Any Port In A Storm
Author's Note : ... And here I thought I was a slash writer. No, seriously guys; I didn't plan the story this way. Grace simply... happened, as did Jane - and now I have to see it through. Whatever they are, and why ever they chose to impose themselves upon Captain Jack Sparrow - a character that I dearly love, but hardly devised - I don't claim to understand, and may never know. All I know is that they're mine, and they have something to say, and this is simply where they chose to be. I owe it to them to see this thing through, know what I mean...? Anyway - fear not, for Will shall be back by the end of the chapter.
Chapter XII : Faded Shades of Grey
[ colloquial title :from lips that I had never kissed ]
******
Morning came in shades of grey.
The horizon of Donegal Bay lay as it had for a thousand years or more; the breakers churned and danced like lovers in the distance, shattering against the sheer, stern faces of the cliffs - faces that had seen the rise and fall of empires, the rise and set of a thousand suns.
Those cliffs had been red when last I'd seen them; timeless, luminous sentries beyond a burning bay, and I had loved them well. She'd told me the stories of this land, this sea - stories that had been passed down, mother to daughter, from an age that none can now recall. Her people had been here before the Christians, before the Romans; and when blood lives and breeds and thrives in a place, age after age as her blood had, the heart that cradles it beats in time with the heart of the land. She had been a part of this ancient, wild, windswept place; a piece of it's very heart and soul as surely as the cliffs, and the hills, and the sea, and her tales had come alive on a voice as wise and beautiful as the land and moment. She had been the Irish Dawn, incarnate - reds and golds and magic; old, silent magic.
But she was lost to me, now, and everything that she had been seemed gone from the world, in all of its incarnations. Dawn did not burst forth and bleed over the horizon, this morning, but rose silent and solemn in shades of grey behind a mourning veil of rain clouds. Grey the sky and grey the sea, grey the faces of the cliffs, and the worn, faded deck of the Sweet Jane, and my own worn, faded soul. There was no red, and no gold - not as I had seen them. The colors of sunrise had died with her, it seemed; somewhere on the hillside they lay dead and buried, marked now by only a cold grey tombstone.
I had not gone to her grave, and I never would. There was nothing for me there. No cold carved words could do justice to a life lived on the waves; the sea was her epitaph, and it should have been her grave as well. To lay her in the earth had been a sacrilege. I imaged her there, beneath the dirt, her silk pale fading to grey with passing of the years, the sunrise of her hair falling away to dust. For hours I sat, numb and motionless, as she rotted to ruin behind my eyes. When the rain came, I did not feel it. I let the sky cry down upon me, drench me with the tears that my own eyes would not, could not shed.
I never even heard her come aboard.
She moved with the same silent grace as her mother, and like her mother, the weather seemed to be of little concern to her. Indeed, she was as soaked as I; her dark hair hung in dripping tendrils before her eyes, and her simple dress clung to her curves, weighed down by the water - yet she wore no coat, and did not shiver. Rather she stood very still at the bow of the 'Sweet Jane', and said, "...you came all the way back."
Yes, Grace. I came all the way back for you. I came all the way back, through heaven and hell, just to kiss you once more. I came all the way back because I lost everything, and I didn't want it anyway. I came back. But you're dead.
I did not look at the woman standing at the bow, I could not. If I didn't look at her then I could pretend - pretend that it really was Grace, that it really was all right, that it had all been just a horrible nightmare... that any moment she would come close, and touch me with her china doll fingers, and the rest of the world would simply fade to grey. Oh God, darling, I'm so tired... so tired... but I'm home now, and I can hear you, yes; if nothing else... I can hear you.
"She said you'd come back. She loved my father fine, but it was you she wanted."
I swallowed, shuddered, closed my eyes. I was listening to my lover speak from lips that I had never kissed, when her own lips had been cold for ten years. No, don't remember that. Don't look. Just listen. You've waited more than a decade to hear that voice, and this is as close as you will come. It can be real, as real as you please, as long as you don't look...
I said nothing.
I could feel her draw closer, though I could not hear her footsteps. The rain was coming down in sheets, now, and the wind had risen to a scream in my ears. She sat down beside me on the deck, and placed her hand upon my arm. I turned my face away.
