Fic: Marooned Ch. 10: Playing with Fire
By Honorat Selonnet
Rating: K+
Disclaimer: I am not the owner of POTC, I am not the scriptwriters, I am not an actor. I am a fanfic writer. And this is not the time for rash legal action. Do not make the mistake of thinking that I am making any profit at all off of this.
Summary: Just how many kinds of fire can Miss Swann play with in one story? Okay! Okay! Here's the song everyone's been waiting for. Tenth in my Island Fic plus deleted scenes plus dragons. This scene is back to the movie. Since the deleted scenes version of this episode does not explain where or when Elizabeth gets the idea to burn the rum, I had to make a choice. See what you think.
Thanks and another chest of uncursed Aztec gold go to geekmama2 for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.
Playing with Fire
After tossing a couple more sticks on the fire, Jack flopped down on the sand beside Elizabeth. She sat staring into the flames, her arms clasped around her knees, wispy trails of steam drifting off her shift and her hair, the firelight turning them shades of gold. He contemplated the bottle in his hand. Rum and a beautiful woman and a song. It almost made being marooned bearable. Almost. He took a deep drink.
"So," he turned to the girl. "Let's have it."
"The song?"
"Of course the song, love. Though if you have anything else to be offering, I'd be willing to consider it."
Elizabeth gave a deep, exasperated sigh. "The song is all you're getting Jack Sparrow."
He flashed a grin at her. "You can't blame a man for trying, darling. Have some more rum."
Elizabeth thought she would, whatever Jack imagined that might do for his nefarious purposes. She needed a little artificial courage to sing for him.
Several swigs of rum later, she felt fortified enough to try. In a voice as light and soft as that of the young child she had been when she had learnt the song, she sang, "Yo ho, yo ho! A pirate's life for me."
Elizabeth stopped singing. The pirate's dark eyes, fixed on her face, were making her uncomfortable.
"Well?" Jack prompted. "There's got to be more to it than that. I'm sure I remember at least one other line."
"I'm not used to singing for an audience," Elizabeth confessed.
"What? A young lady like yourself not an expert in all the accomplishments of drawing room entertainment?" Jack acted shocked.
"But no one pays you any real attention in a drawing room," she protested.
"I can do my best to ignore you," Jack offered. "But you're easy on the eyes, love, and I'd really rather not."
"Mr. Sparrow!" Really the man's sunflower compliments were putting her to the blush.
Jack rolled his eyes and raised an admonitory finger.
Before he could say it, Elizabeth interrupted, "I know, I know. It's Captain. Captain Sparrow."
"I knew you couldn't be as slow as you seemed, love," the captain smirked. "Now go on. Go on. Don't be shy." He took another drink and flapped his hand at her. "You've been running around all day in your underclothes, not that I'm complaining, darling, and now you're balking at singing a little song? Where's the logic in that?"
He dodged the swat he knew perfectly well he deserved.
But the playful banter had at least relaxed Elizabeth enough that she could continue.
"We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot.
Drink up me hearties yo ho!
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot. . . ."
Images of her home shattered by cannon fire, of men with armloads of her family's possessions, of splintering shop windows and fleeing people, of blood running in the street gutters flickered behind her eyes. She recalled fists smashing into her face, ropes chafing her wrists raw, loneliness and fear chilling her heart, strange dangerous men with inscrutable motives laying hands on her. Her voice trailed off. She looked down, biting her lip.
Jack reached over and tilted her chin up, seeing the memory in her eyes. "It's different when it's not a game any more, isn't it love?"
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
"Tell you what," Jack suggested. "Let's just pretend none of this has happened. You're back in England and . . . how old were you when you learnt this song?"
"Six," Elizabeth admitted. "I heard it from some traveling players in the market. . . ."
"Wait, wait, wait!" Jack waved Elizabeth to silence. "Your father let you sing this song when you were six years old?"
A small giggle escaped Elizabeth. She really had the most endearing giggle when she was drunk, Jack decided. Tinged with mischief.
"He didn't find out until it was too late."
Jack raised his eyebrows. "No wonder the man has gray hair, love."
"That's a wig, Jack," she remonstrated.
"Oh and you're telling me he doesn't have gray hair under that wig?" He lifted one of his own highly ornamental locks.
Elizabeth conceded that he had a point.
"Well now." Jack flourished his arms like a conductor. "On with the song, Miss Swann. Buck up, me hearty! I can promise you, you won't give me gray hair. If you're six years old, that would make me—hmmm—well never mind that. I'll just be six years old too."
Looking into the pirate's eager eyes, Elizabeth could almost see the six-year-old Jack had been superimposed over the man he had become. Their day's activities had proved that he'd buried that child less deeply than any other adult she knew.
