Disclaimer: Jack Sparrow does not belong to me. I have no right to pull him out of his proper time and drag him around my modern world. But I have a mind to do it anyway.
A/N: I don't know where this is going. I don't know why I let my muse talk me into writing it. I have an epic to finish, goddamnit. But no, here I am writing my own version of a tale that's already been done and redone...with time travel and everything. You see, I had a dream this afternoon that Jack Sparrow was in my living room. Yeah. I could have just left it at that. But I didn't. I've never done a story like this before, so my apologies if it sucks. Let me know if it's worth continuing...There's already part of Chapter 2 written. I don't know if I'll go on from there.
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Chapter 1: Out of Time
You're going to think I'm crazy.
Daft, in fact. As *he* would put it....
Lord knows, I thought I was crazy, for awhile. And I still would. Except...Well, I have proof. But I'll get to that later.
It all began with our summer trip to New Orleans. We'd been planning it for years. Neither of us had ever been there before. It was supposed to be our last hurrah, I guess, as I was off to grad school at the beginning of the winter/spring semester, and Adri was joining the Air Force come August. And we'd always wanted to make this trip, ever since high school, when we'd become obsessed with Anne Rice's vampire novels.
No, this story has nothing to do with Anne Rice, or vampires. No pale Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise lookalikes here. Sorry.
So, anyway...
***
June in New Orleans is bloody hot as hell. Of course, being a California girl, I'm used to sun. It was the humidity that got to me...
What's a California girl doing using the word "bloody," you ask? I'm not trying to affect a British accent, if that's what you think. Blame *him.* That's where I picked it up.
Yes, I'm getting to him. In a second.
So there we were, two horribly touristy twenty-somethings wandering through the French Quarter. We were lost. I admit it, my sense of direction really sucks. Especially after I've been up all night clubbing, and then am woken up the next morning by an over-enthusiastic best friend with a shopping fixation. Honestly, Adriana's more girly than I am, sometimes, even though she's tough as nails and could kick the asses of most guys I know.
She'd lept onto the bed, shaking me awake, and I'd pulled the covers over my head. It was god-awfully bright in the room. I was sore all over.
"Leave me 'lone, 'Dri."
She yanked the covers off. "C'mon, Miss Thang, you've been asleep practically all day! What did you do last night, anyway?"
I opened my eyes, squinted at her, and then shut them tight again, rolled over, and buried my face in the pillow.
"I'm gonna take the fifth on that one," I said, hoping she didn't hear me.
She didn't take the hint. Instead, she jumped on top of me and stole my pillow. "Silly Leah-girl," she said in my ear, much too loudly. "When are you going to learn that drugs are bad for you?"
Shit. I thought I'd hidden it well enough, when we'd run into each other in the club.
"It was just one pill, all right?" I grumbled. "And I had a good time."
(And before you decide I'm a drug addict who just went on an acid binge and hallucinated this entire story, get over it. That time in New Orleans was the first time I'd done anything in months, and I haven't since. Haven't really wanted to make everything *more* unreal.)
She laughed at me. "I know you did, sweetie. It's fine." She cuffed me affectionately on the shoulder, and I grunted in pain. Ecstasy does not leave you with happy muscles, the next morning. "I just worry about you sometimes, that's all. But honestly. Did you really think you could fool me? Your pupils were still huge when I dragged you out of there, and then you stared at the ceiling and fidgeted for hours, with your headphones on. Now get up! We only have a day and a half left already."
"All right, all right. I'm up, damnit."
I got up and stumbled into the bathroom, where I stared blearily into the mirror. My short reddish-brown hair stuck up every which way, and I had mascara circles under my eyes.
Which were still partially dilated. Considerably less hazel-green iris was showing than usual.
"Fuck me," I muttered. This was definitely going to be a good day to wear sunglasses.
Two and a half hours later, we were lost. As I've said. And I was dehydrated. Naturally. Yes, yes, I know. Stupid. I should have brought a water bottle with me. I wasn't thinking very clearly.
Adri saw how pale I was. "Oh, shit. You ok?"
"I need...to get out...of the sun," I said faintly.