"I kept the boat because I knew that, if you came back, you'd want to see her. She's a fine ship. Pa, he taught me how to sail her early on. We still take her out, now and again, when the weather's fine and there's a following wind. I was named after her, you know. Sweet Jane."
She was very close to me, and though I felt nothing else I could feel the heat radiating from her, seeping into my skin where her hand lay upon my arm, and I placed my own hand over hers. How soft the skin beneath my fingers, and how delicate the bones beneath it. Grace's hand, small and warm and solid, her fingers coiling through my own. Yes, please, keep talking... I don't need the words, just the sound of it; please, come closer. Keep talking. Don't take the dream away just yet.
"I watched you pull into port from The 'Dog. I knew right away who you were. You look just like she said you did. She said, 'He was so easy to fall in love with, Jane. He had the sea in his eyes and the devil on his tongue, just like The Old Man. He cheated me at cards,' she said, 'and I think I loved him all the more for it.' Even after she met Pa, she waited for you. She said she knew you'd come back. 'He's a pirate, lass, but he's a good man,' - aye, those were her words. 'He'll come back, you wait and you see. I've got his Ace of Hearts.'"
Yes, yes, of course I came back... you're Grace, you're the sunrise, you're all that I have, now. A far off rumble of thunder rolled across the water towards us. Her fingers, which had been pliant within my own, now stroked across my palm in a petal-soft caress. Her hair brushed against my cheek. Yes, please, closer. Let the storm come, let it tear this little ship apart - just be real for me, please, this one last time...
I swallowed hard, and whispered, "I never should have left..."
"No, Jack. You never should have left - but that doesn't matter now. Don't think on what you've lost; think of what you've found. You came back, and that's what matters. Now there can be time... for us." She drew my fingers to her lips, kissed each of them in turn before guiding them to the strings of her dress. "You've come so far, Jack... don't let it be for nothing."
Not for nothing, no - for you, darling. Only for you. After all these long years I've come back to you, back for you, back for this...
And then I was kissing her; kissing the tongue that wove the web of Grace's voice around me, kissing my dead lover upon the lips of her offspring. I was undressing the dreams that I had held so very dear, for so very, very long. The warm, willing flesh beneath my own even tasted the same; and the moans of pleasure and passion were memories come alive again on a voice that I'd missed like no other. There on the deck of the Sweet Jane, I made love to the ghost of Grace McClannathan. I kept her alive beneath my fingertips by keeping my eyes closed.
"Ai.... Jesus, Jack, yes, please... ... ... ... NO!"
The body beneath me went rigid, and the word hit me like a bullet in the chest.
I opened my eyes.
For one split second I saw her, there; saw her as I had last seen her, as I had always dreamed about her - my Grace, with her long red hair spread out beneath her - and then that moment shattered upon the nightmare of reality, as the pistol cocked against my temple.
"Get the fuck off my daughter, Sparrow."
Jane shoved me off of her before I could move, scrambled to her feet and laced her dress with quick, steady fingers. She was not trembling, nor was she in pain from what I could tell, but she had broken into a torrent of hysterical sobs. The pistol was joined by a knife at my throat. "Get up, you son of a bitch."
I knew that voice. I loathed that voice. I thought I had left that voice stranded on an island off of Cape Verde, no greater in length than my ship. Now it hissed, very close to my ear, "Din't think ye'd see me again, eh *Captain*? Thought you were rid of 'ol Davy, din'tcha? Thought you'd have a jaunt back to see your bonny lass in the northern sea while I was no more'n bones on a beach somewhere, ye did -- who'da thunk it?"
The knife pressed harder against my throat.
"I'da thunk it, that's who. M'afraid yer a tad late, Captain - 'ol Gracie's been dead and gone a good while, now; and where you been, eh? You been out fetchin jewels for 'er? And 'ere 'ol Davey's been the whole time, raisin' 'er daughter. *Our* daughter. The daughter that you mistook for some two bit whore who'd 'ave no one to revenge 'er misuse?"
Jane had ceased her tears, and now she stood by the rail, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. She had the look, indeed, of a woman misused - until she raised her head and looked at me.
Nothing but satisfied malice in her eyes; the satisfaction of a woman who has cried wolf and gotten away with it hook, line, and sinker. She blew me the tiniest kiss on the air before once again hiding her face in her hands.
"Why you little whore," I breathed.
With a growl of rage, Spencer dealt me a blow to the back of the head with his pistol that sent me reeling.
