Title: Rags and Riches
Author: Rosie Rosen
Summary: Pintel and Ragetti are awaiting their death in the dungeons of Port Royal. Something, or someone, will save both of them. But how easy is it for a pirate to adjust to being a noble?
Rating: PG for now.
Disclaimer: If Ragetti were mine, I wouldn't put him through such angst. I'd feed him bonbons, and bonfish, and keep him in my pants. But no, Disney owns such a man. So I shall have to keep him out of my pants until… until… Ah, but those plans are to be revealed at a later date. =)
Shoutouts in the Author's Note. =)
** * **
Ragetti awoke abruptly from his slumber, startled as a foot connected painfully with his side. "Wha'ja' do that fer?" he pouted, unhappily rubbing his side. He looked up to see one of the red-coated guards standing above him. Ragetti scowled.
"You Frances Pintel?" the guard demanded. Ragetti shook his head, one eye wide with fear, and pointed to Pintel. The man in question rolled over in his sleep and mumbled something before the guard gave him a sharp jab in the ribs with the butt of his musket. "Get up," he growled.
Pintel sat up slowly, confused, and in pain. He glared at the soldier, using the stone wall as a crutch to heave himself up. Ragetti felt sorry for his weak friend. They were both starving, and Pintel, of a usually rounder bulk, was looking thinner every day. He'd developed a worrisome cough and his skin, at least what Ragetti could see under the layers of dirt which were encrusted on his friend's body, was deathly pale. Ragetti often gave Pintel his extra water, thinking nothing of himself. Pintel was much more important.
"Hurry up, pirate," sneered the guard. "Don't want to keep the lady waiting." Pintel, confused, tried to ask what was going on. He received only a blow to the stomach and a coughing fit for his efforts.
Ragetti jumped up to defend his companion. "Leave 'im alone!" The guard laughed cruelly and kicked Ragetti swiftly. Ragetti collapsed, wheezing, onto the floor of the cell.
"Stop," commanded a woman's voice, crisp and British. Ragetti looked up, and the two guards on the outside of the cell parted to reveal a young lady with royal posture dressed in a luxurious gown. Why would she bother herself with the prisoners, Ragetti wondered, when she seems so high above us? He looked to Pintel for help and was taken aback to see recognition on his friend's features.
"Catherine?" Pintel gasped, incredulous. The girl reached out to touch Pintel's rough, unshaven skin and drew back hastily, as if the dirt on his face would harm her. She studied his face with compassion in her soft brown eyes. Something in them reminded Ragetti of calm days on the sea, when he gazed into Pintel's two good eyes, wishing for the same gift of normal vision. "Wh-what are you doing here?"
"I've come to take you back to London with me, Frances." She nodded at the guards and they steadied Pintel, keeping him from crumpling to the ground by reason of his illness and hunger. "Governor Swann gave you pardon on my account, and, if you stay civil, you'll be allowed to stay with me." Catherine, as Pintel had called her, gave the man in front of her a melancholy smile. "Oh, why did you run away so long ago? Staying with the family would have kept you out of this mess, big brother." Pintel stayed stubbornly silent, swaying in the guards' arms. Ragetti's mouth dropped.
"Brother? Pintel, ye never told me ye had a family!" Ragetti tilted his head. "Ye told me ye was alone, 'cept for me…"
Pintel weakly shrugged and the guards started to drag him out the door. Ragetti grabbed his arm, frightened.
"Ye promised, Pintel! Ye promised ye wouldn' leave me!" Ragetti glared at the floor. "Ye promised…" Pintel's fists clenched and he pushed away the guards, grabbing Ragetti's shoulders partially for emphasis and partially for balance.
"I hafta', Ragetti. I hafta' get out of here." He paused to cough. "Catherine's jus' what I need t' escape from this hell." Ragetti shook his head, his one eye meeting Pintel's two functioning but dreary ones.
"No, Pintel! I won' let ye!" He tried not to cry, but his eye burned from the want of it. Pintel dropped Ragetti's shoulders and stumbled to his sister, glancing back only once to mouth an apology to his friend. And in a matter of seconds, the guards, the woman, and Pintel were gone, leaving Ragetti alone in his misery.
** * **
Ragetti spent the next few days split between despair and rage, resisting the tears and the temptation to kill the next person he saw. Day after day passed and he fell deeper and deeper into his depression. He didn't eat the little food he was given, and after days of a harsher hunger than he'd been feeling before, started saving it to give to Pintel when he "came back." Stale bread piled up in the corner Pintel had slept in and Ragetti fought the rats that came to eat it with a fearsome gusto.
Loneliness tore at his frail body, and he began to fear he was going mad. Winter was looming over Port Royal. When Ragetti wasn't shaking violently from the cold, huddled beneath a thin, itchy blanket that he'd found hidden in a corner, he was trying to sleep. Sleep was no better. Ragetti whimpered like an ailing puppy as he watched the past play out in his dreams, over and over. He saw images of Pintel, of Captain Barbossa and his crew of skeletons, and of his own dying self.