"C'mon." She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the nearest shop. I caught a brief glimpse of a hand-painted sign that declared the store's name, in archaic lettering:
*Out of Time.*
Inside, it was oddly dark, which I appreciated more than I cared to mention to Adri; the store was tiny, and cramped, but at least it was air conditioned. I sank down gratefully onto a antique-looking chair in the corner.
"Lee! Look at this!" Adriana picked up a long, slightly rusty sword. It looked real. Her eyes were shining with excitement...she's always been a huge history freak, going to Renaissance fairs and all that stuff. "It's from colonial times. Probably the late 1600's."
"That's pretty cool," I said, trying to muster a little enthusiasm. I really felt like shit. My stomach hurt, too.
"It's perfectly balanced, too," she gushed, turning it over in her hands. Then her face fell. "And frickin' expensive..."
She replaced it regretfully, and after gazing at it for a moment with an expression of longing, wandered off towards the back of the shop. I massaged my throbbing temples, glancing around me cautiously...it kind of hurt to shift my focus too much.
Everything there was old. An antique store, I supposed, but how many antique stores do you know of that sell 17th-century weaponry? The huge chandelier hanging from the ceiling emitted a flickering light...I shook my head in disbelief. It was fitted with candles, not bulbs. Really, the place was more a museum than a retail establishment. The table on my left held a display of battered, ancient kitchenware...probably full of lead, I thought. Who would ever want to buy that crap?
Well, except maybe Adri.
It was then that I caught sight of the bottle.
It had been shoved away under the display table, along with a miscellaneous collection of other flasks, decanters, and rusted canteens. Made of opaque dark amber glass, it was firmly corked, and looked like it had once held some kind of alcohol. But it was the worn design etched on its belly that drew my attention. Some kind of bird, winging across a huge setting sun, above a corrugated expanse that I took to represent ocean.
Something about the unusual image nagged at me, as if I'd seen it somewhere before. But I couldn't remember where.
Tentatively, I leaned down and ran my hand over the cool surface. A strange shiver passed over me as I did so, a quick jolt of adrenaline. I put it down to the residue of the drug in my system. Sometimes when I rolled I'd feel aftereffects for a few days.
But the thing fascinated me. It felt so...*old*, under my fingers. There was a subtle energy there, a kind of hum, as if the glass was charged with electricity. I figured I was imagining it. I didn't believe in stuff like that, vibrations and auras and all that New Age nonsense. Didn't believe in the supernatural. In magic.
At least I didn't, then.
Yeah, I told you you'd think I was crazy. But it only gets weirder from here on out.
I was still examining the engraving when I got the sense that someone was watching me. I looked up to find that they were. Or rather, *she* was.
I could not determine the woman's age; her golden-brown skin was as smooth as mine, and her fine-boned face had an timeless cast to it. Her almond-shaped eyes, near-black and emphasized by the excessive use of even darker liner, were fixed on me intently. She wore huge silver hoop earrings and a blood-red, sari-like dress; I thought she must be Hindu, or Native American, with that long, straight black hair and the intricate tattoos decorating the backs of her hands and her lower arms.
I pulled my own hand away from the artifact as if it had burned me, worried that I wasn't supposed to touch it. "Uh...hi. Sorry. Are you the owner here?"
She smiled, and again I felt an curious little shock run through me. That must have been a damn good pill, I reflected.
"Yes, my dear. I suppose you could call me that."
An odd response to a simple question, and her accent eluded classification. I said, stupidly, "Oh."
She moved fluidly to the display, reached past me, and lifted the bottle out from under the table. "It was this one that interested you, no?"
"Um...no? I mean, yes. Where is it from?"
"This one, he is from the Islands, from Haiti. I found him there years ago." She stroked the neck in an affectionate manner. "On quite the lonely beach, was it not, my darling..."
She was clearly speaking to it, not me. And why was she calling it "him", like it was a person? She was obviously nuts. I edged away.
"You wish to buy, yes?"
"I don't think so," I said hastily. Where the hell was Adri?
"But you do," she informed me, and before I could escape, she'd thrust the bottle into my hands. It was unexpectedly heavy. I stared at it and then at her, in dismay, and I reached to place it back where it had come from, opening my mouth to say that no, I was very sorry but I had no intention in buying a dusty piece of floatsam she'd salvaged from some trash heap in Port-au-Prince. As I did so, the contents shifted; it seemed to be full of sand, or dirt. I hesitated for no good reason, and heard myself say, "How much is it?"
