"Why are you holding those parachutes?" the Harbor Master inquired ten minutes later.

"Oh, that's right!" Norrington perked up. "My plan! You will fly over to that island, where you will fake—fake—a crash landing."

"How will I…?"

"Just do whatever you've been doing with the controls."

"Like this—"

"Not yet. Once we're over the island, then you can. At which point, I will whisk Elizabeth up in my arms, strap on the parachutes, and rescue her from certain doom. We will safely float down to the island, where I will immediately set to signal for help from Port Royal. The Navy will send in the most impressive fleet of ships, and Elizabeth will fawn on me as her heroic and stunningly handsome rescuer."

"You're 0 for 2, there, Commodore."

"Nobody asked you, Harbor Master," seethed Norrington, waving his sword. "As I was saying, she will fall back in love with me, have her marriage with that blacksmith annulled, and then I will live happily ever after with Elizabeth as my wife."

The Harbor Master grimaced slightly, though Norrington was too enraptured in his daydream to notice. Finally, the pilot broke through. "Wait. You said fake a crash. What am I supposed to do after you and Elizabeth jump out?"

Norrington waved an unconcerned hand. "I don't know. Do whatever you like—I don't care. Dispose of Jack and Barbossa; that would be best I suppose. Find a nice tribe of monkeys for Will to reintegrate himself into. Tell Gillette he's needed somewhere far away from me. Sounds like a plan, all right? All right. Go to it, then."

When Norrington returned from the cockpit, he found the others more or less where he had left them. Will was rummaging through his empty peanut bag. Jack was finishing off the rest of Will's peanuts. Barbossa seemed a bit too interested in the stolen laptop. Elizabeth seemed a bit too interested in herself. Gillette…well, Norrington didn't really care.

Strutting into the middle of the aisle, the Commodore regally announced, "I believe our plane is going down."

Will muttered something about peanuts. Norrington coughed.

"I said, I believe our plane is going down."

As if to reiterate his statement, the plane shuddered and dropped. Jack, wiping his salty fingers off on his tattered pants, reached for the complimentary drinks and replied evenly, "No, that's all right, it's been doing this the entire time."

"No, no. This time, we are officially going to crash." Norrington glanced out the window, spotting the approaching outline of his island escape. "Yes, we should be going down in roughly thirty minutes."

"How do you know that?" Elizabeth absently asked, still preoccupied with her nails.

"Because, my dear," Norrington said righteously, "I was exclusively informed by the pilot."

Jack stared dubiously at him from over the green-tinted rim of a half-empty bottle. "He told you were we going to crash a half hour in advance? That strikes me as a bit odd."

"Well, Jack, these things take time. I hardly expect you to understand the aerodynamics at work, the intricate tail winds and mechanics—"

The plane grotesquely lurched and Will shrieked, the empty peanut bag crinkling in his tense hands.

"All you need to know is we're crashing," Norrington summed up quickly, "and Elizabeth and I are leaving." He gave a brief nod. "Cheers and best of luck to all of you. Come along, my dear."

Elizabeth finally noticed what Norrington had swiped from the cockpit. She stared at him, not so much as in hesitation but with indignation. "Um, Commodore, are you expecting me to jump out? With you?"

"Of course. Here is your parachute. Let us escape this plane and these lunatics while we still can!"

"Commodore, I am absolutely not jumping out of this airplane!" Elizabeth protested, yanking her hand back even as Norrington took her wrist. "Listen, we are not going to crash. My father appointed the pilot himself."

"And that reassures you, love?" Jack asked, taking a final swig of alcohol.

"No one asked you, Jack. And no one asked me if I wanted to leave the plane. Commodore, take this stupid thing—" She shoved the parachute back into his chest— "and get away!"

"But Elizabeth—"

"If you want to jump, feel free. The hatch is right down there."

"But the other parachute…"

"One's for you, one's for your nose," Jack explained perkily. "Will, good mate, pass that rum would ye?"

Norrington watched in disgust as Will nervously fumbled for another bottle. "Uh…Norrington…if Elizabeth isn't leaving, maybe I could…?"

"Will," snapped Elizabeth. "You'd just leave me here? Just like that?"

Embarrassed, Will uncorked the bottle and passed it over to Jack, who instead refused it and pushed it back towards Will. "No, mate, you drink it." He nodded over at Elizabeth, whose face had creased and reddened with annoyance. "Ye'll need it more than me. Cheers to marriage."

"Gee, what a fearless husband," she muttered, crossing one leg over the other. "The plane goes down, and he'll grab the parachute instead of offering it to his new wife. How romantic, Will."

"But—But the plane isn't going down," Will stuttered. The plane rattled and heaved.

"Then why did you want the parachute?" retorted Elizabeth.

"Because…" Will paused. "Because Norrington was going to jump!"

"Since when is that a tragedy?" asked Jack. "Will, are you going to drink that?"

Norrington had had enough. Furiously waving the parachutes, he yelled, "I am telling all of you, this plane is going to crash! And Elizabeth, unless you want to ruin a perfect storybook ending, you are coming with me and the two of us are jumping out of here right now!"