"Whore?" hissed Jane. "My mother was the whore, Jack. I told you. She liked my father fine, but it was you she wanted - you, who left her behind... you, who gave her nothing but an ivory bead and a card - you, who left four of your own men to die like dogs so that you could be the dog in the manger; neither keeping my mother nor leaving her to those who would? How many women did you sleep with since you left her, Jack? Thirty? Forty? Do you even know? And she loved you - oh, yes, she loved you; more than Pa, more than me, more than anything. She just settled for us while you were off getting rich."
"And so we din't settle for 'er no more, did we Janie? Set 'ol Gracie right, yer Pa did," - and then, in a whisper against my ear - "right in 'er grave, once she'd become old hat."
There were too many questions to ask and no time to ask them, too many lies to be untangled, and no time to even cut them apart. There was no time to say goodbye to this little boat that I loved so dearly, that had been the home of so much happiness. There was only rage, sheer rage, and one moment opportunity. As Jane's voice had risen, Spencer's grip had loosened; it was then, or not at all - wrenching the blade away from my throat, I spun 'round and caught him in the nose with my elbow. The pistol went off, but the shot struck nothing more than water, and in the next second I'd laid him out cold on the deck with a swift blow to the base of his skull. Drawing my sword, I turned on Jane.
"Don't. Say. A word. Understood?"
I barely remember the trip along the docks, from the Sweet Jane to the moorings of my own ship, dragging an unconscious Spencer with one arm, and a struggling Jane with the other. If anyone saw us, I could not tell you. There was one thing and one thing alone on my mind - revenge. Revenge on her, on him, on this town, on fate itself. My first mate sat up sharp from his slumber as I hauled the duo up the gangplank and past him to the main mast.
"Weigh anchor and ready the nines," I told him.
"Pardon, sir...?"
"You heard me, Adams." I dropped Spencer on the deck, and proceeded to lash Jane to the mast. "Weigh anchor. Ready the nines. Rouse the whole bloody lot of them, wherever they are - and take down this port. Don't leave a building standing, nor a ship afloat. I want it gone, do you hear me? I promised you a sortie before we made the Spanish coast - now do as I say, or I'll leave you hear to burn with it, savvy?"
"You son of a BITCH!" roared Jane.
"Sticks and stones, luv," I hissed.
I wanted to kill him outright, but I didn't. To kill him before he came 'round would have been a kindness that I did not intend to impart upon him. When I killed David Spencer, I wanted him to feel it. I wanted him to writhe with it. I didn't know what he had done to her, or when - but I would do it a thousand times over to him before I granted him the blessed release of death.
It was the sound of her voice that stopped me.
"NO! God, no Jack... please..."
I'm not listening, Grace. I'm not listening...
"Kill me instead, please, just leave my father alone..."
Shut up, damn you... you're not her, not her, not--
"Jack..."
I couldn't do it - not with that voice pleading in my ears, begging me between sobs to have mercy. I should have done it, god knows; I should have done everything that I wanted and more to him. I should have kept him prisoner for months on end - starving him slowly between bouts of torture - but I did not. Because of that voice, I let him live.
But not without keeping his wedding ring, and the finger to go with it.
I left the both there in Killybegs - or what was left of it after our five hour raid. My crew was more than happily obliged to keep to my orders, and by the time we pulled out of port the next morning at dawn, almost nothing remained of the little harbor that, once upon a time, had looked so much like Heaven on Earth to me.
But the cliffs were red, at least, that morning - not with the dawn, but with the fires that we left in our wake.
* * *
"Whatever became of Jane, I do not know," Jack said finally. "I left Ireland behind, and I never looked back. I came back to my beloved Caribbean; back for The Pearl, back for my life. I left Grace in her grave on the hillside... the grave I never saw, and never wanted to. I put love, and longing, and the golden Irish dawn out of my mind; for they were finally dead, to me, and the ghost of Grace McClannathan rested finally in her grave.
"And as for Davey, well... we both know what's become of him now, I suppose."
For a long time there was silence in the little garrison cell; silence save for the steady drip of water from some unknown shadowed corner, and the breathing of William Turner and Captain Jack Sparrow.
And then Will said, "Before we leave here, we're going to kill him."
"Provided that we leave here at all," Jack said quietly.