The woman considered me, expression immediately becoming calculated. "For you, my pretty one, only twenty-five dollars."
I had thirty in my purse, I knew. I couldn't believe I was actually contemplating spending most of it...on this.
It was at this moment, while I was waffling on a decision I should never have considered making, that Adriana rematerialized from the shadows at the back of the shop, wearing that satisfied smile that meant she'd found something to spend her money on.
"Are you feeling any better, honey? Here, check out what I found." She dangled the item in front of me for inspection. "Isn't it gorgeous?"
In fact, it was. A huge moonstoon pendant, set on a tarnished silver chain, that gleamed milky-green in the fitful candlelight.
"I'm going to buy it," Adri announced to the shopkeeper.
The woman nodded. "A good choice," she murmured.
When her transaction was finished, Adri turned to me. "What about you, Lee? Find anything you wanted?"
"I don't know..." I hefted the bottle, experimentally. "What do you think?"
She tilted her head. "Interesting. What's in it?"
"Sand, I'm guessing. But...I don't know why, I kind of like it."
"You should get it then," Adri said positively. "It is kind of cool-looking. You can use it for a bookend."
I frowned. Somehow I didn't think I'd feel right using the thing for such a mundane purpose as that.
"C'mon, decide, sweets. I'm starving."
"Okay." I stood up. "I'll take it," I told the woman in red.
She smiled at me, that same mysterious smile, and made my change from her pocket. She didn't seem to have a register anywhere.
I tucked my purchase under my arm, an unexplicable sense of relief flowing through me.
I was following Adri to the door when I heard her say, softly:
"Take good care of him for me."
***
When I returned home to San Diego, I put the bottle on my bedside table, and promptly forgot about it. I was living alone in a tiny, rundown studio apartment and putting in long hours at work, trying to save up for the upcoming months in which I knew I would have no income and nothing but school loans to support me; otherwise I didn't have much time or energy to do anything but eat and sleep. Adriana left mid-August for boot camp on the East Coast. I missed her. We'd been friends for a long time, since our freshman year in high school, and we'd been roommates for several of our college years.
It was around then that I started having the dreams.
I would dream I was trapped in a place of absolute darkness, unable to move or speak. In the dream, I had been there for a very long time, an eternity, too long to remember clearly how many years it had been or where I had come from in the first place, and a resigned sense that I was going to be there for a very long time to come.
Occasionally there would be flashes of other things. Faces, sometimes: a young man with dark hair and an earnest expression. An older man who looked much like the first, but with a weathered face and a wise, piercing glance. A beautiful girl with flashing eyes and honey-colored hair. A dark-skinned woman, too, whose dangerous smile mesmerized me as she raised two hands and said words in a language I did not understand, and who disappeared every time in a flood of white light that was always replaced by that utter darkness.
Others came and went, most of them too indistinct to remember.
Over and over, too, I dreamed of the ocean. Those were the best dreams, the happiest. It was as if I were dreaming of home.
Once, I dreamed of a sword that ran through my chest, and out the other side. The metal was cold as death, but I felt no pain. Someone laughed cruelly as I stared down at the blade imbedded in my flesh. In that dream, I smiled, because I was already dead. That one haunted me for weeks with a vague image of seeing my own bones gleaming in moonlight.
Then, one night in early September, it happened.
I was having one of the violent dreams. The battle was desperate, and I burned with cold hatred for my opponent. He had betrayed me, I knew. Stolen something precious to me.
At last I saw my chance. Lifted my pistol, pulled the trigger.
The shot woke me, and I sat up straight.
Only, it hadn't been a shot that woke me, but the crash of breaking glass. I must've flung an arm out in my sleep, and knocked my souvenir from New Orleans off the nightstand. And it must have hit the iron bedframe to shatter like that...
Something moved in the corner of my vision.
I froze.
There was someone else with me in the room. Clearly outlined against the window, and swaying slightly as if a little drunk, was the figure of a man. A man with long, dark hair and a somewhat aquiline nose.
He turned, and looked straight at me, and his deep-set eyes glittered in the faint light that seeped through the window from the streetlights outside.
I lost no time in doing what any heroine worth her salt would do.
