8.

Elizabeth cleared her throat, growing uncomfortable under the unwavering gaze of Captain Teague. She swept her hair from her face, offering a closed mouth smile.

"I didn't realize fortune telling ran in the family," Elizabeth said, adjusting in her seat.

"Doesn't," Teague answered. "I don't know a lick about fortune letting, but I do know a thing or two about reading people. Been studying people for a long time; it's all in the delectable subtleties."

Jack was more like his father than he probably hoped, she gathered.

Teague smoked from his pipe then left her to stew at the table alone for a moment, eventually returning with two mugs. He offered one to Elizabeth and she relented against her better judgment, taking a swig. The alcohol felt good on her tongue and better as it warmed her chest, although she coughed from the biting aftertaste, her hand drawing to her throat.

Teague's eyes locked on the pendant around her neck and Elizabeth nearly started from his sudden grip around the necklace, his eyes dancing with unlocked memories.

"You're familiar with the pendant," she whispered, holding her chin high and forcing the shaking fear from her voice although Teague's hand was already drawn away. "Care to enlighten me as to why?"

Teague wrung his hand slightly, as if scalded, and Elizabeth wondered if the pendant really had burned him. "Jack didn't already tell you?"

"He said something along the lines that it wasn't quite his story." Elizabeth crossed her arms, leaning against the table. "Not quite."

Teague nodded, making to return his pipe to its case but only after one last long inhale.

"How much do you know?"

"The jewelry reunites two people or switches their places."

He nodded. "Aye. All you need to know."

"Please, I need to know the origin. I need to know everything. Anything that can help with—"

"You saving the Turner boy?"

Elizabeth toyed with the necklace. "Well, yes."

"Knew it."

"How?"

"Why else would a woman like you be tied up with a man like Jack?"

Elizabeth met Teague's challenging gaze and, in his silence, she wondered if he was searching to uncover a hidden truth, like her possibly harbored feelings for his son. She showed no sign of breaking, refusing to be the first to cast her eyes aside as she was afraid of what he might find in her expression if she backed down.

"As I thought." Teague started shuffling the tarot cards again.

"The origin, Teague," she reiterated. "Please."

His mouth pulled into a thoughtful look. He set the cards aside, took a drink, then gave Elizabeth his undivided attention.

"It's not my story alone to tell either but, of course, Jack's mother doesn't have a say." His hand worked his beard, weighing the decision. "Can't take every skeleton to the grave," Teague ultimately relented. "You recall the Code?"

Elizabeth nodded. "Of the Pirate Brethren, yes."

"I was granted leave from the Code every eight moon cycles or so, at which point, I'd have a stand-in. Three days of whatever I wanted. Mostly, I sailed to Port Royal to trade goods to bring back to the Cove. I would indulge in a good meal or two in the day and, by night, sit and play out the sunset." His fingertips instinctively felt the air, as if plucking at strings. "After I'd grown well accustomed to this—we're talking years in—I noticed the beginnings of a seaside home where I usually watched the sun fall out of the sky. Well, that was different. But I wasn't going to give up my spot. So, I went on as I did, playing while watching the night color the sky. Once the home was fully complete, little did I know I was being watched from those white pillars."

Elizabeth placed her hands into her lap, setting her expression to appear pleasantly focused instead of hanging onto Teague's every word.

"That night, above me, I heard the purest voice say, 'Don't stop.' And there she was." Teague couldn't help his smile. "In all her grace and glory, everything I didn't deserve and more—all thin frame and long, dark, curling hair."

"She was beautiful," Elizabeth supplied.

"As any woman would be to a man locked up with nothing but pages and artifacts and keepsakes, but yes, more than that. She was also a hothead—That's where Jack got it," Teague whispered the aside conspiratorially.

Elizabeth couldn't help but smile. Jack was rather irascible, but then again, so was she.

"But it just made me love her all the more. She was a woman of status, like yourself. I thought," Teague paused, seemingly thinking on what he actually felt years ago. "'No way. There's no way.' But there was, you see, because you keep two people stowed away long enough, then couple them up, add the moon and a song and, well—some call it 'love.'"

