What in nine hells had Norrington hit him with?
A sword hilt, the hammer-wielding ghosts reminded him. A sword hilt apparently made of solid lead.
Will. There was something wrong with Will, he reminded himself. What was wrong with Will?
Then, with a sinking, hollow feeling building in the pit of his stomach, he remembered. In place of the empty darkness he once again saw Will wavering and falling backwards off the navy ship's rail, there and then gone. If he were lucky, his lungs would have filled with water before the sharks noticed him. If he were lucky, being dead was better than being undead, peaceful and welcoming instead of empty and devoid of sensation. Maybe Bootstrap would be there, and the two of them could commiserate over the fact that Jack had gotten both of them killed.
Will was dead. It was a painful thought, edged with razor-sharp little daggers of pain (though maybe that was just the headache), and on the heels of it came the realization that he had promised Elizabeth that he would bring Will home to her within the month. It wouldn't be the first promise he had broken, but it was one of the first ones he'd ever sincerely intended to keep.
Elizabeth was going to be very, very angry at him, he decided muzzily. She would probably slap him. Will would probably have been angry at him too, for dragging him into this, but the dead didn't get angry. Except that he'd recently learned that they did, hadn't he?
Deciding that his head hurt too much to think about it, Jack rolled gingerly onto his side, resting his back against the bulkhead and pillowing his aching head on his chained-together arms. His right sleeve was stiff with blood, mostly dry but still slightly sticky, and the thick, metallic smell of it brought back the nausea that had never completely gone away. Hopkins' blood. Mustn't think about Hopkins, and the way his headless body had flopped on the deck like a landed fish, spraying blood everywhere. If he thought about that, he really would be sick, and Captain Jack Sparrow was never sick.
The orlop might not have been the Pearl's orlop, but it was still inside a ship, and said ship was swaying gently, which probably meant that she wasn't making much headway, but also made for a very comforting rhythm. Thinking hurt, and he wasn't going anywhere in the near future, so Jack closed his eyes and went to sleep, hoping that the memory of Will Turner disappearing over the rail would not follow him there.
^_~
Once again, Norrington had been forced to stand on the Endeavor's quarterdeck and watch the Black Pearl vanish into the distance, uncaught and mocking him with her continued freedom. This time, they couldn't even attempt to pursue her. The Endeavour's bowsprit had been shot away, and there was a crack in the foremast so large that he feared the whole thing would be carried away if they dared to stretch a sail on it. The only thing to do was to limp back into Port Royal for repairs. At least they wouldn't be going back empty handed.
The Pearl might have gotten away, but her amazingly obnoxious captain was securely shut in the Endeavour's orlop with a marine sentry standing guard outside the door. Sparrow's ship and crew might have escaped, but he himself was going to dance the hempen jig in Port Royal, as he should have seven months ago. There would be justice for Mrs. Swann's murdered husband, as well as for an unknown but doubtless vast number of others, and there would be one less pirate in the Caribbean to plague British shipping.
Norrington had finally accomplished something that had been a personal goal of his for some time; he had caught "Captain" Jack Sparrow. That in itself was nearly enough to make the damage to the Endeavour worth it. He hadn't caught Turner, though a brief glimpse of him dueling atop one of the boarding planks during the fight had confirmed his suspicions that the boy had joined Sparrow, but he wasn't quite as unhappy as he probably should have been about that. Returning to Port Royal would not have been nearly as enjoyable if he had had to announce to Elizabeth the moment he arrived in port that he intended to hang her husband.
Instead, he would simply have to tell her that her husband was now very much persona non grata in Jamaica, and that he probably wouldn't be coming back any time soon. That wouldn't exactly be fun either, but at least he wouldn't have to face Elizabeth every day for the rest of their lives with her husband's death--deserved or not--on his hands.
Once the Black Pearl had vanished from the horizon and the jury-rigged repairs to the Endeavour were well underway, and the necessary report to the Admiralty written (plus an extra copy for Governor Swann, out of courtesy), Norrington decided it was time to look in on his prisoner.
When he stepped through the entrance of the orlop, accompanied by two more marines and by the midshipman Billings, who bore a candle in one hand, Sparrow was half-curled against the far bulkhead, either unconscious or feigning sleep. He looked a lot smaller huddled on the deck planks than he had during the fight, Norrington noted.
Mr. Billings strode across the orlop and fetched Sparrow a violent kick in the ribs, eliciting a sort of grunting moan from the man. He stirred, bringing his shackled arms up as a shield, and Norrington was across the room in two steps, grabbing Billings by the elbow and hauling him back.
"Mr. Billings," he barked, "you are an officer in His Majesty's navy, and British naval officers to not strike prisoners, no matter how much they may deserve it. Nor do they kick them."
"I always said you were an honourable man, Commodore," Sparrow announced, somewhat groggily. He blinked several times at the candle in Billings' hand, eyes slowly focusing on the pair of officers. In the dim candlelight he looked like some form of spectre, face hollowed out by the flickering shadows while glimmers of light caught in the beads and trash he wore in his hair. There was a large bruise on his forehead, already darkening and spreading down into what was going to be a spectacular black eye.
"On your feet, Mr. Sparrow, if you please," Norrington ordered.
"I think I like it here better." One hand indicated the floor around him, the gesture made unusually understated by the shackles that limited his movement. "It's nice an' comfy here."
"Let me rephrase that," Norrington said tightly, fighting irritation. "Get up. Now. That is not a request."