In other words, I screamed as loud as I could.
A/N: I don't know where this is going. I don't know why I let my muse talk me into writing it. I have an epic to finish, goddamnit. But no, here I am writing my own version of a tale that's already been done and redone...with time travel and everything. You see, I had a dream this afternoon that Jack Sparrow was in my living room. Yeah. I could have just left it at that. But I didn't. I've never done a story like this before, so my apologies if it sucks. Let me know if it's worth continuing...There's already part of Chapter 2 written. I don't know if I'll go on from there.
_______________________________________________________________________
Chapter 1: Out of Time
You're going to think I'm crazy.
Daft, in fact. As *he* would put it....
Lord knows, I thought I was crazy, for awhile. And I still would. Except...Well, I have proof. But I'll get to that later.
It all began with our summer trip to New Orleans. We'd been planning it for years. Neither of us had ever been there before. It was supposed to be our last hurrah, I guess, as I was off to grad school at the beginning of the winter/spring semester, and Adri was joining the Air Force come August. And we'd always wanted to make this trip, ever since high school, when we'd become obsessed with Anne Rice's vampire novels.
No, this story has nothing to do with Anne Rice, or vampires. No pale Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise lookalikes here. Sorry.
So, anyway...
***
June in New Orleans is bloody hot as hell. Of course, being a California girl, I'm used to sun. It was the humidity that got to me...
What's a California girl doing using the word "bloody," you ask? I'm not trying to affect a British accent, if that's what you think. Blame *him.* That's where I picked it up.
Yes, I'm getting to him. In a second.
So there we were, two horribly touristy twenty-somethings wandering through the French Quarter. We were lost. I admit it, my sense of direction really sucks. Especially after I've been up all night clubbing, and then am woken up the next morning by an over-enthusiastic best friend with a shopping fixation. Honestly, Adriana's more girly than I am, sometimes, even though she's tough as nails and could kick the asses of most guys I know.
She'd lept onto the bed, shaking me awake, and I'd pulled the covers over my head. It was god-awfully bright in the room. I was sore all over.
"Leave me 'lone, 'Dri."
She yanked the covers off. "C'mon, Miss Thang, you've been asleep practically all day! What did you do last night, anyway?"
I opened my eyes, squinted at her, and then shut them tight again, rolled over, and buried my face in the pillow.
"I'm gonna take the fifth on that one," I said, hoping she didn't hear me.
She didn't take the hint. Instead, she jumped on top of me and stole my pillow. "Silly Leah-girl," she said in my ear, much too loudly. "When are you going to learn that drugs are bad for you?"
Shit. I thought I'd hidden it well enough, when we'd run into each other in the club.
"It was just one pill, all right?" I grumbled. "And I had a good time."
(And before you decide I'm a drug addict who just went on an acid binge and hallucinated this entire story, get over it. That time in New Orleans was the first time I'd done anything in months, and I haven't since. Haven't really wanted to make everything *more* unreal.)
She laughed at me. "I know you did, sweetie. It's fine." She cuffed me affectionately on the shoulder, and I grunted in pain. Ecstasy does not leave you with happy muscles, the next morning. "I just worry about you sometimes, that's all. But honestly. Did you really think you could fool me? Your pupils were still huge when I dragged you out of there, and then you stared at the ceiling and fidgeted for hours, with your headphones on. Now get up! We only have a day and a half left already."
"All right, all right. I'm up, damnit."
I got up and stumbled into the bathroom, where I stared blearily into the mirror. My short reddish-brown hair stuck up every which way, and I had mascara circles under my eyes.
Which were still partially dilated. Considerably less hazel-green iris was showing than usual.
"Fuck me," I muttered. This was definitely going to be a good day to wear sunglasses.
Two and a half hours later, we were lost. As I've said. And I was dehydrated. Naturally. Yes, yes, I know. Stupid. I should have brought a water bottle with me. I wasn't thinking very clearly.
Adri saw how pale I was. "Oh, shit. You ok?"
"I need...to get out...of the sun," I said faintly.
"C'mon." She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the nearest shop. I caught a brief glimpse of a hand-painted sign that declared the store's name, in archaic lettering:
*Out of Time.*
Inside, it was oddly dark, which I appreciated more than I cared to mention to Adri; the store was tiny, and cramped, but at least it was air conditioned. I sank down gratefully onto a antique-looking chair in the corner.
