The tea fetched what Barbossa understood was called 'a tidy sum'. He didn't know why. He always thought all those zeroes made the page look messy.

He had insisted on buying Lovehaste a few dresses, not the kind that the women were wearing in Paris, but the kind at a quiet little dress shop in a corner which, it proclaimed on a quiet little sign, specialised in quiet little corsets for the, ahem, less endowed lady. It worked. Lovehaste could now only be mistaken for a cross-dressing male from a twenty metre or more radius.

"But these dresses won't be any good on a ship," she said coyly, and touched his hand.

Barbossa gave it a steady, level glare until she coughed and removed it. "I know," he said.

Walking down the street together, emphatically not linking arms, they looked a strange pair. Barbossa, who walked like a sailor (swaying slightly, both from being marinated in alcohol and from being used to wandering around on a rocking ship), exuded malign authority like a bad odour. Lovehaste, bound up in her brand new dress and twinkling at horrified strangers from behind her tasteless lace fan, tottered along on precarious heels, walking like someone glad to be on dry land. Barbossa noticed that in her stride. It just made him more determined to install her on the earth once and for all.

He badly wanted a pint of beer- he knew a smelly, authentic pub quite near where the ale was half liquid, half sludge and the women were cheaper than a shandy- but Lovehaste had caught sight of a waterfront café where they could have a glass of expensive wine. They sat down and Lovehaste tried to order in the same appalling French as Ragetti would have. Barbossa grinned; evidently, during the final week it took the crew to sail to the port, Lovehaste had made sure whatever little story she thought she was living in provided her with at least one successful love interest. He couldn't help noticing her eyebrows were separate too.

(Incidentally, Barbossa's grin made the occupants of the surrounding tables feel amazingly uncomfortable and they hurriedly overpaid their waiters and left, feeling oddly as if they'd only just escaped with their lives. Barbossa had learned to ignore this, or he might have been quite hurt.)

They sat in the first comfortable silence to ever to pass between them. Barbossa, pessimistic in all matters regarding Lovehaste, decided to break it. "What's going to become of your Ragetti?"

She looked very pleased at the use of the possessive. "I promised him I'd write letters and send them to his mother in Tortuga, for him to read when he visits." She adopted the 'woe is me' look and Barbossa had to stay his boot from giving her a kick up the backside. "Though our bodies may be far apart and unable to share the same embrace, our hearts are tightly knit together, always. And I will send him some of my love poetry," she added, cheering up suddenly. "I've written over three hundred poems."

"Aye? That be nice." Barbossa wondered whether he should tell her that Ragetti couldn't read, but decided against it. "Ragetti'd be able to appreciate that," he said instead, with such sincerity that Lovehaste beamed.

"You know your crew so well, Captain, so I trust your judgement," she said, giving him a bright little smile.

Barbossa turned his head away and fiddled with his wineglass. (He'd accidentally chipped it by holding the damnfool thing too hard.) "Jack used to say that too," he mumbled. "Although I was 'Barbie' to him," he added, and scowled.

"Ragetti told me your first name was Hector," Lovehaste said, slyly.

He snapped abruptly back to the real world, spun round in his seat and fixed her with an utterly ferocious glare. "What of it?"

She pressed her lips tight shut, so that facially she looked like a shaved orang-utan. "Nothing," she said quickly, "nothing at all. It's a good name."

"Right." He slurped his wine viciously.

Lovehaste licked her lips a couple of times. The air of trepidation, like someone peering over into a bottomless abyss after the lollipop they just dropped down it, was annoyingly familiar by now. "Just ask me, Lovehaste," he sighed. "It's going to be about Jack, isn't it?"

"Well, yes," she admitted. "I mean, I have spent a full seven days reading his peculiar maps for you, which is an uncomfortable insight into how his (rather unique!) mind worked. Incidentally I still can't understand how you couldn't comprehend them. Seemed perfectly obvious to me, although," she batted her eyelashes so her eyes looked like a Venus flytrap having trouble digesting its food, "I am a Mary Sue, and we can do anything."

"Aye, if yer say so," Barbossa replied. "What's yer question?"

"You loved him, didn't you?"

Barbossa carefully finished off his wine, poured himself another glass, handed the glass to Lovehaste and drank the rest of the wine in the bottle. She waited, unperturbed.

At length he said, "Yes. Don't yer go misinterpreting the meaning of the word 'love'."

"So, how did you love him?" Lovehaste asked, grinning.

"Don't yer go asking for further explanations on the subject, either."

Ragetti, or some crew member, must have taught Lovehaste tact as well as bad French, because she left that part of the subject alone. Unfortunately, a week is not long enough to teach some pupils anything, because her next question was, "If you did, why did you mutiny?"

Barbossa shrugged. "Order me another bottle and I might consider telling ye."

Over the second bottle, with Lovehaste increasingly out of focus, Barbossa felt better about talking about it. "Ye said I knew my crew well," he began, and hiccupped.

She nodded, which made him feel dizzy. In my old age, I am a-becoming a lightweight. "Well, I do. Because I care about each and every last man. They are a family to me. The whole Pearl is my family. And Jack was, uh…"

"Your wife?" Lovehaste suggested.

