Pirates of the Caribbean: Before it all began
Summary: You know how Elizabeth and Will met on the ship. But what happened in the eight years before they met Jack Sparrow?
Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own POTC or any characters in this story as they are all from the movie. But after a few years of allowance I will probably be able to buy them. Yay!
Chapter 1- The Mysterious Boy
"We're devils, we're black sheep, we're really bad eggs, drink up me hearties yo ho. Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me." Elizabeth Swann stood at the stern of the HMS Dauntless, singing a pirate song. Her voice seemed penetrating in the thick fog the ship was trying to sail in. She continued her song. "We extort, we pilfer, we filch and sack..." Elizabeth knew it wasn't entirely proper to be singing about pirates and the dreadful things they did, but a pirate's life, at least as the song described it, seemed so much more interesting than her own.
She had been on the ship for weeks, and had been the only child aboard, so it was dreadfully boring. The only people on the ship that would talk to her were her father and occasionally the captain. But her father was to be the governor of Port Royal, where they would make their new home. And the captain had a ship to run, so they were both very busy.
Lieutenant Norrington would occasionally talk to Elizabeth as well. He was the closest in age to Elizabeth besides some of the sailors. But Elizabeth found him quite a bit annoying, the way he would go on and on about how he despised pirates and how it was his goal to rid the sea of them. So she usually tried to avoid him when she could.
But as Elizabeth continued to sing, she was unaware of the mysterious figure creeping up behind her...
"Lock him in the brig!" Captain Barbossa shouted. He thrust the boy at a dark, lanky man as the whole pirate crew laughed. The man shoved him down the steps into the dark brig of the Black Pearl. The boy held on to the small, golden treasure in his hand, for he knew that if the pirates found out that he had it, they would kill him and anyone in their path to get to it.
The brig had two very small cells. The man shoved the boy into the smaller of the two, locked the rusty, iron door and headed back up to the main deck. There was a small hole in the wooden wall of the ship. The boy looked out, and saw another ship. It looked like a merchant vessel of the British Navy. And the Black Pearl was gaining on it fast...
Elizabeth felt a firm hand grasp her shoulder. She spun around quickly and stood face to face with Mr. Gibbs. He was a sailor but not for the Navy. However, he knew as much about ships and the sea as any other sailor on the ship, and he had other knowledge that sailors of the Navy did not: of pirates. "Quiet missy!" he said in a hushed yell. "Cursed pirates sail these waters! You don't want to bring them down on us now, do ya?"
Suddenly she heard another familiar voice behind her. "Mr. Gibbs, that will do."
Just my luck, Elizabeth thought, it's Lieutenant Norrington.
"She was singing about pirates!" Mr. Gibbs said to Norrington. "Its bad luck to be singing about pirates, with us mired in this unnatural fog, mark my words!"
"Consider them marked." the lieutenant retorted. "On your way." he said, dismissing Gibbs.
"Aye Lieutenant." Gibbs said irritably. He walked off, took a swig from his whiskey flask, and muttered something unheard, "'Tis bad luck to have a woman aboard too, even a miniature one."
"I think it would be rather exciting to meet a pirate" said Elizabeth to Lieutenant Norrington.
"Think again Miss Swann," he replied with a slight touch of dignity to his voice. "Vile and dissolute creatures, the lot of them." He spat the words as if they had been rotten food or metal nails. Another of his boring ramblings, Elizabeth thought to herself. He continued. "I intend to see to it that any man who sails under a pirate flag or wears a pirate brand gets what he deserves: a short drop and a sudden stop." Elizabeth, not knowing what this meant, looked behind her and saw Mr. Gibbs using his tie as a noose and mimicking a hanging. She gasped. Elizabeth knew that this would happen to all pirates if caught, but it still came as a shock to her that there were people so evil that they had to die as punishment.
Elizabeth's father stepped in. "Lieutenant Norrington, I appreciate your fervor, but I'm concerned about the affect this subject will have upon my daughter."
"My apologies, Governor Swann" he said and with that he left.
"Actually, I find it all fascinating" she told her father.
"Yes," he replied, "That's what concerns me." He too left, and Elizabeth was, once again, lonely and bored. She blankly stared out to the vast expansion of sea before her, wondering if they would ever get to their new home.
