A/N: This chapter dedicated to Curiosity Inc., to whom I owe an apology. I'm sorry I didn't reply to your e-mail, my computer has issues... And I wasn't really offended that you gave me criticism, just that you phrased it in such a way that it sounded more of a command. I'm very, very sorry if I, in turn, offended you.
It was the dead of night... or maybe the middle of the day -- Will couldn't really tell, this prison had no windows. Either way, James was across the hall snoring dreadfully. He had been sleeping a lot, lately, and Will was terrified that it might be because of depression. It seemed the sort of thing that the man would have, if not by accident then by long hours of working at negativity. Why, just the other day when Will had tried to wake him up to tell him that Ivan and Kristoff were talking about him again, he had replied with a groan of "Someone please shoot me..."
The man was obviously in need of anti-depressants... or a Care-Bears movie.
Anyway... the thing was, as his friend was sleeping, Will was sort of bored. There's not exactly a lot to do in a prison, after singing showtunes (Norrington had made him stop after he began Cats. But, perhaps he was allergic). There had been a small white rock on the floor, which had been used to draw a hopscotch area, but he got tired after so much jumping around. So, he sat and thought about all the words to all the musicals he had seen or had CD's of. He didn't get very far before Ivan and Kristoff drifted off, too.
He was the only one in his particular corner of the jail that was awake when two guards came in, each holding the arm of a rather wiry looking man who seemed to find something fascinating about the ground. They stopped in front of the cell next to Will's, which had been emptied a few days ago, and threw the man inside. Several manly grunts followed, probably in a hopeful attempt to show everyone who was in charge. That was rather stupid, Will laughed to himself, as they were the ones who were called "guards", and everyone down here was called "convict".
The guards left, and Will found himself carefully examining his new neighbor. There wasn't anything particularly special about him... Very tall, very thin. His hair was almost maroon, and seemed to be continually ruffled by the man's own hand -- probably a nervous tic, Will guessed, pretending for a moment that he was back on the job and not in some dirty foreign jail without anything better to do than stare at a stranger. Then again, he did have something better to do, for a moment at least.
"Er... Excuse me," he said, looking hopefully at the man. "Do you, by any chance, speak a word of English?"
Jack Sparrow was in his office, carefully uploading data to his website when his wife began shouting at him. He didn't know exactly what he'd done, because she had never wailed like this before and there was no past experience to guess from, so he asked what she wanted. The next thing he knew, she was screaming obscenities and whacking through his door with the nine-iron he had found at that pawn shop down the road.
The bloody thing missed his nose by a centimeter.
When she hit the splintering wood again, he stood up as fast as he could, his mind whirring as he tried desperately to figure out what would stop her rampage.
"Lizzie, darling --"
She smacked the door again, a sizeable hole beginning to show up as the chunks of wood from her previous attacks fell away.
"Lizzie, pet, could you please stop --" "You evil man!" she screamed, angry thuds punctuating the exclamation. "You bloody evil man!"
Jack assessed the situation, beginning to get jumpy as to what he could have possibly done to get her so riled. He hadn't been sleeping with someone, he hadn't gotten drunk and done something stupid... then again, he couldn't rule out that choice... It was beginning to get horribly dangerous, what with all the wood shards flying about, and he wasn't about to hide under his computer desk like a horrified child.
He was not, by any standards, a child. So, he did the only thing that he could think of.
"Elizabeth, please stop... I'm sorry, love!"
She stopped. Jack smirked in a very self-satisfied way, carefully stepping across the debris and out of his office, over to where his wife was standing in a corner of the hallway. He stopped, though, when he saw the look on her face. He had watched those shows with matadors and bulls, and he remembered laughing at their antics. He also remembered the look that bulls got on their faces when they had been thwarted, and then devised a way to skewer the fancypants matador.
Elizabeth gave him that look, and for the first time in his life, Jack Sparrow was afraid of a woman. A small, young woman.
"Do you even know what you've done?" she asked venomously, dropping the golf club much too close to his foot. "Do you even know what you've bloody done, Jack?"
"Er... I love you?"
"New York?"
Brewster nodded, hoping that he hadn't just made an idiot of himself. He tended to do that a lot, and although he was fairly used to it, it was not a feeling that a person could enjoy. Unfortunately, that feeling was starting to build up in the pit of his stomach, a sort of churning embarrassment as Friday Lawrence continued to stare right at him.
"New York?" she repeated, eyes widening.
"Yes, New York... Not a terrible deduction, is it? Because if it was, I -- "
She cut him off with an exclamation of "Oh, no! No, Detective, it's not a terrible idea at all..." She adjusted her position in one of the uncomfortable hotel room chairs that had been provided, and smiled... perhaps wryly. "It's a rather good idea, when a person considers the facts."
"Yes, that's exactly what I had guessed," he replied vigorously. There was something about being right, for once, that gave him a rather pleasant buzz of energy. He wanted for all the world to head to the airport and fly to New York at that very instant... but along with the cheer surprise of having made a correct assumption, Brewster noticed that the strange churning in his stomach had not gone away.
Odd, he thought. But he had never had the longest attention span, and the thought was very easily dismissed when Miss Lawrence broke the awkward pause by announcing that she had called Brewster's housekeeper to see how his kittens were.
"Lord Wugglesby caught a little mouse," she said, trying her best to sound interested in the information. "and Madame Floof Devereaux's new ribbons arrived in the post."
Brewster expressed his happiness that his precious girl could finally be properly adorned in the company of Sir Pelham and Mr. Avery, and the conversation came to an abrupt halt. They looked at each other for a moment, neither sure of what to say. This was not an uncommon occurance, as they had worked together long enough to understand that they had absolutely nothing in common.
Miss Lawrence coughed. "So... we leave tomorrow morning, then?"
"Yes," he replied, nodding slightly. "Yes, tomorrow morning." She gave him a very pointed look, which he returned without hesitation.
"I'd like to go to sleep now, Detective."
"Oh, right."
He left her immediately, and, upon arriving in his own room, began to pack. Suits, socks, ties, undergarments, and finally, a black hat reminiscent of one that Humphrey Bogart wore in Casablanca all graced his suitcase. Brewster smiled in satisfaction as he surveyed the neatness that now surrounded him, and resigned himself to bed with a happy sigh. ...However, he could not close his eyes without getting another idea as to what Elizabeth Swann and her captor might be doing.
Quite frankly, he was beginning to wonder what was in the Nevada air.