It was decided, without any communication taking place, that Maximo would take over command of the ship for a while. Anyway, no one wanted to disturb the Captain when he was so clearly in the kind of mood that stirs up storms and spits out lava.
Lovehaste was trying to wipe off the ink, and so far had only succeeded in smearing it evenly across her face. Dark blue suited her. A small bump was forming where the inkwell had connected with her skull.
As if to try and match Barbossa furious, curse-befuddled tirade, Hector Junior was screaming so hard it was a wonder his head hadn't popped off.
Barbossa paused to drag some breath into his lungs, then started again. "WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE SEVEN SEAS WERE YER THINKING, YE LIMP-HAIRED, LIMP-BRAINED SCUD OF NATURE?"
Lovehaste didn't even try to make an excuse, but just wiped her face on Barbossa's spare pillowcase, looking sad and doomed. Barbossa gave up, and tried to be reasonable.
"What the hell were yer hoping for?" he asked, over Hector Junior's caterwauls.
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. "Nothing, really," she mumbled.
He shook his head in wonder. "I can't be a father, Lovehaste. Yer do know what I am, aye? A pirate? Aye? That sounding familiar?" She nodded mutely, not meeting his eye. Hector Junior was really going for sound barrier-breaking. "I spend most of my time at sea. Y'know the sea? The big, blue, big, damp, big, thing? Aye? The thing I spend a lot of my time on?" She nodded again, and started worrying at the edge of the blanket.
He sighed. This was like extracting teeth. "Yer do know why I became a pirate, don't yer, Lovehaste?" This time the nod was a trifle more enthusiastic.
He'd told her early on in their acquaintance, and then elaborated on it over the years. Daddy had been a pirate, and Mummy had been a fairly well-off spinster in a settlement town. Daddy did to Mummy what pirates usually do to women when they're raiding their towns, and Mummy had ended up with him. (Barbossa remembered his mother as a stolid and permanently sad woman, with a turned-down mouth and red puffy eyes. She'd married the first man who'd have her after Daddy had paid her his court, and turned out child after child, only two of whom survived beyond the fourth month. )
One of Barbossa's first memories was of him asking, with his hands on his hips, shouting very loudly, why he didn't have a daddy like all the other boys. Mummy had shaken her head and her lower lip had trembled, which made little Hector even more angry, because Mummy never listens to me, Mummy's always crying in a corner, stupid cow. He'd hit, with a six-year-old fist, the side of her head, and although it couldn't have hurt much, she gasped, fell off her chair, and burst into tears. He'd stood there, waiting for her to shut up, stupid cow, until she explained, through gulps, that his daddy was a pirate, a bad man, and he wasn't ever coming back to him, ever.
Barbossa had been eleven when he'd first killed someone. It was a lad named Quincy, a rough, rangy fourteen year old whom the alley kids all called Skip. Technically speaking, Mummy was of a social class that just about could afford to keep its kids out of alleys, but then again Mummy could never really control her wayward firstborn.
Skip was a bully. He'd been steadily insulting Barbossa for about a week- the younger members of the street gangs were always initiated through abuse- although some glimmer of common sense did prevent him picking on little Barbossa physically. At the end of this long week, Barbossa had finally cracked.
"Haha. Got no dad. Got no dad. Changeling! Hector's a little fairy changeling!" squealed Skip.
"My dad's a pirate," Barbossa had coldly replied, in his oddly musical, high voice. "He'd slit your gizzards and make you walk the plank if he could hear you talking like that."
"Haha. Hector's got no dad. That makes you a bastard!" Skip had continued, oblivious to his impending doom. "Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!" He reinforced his point by jabbing his finger into Barbossa's shoulder on every first syllable. Barbossa let this go on for six chants on the word 'bastard', then had seized Skip's wrist and snapped it upwards.
Skip had opened his stupid mouth to howl and Barbossa had forced his fist into it, listening to the teeth crack with a new, thrilling satisfaction. He swung his other fist up, into Skip's fat nose, and heard the wonderful crumbling, crunching, damp sound of it breaking. Skip had fallen over backwards, a shocking pile of blood and rags, and only then did Barbossa realise he'd pushed Skip's nose through his skull. The boy was dead.
Little Barbossa had turned on his heel and walked calmly home, leaving the street urchins gaping and silent behind him. Dad would be proud, he thought.
Mummy couldn't even bear to be in the same room as him after that.
For two years he scurried around the settlement's criminal underground, his adolescence shaped by the scarred, snarling men and pitted, scowling women he met there. When he was thirteen, he gained a place as a cabin boy aboard a pirate ship, vowing to find his father. He never saw his mother again.
He'd searched for decades without any luck before he met Jack Sparrow. When he did, it was as if all those years had been spent in a silly dream and he'd only just woken up to the real world, and the real world centred on Jack.
The rest was history.
Now, Hector Barbossa looked gloomily over at the wailing pink sausage that was apparently his offspring. "Tough luck, brat," he told it, wearily. The thing shut up and gave him a look of confuddlement.
Lovehaste started to speak, in a flat voice devoid of emotion. "I don't expect anything of you," she said quietly. "It was something I wanted for myself. I didn't expect you to be involved at any point." She frowned suddenly. "Except, you know, where it wasn't avoidable. And Tia Dalma used tubes and things for that anyway." She caught Barbossa's eye and stopped giving details. "I know," she added, "that you already loved Jack like a son, and that this isn't- this must be painful for you."
Barbossa stared numbly at her. "Tubes," he repeated. "I see." He wished he didn't, but his imagination had always been rather vivid.
He was starting to feel extremely confused. Ye twerp, he wanted to say, all that 'like a son' business, yer can't really be that dense, surely? Surely yer know what I mean? I thought yer interpreted everything the uncomfortable way, why are yer making an exception now?
He said instead, "Of course this is painful. I'm a pirate, Lovehaste. I'm a rotting human being. The only difference between my body now and my body when I was cursed is that I can currently feel all the aches and twinges and pains that are slowly taking me apart. And I'm not a young one either. And now yer tell me I've got a son, just when I've reached the point when I can stop being miserable about never having a family, because I'm going to die in a few years anyway? Thanks, wench. Tubes don't be the worst of it."
She was starting to resemble a blue and white tiger, because tears were strolling their way down her thin cheeks. Her nose, however, was the same as ever, so Barbossa ignored it and the flowery sentences that came out of her mouth next, because it was only happening for the sake of the narrative.
When she'd finished, he said. "Get out of my cabin. I need to lie down. Take," he gestured towards Hector Junior, who appeared to have dropped off to sleep, "that away too."
She got up, taking her stationary with her, and wobbled over to the desk. She paused beside him.
"See this?" She was gesticulating towards her chest. Because she was almost the same height as him, Barbossa had to stand back to see what she was indicating. It was the gunshot wound, recently his and now hers.
"Aye. Very pretty," he said.
She gave him a tight, prim little smile. "If you're a dying man, why am I carrying your death around?" She picked up the child. "Think about it. Then have a really long conversation with Tia Dalma when we get there."
With this fatuous remark, she left. Barbossa stuck his tongue out at her back and went to lie down.
Have a rest, he told himself. Ye deserve it. First Spaniards, then Lovehaste, and now babies. The horror never stops.
Wouldn't you rather think about tubes? his mind said, apparently intent on keeping him awake.
SHUT UP, BRAIN.