In fact, that night when Barbossa dreamed, he dreamed not of any sort of map, path, outline or clue. He dreamt firstly about Jack himself.
"Hallo, mate," Jack said. They were onboard a wrecked ship, surrounded by the dead bodies of one of Jack's many crews. Closer inspection revealed the ship to be the remains of The Black Pearl, and the crew Barbossa vaguely recognised as some of Tortuga's dregs. "Yer looking very well for a dead person."
"Right back at yer, Jack," muttered Barbossa. He was surveying the bodies with great distaste- Jack's habit of getting almost every member of his crew killed because of some ridiculous, half-magical mission he was on was part and package of the reasons Barbossa had betrayed Jack.
Jack gave him the laugh Barbossa used to mentally term the Tarnished Silver Bells Laugh. It used to have a devastating effect on Barbossa- one brief guffaw and any previous indignation would melt away under the blowtorch of Jack's charm. He gritted his teeth.
"Missed me, Barbie?" asked Jack.
"No," Barbossa replied, a tad too quickly.
Jack twinkled humorously at him and quirked an eyebrow. (The eyebrow had bad effects on Barbossa too. Memories came flooding thick and fast, poured up against the side of the boat, and sank down again into the sea.) "Course you have, love," he said. "Missed yer wifey. Missed the good ole days when we were one happy, smelly, unbelievably evil family."
"Yer never gave a damn about us," Barbossa said softly. "And yer never called me 'love' so don't start that."
Jack grinned. "How's Latonya?"
Ah yes. Latonya had been on Jack's list of conquered women. "Fine," he growled.
"Have you seen that trick she does with the peaches and those silver rings?"
"Ye know perfectly well I never go with the wimmin," Barbossa told him.
At that line, Jack started to fade away, rather abruptly and without any preliminaries. Barbossa lunged forwards to snatch at him, but found he was clapped in irons. When he looked around, the Pearl was spotless once more and the corpses had vanished.
Someone rounded the mast. Barbossa groaned aloud and felt a mad desire to rattle his chains and start chanting, "Ooh, dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones." The ineffectual, dreadful and horribly monobrowed Mariella Suzella Lovehaste always had that effect on him.
She was in what she probably thought was pirate fare- her awful leather breeches, a full-sleeved shirt that puckered strangely over her flat, bony chest, a huge leather belt, a ridiculous ornate sword, an extravagant royal blue coat with gold edging, and a hat with a peacock feather stuck in it at a rakish angle. In Barbossa's dream, she looked paler and thinner than he remembered. Since Lovehaste was a white-complexioned, skinny wretch of a woman, she came to resemble a translucent skeleton.
"Darling," she said.
"Argh!" said Barbossa.
She gave him a sickly grin. "Alright, I know, our love was never to be." Barbossa rolled his eyes; that was another thing that always bothered him about Lovehaste. He had met her by destroying her ship and absentmindedly rescuing her. It seemed to appropriate thing to do at the time, but Lovehaste had turned out to be convinced she was a 'Mary Sue' character (whatever that was) in a 'fanfiction' (whatever that was), and seemed adamant that they were destined to be lovers. Since Barbossa would happily wed a cuttlefish with STDs over Lovehaste, she had had to do some serious plot redrafting.
She stood squarely in front of him now, and rolled up a sleeve with difficultly.
"Remember this?" she asked him, neutrally.
Barbossa stared at the diagonal gash across the taut white flesh of her arm. "Aye," he confirmed. He felt slightly embarrassed, partly because he had a feeling Lovehaste would want him to feel guilty about it, which he didn't, and partly because he felt that he'd been overly dramatic when he'd slashed her arm.
Lovehaste seemed satisfied with this answer, and drew no more attention to the scar. "You haven't come to see me in a while," she said, playfully accusing. Lovehaste being playfully accusing reminded Barbossa markedly of a vulture batting its eyelashes and blowing kisses from behind its wings, but he couldn't let that pass.
"Sorry, I've been dead. Yer know how it is- busy busy busy, all that catching up with men whose throats I slit in the living world, playing poker with the Devil, being tossed in brimstone. It eats inter yer time."
She smiled. "Pity. If you'd stayed there long enough, you could have bumped into Jack."
Barbossa winced. He'd revealed certain truths about himself to Lovehaste in a rare moment of shared drunkenness and camaraderie, and had lived to regret it. "It seems I'll be chasing the bugger in any case," he muttered.
She clapped her hands together. "Yay! The Further Adventures of Captain Barbossa, Scourge of the Seas! Come and see me soon- you know how good I am at reading maps!"
This, at least, was true. "Yes, I can tell by yer enormous forehead that yer've got brains in there somewhere." Barbossa privately suspected Lovehaste of having an enormous amount of intelligent and a savagely good capacity for puzzles, but absolutely no creativity and a total inability to think original thoughts. Quite likely intellectual conundrums were the only way she could let off the excess thought-power, because she lacked the artistic ability to even draw convincing stick-men. He remembered once, when he'd gone to visit her during the days of the curse (why oh why did he stay in contact with her?), and they'd had a mad conversation about the nature of justice. Much later, he'd read a badly printed book bearing some sappy title, designed to appeal to women like Lovehaste, and found that her half of the conversation was almost word for word taken from the dialogue of the buxom, swashbuckling heroine in the book. He'd laughed for days.
"When you come, I've got a surprise for you," she said, smiling. Barbossa recognised that smile. It made him want to crawl to Tia Dalma on his belly, kiss all ten of her toes five times over and beg to be returned to the land of the dead. "And it's funny you should be thinking of Tia Dalma," she added, and Barbossa cursed. Dreams were so annoying when they took advantage of the fact that they knew what you were thinking.
"Why?" he muttered darkly. Then he felt his body grow clammy, and he said, "What did you give her for it?"
Lovehaste giggled. It was not a nice sound. "Information," she replied, and leaned forward to give Barbossa a kiss on the cheek. Barbossa howled and tried to slap her away, and woke up rather suddenly when his fist connected with Latonya's temple.
"Nuh?" said Latonya, and fell off the bed.
Barbossa sat bolt upright. "Miss Vaughn?" he called, to the spread-eagled figure on the floor.
"Yuh?"
"Get dressed." Latonya slept in her clothes anyway. "I need a ship. I need my crew. No, first I need a disposable crew, some cannon fodder, because I need to raid Port Royale. Then I will have what of my original crew is left. Then we need to go to," he frowned, and searched his memory, "a certain island," he finished lamely. "There's a woman I have to talk to. God help me," he added, glumly.
A/N. For further information on Lovehaste, read 'Don't Give Up The Day Job, Love'. It's not necessary for future consumption of this story, but it's a better fic and far more amusing, though I say it myself. modest cough