Pretend. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, trying to recapture the feeling she'd had as a little girl, listening to the merry music that sparkled through the gray day.
Her words came out rather tentatively at first.
"We extort, we pilfer, we filch and sack.
Drink up me hearties yo ho!
Maraud and embezzle and even hijack. . ."
"That's it, love," Jack's voice was full of sly laughter. "Close your eyes and think of England."
Her eyes flew open. Oh! That man wanted slapping so badly! Then her sense of humour, or the rum, got the better of her and she doubled over, laughing.
The laughter loosened something inside of her that had been too painfully tight for this song. Her voice grew stronger as she continued.
"We kindle and char and inflame and ignite.
Drink up me hearties yo ho!
We burn up the city, we're really a fright. . ."
She would not think about the flames over Port Royal. None of it had happened yet, they were pretending.
Jack watched, appreciating the really rather poignant sight of Elizabeth, whose childhood had been peeling from her so fast he could almost see the layers drop away, reenacting her childhood song for him.
"We're rascals, and scoundrels, and villains, and knaves," she sang, gaining enthusiasm as she remembered how she used to sing this song. "Drink up me hearties yo ho!"
When she had finished, Jack, who was certainly a rascal and a scoundrel, and at times was even a villain and a knave, exclaimed, "That is a wonderful song!" ready to try it himself. He chased a swallow of rum down with another one.
"It's even better if you dance," Elizabeth told him.
Jack bounced to his feet, wobbling a bit. "I love to dance!" he informed her, holding out his free hand and hauling her up.
Nothing but the wind and the waves and the soughing palms witnessed the two castaways singing in the dark. Singing because it would do no good to weep. Dancing and drinking rum to outrace anguished thought. In the circle of light cast by the fire to hold back the night and the future and fear, Elizabeth Swan and Jack Sparrow played her childhood game, cavorting in opposite directions about the fire, and caroling at the top of their lungs, "We're devils and black sheep and really bad eggs. Drink up me hearties yo ho!" Unashamed, the governor's daughter kilted up her skirt, kicked up her heels and danced with a pirate.
"Yo ho, yo ho!" they chorused.
"Ouch," interrupted Jack, discovering a conch shell the hard way. Then he joined back in, "A pirate's life for me!"
As Jack staggered around the fire, arms out flung flourishing his bottle of rum, he whooped delightedly, "I love this song!"
Catching Elizabeth's arm, he whirled her about, the two of them laughing hilariously. They swung apart, and Jack tilted into an intoxicated spin shouting, "Really bad eggs!" But his balance was not equal to the task anymore. Eyes going unfocused, he gave a soft "Ooof" and toppled to the sand with an inelegant burp. Rocking back to a sitting position, he grabbed Elizabeth's arm and pulled the giggling girl down beside him.
Eagerly he informed her, "When I get the Pearl back, I'm gonna teach it to the whole crew, and we'll sing it all the time!" He had had enough rum that there was no doubt he would get her back. Lovely, lovely rum.
Eyes glowing, tousled hair catching light from the fire, the rum-mellowed Elizabeth enthusiastically entered into his plans. Leaning towards him she gushed, "And you'll be positively the most fearsome pirates in the Spanish Main!"
Widening his eyes and waving his spread fingers in her face, Jack waxed even more excited, "Not just the Spanish Main, love. The entire ocean! The entire world!" He gestured expansively.
Lost out in the middle of that ocean, on a sandy beach, watched over only by the indifferent stars and the dark tossing shapes of palms, Captain Sparrow painted pictures for her of his dreams.
"Wherever we want to go, we'll go," he told Elizabeth. "That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs." Jack's eyes glowed with small flames. His hands traced ships in the air before him. Elizabeth half expected to see them sail off to the stars limned with firelight.
"But what a ship is," he paused, looking out over the restless breathing waves, holding out a hand to the sea as if to caress a ship that was not there, his voice low and passionate, "…what the Black Pearl really is…is freedom."
Elizabeth marveled at the change in Jack. His expressive eyes which she had seen furious and dangerous, sober and empty, madcap and laughing, but always hard like a steel blade, were soft and liquid with longing and loss, almost with love, searching the dark night for an even darker ship that never came. The fire outlined the pirate with light as the phosphorescence had done, and she thought how like the sea that he loved this man was. As if he had spent so much time in it, he had become a part of it—capricious, heart-breakingly beautiful, unpredictable and deadly. A surface of ever-changing light over fathoms of deep, dark mystery. And above all, free as no one else she knew was free, responding only to the force of the wind and the pull of the waves. His body was engraved with the record of the price he had paid for that freedom. For the first time she thought she might understand a little of why Jack was so desperate to win back the Black Pearl, why Barbossa would consider it the ultimate torment to maroon this man and take his ship.