Sometimes, in this God-forsaken jail, he wished he was still under the curse. He wasn't a real person that way, with feelings and emotions. He was just greed and wants and pain, all packed tightly into rotting flesh and bones. It was better to be immortal than to have this regret tearing at his heart. He wondered, now and then, if that were the lunacy taking him over. To want to be cursed? That was madness.
** * **
For the first time in weeks, Ragetti fell into a sleep that was not hindered by the undead. He did not have images of Pintel spurning him. He was taken back farther than that, to a time when he did not know of skeleton pirates or unrequited love.
** * **
He was no longer Ragetti, but Rags, with both of his soulful brown eyes, a comfort the present Ragetti hadn't experienced in years – except in his dreams. Ratty clothing clung to his frail bones. He was back in his childhood, where he slept in the streets, ate others' scraps, and lived in the moment; a tiny little devil. He was an expert pickpocket. The thinner your fingers, the nimbler you are, after all. No more detected than if a butterfly had brushed against his victims' pockets. He was well-known to the whores and even better known to the alley cats. Those were his friends. They were all he had.
Sundays he rested. At least, he called it the "seventh day," and it was Sunday to everyone else. There'd been an incident once when a lady with too much makeup and not enough morals asked him the date. He'd been humiliated when the gathered women burst into laughter at his answer: the thirty-sixth of May. After that, he'd become determined to remember at least which day of the week it was. Every seventh day, he took a day off. He didn't know why he chose Sunday; it just made the most sense. There seemed, almost, to be less people on the streets on Sundays. At least during the day – at night, they were still the same bunch of drunks and bums.
And today, as proclaimed the make-shift calendar scratched into the alley wall, was the seventh day, so he lay in the backstreet with a scraggly cat purring ferociously in his lap. He daydreamed of the things little boys usually dream of; sugar plums and freedom. A warm cup of cocoa was often on his mind, he'd had a taste of it once and craved it ever since.
Cocoa made him think of food. He pretended he had a home to go to tonight, a home where the table would be set and delicious smells wafted from the kitchen. A mother lived in there, in that blessed kitchen. She was soft, with round curves he could wrap himself around and bury himself into when he needed solace from the world.
But, oh! The food he would eat at that house! Giant cakes with lacy white icing, and the sweet-sour oranges that he loved to steal from the expensive fruit stands. Pastries drizzled with chocolate and filled with cream, and the coveted hard candies the street boys loved, the ones you could suck upon for an hour before they were gone. And he'd have plump, sugary dates, mouth-wateringly exotic, as good as the first he'd ever had when a strange, turbaned sailor with dark skin and a foreign tongue slipped one into his hand. It would be heaven, he dreamed, to have every food in the world.
The cat in his lap scampered away, waking Rags from his daydream and leaving another tear in his clothes and tiny jewels of blood on his thigh. He looked up to see the disturbance; a boy not much older than he, in clothes that were once quite fancy, and now were stained and torn. Anyone could have mistaken this boy for another street rat, if he hadn't opened his mouth and let his educated tone give him away.
"My name is Frankie," the boy stated regally. "I demand you find me something to eat." He asked for food? From a beggar? Rags tried not to laugh. He stood up and began to tell the boy he didn't have any food.
"I don't-"
"Never mind that, I changed my mind. You will teach me to live on the streets." Frankie rolled his eyes at the slow, unintelligent nod Rags gave him. "Fool."
** * **
Author's Note: Ahhh… took me awhile, no? And it's kind of short. There will be more flashbacks in the next chapter or two, including, hopefully, how Ragetti lost his eye. Poor Ragetti… =( And poor Pintel, all sick and coughy…
TA Maxwell: ^_^ There are some
non-death P and R fics out there… besides mine! ^_^ And they totally stole the movie. They were the stars. =)
Jack was good, too, but… Mmm. Ragetti. YAY EYE FORK!
Softbrush: Thank you! ^_^ Your
roaring didn't exactly hurry me up any [I'm slow…], but it was nice that people
roared for me.
Ruu: I know, there are totally not enough Rags and Pintel fics out there. Hopefully, I'll write a couple of P and R one shots to fill that void. But, honestly, probably not. They'll rot in my head and never come out.
Peachness: There's more for you. =) Angsty.
jordie78: Ahhh, thank you! Getting people in character is hard for me [well, it's mostly Jack… he is a difficult fish to write!], but I definitely try to get that visual aspect going where people can see it happening. At least, I see it happening in my mind, so I try to convey that to the reader. ^_^
Hazana: Truthfully- you were the one that reminded me to finish this chapter. I had *guilt* forgotten about it. Thank you, though! ^_^ I love y'all.