******
- to be continued -
Author's Note : ... And here I thought I was a slash writer. No, seriously guys; I didn't plan the story this way. Grace simply... happened, as did Jane - and now I have to see it through. Whatever they are, and why ever they chose to impose themselves upon Captain Jack Sparrow - a character that I dearly love, but hardly devised - I don't claim to understand, and may never know. All I know is that they're mine, and they have something to say, and this is simply where they chose to be. I owe it to them to see this thing through, know what I mean...? Anyway - fear not, for Will shall be back by the end of the chapter.
Chapter XII : Faded Shades of Grey
[ colloquial title :from lips that I had never kissed ]
******
Morning came in shades of grey.
The horizon of Donegal Bay lay as it had for a thousand years or more; the breakers churned and danced like lovers in the distance, shattering against the sheer, stern faces of the cliffs - faces that had seen the rise and fall of empires, the rise and set of a thousand suns.
Those cliffs had been red when last I'd seen them; timeless, luminous sentries beyond a burning bay, and I had loved them well. She'd told me the stories of this land, this sea - stories that had been passed down, mother to daughter, from an age that none can now recall. Her people had been here before the Christians, before the Romans; and when blood lives and breeds and thrives in a place, age after age as her blood had, the heart that cradles it beats in time with the heart of the land. She had been a part of this ancient, wild, windswept place; a piece of it's very heart and soul as surely as the cliffs, and the hills, and the sea, and her tales had come alive on a voice as wise and beautiful as the land and moment. She had been the Irish Dawn, incarnate - reds and golds and magic; old, silent magic.
But she was lost to me, now, and everything that she had been seemed gone from the world, in all of its incarnations. Dawn did not burst forth and bleed over the horizon, this morning, but rose silent and solemn in shades of grey behind a mourning veil of rain clouds. Grey the sky and grey the sea, grey the faces of the cliffs, and the worn, faded deck of the Sweet Jane, and my own worn, faded soul. There was no red, and no gold - not as I had seen them. The colors of sunrise had died with her, it seemed; somewhere on the hillside they lay dead and buried, marked now by only a cold grey tombstone.
I had not gone to her grave, and I never would. There was nothing for me there. No cold carved words could do justice to a life lived on the waves; the sea was her epitaph, and it should have been her grave as well. To lay her in the earth had been a sacrilege. I imaged her there, beneath the dirt, her silk pale fading to grey with passing of the years, the sunrise of her hair falling away to dust. For hours I sat, numb and motionless, as she rotted to ruin behind my eyes. When the rain came, I did not feel it. I let the sky cry down upon me, drench me with the tears that my own eyes would not, could not shed.
I never even heard her come aboard.
She moved with the same silent grace as her mother, and like her mother, the weather seemed to be of little concern to her. Indeed, she was as soaked as I; her dark hair hung in dripping tendrils before her eyes, and her simple dress clung to her curves, weighed down by the water - yet she wore no coat, and did not shiver. Rather she stood very still at the bow of the 'Sweet Jane', and said, "...you came all the way back."
Yes, Grace. I came all the way back for you. I came all the way back, through heaven and hell, just to kiss you once more. I came all the way back because I lost everything, and I didn't want it anyway. I came back. But you're dead.
I did not look at the woman standing at the bow, I could not. If I didn't look at her then I could pretend - pretend that it really was Grace, that it really was all right, that it had all been just a horrible nightmare... that any moment she would come close, and touch me with her china doll fingers, and the rest of the world would simply fade to grey. Oh God, darling, I'm so tired... so tired... but I'm home now, and I can hear you, yes; if nothing else... I can hear you.
"She said you'd come back. She loved my father fine, but it was you she wanted."
I swallowed, shuddered, closed my eyes. I was listening to my lover speak from lips that I had never kissed, when her own lips had been cold for ten years. No, don't remember that. Don't look. Just listen. You've waited more than a decade to hear that voice, and this is as close as you will come. It can be real, as real as you please, as long as you don't look...
I said nothing.
I could feel her draw closer, though I could not hear her footsteps. The rain was coming down in sheets, now, and the wind had risen to a scream in my ears. She sat down beside me on the deck, and placed her hand upon my arm. I turned my face away.
