AUTHOR: shoneaugen
SUMMARY: It had never been Anamaria's intention to return the Black Pearl to Jack Sparrow.
Anamaria was the finest sailor in her family. Sea blood ran from father to son, or so it was said, but the sea had taken her only brother when she was too young to remember and it seemed right that the sea had given her his gift with the ocean in the place of his life. The sea, she learned, was like that; it stole, but it gave back as well.
Ships were another matter entirely.
It had been two days since she had turned the Black Pearl away from the the shipwreck-riddled shallows of the Isla de Muerta. For the last day and seven hours, there had been no wind and no sun. The Pearl's massive black sails hung slack and empty, the greyish sea was no longer distinguishable from the greyish skies, and somewhere from the rigging above Anamaria had heard Gibbs cursing her name and her sex for the better part of an hour.
A tug of breeze at her back made her look up, but the Pearl did not notice the wind. From below, there came a creaking sigh, mournful with the press of sea-swollen boards and tideless water.
Captain Jack Sparrow had believed wholeheartedly that the Black Pearl spoke to him, and he took great pains to speak back. She had lived and breathed under his hands, darting through straits and naval fleets alike with the wayward ease of a beckoning lover. She had gone where Jack Sparrow had guided her, had taken the winds along with her, and for that he had sung to her at night, stroked the splintered boards of her masts after fights. Anamaria had never believed in this coddling of a boat; a wind, after all, was a wind, and the finest ship in the world wouldn't change that.
Despite that, she softened her grasp on the deck's rail, smoothed one hand over the scarred wood, and closed her eyes. "To Tortuga, my pearl," she murmured, and the slap of a sudden wind in her face was almost a reproach -- enough to startle her into opening her eyes, too little to move the Pearl onward.
She lost her temper.
"You worthless lump of driftwood, you damned--" Her father had taught her never to swear at a ship or the sea for fear of what they might retaliate with; she paused, face burning with the sharp humiliation of submission to a boat. Anamaria turned and stalked over to the mainmast, kicking its base with a thump that made her heel ache. She wondered briefly if this was how the Black Pearl had driven Jack Sparrow mad, and turned toward the deck again.
"We go to Port Royal!" she said to what little crew she could see, and then had to shout it when the wind picked up with a roar that threatened to drown out her voice. "All hands! We go to Port Royal and Captain Jack Sparrow!"
The Black Pearl thrummed with the sudden activity within her holds; sails unfurling and snapping taut with the return of the wind, she started forward with a joyous creak toward the horizon ahead.