Soon enough, The Black Pearl was parallel to the other ship, and the boy could hear the pirates readying the cannons above him. He was nervous; he had never been in a real battle before, only heard of them from sailors like his father. All of a sudden, BANG! Cannons from both the ships exploded with a deafening noise. The boy jumped back as a cannonball crashed through the wall of the cell he was being held captive in. The ball rocketed through the other end of his small cell, leaving a hole in the criss-crossing bars just big enough for the boy to crawl through. Once he was out of his prison, the boy decided to go up to the main deck, hoping not to be noticed. When he arrived, his hopes became true, for no one noticed the small boy, as there was already a raging battle to pay attention to. The boy didn't know what side he was on, so he just watched as the battle mercilessly continued on around him. How can I get away from here? he thought desperately.
Suddenly a soldier staggered backwards and knocked the boy off the ship. The boy fell about twenty feet, fortuitously missing the bullets and cannonballs whistling by him. The boy landed on a wooden board, broken off of one of the ships, with a hard crash. He was knocked unconscious and floated away on the board as the merchant vessel was blown up. There he stayed, awaiting his rescue.
Elizabeth's attention was suddenly drawn to a white parasol floating in the water. She pondered the veracity of this until her attention was drawn to another object in the water. There was a small boy, about her age, floating on a board. She couldn't see clearly, but she was still sure it was a boy on the board. "Look, there's a boy! There's a boy in the water!" she cried.
"Man overboard!" Lieutenant Norrington yelled to the crew. "Fetch a hook! Haul him aboard!" The boy was brought aboard. "He's still breathing." Lieutenant Norrington alleged.
Mr. Gibbs, whom no one had been paying attention to spoke up and said surprised "Mary, mother of God!" Everyone moved to the side of the ship, forgetting the unconscious boy and spotted a ship doused in flames, and the scorched British flag in the water.
"What happened here?" inquired the Governor, Elizabeth's father.
Norrington answered. "It's most likely the powder magazine. Merchant vessels run heavily armed."
"A lot of good it did them." Gibbs retorted. "Everyone's thinking it, I'm just saying it. Pirates!" he said, trying to explain the wreckage.
"There's no proof of that, it was probably an accident." The Governor said.
Norrington, always wanting to be a leader, took charge. He shouted out his orders. "Rouse the Captain immediately! Heave to and a take in sail. Launch the boats!" Cries of "Heave to!" and "Launch the boats!" could be heard amongst the chaos amongst the crew and ship.
Elizabeth, feeling lost amid the busy sailors, was finally assigned a task by her father. "Elizabeth, I want you to accompany the boy," he said, as the boy was picked up by some soldiers. "He'll be in your charge. Take care of him." Elizabeth nodded and followed the soldiers carrying the boy.
After the soldiers left she looked closer at him. Yes, he was about her age, a small, pale-faced, freckled boy. Suddenly, the boy gasped and grabbed Elizabeth's wrist. To reassure the boy, she said, "It's okay. My name's Elizabeth Swann."
"Will Turner." he managed to stutter, tripping over the simple words.
"I'm watching over you, Will." The boy fainted from exhaustion, and as he lay down, Elizabeth noticed a faint glimmer of gold underneath his shirt. She pulled out a medallion on a chain from around his neck, and recognized the pirate symbol that she had been taught so well to be wary of. "You're a pirate!" she stuttered in disbelief.
But she got naught but a minute to further study the medallion, for Lieutenant Norrington arrived on the scene and asked her "Has he said anything?"
"His name's William Turner. That's all I found out." she replied. The medallion she had found around Will's neck was clenched tightly behind her back. She hadn't gotten to look at it long, but she knew one thing, that it had the pirate symbol on it, and she didn't want Norrington to find out that her new friend was a pirate. To her relief, Norrington responded by merely saying, "Take him below."
After he left, Elizabeth left to study the medallion more closely. The pirate symbol, indeed, was engraved in the shiny gold medallion. She looked up and out to the ocean, and astonished, saw a ship with torn, ragged black sails. The flag on the mast had an identical design to that of the medallion. A pirate ship! She closed her eyes, hoping it would erase the ship from memory and existence, and didn't look back after turning around to follow Will, trying to forget the black ship...
A/N: Ohhh, cliff-hanger! Sorry about the extremely boring chapter. I know it's the exact same as the movie, except for the part about Will. Just had to "set the story" is all. The next chapter will be more interesting. Please R&R!