"I kept the boat because I knew that, if you came back, you'd want to see her. She's a fine ship. Pa, he taught me how to sail her early on. We still take her out, now and again, when the weather's fine and there's a following wind. I was named after her, you know. Sweet Jane."
She was very close to me, and though I felt nothing else I could feel the heat radiating from her, seeping into my skin where her hand lay upon my arm, and I placed my own hand over hers. How soft the skin beneath my fingers, and how delicate the bones beneath it. Grace's hand, small and warm and solid, her fingers coiling through my own. Yes, please, keep talking... I don't need the words, just the sound of it; please, come closer. Keep talking. Don't take the dream away just yet.
"I watched you pull into port from The 'Dog. I knew right away who you were. You look just like she said you did. She said, 'He was so easy to fall in love with, Jane. He had the sea in his eyes and the devil on his tongue, just like The Old Man. He cheated me at cards,' she said, 'and I think I loved him all the more for it.' Even after she met Pa, she waited for you. She said she knew you'd come back. 'He's a pirate, lass, but he's a good man,' - aye, those were her words. 'He'll come back, you wait and you see. I've got his Ace of Hearts.'"
Yes, yes, of course I came back... you're Grace, you're the sunrise, you're all that I have, now. A far off rumble of thunder rolled across the water towards us. Her fingers, which had been pliant within my own, now stroked across my palm in a petal-soft caress. Her hair brushed against my cheek. Yes, please, closer. Let the storm come, let it tear this little ship apart - just be real for me, please, this one last time...
I swallowed hard, and whispered, "I never should have left..."
"No, Jack. You never should have left - but that doesn't matter now. Don't think on what you've lost; think of what you've found. You came back, and that's what matters. Now there can be time... for us." She drew my fingers to her lips, kissed each of them in turn before guiding them to the strings of her dress. "You've come so far, Jack... don't let it be for nothing."
Not for nothing, no - for you, darling. Only for you. After all these long years I've come back to you, back for you, back for this...
And then I was kissing her; kissing the tongue that wove the web of Grace's voice around me, kissing my dead lover upon the lips of her offspring. I was undressing the dreams that I had held so very dear, for so very, very long. The warm, willing flesh beneath my own even tasted the same; and the moans of pleasure and passion were memories come alive again on a voice that I'd missed like no other. There on the deck of the Sweet Jane, I made love to the ghost of Grace McClannathan. I kept her alive beneath my fingertips by keeping my eyes closed.
"Ai.... Jesus, Jack, yes, please... ... ... ... NO!"
The body beneath me went rigid, and the word hit me like a bullet in the chest.
I opened my eyes.
For one split second I saw her, there; saw her as I had last seen her, as I had always dreamed about her - my Grace, with her long red hair spread out beneath her - and then that moment shattered upon the nightmare of reality, as the pistol cocked against my temple.
"Get the fuck off my daughter, Sparrow."
Jane shoved me off of her before I could move, scrambled to her feet and laced her dress with quick, steady fingers. She was not trembling, nor was she in pain from what I could tell, but she had broken into a torrent of hysterical sobs. The pistol was joined by a knife at my throat. "Get up, you son of a bitch."
I knew that voice. I loathed that voice. I thought I had left that voice stranded on an island off of Cape Verde, no greater in length than my ship. Now it hissed, very close to my ear, "Din't think ye'd see me again, eh *Captain*? Thought you were rid of 'ol Davy, din'tcha? Thought you'd have a jaunt back to see your bonny lass in the northern sea while I was no more'n bones on a beach somewhere, ye did -- who'da thunk it?"
The knife pressed harder against my throat.
"I'da thunk it, that's who. M'afraid yer a tad late, Captain - 'ol Gracie's been dead and gone a good while, now; and where you been, eh? You been out fetchin jewels for 'er? And 'ere 'ol Davey's been the whole time, raisin' 'er daughter. *Our* daughter. The daughter that you mistook for some two bit whore who'd 'ave no one to revenge 'er misuse?"
Jane had ceased her tears, and now she stood by the rail, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. She had the look, indeed, of a woman misused - until she raised her head and looked at me.
Nothing but satisfied malice in her eyes; the satisfaction of a woman who has cried wolf and gotten away with it hook, line, and sinker. She blew me the tiniest kiss on the air before once again hiding her face in her hands.
"Why you little whore," I breathed.
With a growl of rage, Spencer dealt me a blow to the back of the head with his pistol that sent me reeling.
