For some reason- probably because of that vivid dream- Barbossa was expecting Lovehaste to be expecting him. He was slightly annoyed when there was no skinny, tottering figure standing on a jetty to greet him when they docked.
Lovehaste, due to her slightly deranged view of the world, tended to be permanently on the lookout for what Barbossa called 'adventure' and what she called 'the perfect plotline'. As a result, she moved around the Caribbean a lot, but never forgot to leave her full address with Ragetti's mother on Tortuga.
Currently she was residing in a rather civilised looking town that occupied the edge of a surprisingly big island. The scents of people living peaceful lives- cooking, the metallic tang of the smithies, the stench of the open sewers, the gas from the streetlamps- and the babble of pleasant, everyday noises was a strange greeting for pirates. They were under strict instructions to act like off-duty sailors around the places where Lovehaste lived. Barbossa was worried Lovehaste would come out and shout at him, or worse, insist on joining in, if they started pillaging. He always made it up to them the moment she moved out- some of the worst atrocities The Black Pearl committed during the cursed days were a result of Lovehaste's continued residence in the area.
The pirates wandered sheepishly towards the red-light district. Occasionally one of them would shout, "Gragh!" at a passerby and make them jump, to let off some steam. Latonya placidly followed them, looking about with great interest and smiling at everyone.
Barbossa set off down what passed for a high street in the settlements. His nautical sway, his strange clothes, and of course his air of extreme nastiness, made people cross to the other side of the street to avoid him. To amuse himself, he zigzagged across the road for a while. People fell over themselves to get out of his way.
Twenty minutes zigzagging and strolling parked him outside a small house, painted yellow for some unfathomable reason, with dahlias growing outside. Barbossa glared at the dahlias. There was something profoundly insulting about being greeted by dahlias. He trod on a few, and pounded at the door.
"Hang on," fluted a well-spoken, feminine voice. Barbossa gritted his teeth. Even after a decade, he still found Lovehaste's immaculate English accent irritating. He chewed on his tongue for a bit, to relieve the desire to punch her on her prominent nose when she opened the door.
It swung open dramatically- Lovehaste was a great believer in drama- to reveal the woman herself.
Lovehaste, characterised by her single terrible eyebrow, her brittle thinness and her dun-coloured skin, was never going to be a beautiful woman, or even an acceptable looking one. Growing older did not really help. She was in her early thirties, and looked it. In fact, she had the face of a woman who was in her early thirties, but it was plain to see on her visage what she would look like in her late forties. She didn't look it, but it was obvious from her face that she was going to get old and wrinkly. Lovehaste really was dealt more of a foot than a hand in the great card game that is life.
She gaped a lot at him, then goggled, then switched back to gaping.
"Captain!" she exclaimed.
"Hallo, Lovehaste," he said, unable to keep the gloom out of his voice. He couldn't help noticing she was wearing an elbow length dress, which showed the scar on her arm rather prominently. "Long time no see."
"I thought you were dead!" shrieked Lovehaste, and before Barbossa could stop her she threw her arms about his neck.
He untangled himself, took her by the nose and pulled her inside the house. She started to cry with happiness. They were real tears of happiness too, not her usual the-story-requires-that-I-cry tears; Barbossa could always tell, because real tears made her nose run even more than her eyes.
He sat her down on a chair and wiped his hand on her skirt. She didn't seem to notice.
Between sobs she managed, "So Tia Dalma brought you back!"
Barbossa heaved the loudest, longest groan he could manage. "Why does she turn up everywhere I go?" he shouted. Lovehaste stopped crying and started to shush him. "Don't shush me Lovehaste!" he snapped. "I am not in the mood ter be shushed. Shushing will not happen in my vicinity. Yer've reached the end of shush."
"You- you lifted the curse then," Lovehaste murmured. "Did you find Bootstrap?"
"No," Barbossa said, rolling his eyes. He'd tried explaining before that Bootstrap Bill was nigh unfindable, what with being somewhere in the seven seas, but Lovehaste always ignored details she didn't understand. "I found his offspring," Barbossa replied, and recounted briefly his traumatic few days before his death. Whenever he mentioned Jack, Lovehaste's eyes would go wide and give him a significant look, but he ignored that.
When he finished, she stood up and said, "I expect you'd like a drink."
"I always do," he replied, and grinned when she returned with some decent wine.
Lovehaste was privy to the effects of the curse because she'd been unlucky enough to have it for a few months. It was she who'd eventually managed to make some sense of Jack's maps and Jack's directions to the Isla de Muerta, and when Barbossa had found the cursed gold, he'd taken a few pieces to give to her. Being a sap, she'd drilled holes in them and worn them around her neck.
It was not long after this that Barbossa and his crew had discovered that the curse was more than a ghost story, and they'd spent a horrible few months trying to find out how it was lifted. The knowledge that Bootstrap Bill's blood was needed to lift it made Barbossa near to insane with fury. He hated, oh he hated, when he made mistakes.
When he'd revisited Lovehaste, he found her sitting patiently on a jetty, looking like living death (which she was- she was under a scrap of moonlight). The moss growing up her dress suggested she'd been waiting there for some time. Her unusual silence, more accusing than her usual squeaky, oddly-worded reprimands, incited more anger on Barbossa's part. When the time came to spill her blood, he had dragged his dagger across the veins in her arm, fully intending to kill her.
The anger dissipated of course, but not before Lovehaste nearly did die. He rather suspected Destiny was teaching him a lesson in compassion, but since a) he felt no guilt about it and b) Lovehaste never mentioned it again, he had a feeling Destiny had its head up its arse. Moreover, Lovehaste had returned to the living on that night, whereas the pirates stayed cursed. He'd resented her for that.
"I need a favour, Lovehaste," he said to her now, as she drank her wine in delicate, affected sips.
"That's always why you visit me," she said, giving what she probably thought was a coquettish smile- Lovehaste had heard of coquettes and her smile suggested she thought they were a kind of coconut.
He sighed, and she hastily added, "Tia Dalma intimated it might have something to do with map reading."
He stared at her, doing the Evil Pirate Captain Deadpan face. It always made her uncomfortable. "If Tia Dalma," and he said the name as one would usually say 'plague-ridden bilge rat', "said I'd be coming, why did yer think I was dead?"
Lovehaste went pink. She mumbled something in which the word 'zombie' was distinguishable. Oh, so she doesn't know how I got back either, thought Barbossa, without surprise. I suppose I'll have ter ask the voodoo woman myself.
"I- I knew she was going to bring you back," Lovehaste said, shyly. "I had to give her some information to help her."
"What kind of information?" Barbossa asked in a dangerously soft voice.
"A-a-about you and Jack," Lovehaste said, shading to a novel shade of magenta. "She- she said she needed to know about your heart, if she was to make it start beating again."
Barbossa briefly toyed with the idea of giving Lovehaste a smack in the chops, but decided he couldn't be bothered. "What did she give you in return?" he asked, rather tiredly, to block out the mental images of what Lovehaste, with her unique ability to interpret everything the wrong way, would have told Tia Dalma.
Lovehaste went completely silent. "I- I don't know how to tell you," she mumbled.
Barbossa was about to lose his temper, when suddenly something bloody awful happened in his chest and he dropped off his chair, clutching at it and hissing with agony through his teeth.