Elizabeth stared icily at him. "My father promised we'd land safely at the salon, and I am not budging from this seat until we do."

Her comment piqued enough of Barbossa's interest to convince the pirate to look up from his laptop. "The salon?"

"Yes, the beauty salon," sneered Elizabeth, "where all of you were going to get the makeover you so desperately need. It was supposed to be a surprise, from my father and I to all of you. And now you've all ruined it."

"The salon?" repeated Barbossa again. "But he told me that we were flying off to a place with a great selection of really big hats."

Jack chuckled, spewing wine. "Hardly. We were heading for Tortuga for a day of drinks!"

"You've had enough drinks for one day," snarled Norrington. "Actually, you two clueless pirates were being—are being—ditched in the furthest prison from Port Royal we can find. You can thank Governor Swann for that."

"But what about lemon meringue?" questioned Will, so caught up in his thoughts of dessert that he neglected to notice Jack plucking another bottle from his hand. "He told me that we're gong to see the largest lemon pie ever made this side of the hemisphere."

"Will," Norrington said gravely, "I believe you have a hemisphere missing from your brain."

"Are we going to see that, too?"

"No! We're throwing the two pirate idiots in jail! But first, Elizabeth and I—"

Norrington suddenly stopped, hearing fragmented sniffles coming from his elbow level. Gillette was wiping his eyes with a corner of his blue Lieutenant sleeve, looking pathetically disappointed.

"What, pray tell, is wrong with you?" Norrington asked impatiently.

"Oh, nothing, bro," whimpered Gillette, wringing out his damp sleeve. "It's just… Dad told me that today was supposed to be a fun Special Brothers' Day Out with you."

Norrington cringed at the word "bro," nearly keeled over at the word "Dad," and had to be scraped off the floor after collapsing at the word "fun."

"Norry, are you okay?"

The Commodore's skewed and fuzzy view displayed two Gillettes peering down at him. Wonderful, he thought, half-deranged, Gillette's found another Siamese twin. Suddenly, his vision righted itself, and he quickly pried himself away from the Lieutenant. He stumbled to his feet.

"Whatever the Governor told you, all of you," he declared, "is nothing but lies! We are not going to a salon; we are not going to buy hats; we are not going to Tortuga; we are not going—Will, yours is too stupid to count!—and we are not, absolutely not, over-my-dead-body-not, frolicking around on a brother outing!"

"Well, no one said we had to frolic—"

"Elizabeth! Spare me my sanity! Take this parachute and let's leave before we drop to their level!"

"So instead we'll just drop out of a plane?"

"With a parachute!" shrieked Norrington. He rifled the pack into Elizabeth's unsuspecting arms and strapped his own around his shoulders. "Come along, my dear. We haven't much time now."

Not hearing any further protests, he led the way down the aisle—it wasn't quite a church aisle, but it was an aisle—hearing a clatter of uncertain footsteps from behind him.

"Don't worry, Elizabeth, darling," Norrington muttered, blindly struggling to find the cord of his parachute. He loosened it from the pack so it would be at close proximity once he leaped, then knelt down to the floor to examine the hatch. "Everything will work out quite all right. Once Will's out of the picture, the world will be righted on its axis again. And I'll find you a salon, if you'd like. It will be quite perfect, actually. Now, where's the stupid handle to this stupid hatch…?"

With stomach-lurching rapidity, the plane stalled in the air and began its final plummet. The force of drop sent Norrington reeling downwards, where he solidly knocked his head against the metal hatch. Automatically, it swung open. A vacuum of air rushed up through the hole, raveled up Norrington and his partner, and sucked them cleanly out of the airplane.

…

"Elizabeth," Will said back in the passengers' seats, "didn't Norrington want you to go with him?"

She never once glanced up. "No. That stole-away donkey seemed much more anxious to take the parachute for himself, anyway."

Will blinked, dumbfounded. "Donkey?"

…

"ISN'T THIS GRAND, ELIZABETH?" Norrington was trying to shout, but the atmosphere got caught in his wide-open mouth and suppressed most of the words.

However, it failed to suppress the scream when he turned in midair to search out Elizabeth, who he thought had followed him from the plane.

But she hadn't. It was Will's blacksmith donkey spiraling after him from above, its four legs careening out in the blue sky with the parachute snuggly fit around its middle section like an awkward saddle. It sounded like it whinnied; Norrington would have sworn it even laughed.

Norrington wasn't laughing much now. His secure, faultless plan had been ruined by Will again—even worse, at the hands—shoes—of Will's donkey. Norrington had been outsmarted by an ass—there had to be some irony there, but at the moment, Norrington could only stare in outrage at the beast falling with him to the island below.

The donkey noticed that the two would be landing in the trees. With a quick bite on the string, the animal's parachute burst open in a white puff, reminding a fuming Norrington to do the same.

The last anyone on the plane saw of them, the two vanished into a thicket of mossy jungle. From the looks of it, Norrington had selflessly broken the donkey's fall.