The rum having dulled her sense of propriety (never one of her strong points anyway) and her sense of self-preservation, she gave in to the impulse to lean comfortingly against Jack's shoulder, her head fitting snugly under his jaw so that his breath stirred her hair. The sea was too big, the night too dark, the future too uncertain for a man or a woman to be so horribly lonely.
"Jack," she murmured, "it must be really terrible for you to be trapped on this island."
Jack stiffened, shifting like a sail that has caught a new wind. "Oh, yes," he breathed, slipping an arm around her shoulders. What an unexpected gift! What a lovely girl she was. Her hair glowed golden in the firelight like treasure. Her slender body pressed entrancingly against his side. "But the company is infinitely better than last time," he assured her. So good, not to be alone.
At first Elizabeth felt only the warmth and security of his strength, but then his words, the race of his heartbeat registered. His low insinuating voice brushed her forehead as he gazed down at her. "And the scenery has definitely improved."
Elizabeth looked up into Jack's dark face, so close to her own. For the second time, she was in the arms of the notorious pirate captain. Again his smouldering eyes held hers, his voice murmured seductively in her ear. Again the rancid scent of rum and sweat and the sea, the heat of his body assaulted her senses. Again his eyes devoured her; his teeth gleamed with gold in his disturbing smile. But when he had taken her hostage, while she had been outraged, she had known the lechery was a joke, a pleasant flirtation for a man who always flirted, an airy nothing intended to insult her father and infuriate the commodore. And while she had been angry, she had not been afraid.
This time, however, was different. His arm encircling her shoulder. The brush of his rope-calloused fingers on her arm. The need in his rum-darkened eyes. In consternation, she twisted her head to see his grimy hand in its strange wrappings holding her. The faceted emerald in his silver ring winked at her in the flickering light. This time Jack wasn't joking. Not playing for his audience the role of mad bad pirate. Here, stranded alone on this tiny island, the only audience he played for, kept at bay by the glow of the leaping flames, was the dark angel Death, whispering in the night behind their heads of thirst and hunger, of a single shot in a single pistol lying on the sand at the edge of the light. She could see the shadow of it in his eyes and wondered what he saw in hers. And so she did not slap him away, nor did she tell him no. And while she was not angry, she was very afraid.
Her voice holding a note of panic, Elizabeth fell back on a parody of formality, trying to distract the pirate.
"Mr. Sparrow!" she exclaimed, pulling out of his embrace.
"Mmmm?" he looked at her in intoxicated confusion, letting his hand drift across her back.
"I'm not entirely sure that I've had enough rum to allow that kind of talk," she told him in her best society imitation. But oh, she had had far too much rum. Too much rum to run away as fast as she should be running away.
Jack's hand slipped off her shoulder and hovered in the air before her. Reflected fires burnt in his dark eyes as he pointed at her significantly. His smile held nothing comforting.
"I know exactly what you mean, love." His voice held the suffocating heat of a summer Caribbean night.
If he did, that was more than she knew herself. Like a small wild creature cornered by a predator, Elizabeth sat frozen in the sand. Without taking his eyes from hers, the pirate slowly lifted both hands to his face. Stroking his fingers down his moustache, he twisted the ends and curled them up. Then his hand dropped to her arm, brushing the tips of his fingers from her elbow to her shoulder in a way that sent a frisson up her spine. She had to draw his attention away—to give herself time to think. What was the right thing to do? What did she really want?
In desperation, Elizabeth raised her bottle of rum. "To freedom!" she saluted.
Jack brushed her hair from her shoulder, his hand resting on the nape of her neck, his rough thumb caressing the curve of her jaw. He held her gaze as he lazily lifted the dark bottle, touching it to hers with a festive clang.
"To the Black Pearl." His voice was graveled velvet; his eyes promised things she was afraid to imagine.
Tilting her bottle against her lips, Elizabeth took a small sip, hoping Jack would follow suit. He tipped back his head, draining the bottle in long gulps, but his hand remained nestled in her hair, fingers feathering her skin, sending chills down her neck. In apprehension, Elizabeth looked away from him. She was running out of delays. She didn't know why she hadn't tried to escape him, why, in spite of her own resolutions, she needed the touch of another human being. The rum in her head was making it hard to think, harder to refuse any solace offered.
Steeling herself, she waited, staring out to sea, for the decision to be taken out of her hands. Then she felt Jack's hand go slack, trailing down her back as, at last, he slumped to the sand.