Elizabeth drew her lip into her mouth, remembering drunkenly singing and circling with Jack on the island they stayed on after Barbossa forced them off the Pearl.

"I started spending my three days quite different as you might imagine. I took Jack's mother out to sea and—"

"She couldn't help but adore the sea," Elizabeth interjected once again, unable to help herself.

"You know the origin there, girl? You want to be telling it?" he asked, his words colored with what Elizabeth found was possibly amusement masked in snarky phrasing, the pull of his mouth and look in his eye betraying his cold exterior.

"Go on," she said, a near-plea.

"Where was I?" He drank. "Right. She couldn't help but adore the sea," he echoed, noticeably retracing the bookmarked memory in his mind's eye. "We couldn't help but adore each other. She shared her life with me—how it was to be kept and hidden away, how she couldn't stand it. I tried to talk her out of the idea of me, honest, I did. Also tried to talk myself out of it, the idea of an 'us'—but you know how these things go all too well yourself, I'm sure."

Teague drank again then paused, looking at Elizabeth expectantly. Elizabeth grappled for the mug before her, taking a drink as well.

"I knew the perfect woman to barter with. Tia Dalma—"

"Tia Dalma? But she—"

"Human bonds, but never aged," Teague explained. "In came the pendant." He gestured to the necklace Elizabeth wore. "In came the ring. I didn't have to wait through eight moon cycles, through days of tending to what needed tending to, reciting the Code to memory, and shooting or stabbing anyone who tried to steal or even question the Code—When nighttime fell, all it took was the press of her lips to the chain and she was right there with me. We were hooked, to say the least. She took interest in all I kept watch over—the history of pirates, the Cove itself which I made my sanctum. On the rare occasion she yielded to my request, on one of my three days, I used the ring to come to her. I took interest in her room and her fine things but, more importantly, interest in witnessing her there. Visually, she belonged, but she had a wild streak inside that didn't match up at all."

Teague took another drink, this one the longest, preparing himself for the next onslaught of memories.

"Stolen nights ultimately proved not enough and she wanted it all, the whole lot, a whole life with me. Had me help her steal away remnants of a body from the Cove and staged a fire. Her family believed as she intended and we started a life together, building a home not too far away from the Cove. On my three days, we went out to sea, got through scrapes by the skin of our teeth—she kept up with every step. She loved it." Teague turned, staring at the steady fall of rain out a window. "And, well, then came Jack."

"Then came Jack?" Elizabeth echoed.

"Shouldn't that be the ribbon tying up the story all pretty?" Teague shook his head. "Some women aren't intended to mother—which is alright, but give them a child and things start to go…" Teague waved his hand side-to-side. "She thought she wanted a child and roped me in the way she did last time. I knew her wild streak and still I relented. After Jack, she turned distant, and she never came back into herself."

Elizabeth played with the pendant around her neck, remembering her own near-motherhood.

"She resented me. For giving her Jack. For making her stay stagnant. For keeping her landlocked just as I was locked to the Cove. She loved sailing more than I did," Teague reminisced. "She stayed around for a while, sharing in Jack's life at the start, teaching him what we agreed upon. I wanted to keep his feet nailed to the ground—the one thing she didn't push me on—but playing a role she was never intended for, it made a shell of a person of her. Jack had to sense her restlessness, but he didn't know why. The irony of still feeling kept in what she originally saw as freedom. She let Jack believe she was always a woman of the earth instead of a woman of a home with white pillars, never wanting for a thing outside of adventure. He's still none the wiser as she had a good report with island women, let him roughhouse with island boys."

"'She stayed around for a while,'" Elizabeth repeated softly. "She left you both?"

Teague nodded.

"But your ring. You didn't try to go after her?"

"'Should a pair, truly linked, wear the objects in time, all the pair should do is think, to be rejoined or realigned.'" Teague's eyebrows rose, waiting a beat to let Elizabeth register the words. "You have to want it, to be found."

"And Jack? What of him?"