"Can't I just not, and we can pretend like I have?" Sparrow's voice was laced with false plaintiveness, like a man pleading for a favour. "If I get up, I'm goin' to be sick, savvy?"
Norrington's battle against irritation, which had been going poorly to begin with, was lost. "Stop malingering and stand up, you wretch," he snapped. "I didn't hit you that hard."
Sparrow levered himself to a sitting position with his arms and rested a hand against the wall to pull himself upright. Once on his feet he stood swaying for a moment, then fell heavily to his knees and threw up.
He might have been concussed, but his aim was perfect. The contents of his stomach landed squarely on Norrington's polished black boots.
Norrington jumped back--too late, unfortunately--and tried to repress a strangled sound of disgust. He didn't quite succeed. "Sparrow," he announced, keeping his voice even with a supreme effort of will, "I hate you. I have hated you since the first moment I met you, and will continue to do so until that happy hour when the noose finally closes about your grimy, verminous neck."
"I did warn you, you know," Sparrow mumbled, still on his knees. The comment was followed by something inaudible but almost certainly uncomplimentary. Norrington felt vaguely guilty, for some odd reason. Perhaps he had hit the man a bit harder than he had intended. His anger must have gotten the better of him. He chose to ignore the insolent remark, and laid a warning hand on Billings' shoulder as the midshipman prepared to kick Sparrow again. The lad subsided, somewhat guiltily.
"I may have misjudged the force of my blow," Norrington admitted. "You may remain seated."
"Misjudged my-" Sparrow cut the phrase off and sagged back against the bulkhead, legs bent in front of him. He rested his manacled arms on his knees and regarded Norrington over them. "What do you want?" he asked, sounding considerably more subdued than usual, almost bored. "Come to drag me on deck and hoist me up on a yard arm for a short drop an' a sudden stop?"
"You'll hang in Port Royal," Norrington told him, taking a certain amount of pleasure in pronouncing the words, though he knew it was unworthy of him. "After a trial. I mean to see justice done for Mrs. Swann's husband."
"It's Mrs. Turner now," Sparrow said tiredly, as if to a dull child, "and I never knew you liked him all that much."
"Not Turner," Norrington half-snapped, exasperation washing away any of the remorse he might have felt over injuring the man. "If he chooses to throw his future away dashing about after you, that's his own fault. Robert Swann. The man you killed aboard the Golden Dolphin."
Sparrow blinked at him. "Who?" He shook his head, then winced. "I've killed a lot of people. I'm an evil pirate, remember. My head hurts," he added. "Go away." He leaned his head back against the boards behind him and closed his eyes, the opened them again. "Wait a minute, Swann?"
"The Governor's nephew," Norrington informed him icily. He beckoned to Mr. Billings and the two marines, who had spent the past few minutes standing casually by the door, exuding menace. This conversation had not been nearly as satisfying as he had expected. Nothing involving Sparrow ever went right. The man was a walking curse. "There shall be no pardons or last minute rescues this time, Mr. Sparrow," he informed him. "You picked the wrong victim to murder." He left then, taking the candle with him and laving Sparrow behind in the dark, to contemplate his fate.
^_~
Orlop: The lowest deck on a four-deck ship, directly over the hold, generally dived up into storerooms and such. The midshipmen's quarters were also frequently located down there.
Foremast: On a three-masted ship, the mast farthest forward (hence the name).
Next up, Chapter Eleven: In Which Elizabeth Goes for a Walk on the Strand.
Anamaria is guilt-stricken and miserable, Jack is concussed and miserable, and somewhere offscreen, Will is wet and miserable. Unless he truly has joined his father on the ocean floor, in which case he's simply wet and dead. Will things ever improve for our beleaguered heroes? Stay tuned for another thrillingly melodramatic chapter of "As the Caribbean Turns."
Thank you to all my reviewers!
Jenni: Thank you! Chapter Eleven should be out in a couple of days, but later updates may be sporadic (I'm going to Ireland for four months, and don't know what my internet access will be like).
Jehan's Muse: Thank you! Norrington gets to feel bad later. At the moment, his luck is in. As for poor Hopkins--I actually do feel sort of bad about decapitating him with a piece of roundshot, but it just seemed to happen. I plan to resurrect him in an original story of mine later, along with his partner-in-crime McTaggart.
Mirth: Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying the storyline and that my characterization is coming across as fairly decent. Sadly, my updating speed is going to take a major hit after this chapter, as I'm about to leave to spend a semester at the University of Cork, and must wait to have my laptop shipped to me (also, I've no clue what my internet access will be like or even if I'll have any).
ballerina-on-fire: Thank you! I loved shirtless!Jack as well. That was sort of the entire purpose of the second half of that chapter--me typing and drooling. Thanks for the pointers as well (so Johnny Depp isn't married? There's still hope!!! I assumed kids=married). Sadly, I'll be overseas when the Mexico movie comes out.
EnglishMystic & Seph: Thank you! Well, here's the next update, though I realize it assuages none of y'all's worries about Will. I'll try to get chapter eleven out before I leave for Ireland and take care of that plot thread. * grins* No, I didn't make the nautical terms up--I got them all from my extensive reading of historical fiction. I think there may be a few anachronisms in there, but hey, the movie had tons of them.
Shellie Rae: Thank you! Ah, chapter four--that would be the one written at Virginia Beach under the influence of far too much Jimmy Buffet music. I had fun with that one. The earrings idea just sort of sprang out of nowhere.