"I preferred to think of him as my son," Barbossa said coolly. "Anyway. Yes. They were my family, and Jack was my love. My son. And yer see," he waved his arms about, hitting a waiter, "you see, when I first joined his crew- I'd been looking for my father for something like thirty years- ah, we attacked the Pearl. But he let us surrender. Pirates don't often do that. Jack was unique, like yer said.

"So for a year I adored him. What a man. Made me so proud. Made me lots of money too. And I thought- suffering from the nautical version of domestic bliss- that he felt the same way too. Not necessarily about me," he added, rather sadly, "no, I never dared hope he'd notice that, but at least about the Pearl and our, our, our family.

"But I started to notice that, even though our missions were successful, we'd always end up battling supernatural forces or huge odds and, well, about half the crew would be killed. So we'd get another crew, and most of them would be killed. I started to realise Jack hadn't allowed us to surrender because he was a gallant- he just didn't care. He didn't give a toss about anyone except," and here Barbossa, labouring under an alcoholic burden, made speech marks with his fingers, "the main characters. The only survivors from our original crew are Ragetti and Pintel, Bootstrap Bill- you may have bumped into him, taciturn bugger these days-, Cotton- the one travelling behind the parrot-, and Marty, the titch. Everyone else was killed when we were snatching some treasure from a bunch of unstoppable terracotta warriors in China."

Barbossa broke off, because the memory of that battle had surfaced like a dead fish in a goldfish bowl. "Flowerpot men!" Jack had yelled. "Wow! I want one!" "Jack, they're pulling the roof in!" "They're so cute," Jack had cooed. "Look, they can't bend their elbows! Aww! Barbie, can I have a flowerpot man for my next birthday? When's my birthday?"

He received a kick in the ankle from a four-inch heel court shoe. "Mm?"

"Carry on, then," Lovehaste said impatiently.

He unsteadily poured about half a glass of wine for himself, and a quarter of a bottle for the tablecloth. "Not much left to tell," he said. "I loved him but I started to hate him. When he almost got one of his many girlfriends, Anamaria, killed in battle, because he'd nicked her ship, that was the last straw. I didn't like Ana, obviously, but I thought to myself, 'If that's the way he treats her, how is he going to treat me when the going gets rough?' And one night, when he was very drunk, he teased me about something stupid- something about how he should call the monkey Barbie, I don't remember- and I lost my rag. And, funnily enough, the crew agreed. So we mutinied. End of tale, yo ho ho etc."

He looked at her. "Don't yer dare say, 'I'm sorry'," he snarled. "It had nothing to do with yer then, it has nothing to do with yer now."

She nodded. "Alright."

They sat in silence, and the sun got bored with the lack of conversation and started to go down.

"I should be going," she said, carefully.

Barbossa stretched, got up, hauled her upright by her nose. They started to walk away, she nursing her nose gently.

"Shouldn't we pay the bill?"

He gave her a funny look. "No."

"Ah."

He followed her, as she seemed to know where she was going. He could vaguely recollect she'd assigned herself to some house somewhere, to do some female things for other females. Just as long as she stayed on land, he didn't care if she went and joined Ragetti's mother and Giselle and Scarlet and the girls, as long as she didn't ever expect him to visit her.

She drew to a halt and he walked into her.

Lovehaste coughed. "I guess… this is goodbye."

"Yep." Barbossa wondered how many of his crew were in the smelly authentic pub. The night was still young.

She opened her fan again and Barbossa realised she was crying behind it. Not the usual dramatic tears, but real tears, the tears of someone who is very miserable and can't make the misery go away. He could tell because real tears made her nose snotty. "Er," he said, not sure how to deal with this.

"Though you probably don't care," she gulped, "I think you're a great captain. And I- I think you're going to be just f-f-fine…" She started to sob in earnest. "And I am sorry about Jack Sparrow! I'm sorry that I'm sorry! But I am!"

"There there," he said awkwardly. Why was she saying such a long goodbye? Why didn't they just hurry up and go their separate ways? He was thirsty, and he needed the toilet, or failing that a nice quiet alleyway. Not a good combination.

She visibly pulled herself together, and wiped the excess liquid on a handkerchief. She sighed and tried a watery smile. "Honestly," she said, "you're such a red herring. The genre clearly stated 'Humour / Parody'. Why d'you have to turn it into a tragedy for?"

Barbossa regarded her mildly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I know." She smiled a little wider. "Well…"

"Well. It's been…"

"Fun?"

"No."

"Elucidating?"

"No."

"Novel?"

"I think the word I'm looking for is 'disturbing'," Barbossa told her. "Now be on yer way."

She nodded, and put away her fan. "So long… Hector."

Barbossa felt weirdly thrown off balance. Something was happening in his chest- he wondered what it was. "So long… Mariella." Ah, now he knew- it was sadness.

As if in homage to this feeling, he leaned down and gave Mariella Suzella Lovehaste a kiss in the corner of her mouth. Not quite lips, not quite the cheek.

"No!" he burst out, because she seemed to be leaning in for more.

But she wasn't; she was laughing, she was backing away even as he cried out, she was wandering into the night, towards her new future. "I won't forget you," she called over her shoulder, as the shadows cuddled her up and welcomed her home.

"I won't forget yer either," he called back, "although I might try." She didn't answer- perhaps she never heard. "I hope to hell your authoress knows what she's doing to you, Mary Sue Lovehaste," he added, and went in quest of his crew.