Almost unbelieving, Elizabeth stared at the unconscious pirate captain. Reprieved. Finally he had passed out, although now she was alone with the menacing dark beyond the firelight. She was not sure what might have happened had she had enough rum. Had he not had too much. She was not sure she wanted to find out. But what was left to them? Captain Jack Sparrow had proved not to be a miracle worker, tamer of sea turtles, fiendish escape artist. He was an ordinary human being, like herself. And the bones of ordinary human beings had been picked gleaming white by sea birds on islands like this one before.
She ran a daring finger over the curve of Jack's cheek bone, imagining the dark skin rotted away, the gleam of skull, and she shuddered. He slept on so peacefully, arms out flung, looking innocent, which he certainly was not, and vulnerable, which she now knew he was. When he had stood beside her in the wash of the tide, watching his ship disappear, she had seen the armour fall. As he had described what his ship meant to him, almost she had seen the wound, so like her own. Looking at him now, haunted eyes closed, muscles relaxed, she realized how like a halyard under too much strain he had been, nearly ready to snap. If the Pearl was his freedom, as he had drunkenly tried to explain to her, perhaps, in her absence, rum was his substitute freedom. She looked a little tipsily at the bottle in her hand, firelight glowing in its depths. Drink up me hearties yo ho.
Taking another swig of rum, she hiccupped loudly. Not such a perfectly lovely woman now, Commodore, she grimaced, imagining what that stiff proper man would say about his ideal woman, dressed only in a grimy shift, spending the night beside a dead drunk pirate, guzzling rum. The lowliest slattern could scarcely better the infamy!
Dead drunk. Dead. Men died of alcohol poisoning. Suddenly she was terrified of being alone with a dead man on the island and she frantically bent over Jack. With relief, she felt his breath on the back of her hand, the steady beat of his heart against her scarred palm. He was only asleep. Surely she would die first. She couldn't bear to die alone. In morbid curiosity she crawled over to the pistol, picked it up and stared into its sinister eye—one shot for Barbossa, Jack had sworn. One shot left for a marooned man to end his misery swiftly. One shot between the two of them. Who would pull the trigger?1
The fire popped suddenly, like a pistol or an explosion. She thought of fire—of the lambent flames licking at driftwood, of the dehydrating sun scorching white sand, of the cold blaze of phosphor searing a still moonless bay, of the flint-struck spray of sparks that would ignite black powder, of the intoxicating burn of amber rum in her brain, of the look in Jack's eyes before he had passed out. Fire.
She was so tired, she realized. Her head felt detached from her body. Her eyes suddenly refused to stay open. Shivering, Elizabeth moved closer to the fire, but she was afraid of the snapping embers. Surely Jack was out for the night she rationalized. So she moved back towards the slumbering pirate. She lay down beside him in the sand, not touching, but close enough that the heat radiating off him warmed her a little. A wistful memory of Estrella tucking her under a warm coverlet stirred, and she felt a pang of homesickness. She hoped her father and Estrella were safe. She hoped she would see them again. Then sleep swallowed her in blessed oblivion.
The cold woke her in the pre-dawn darkness. Jack hadn't moved at all, she discovered. Her head felt as though someone were hammering on it. Her tongue felt thick and dry. But the only thing to drink at the moment was more rum. The fire had died down to coals and the night was closing in on her—she had to keep the thing in the dark away. However, when she tried to get up to add more wood, her legs didn't seem quite to belong to her. She felt triumphant and light-headed when she finally succeeded. The flames rose up, throwing small glittering stars into the sky and setting ghost fires alight on the waves. Their own little lighthouse. Don't hit the island in the dark.
Elizabeth giggled foolishly, but then an idea caught. A beacon! Commodore Norrington must have the entire Port Royal fleet out searching for her. Her father would insist on it. They would not see this small fire except by veriest accident, but if she could make a big enough fire . . . Rum and explosions. She had gallons of explosives.
The trick would be to put her plan into effect without waking the rum-sozzled pirate. Just how drunk was he? He'd proven his ability to consume phenomenal quantities of rum without incapacitating himself. She couldn't have him coming to and realizing what she was up to. Even as she was stumbling to the hidden stash, she knew Jack Sparrow would kill her. He would use Barbossa's shot on her. Elizabeth cast a quick glance at the slumbering pirate as she lugged a barrel past him to the stand of palm trees on the point of the island. She would have to hurry.
TBC
CaptainTish Thanks as always for the lovely comments, but don't let my muse hear you about writing too much more. I'm going to have to strike for better hours.
Kalimac I tried to comment on your story but FF won't let me comment twice, so let me return the compliment. You also are a ray of light in this ficdom. I'm glad you're enjoying my juxtaposition of the two tricksters, Jack and Barbossa. They use a lot of the same means to a lot of the same ends, but there are some things Jack just won't do that Barbossa doesn't even blink at doing.