"You see he's still breathing."

"But of his boyhood?"

"I had to keep to protecting the Code, and he has his mother's wild streak. As with his mother, he grew tired of waiting on me. You know the rest—became what I, and he, never intended—a pirate. Changed his name and everything."

"What?"

"'Jack Sparrow?'" Teague leaned an elbow on the table, giving Elizabeth a look. "Too great a name to be his only. Furthermore, between 'John Teague' or 'Jack Sparrow,' which do you think has a more pleasant ring in the voice of a woman? Look more appealing in print? More likely for you to remember?"

Elizabeth filled the silence with a timid drink.

"As with his name, Jack even made the title 'pirate' his own. Let people believe what they wanted. But he never wanted to be a pirate," Teague laughed humorlessly. "To be a pirate was to be me—probably the last thing he wanted. He thought I cared more about The Code than him or his mother which, in all fairness, I didn't fight to correct him much on that point, out of necessity."

"Necessity?"

"To be the Keeper of the Code is to repay a debt. I killed a former member of the Brethren Court, so I paid my time where they held meetings. Kept the Code to keep my life." Teague's eyes looked distant. "Anyway, how do you explain to your son you killed the person he would have called 'grandfather?'"

Elizabeth felt uneasy in her chair again. She took a long drink.

"Jack, he was just a kid on the run with no riches but that was enough to fit the bill of pirate. And once he realized if he fully leaned into this life, really committed, that he could just sail for the rest of his days as he pleased? I imagine he must have thought, well, then call him pirate."

"And here I was, thinking all these years, he was just spit out a pirate." Elizabeth felt a smile pull at the corners of her lips that she swallowed down, resuming an expression of indifference.

"We grow into what we're meant to become."

Elizabeth sat in silence with Captain Teague, letting the backstory of Jack Sparrow—John Teague—a Pirate Lord, the backstory she was never intended to know, wash over her. Jack was further humanized in her eyes, and she wasn't sure what to make of it. The pirate legend of her childhood was further actualized, not merely in flesh and blood, but in generational conflict. Elizabeth couldn't help but trace noticeable patterns, and she couldn't help but feel an even stronger pull to Jack.

"You should know that your son grew to become a good man."

"A man rich in stories. Silver and gold doesn't make the pirate, stories make the pirate, and stories I'm sure Jack can tell. Stories I'll never hear." Teague felt the weight of his words hanging in the air before rummaging beneath the table.

Elizabeth braced herself, her eyes falling upon the nearest exit.

"Something for you," Teague said, placing a smallsword on the table. Elizabeth stared at the sword for a moment then lifted up the weapon, inspecting it closely.

She instantly noticed the delicate hilt piercings, a sign of a patient and skilled craftsman. The blade was trefoil and needlepoint, the dish guard decorative as a doily, and there was a twist wire silver banding at the top, balancing out the design. Elizabeth held the sword properly, as if prepared to fight, testing its weight. It felt heavy in the backhand so she could effectively cut quick. Noticing an engraving at the top of the hilt, Elizabeth rubbed her thumb over it and her mouth parted as she registered the "WT." Her hand fell to her waist, her fingertips brushing against Will's heart as her own beat faster.

"This is Will's sword," she whispered, voicing the words to assuage her disbelief.

"Bill's boy," Teague muttered. "Quite the silversmith."

"Yes." Elizabeth stared at the weapon, seeing her eye reflected back in the blade. "I can never thank you enough for this."

"I ask one thing in return," Teague started, meeting Elizabeth's eyes. He handed Elizabeth another smallsword for Jack. "Jack can't out sail himself forever. Protect my boy—from himself."

"No one can but Jack, you know that." Even so, under Teague's heavy gaze, Elizabeth took the sword and nodded. "I'll try."

"Long live the King." Teague toasted Elizabeth, and she clinked her mug against his.

As Teague drank, Elizabeth poured what was left in her mug into the wash bucket by her seat. Her mind was far off, thinking of pirates, one who righted his relationship with his father and another still left to tend to the matter, in particular.