"Lee! Look at this!" Adriana picked up a long, slightly rusty sword. It looked real. Her eyes were shining with excitement...she's always been a huge history freak, going to Renaissance fairs and all that stuff. "It's from colonial times. Probably the late 1600's."
"That's pretty cool," I said, trying to muster a little enthusiasm. I really felt like shit. My stomach hurt, too.
"It's perfectly balanced, too," she gushed, turning it over in her hands. Then her face fell. "And frickin' expensive..."
She replaced it regretfully, and after gazing at it for a moment with an expression of longing, wandered off towards the back of the shop. I massaged my throbbing temples, glancing around me cautiously...it kind of hurt to shift my focus too much.
Everything there was old. An antique store, I supposed, but how many antique stores do you know of that sell 17th-century weaponry? The huge chandelier hanging from the ceiling emitted a flickering light...I shook my head in disbelief. It was fitted with candles, not bulbs. Really, the place was more a museum than a retail establishment. The table on my left held a display of battered, ancient kitchenware...probably full of lead, I thought. Who would ever want to buy that crap?
Well, except maybe Adri.
It was then that I caught sight of the bottle.
It had been shoved away under the display table, along with a miscellaneous collection of other flasks, decanters, and rusted canteens. Made of opaque dark amber glass, it was firmly corked, and looked like it had once held some kind of alcohol. But it was the worn design etched on its belly that drew my attention. Some kind of bird, winging across a huge setting sun, above a corrugated expanse that I took to represent ocean.
Something about the unusual image nagged at me, as if I'd seen it somewhere before. But I couldn't remember where.
Tentatively, I leaned down and ran my hand over the cool surface. A strange shiver passed over me as I did so, a quick jolt of adrenaline. I put it down to the residue of the drug in my system. Sometimes when I rolled I'd feel aftereffects for a few days.
But the thing fascinated me. It felt so...*old*, under my fingers. There was a subtle energy there, a kind of hum, as if the glass was charged with electricity. I figured I was imagining it. I didn't believe in stuff like that, vibrations and auras and all that New Age nonsense. Didn't believe in the supernatural. In magic.
At least I didn't, then.
Yeah, I told you you'd think I was crazy. But it only gets weirder from here on out.
I was still examining the engraving when I got the sense that someone was watching me. I looked up to find that they were. Or rather, *she* was.
I could not determine the woman's age; her golden-brown skin was as smooth as mine, and her fine-boned face had an timeless cast to it. Her almond-shaped eyes, near-black and emphasized by the excessive use of even darker liner, were fixed on me intently. She wore huge silver hoop earrings and a blood-red, sari-like dress; I thought she must be Hindu, or Native American, with that long, straight black hair and the intricate tattoos decorating the backs of her hands and her lower arms.
I pulled my own hand away from the artifact as if it had burned me, worried that I wasn't supposed to touch it. "Uh...hi. Sorry. Are you the owner here?"
She smiled, and again I felt an curious little shock run through me. That must have been a damn good pill, I reflected.
"Yes, my dear. I suppose you could call me that."
An odd response to a simple question, and her accent eluded classification. I said, stupidly, "Oh."
She moved fluidly to the display, reached past me, and lifted the bottle out from under the table. "It was this one that interested you, no?"
"Um...no? I mean, yes. Where is it from?"
"This one, he is from the Islands, from Haiti. I found him there years ago." She stroked the neck in an affectionate manner. "On quite the lonely beach, was it not, my darling..."
She was clearly speaking to it, not me. And why was she calling it "him", like it was a person? She was obviously nuts. I edged away.
"You wish to buy, yes?"
"I don't think so," I said hastily. Where the hell was Adri?
"But you do," she informed me, and before I could escape, she'd thrust the bottle into my hands. It was unexpectedly heavy. I stared at it and then at her, in dismay, and I reached to place it back where it had come from, opening my mouth to say that no, I was very sorry but I had no intention in buying a dusty piece of floatsam she'd salvaged from some trash heap in Port-au-Prince. As I did so, the contents shifted; it seemed to be full of sand, or dirt. I hesitated for no good reason, and heard myself say, "How much is it?"