"Whore?" hissed Jane. "My mother was the whore, Jack. I told you. She liked my father fine, but it was you she wanted - you, who left her behind... you, who gave her nothing but an ivory bead and a card - you, who left four of your own men to die like dogs so that you could be the dog in the manger; neither keeping my mother nor leaving her to those who would? How many women did you sleep with since you left her, Jack? Thirty? Forty? Do you even know? And she loved you - oh, yes, she loved you; more than Pa, more than me, more than anything. She just settled for us while you were off getting rich."
"And so we din't settle for 'er no more, did we Janie? Set 'ol Gracie right, yer Pa did," - and then, in a whisper against my ear - "right in 'er grave, once she'd become old hat."
There were too many questions to ask and no time to ask them, too many lies to be untangled, and no time to even cut them apart. There was no time to say goodbye to this little boat that I loved so dearly, that had been the home of so much happiness. There was only rage, sheer rage, and one moment opportunity. As Jane's voice had risen, Spencer's grip had loosened; it was then, or not at all - wrenching the blade away from my throat, I spun 'round and caught him in the nose with my elbow. The pistol went off, but the shot struck nothing more than water, and in the next second I'd laid him out cold on the deck with a swift blow to the base of his skull. Drawing my sword, I turned on Jane.
"Don't. Say. A word. Understood?"
I barely remember the trip along the docks, from the Sweet Jane to the moorings of my own ship, dragging an unconscious Spencer with one arm, and a struggling Jane with the other. If anyone saw us, I could not tell you. There was one thing and one thing alone on my mind - revenge. Revenge on her, on him, on this town, on fate itself. My first mate sat up sharp from his slumber as I hauled the duo up the gangplank and past him to the main mast.
"Weigh anchor and ready the nines," I told him.
"Pardon, sir...?"
"You heard me, Adams." I dropped Spencer on the deck, and proceeded to lash Jane to the mast. "Weigh anchor. Ready the nines. Rouse the whole bloody lot of them, wherever they are - and take down this port. Don't leave a building standing, nor a ship afloat. I want it gone, do you hear me? I promised you a sortie before we made the Spanish coast - now do as I say, or I'll leave you hear to burn with it, savvy?"
"You son of a BITCH!" roared Jane.
"Sticks and stones, luv," I hissed.
I wanted to kill him outright, but I didn't. To kill him before he came 'round would have been a kindness that I did not intend to impart upon him. When I killed David Spencer, I wanted him to feel it. I wanted him to writhe with it. I didn't know what he had done to her, or when - but I would do it a thousand times over to him before I granted him the blessed release of death.
It was the sound of her voice that stopped me.
"NO! God, no Jack... please..."
I'm not listening, Grace. I'm not listening...
"Kill me instead, please, just leave my father alone..."
Shut up, damn you... you're not her, not her, not--
"Jack..."
I couldn't do it - not with that voice pleading in my ears, begging me between sobs to have mercy. I should have done it, god knows; I should have done everything that I wanted and more to him. I should have kept him prisoner for months on end - starving him slowly between bouts of torture - but I did not. Because of that voice, I let him live.
But not without keeping his wedding ring, and the finger to go with it.
I left the both there in Killybegs - or what was left of it after our five hour raid. My crew was more than happily obliged to keep to my orders, and by the time we pulled out of port the next morning at dawn, almost nothing remained of the little harbor that, once upon a time, had looked so much like Heaven on Earth to me.
But the cliffs were red, at least, that morning - not with the dawn, but with the fires that we left in our wake.
* * *
"Whatever became of Jane, I do not know," Jack said finally. "I left Ireland behind, and I never looked back. I came back to my beloved Caribbean; back for The Pearl, back for my life. I left Grace in her grave on the hillside... the grave I never saw, and never wanted to. I put love, and longing, and the golden Irish dawn out of my mind; for they were finally dead, to me, and the ghost of Grace McClannathan rested finally in her grave.
"And as for Davey, well... we both know what's become of him now, I suppose."
For a long time there was silence in the little garrison cell; silence save for the steady drip of water from some unknown shadowed corner, and the breathing of William Turner and Captain Jack Sparrow.
And then Will said, "Before we leave here, we're going to kill him."
"Provided that we leave here at all," Jack said quietly.
******
- to be continued -