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Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to the Pirates of the Caribbean or its characters, which solely belong to Disney, et al, but that hasn't stopped me from writing about them.
Warning: This story contains the themes of graphic torture/mutilation, and male/male relationships, a.k.a. slash/yaoi. If any of these may offend you, then stop reading. If, however, you do read this, in spite of my warnings, and find it offensive, then I have to say it is your own fault. Some scenes are of an erotic nature, but I have attempted to write them as tastefully as my ability allows.
Note: I will not accept any flames, however, comments and criticisms are welcome. I am under the assumption that anyone reading this has a clear understanding of the difference between flames and criticisms so I don't have to explain it. Here are some reason why I don't accept flames: 1) they generally include an attack on the author's character without regard to previous or future works that may or may not be in the same vein, 2) not only are they childish, but they make the writer of them sound immature and not old enough to read the material contained herein, 3) flames help neither the author nor the flamer to improve the work and, therefore, are not constructive, 4) if something is so offensive as to elicit the impulse to flame then it is better forgotten and not dwelled upon, 5) you waste time writing it and I waste time reading and then deleting it, 6) it won't do you any good to point out my lack of scruples, morals, intelligence, sanity, etc., because not only don't I care, but I won't listen.
Thank you for your kind regards and any reviews (not flames) that you will allocate to me.
From Your Sight,
Yxonomei Ayauhteotl
::Change in the House of Flies::
*~Prologue~*
The horrified screams of Elizabeth Swann echo through the manor as the proof of her fiancé's death rests in the terrified hands of a young messenger boy. Governor Swann barely manages to catch his swooning daughter. The attendant servants take after Miss Swann's example and fall into fits of hysterics. Commodore James Norrington, ever the leader, orders the glass jar to be covered and the young miss to be taken to her chambers posthaste.
"Merciful heavens," the governor murmurs over and over in a chant for unwarranted forgiveness. Clumsily he crosses himself and sags onto the nearest ottoman. "I should have…I should have given them what they asked for. I should have…"
"You did what you believed best, governor," Norrington reassures him. The jar and its sickening contents have been hurriedly hidden away from sight in the liquor cabinet. The dark-haired man gives a slight shudder, horror momentarily breaking through the veneer of a stoic naval man.
"That is the point, commodore. I acted as governor; I should have acted as a man, as a father-in-law. Oh, Saints preserve us, it is too late." Awkward sorrow and bitter regret chokes the old man. He covers his face with the hands of a gentleman, but inside he knows that, beneath the fine white gloves, they are the hands of a murderer. Murder by negligence, homicide through stubborn pride and a misguided sense of duty. Elizabeth will never forgive him.
Never.
Norrington remains silent. He has no words of respite for the aged governor. The sorrow and reality of young Turner's brutal death has shocked him to the very core of his being. Somehow, in a place untouched by pride and politics, he believed that there would be a happy ending.
*~*~*~*
"Send the message out that the search is to be called off," Norrington tells Gillette with eerie control. The lieutenant shifts uneasily under the completely expressionless gaze of his commanding officer. The commodore's face is pale and drawn, age lines just beginning to crease the corners of his dark eyes, and cold as a sheet of ice.
"Sir?"
"Turner is dead. Call back the ships."
"Dead, sir?"
"Yes." There is a broken harshness beneath the clipped tone. Gillette nods hesitantly. This is a great blow. Though not on familiar terms with the young man, Gillette has a highly developed sense of respect for Turner. After all, he risked life and dignity to rescue Miss Swann from the clutches of blackguards. He had thought nothing could touch a man who could triumphantly survive such an ordeal, once again reality reasserts her bloodied face.
"Gillette." The lieutenant pauses on his way out the door to deliver his superior's command. A leather pouch weighted and musical with the sound of coins sails through the air. He grabs it clumsily. "Make sure the payment is delivered with the note."
"Note, sir?" The commodore indicates the small bag. A small scrap of paper, precisely folded in half, has been attached to the drawstring by a bit of black ribbon. "Ah yes, sir."
He leaves Norrington looking imperiously unaffected, hands crossed in a gentlemanly manner at the small of his back. When the door clicks shut the commodore's broad shoulders sag ever so slightly.
"'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…'"
*~*~*~*
"Sparrow, got a note fer ye." The lithe, swaying form of said person stops and then, in a whirling halo of hair and beads, he turns around and sashays up to the burly tavern owner.
"That's Captain, c-a-p-t-a-i-n, Captain Sparrow, and throw in Jack if we be going by the firsts." The pirate grins rakishly, gold teeth glinting in the smoky light.
"We-ell then, captain, I 'ave 'ere a note, like I been sayin', and I be thinkin' it's from that li'l job you've been sweatin' on for nigh two months gone now."
"Hand it over, you blackguard, and keep a mind to your own business," Jack warns the man gamely. Even the lightest tone hides a garrote wire stretched taut. Grumbling in the manner of all curs denied a juicy tidbit, the man reaches below the counter and tosses up a leather pouch and the attached missive.
"What be that, cap'n?" Joshamee Gibbs[1] asks as he comes up behind the fey rogue. Shadowed eyes briefly scan the note.
"Well, Gibbs, it seems as if the gracious commodore is no longer in need of our services and has left us with our pay." Jack's voice is pleasant enough, careless enough, but there is a tension dwelling beneath his words. The words are oddly strained, the potential for violence less obscured in foppish dandyism.
"They found young William, then?" The portly man smiles in evident relief. He assumes Jack's subtly put-off air finds origination in the fact that it wasn't he who managed to play the dashing rogue with the well-hidden heart of gold, or perhaps he just wanted to prove he could outwit the Royal Navy. One never knows with the likes of Captain Jack Sparrow.