The woman considered me, expression immediately becoming calculated. "For you, my pretty one, only twenty-five dollars."
I had thirty in my purse, I knew. I couldn't believe I was actually contemplating spending most of it...on this.
It was at this moment, while I was waffling on a decision I should never have considered making, that Adriana rematerialized from the shadows at the back of the shop, wearing that satisfied smile that meant she'd found something to spend her money on.
"Are you feeling any better, honey? Here, check out what I found." She dangled the item in front of me for inspection. "Isn't it gorgeous?"
In fact, it was. A huge moonstoon pendant, set on a tarnished silver chain, that gleamed milky-green in the fitful candlelight.
"I'm going to buy it," Adri announced to the shopkeeper.
The woman nodded. "A good choice," she murmured.
When her transaction was finished, Adri turned to me. "What about you, Lee? Find anything you wanted?"
"I don't know..." I hefted the bottle, experimentally. "What do you think?"
She tilted her head. "Interesting. What's in it?"
"Sand, I'm guessing. But...I don't know why, I kind of like it."
"You should get it then," Adri said positively. "It is kind of cool-looking. You can use it for a bookend."
I frowned. Somehow I didn't think I'd feel right using the thing for such a mundane purpose as that.
"C'mon, decide, sweets. I'm starving."
"Okay." I stood up. "I'll take it," I told the woman in red.
She smiled at me, that same mysterious smile, and made my change from her pocket. She didn't seem to have a register anywhere.
I tucked my purchase under my arm, an unexplicable sense of relief flowing through me.
I was following Adri to the door when I heard her say, softly:
"Take good care of him for me."
***
When I returned home to San Diego, I put the bottle on my bedside table, and promptly forgot about it. I was living alone in a tiny, rundown studio apartment and putting in long hours at work, trying to save up for the upcoming months in which I knew I would have no income and nothing but school loans to support me; otherwise I didn't have much time or energy to do anything but eat and sleep. Adriana left mid-August for boot camp on the East Coast. I missed her. We'd been friends for a long time, since our freshman year in high school, and we'd been roommates for several of our college years.
It was around then that I started having the dreams.
I would dream I was trapped in a place of absolute darkness, unable to move or speak. In the dream, I had been there for a very long time, an eternity, too long to remember clearly how many years it had been or where I had come from in the first place, and a resigned sense that I was going to be there for a very long time to come.
Occasionally there would be flashes of other things. Faces, sometimes: a young man with dark hair and an earnest expression. An older man who looked much like the first, but with a weathered face and a wise, piercing glance. A beautiful girl with flashing eyes and honey-colored hair. A dark-skinned woman, too, whose dangerous smile mesmerized me as she raised two hands and said words in a language I did not understand, and who disappeared every time in a flood of white light that was always replaced by that utter darkness.
Others came and went, most of them too indistinct to remember.
Over and over, too, I dreamed of the ocean. Those were the best dreams, the happiest. It was as if I were dreaming of home.
Once, I dreamed of a sword that ran through my chest, and out the other side. The metal was cold as death, but I felt no pain. Someone laughed cruelly as I stared down at the blade imbedded in my flesh. In that dream, I smiled, because I was already dead. That one haunted me for weeks with a vague image of seeing my own bones gleaming in moonlight.
Then, one night in early September, it happened.
I was having one of the violent dreams. The battle was desperate, and I burned with cold hatred for my opponent. He had betrayed me, I knew. Stolen something precious to me.
At last I saw my chance. Lifted my pistol, pulled the trigger.
The shot woke me, and I sat up straight.
Only, it hadn't been a shot that woke me, but the crash of breaking glass. I must've flung an arm out in my sleep, and knocked my souvenir from New Orleans off the nightstand. And it must have hit the iron bedframe to shatter like that...
Something moved in the corner of my vision.
I froze.
There was someone else with me in the room. Clearly outlined against the window, and swaying slightly as if a little drunk, was the figure of a man. A man with long, dark hair and a somewhat aquiline nose.
He turned, and looked straight at me, and his deep-set eyes glittered in the faint light that seeped through the window from the streetlights outside.
I lost no time in doing what any heroine worth her salt would do.
In other words, I screamed as loud as I could.