"No." Jack crumples the note and tosses it at the startled Gibbs. The smile on his face is more deranged than normal and yet wholly, frighteningly sane. The purse of coins disappears with nary a sound as the quartermaster reads the three little words that have affected his captain so.
'Turner is dead.'
"Merciful Spirit…Nay, this canna be true, Jack. Not Will—" Jack throws one eloquent arm about the horrified sailor's shoulders.
"Oh, sir, we might have been paid in gold, but there's another debt we needs must be collecting. And this one"—the darkness in Jack's eyes seems to spread in feathered edges far past the limits of his face, as if the shadows of his soul are seeping out—"This one requires blood."
A hardness born of sailing life shifts Gibbs normally dismissively innocuous face. The darkness radiating from the pirate captain is contagious and the only antidote seems to be revenge.
"Aye. Then it be best we start a collectin'."
*~*~*~*
"You see, sir," Jack murmurs as he slowly draws out a pale loop of the eviscerated pirate's intestine, "you did something quite, quite naughty, you did. You went and you…took something that did not belong to you." The man, former scourge of the Windward Passage, former captain of the Bonny Maid[2] and murderer of one William Turner, Jr., grins madly. Even tied down to one of the Pearl's cannons, abdominal flesh peeled back to reveal the helpless, wet organs within, he grins without fear and without sanity.
Jack's face is all pleasant smiles, as if he is conversing in some lord's parlor and not playfully gutting a man alive. The crew of both ships watch the two men with eyes nearly black with revulsion and horror. Blood soaks both men dark crimson, but they simply smile eerily at each other amid the silence of the ocean.
"So you're…the judge and…executioner," the dying man laughs softly. Jack chuckles as well and rips the strand of intestine out violently. It lands upon the Pearl's deck with a juicy splat. The noxious odor of the torn organ begins to overpower the stench of blood and gunpowder.
"I suppose I am, mate." Tenderly the Pearl's captain runs sanguine hands across the other's slowly pulsing heart. He stares deep into the dying man's eyes, hands wrapped around the vulnerable organ, and watches him die. When the heart is still he tears it free and hurls it into the hungry ocean. [3]
"Well, what should I do with the rest you?" he asks the prisoners jovially. He faces them, smiling, covered in blood and other fluids, and everyman (and woman) swears that, at that instant, Lucifer himself stands before them.
AnaMaria, fearless woman and fearsome pirate, quells before the demon in their captain's flamboyant body. This is not Jack, her mind tells her, but something deeper whispers that the bloody creature is. This is the Jack that no one wants to meet. This is the Jack that lurks too close to the surface of the playful rogue.
"Cut off their arms and leave them aboard their ship," the captain orders calmly, smilingly. He nods at AnaMaria to handle this matter and retires to his cabin.
"Oh, and one more thing." Everyone jumps a little as Jack sticks his head back out. "Make sure their captain is lashed to the wheel. Perhaps he will steer them all to hell with him."
The woman swallows the viscous bile oozing up her throat and repeats the orders. Jack's crew, haunted by this new side of their captain, snap to it. The command is fulfilled with great haste. The screams and unheeded pleas of the enemy nearly drown out the splatter of blood and the wet thunk of falling limbs.
Less than ten minutes have passed since Jack captured the Maid's captain, and already the man is dead and thirty others doomed to follow in his burial shoes. The Devil must be turning a right caper, Jack thinks to himself as he sips from a bottle of good rum.
However, all the screaming above and all the rum within have not yet erased the three little words that compelled his actions today:
'Turner is dead.'
*~*~*~*
"Elizabeth, are you certain this is the right course of action?" Commodore Norrington asks the young lady moments away from boarding a merchant ship bound for England.
"Yes. There are too many memories here, too many." Grief has left an indelible mark upon Elizabeth's elegant features. She seems to be little more than an animated doll. "I need to move on and I cannot do that here." A wan smile briefly lights her flat blue eyes. "Good bye, James."
She pats his hand comfortingly and turns away.
"Good bye, Elizabeth." Norrington attempts to smile gamely, but all that appears is a pained grimace.
Elizabeth Swann turns her back to Port Royal and never looks back.
*&*&*&*&*&*
[1] I actually did not invent this name. On the extended DVD version of PotC there is a little thing called the Diaries and I discovered the character's full name in the section called "Diary of a Pirate" (which is the one where we follow the man who plays Pintel around and he introduces us to people and whatnot.) Additionally, the commodore's known full name is James Norrington (Elizabeth call's Norrington 'James' in one of the deleted scenes.). I don't know if there's a middle name, but probably.
[2] I have not based the Bonny Maid on any real ship that I know of. It probably was or is the name of some ship somewhere, but I'm not talking about it. This ship, her crew and her captain are all fictional, to my knowledge.
[3] I am fully aware of the sheer improbability of this scene. Taking into account blood loss and the pain threshold of most humans, it is highly unlikely that the man could have spoken with such coherency. However, seeing as this is fiction and I have never actually cut someone open and watched them bleed to death, I feel somewhat reassured in my own creative license.
Final Notes: For all of those who have read the little piece of fiction involving OCs, I only have a problem with the Mary Sue variety (girl, who is the main character of the fanfic., falls in love with canon male. They have a romantic relationship, blah blah blah.). Any others (especially villains!) are fine with me. After all, if not for the non-pairing OCs, we would experience the Wuthering Heights Syndrome, which is to say that there apparently only exists eight people in that world.
*
My reasoning behind Jack's sudden barbarity at the end of this chapter is that, despite the happy, easygoing, Disney portrayal of him, he is a pirate. Not only that, he has learned his lesson about being soft with others after Barbossa. Besides, he does truly care about Will in my universe and would gladly seek bloody retribution.